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Books by Jaques Maritain
The Degrees of Knowledge /
Person and the Common Good /
An Introduction to Philosophy /
Natural Law
Man and the State /
Christianity, Democracy and the American Ideal /
Art and Scholasticism
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The Responsibility of the Artist
By Jacques Maritain
In this small volume [The Responsibility of the Artist] drawn from lectures
given in 1951 the celebrated Thomist philosopher Jacques
Maritain, emeritus professor at Princeton, takes up the
stressful and thorny questions of the relations between the arts
and morality. It is a subtle, highly provocative work.
Maritain's argument may be roughly stated as
follows. Art and morality are different spheres. "Art by
itself tends to the good of the work, not to the good of
man." But suppose one asks: Is not the artist's moral
conscience also involved? "My answer," writes Maritain
is yes . . . For moral conscience deals with all the acts of
man; moral conscience envelops so to speak, all the more
particularized kinds of conscience--not moral in themselves, but
artistic, medical, scientific, etc."
For the Thomist Maritain, of course, the
highest law reveals that "the only real queen of all
virtues is Charity, or that God given love for God and our
fellow men which is God's love itself communicated to us."
Beef + Ice Cream: In the light of this
attitude, Maritain scorns the idea of art for art's sake:
"It does not mean art for the work, which is the right
formula. It means an absurdity, that is, a supposed necessity
for the artist to be only an artist, not a man, and for art to
cut itself off from its own supplies, and from all the food,
fuel, and energy it receives from human life."
He is equally scornful of the authoritarian
notion of art for the people (Soviet or otherwise). It becomes,
"inevitably, propaganda art."
Artists, Maritain goes on to say, are not
waiters who serve the people "with the bread of
existentialist nausea, Marxist dialectics, or traditional
morality, the beef of political realism or idealism, and the ice
cream of philanthropy. They provide mankind with a spiritual
food, which is intuitive experience, revelation, and
beauty.
In this process, Maritain declares, the
artist will necessarily remain a whole and candid man, aware of
and reflecting the range, moral or immoral, of the human
curiosity and appetites. But it is "a childish notion to
think that a novelist or a playwright . . . needs to steep
himself in the sins of man . . . It is enough for him . . .
to look at his own inner universe of repressed tendencies, and at
the various monsters which are latent in his heart.
Introspection . . . is the best teacher in the geography of
evil."
All these large issues the French philosopher
explores with penetrating depth and copious examples.
Summing Up: Art for morality's sake.
Source: Newsweek, 22 February 1960 * * * * *
The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux
Using Privilege to Challenge the State
Excerpt by Noam Chomsky
Since we often cannot see what is
happening before our eyes, it is perhaps not too surprising that what is
at a slight distance removed is utterly invisible. We have just
witnessed an instructive example: President Obama’s dispatch of 79
commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to carry out what was evidently a
planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities
of 9/11,
Osama bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and
with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply
murdered, his body dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed
“just and necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as
there was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal
authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the
procedure. As
Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of assassination in
international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice
by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as “international
outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with
“horror” and merits the “sternest retaliation.”
In 1967, writing about the deceit
and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam, I discussed
the responsibility of intellectuals, borrowing the phrase from an
important essay of
Dwight Macdonald’s
after World War II. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 arriving, and
widespread approval in the United States of the assassination of the
chief suspect, it seems a fitting time to revisit that issue. But before
thinking about the responsibility of intellectuals, it is worth
clarifying to whom we are referring.
The concept of intellectuals in the
modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto
of the Intellectuals” produced by the
Dreyfusards
who, inspired by
Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned
both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges
of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance
conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting
power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at
the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were
bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular
by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard
Académie Française,”
Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard
leader Maurice
Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists
of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals,
Ferdinand
Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most
ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising
writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of
supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social
institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”
Who then were the intellectuals?
The minority inspired by
Zola (who was
sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of
the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another
form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility
of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to
intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position
to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom,
justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it
refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating,
leadership and established institutions?
Source:
BostonReview
Note: In 1967, as the
Vietnam War escalated, Noam Chomsky penned
The Responsibility of Intellectuals, a stunning rebuke to scientists
and scholars for their subservience to political power. Today we face a
similar array of crises, from wars to escalating debt. What are the
obligations of intellectuals in this day and age?
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 18 June 2008
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