John Ruskin: A radical conservative

Text/Xue Wei

British art and social critic John Ruskin

The importance of aesthetics

John Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819. His reputation has been fluctuating. In 1964, the British art historian Kenneth Clarke said in his book "Ruskin Today" that for nearly 50 years, reading Ruskin's books was proof that a person has a soul. But from the beginning of the 20th century, he gradually became forgotten, perhaps because some of his views began to appear somewhat reactionary. British scholar Daisy Dunn said: "Ruskin is a highly contradictory person. Like a fish, he says, the healthiest way is to swim against the current. He said he was basically a conservative, but many of his ideas were socialist. He believed in hierarchy, but believed that the rich had a responsibility to protect the poor. He often rides the train, but in his article denounces the extension of the railway, saying that the train transforms people from tourists into living packages.

David Russell, an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, said: "People worry that some of Ruskin's ideas are too outlandish, but his core proposition is still very relevant and important: our aesthetic experience, the experience of beauty in our daily lives, should be at the heart of the idea of a good life and a good society." Beauty is not only a luxury that is decorated or enjoyed by a few people. If you learn to see the world correctly through an understanding of aesthetics, you can see society correctly. ”

One of Ruskin's core ideas was that if a society was built on a ruthless structure that was cruel to its people and environment, it would be indifferent to beauty. "Only with the wisdom to rejoice with the mountains and rivers around us can the population reach its limit." The earth is the perpetual motion machine, which takes the earth's axis as the driving rod, takes the four seasons as the rhythm, and takes the ocean as the breath... The silent air will not be sweet, unless there are birds chirping, there are whispers of insects, unless there is the thick and loud voice of a man, and there is a mischievous scream of a child playing. The art of living is acquired, but in the end we will find that beautiful things are also indispensable. Crops grow on the side of the road, wildflowers bloom, cattle and sheep graze in wooded meadows, birds and other wildlife. ”

Ruskin said: "The commodities traded on the market should be of good quality, pure and flawless, and at the same time to obtain or transmit as much as possible the power of simple pleasure, and to show that there is great beauty in the ordinary, that is, the power of appreciation does not depend on the number of things tasted, but comes from the participation of life and the peaceful state of mind in the process of tasting." ”

Critic John Carey said: "Ruskin's father was a wealthy wine importer who loved the arts, and his mother was a Protestant who read the Bible with his son every year, and this training cultivated his style of writing, making his sentences appear mysterious even when hollow." ”

As a young man, Ruskin needed to reconcile art and religion. His solution was to see all true art as the worship of God. Works of art accurately reproduce God's creation and the natural world, thus beautifying God. In The Modern Painter, he says that the pre-Raphaelites were faithful to nature, and he claimed that Turner was a prophet sent by God to explain the mysteries of the universe to people, like the archangels in the book of Revelation. Such strong feelings embarrassed Turner, but he put up with it because Ruskin bought his paintings. After Turner's death, Ruskin was horrified to find a batch of pornographic paintings while rummaging through his documents. This obviously should not have been done by the angels, and it was immediately burned.

John Rosenberg, a professor of English at Columbia University, said: "Ruskin's talent lies in his unique blend of the ability of children to look surprisingly with the agile, sharp inference of the British. He once praised the artist for regaining his innocence, with a childlike sensitivity to color itself, like a blind person suddenly gaining sight. Ruskin's intense feelings imprisoned him in his own world, where every glance was a revelation, but there was no one else's gaze but his own gaze. He had two teachers (Turner and Carlisle) and numerous disciples, but not a single colleague. His intellectual activity was almost absolutely isolated, he said, because of his occasional arrogance and frequent weirdness. ”

The meaning of work and wealth

In his book Ruskin's Farm, Financial Times editor Andrew Hill said: "Ruskin is best known for his shaping of Victorian artistic and architectural tastes, and he admired the painter Turner, the pre-Raphaelites and venetians. But what was more revolutionary and enduring was his later role as a social commentator and reformer. He has promoted the British welfare system, free public education, and the environmental movement with very radical ideas. And his most interesting teachings about modern leaders, organizations, and the modern economy are how to make work more meaningful. ”

According to Ruskin, industrialization was inhumane to workers, stifled creativity, and polluted the environment, "although the table was full of sodom apples and gomorrah wine, the smooth apples were full of dust, and poisonous snakes lurked in the jade-like wine."

He encouraged workers to improve their lives through self-education. He founded a painting school in Oxford and the UK's first local museum in Sheffield. When his father died in 1864, he left him with an inheritance of £120,000, most of which he donated to charity and bought rows of houses for the poor.

Ruskin believed that the anonymous builders and carvers of the cathedral were able to create such art because they were free to exercise their free will and talents. He said that the division of labor in industrial capitalism turned man into a cog. The builders of the Gothic cathedral were both craftsmen, artists and thinkers, happy at work, free to use their imaginations, proud of the fruits of their labor. But the modern worker does not see the final fruits of his labor, but is only a meaningless component.

In the 1850s, he promised to teach the craftsmen of the Workers' College to paint. He explained that he did not want to train carpenters to become artists, but to make them happier carpenters. "In order for people to be able to work happily, three things are needed: they have to fit in for the job, they can't do too much, they have to feel successful."

Of Ruskin's numerous works, apart from his autobiography, only a pamphlet on social criticism, "To the Last To Come," is still in print. The title of the book, "To the Last To Come," comes from the "Parable of the Vineyard" in the Bible Matthew: a vineyard owner pays the workers as much as the first one receives, although the last one comes for only one hour, and the first one comes all day.

In this book, he denounces the exploitation of the poor by the rich, offending some but also inspiring many. Gandhi said that reading the book overnight transformed him from a lawyer and city dweller into a countryman. Gandhi also received Ruskin's teaching that manual labor was as important as a profession requiring higher education.

In his book, Ruskin criticizes the polarization of society: "The art of getting rich is not to accumulate wealth for oneself absolutely, but to find ways to make the people around them poor and maximize the inequality that benefits them." The idea that such unequal relations are certainly advantageous is sloppy and absurd, based on widely spread political economy fallacies. He wrote: "It is true that there can be a life of luxury in the future, but it is pure and flawless, perfect luxury, a luxury enjoyed by the people, made by the people, and the luxury of the present is reserved only for the ignorant." ”

He proposed: "There is no wealth outside of life. Life here includes the power of love, the power of joy, the power of admiration. The more decent and happy people a country raises, the richer it becomes; the more a person, while giving full play to his role, the more beneficially he can have an impact on the survival of others, whether through himself or through his own property. ”