Already in Hesiod, the founding document of Western aesthetics, the poet is said to speak truths, and yet already here, for the first, not the last time, the cognitivist affirmation is qualified or warped, by the Muses previously telling the shepherd that they impart to him lies that only seem like truth.1 Plato had his own use for ‘lies’ or ‘fictions’, but he did not hesitate to charge the poets with truths or truth‐claims about the gods or how to wage warfare.2 So far as one can characterize the vast, succeeding literature, the cognitivists have predominated against the sceptics, though we must always bear in mind their profound intra‐mural differences over the nature of artistic truth, the vehicles of embodying and communicating such truths, and indeed the appropriate and therefore unorthodox meaning of ‘truth’. Not only acknowledging but insisting upon these departures from a staple correspondence theory, they disparage Plato’s obtuse literalism. Their celebrations of the distinctive nature of artistic truth have frequently been resonantly uplifting, though it will not be disputed that they have been almost as often manifestly vague and sometimes, one fears, quite gaseous.
Now, or any other time, is a good time to re‐consider the issue. Further, should my argument for the cognitive triviality of fine art pass muster, it will go some way to explain why art’s influence on social structure and historical change has been fairly inconsequential.3 It may also afford a less hieratic defence of the currently popular view that the work of art has no reference beyond itself.
It is prudent to approach so volatile a concept as ‘artistic truth’ by identifying truths that are, by contrast, beyond dispute. Scientific truths, for one. We have a relatively clear and firm conception of how science arrives at its truths. It will be protested that the once unquestioned belief in ‘scientific method’ has recently been brought under fire and rejected. It continues to dominate the scientific community, however, and is still espoused by more traditionalist philosophers of science. In any event, both this conception and its challengers occupy positions of shared, partisan agreement within philosophy of science. But a ‘method of artistic truth’ is not matter for debate and hardly makes sense. Secondly, scientific truths, once arrived at, are truths about the great world. Evidence, in the face of recent philosophers of science, is to be found in those who have thought so and continue to think so – scientists, many other philosophers of science, and in those humans in all the continents who, because of its successes, like no other way of knowing, have turned to science to control their environments and improve their lives. Philosophers’ theories have little force against the palpable reduction in infant mortality and increase in longevity. Do the arts give us truths about the great world? This question we take up presently. Short of that discussion, we can give clear instances of scientific truth, the inverse square law, for example. But art?
History, for all its ignorance, disagreements, biases, and falsifications, has, unearthing documents, artefacts, and other evidence, attained undoubted truths about man’s past, e.g., Caesar was assassinated in 44 bc.
A vast number of other truths about the great world have been gained by all human beings, not by any method, but simply by living and learning, e.g., Summer is warmer than Winter.
The models of science and history are relaxed even further if we turn to religious truths. Though talk of ‘method’ is again inappropriate, there are a number of putative ways of knowing, such as revelation and priestly authority. The second criterion is the rub, since there is weighty reason to doubt that religious beliefs are indisputably true of the great world. But though your materialist will deny the truth and may question the meaningfulness of ‘Man is the creature of God’, he will unhesitatingly accept that it is a recognizably religious truth‐claim.The devout have sometimes thought to contend with such scepticism by abandoning ‘truth’ as unfitted to and even unworthy of their beliefs.The articles of faith are beyond ‘truth’, even beyond logical consistency, and though they are not amenable to the verification of scientific or historical truth, are more precious.They give ‘wisdom’.
We may now be nearing a model more congenial to artistic truth. For where is it written, save in Philistia, that artistic truth must be subject to the same criteria as are satisfied by such prosaic truths as the inverse square law and the date of Caesar’s assassination? This importunate demand will not be countenanced by those theorists who contend that the truths conveyed by art can be achieved in no other way. Artistic truths are truths broad and deep, too acute and suggestive, perhaps too tremulous, to be caught in the grosser nets of science, history, or garden variety experience, but no worse, indeed, all the better for that. But then they are also unlike religious truth‐claims, being less doctrinaire, less parochial – freer. Did not Freud take more seriously the poets and novelists than virtually all of the academic psychology written up to his time?4
Thus urged, we go on to look for other reasons why artistic truth is sui generis and so to a linguistic oddity, or several such. Philosophers, critics, and others speak often enough of artistic truth. Considerably less often do they speak of artistic knowledge. How should there be truth without knowledge? We have scientific truth and scientific knowledge, historical truth and historical knowledge. Understandably, for once truth has been established as that and therefore accepted by a judging mind, it is knowledge. Why do we hear so little of artistic knowledge? In religion, there are, in part because of the uncertainties remarked a moment ago, recurrent references to the state of mind of the believer – Credo quia impossibile, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, etc.There are, the phrase attests, religious believers; there are those who believe the findings of science and those who distrust them, those who accept history and those who think it ‘bunk’. Whereas we have never heard of artistic believers. Why not? What would they believe, if they existed? There are also those who believe in science, in its capacity to yield more truths in future; so, similarly, those who believe in history and religion. Theorists aside, where are their counterparts in the arts? (There are certainly those who ‘believe in’ art in the sense of ‘esteem highly’ or ‘take very seriously’.) Thus artistic truth moves still further away from religious truth as well as the other kinds of truth‐cum‐knowledge.
「芸術的真実」の候補を考えてみる。
「英国摂政時代のハートフォードシャーに住む魅力的なふたりが、頑固なプライドと無知による偏見から仲たがいしている」