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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 * * * * *
update 18 June 2008 |
