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」
It is time now to consider some likely candidates for artistic truth.The Muses and their followers hold that truth is found in all the arts, including music, but novels and plays are in general closer than any of the others to the great world, the actualities of man in society. A comedy of manners, renowned for its deft psychological insights and thus propitious, gives us:
Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep apart two attractive people living in Hertfordshire in Regency England.
This is, as far as it goes, a summary, reasonably accurate and thus true, of the story, of the fiction. So this is not what we want.Those who espouse artistic truth are not after the fiction. They will not, consequently, settle for other truths, of which there are a great many, about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.They have much bigger game in mind – the truths that are, in some manner, created by the fiction – and so therefore do we. ‘Lies like truth’ might be fictions so plausible that the audience takes them to be truths. But neither are the cognitivists after als ob truths. Many of them have insisted that art brings to light, above all, human character – the hidden, unvoiced, perhaps, apart from art, the unknown impulses and affects that stir and move our inner and then outer beings.They will settle for nothing less than psychological truths about people in the great world, truths universal, more or less, nor, therefore, will we.
「頑固なプライドと無知による偏見は魅力的な人たちを仲たがいさせる」
Hence: Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart.
心理学的真実においては、小説の舞台が切り捨てられている。
フィクションから真実に至る過程で、その心理学的領域に働いている多様で特異な力をいったん切り離してしまうと（そうせざるをえないものの）、真実はひどく貧相に見えるに違いないし、現にひどく貧相なものになってしまう。(p. 291)
We are compelled to abandon the setting of the novel in order to arrive at psychological truth. Yet in abandoning Hertfordshire in Regency England, we give up the manners and morals that influenced the sayings and doings of the hero and heroine. A greater influence is that of their personal relationships to other characters – the feather‐brained family members, the ne’er‐do‐well soldiers and priggish parsons. Their motivations and behaviour respond to and are thus largely shaped by these other people, fictional all, and to each other, of course, fictional too. These interactions are integral to the finely detailed delineation of their characters which is, the critics are as one in holding, a major ground of the novel’s excellence. Finally, we abandon their individuality in all of its complexity and depth. My statement of the psychological truth to be gained from the novel is pitifully meagre by contrast. Necessarily, since the psychologies of Miss Bennet and Mr Darcy are fleshed out and specified within the fiction only. Once we divest ourselves of the diverse, singular forces at work in its psychological field, as we must, in getting from the fiction to the truth, the latter must seem, and is, distressingly impoverished.