Nobel laureate in literature Joseph Brodsky on aesthetics

Aesthetics is the mother of ethics

Author: Brodsky

For a person who is rather personal, for a person who prefers his own private affairs to more than any important role in society, for a person who has gone quite far in this preference, at least far from his homeland, for a man who would rather be a complete loser in a democracy than a martyr under tyranny, it is somewhat embarrassing to find himself standing on this rostrum.

If art teaches anything (first and for the artist first), it is the privateness of personality. Art, as the oldest and most literal form of private undertaking, consciously or unconsciously cultivates in a person's mind a sense of uniqueness, individuality, and separation, transforming him from a social animal into an independent "me." Many things can be shared, a bed, a piece of bread, some trust, a mistress, but not a poem, such as the poem of Lehrer Maria Rilke. A work of art, especially a work of literature, especially a poem, is a whisper to a person, bringing it into direct conversation, without any intermediary.

It is for this reason that art in general, and literature in particular, and poetry in particular, is not entirely favored by the fighters for the great good, the teachers who educate the masses, the prophets who reveal the inevitability of history. Where art dabbles, where poetry is recited, they find: indifference and multiple tones, in place of prior promises and total absence of objection; negligence and nitpicking, in place of determination to act. In other words, in the positions of the small zeros, in the places where the fighters of the great good and the leaders of the masses tend to operate, art leads to a string of "periods, periods, commas, and a negative sign", making each zero a small, though not always beautiful, face of humanity.

The great Balatingski spoke of his muse, which boiled down to having an "otherworldly face".

It is in the attainment of this "otherworldly face" that the meaning of human existence is revealed, because we, like this face, are genetically willing and capable of being otherworldly. A person's first task, whether it is the author or the reader, is to grasp his own life, free from external coercion or norms, no matter how noble his appearance may be.

Because each of us has only one life, we fully understand how it will end. It would be regrettable to waste this opportunity on the appearance of others, on the experience of others, on the repetition of synonyms; and even more regrettable is that the prophet of history convinces a man that he may be willing to approve of this repetition of synonyms, but neither goes with him to the grave nor thanks him.

Language, and perhaps literature, is older, more inevitable, and more enduring than any form of social organization. Disgust, ridicule, or indifference to the state, usually expressed by literature, is essentially a reaction to permanent resistance to the temporary, or rather, to the infinite resistance to the finite. To say the least, literature has the right to intervene in the affairs of the state as long as it allows itself to intervene in literary affairs. A political system, a form of social organization, as in general any system, is by definition a form with the implications of the past, but expects to impose itself on the present (and often in the future).

A person who takes language as a profession cannot forget this. The real danger of the writer lies not primarily in the possibility (often certainty) of persecution by the state, but more in the possibility of finding himself hypnotized by national peculiarities, which, whether barbaric or improving, are always temporary.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics, not to mention its aesthetics, is always "yesterday". Language and literature are always "today" and often constitute "tomorrow", especially when the political system is orthodox. One of the values of literature lies in the fact that it helps the individual, makes the times of its existence more special, distinguishes it from its predecessors and its contemporaries, and avoids the repetition of synonyms—the fate that is revered as "historical sacrifice." The difference between art, especially literature, and literature and art from life, lies in the aversion to repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke three times, and it can be the energy of the party to laugh all three times, however, in art, this practice is called a cliché.

Art is a recoilless weapon whose development depends not on the artist's personality, but on the movement and logic of the substance itself, on the past ending of each request (or suggestion) of a novel aesthetic solution. Art has its own genealogy, movement, logic and future, and is not synonymous with history, but at best parallel to it; the way art exists is in the constant innovation of its aesthetic reality. This is why it is often found that art is "ahead of progress", ahead of history; if we no longer improve on Marx at once, then the main tool of history is clichés.

Today, there is a fairly widely accepted view that writers, especially poets, should adopt street language in their works, and should use the language of the masses. This claim, though democratic and clearly beneficial to the writer, is absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art— in this case literature, to history. Unless we have decided that the time has come for modern humanity to cease to develop, and therefore literature should use the language of the people, it is the people who should use the language of literature.

In short, each new aesthetic truth makes man's ethical truth more precise. Because aesthetics is the mother of ethics.

The category of "good or bad" is first and foremost aesthetic, at least etymologically preceding the category of "good and evil". If it is not ethically "permissible", it is precisely because aesthetically it has not yet "allowed everything" and precisely because the pigment of the spectrum is limited. Sensitive babies crying and rejecting strangers, or instead reaching out to strangers, are instinctive and make aesthetic choices rather than moral choices.

Aesthetic choice is a highly personal matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. Each new aesthetic reality makes the human experience more personal, and this privateness, which often appears in the guise of literary (or other) taste, can become in itself a form of resistance to slavery, if not as a guarantee. A person of taste, especially of literature, is less seduced by the accompaniments and rhythmic incantations used as political incitement. The good does not constitute a guarantee of the production of a masterpiece; it is rather the view that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The richer the individual's aesthetic experience, the more sound his taste, the clearer and freer his moral perspective, although not necessarily happier.

It is only in this pragmatic and non-Platonic philosophical sense that we should understand Dostoevsky's famous saying that beauty will save the world; or Matthews Arnold's belief that we will be saved by poetry. It may well be too late for the world, but there is always a chance for individuals. People's aesthetic instincts develop rapidly, because even if they do not fully realize what they are and what they actually want, a person instinctively knows what he does not like and what is not suitable for him. From an anthropological point of view, let me reiterate that one is first and foremost an aesthetic man and then an ethical man.

Therefore, art, especially literature, is not a by-product of our human development, but quite the opposite. If speech distinguishes us from the other members of the animal kingdom, then literature, and especially poetry, as the highest form of speech, is, clearly, our human end.

I am far from advocating for the idea of compulsory rhyming composition; nevertheless, it seems unacceptable to divide society into intellectuals and "all others." Morally, this situation can be likened to dividing society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material basis for the existence of social inequality, then these bases are inconceivable for intellectual inequality. And not as in other respects, equality in this respect has been guaranteed to us by nature. I'm not talking about education, I'm talking about cultivating speech. The slightest inaccuracy in speech can trigger wrong choices and invade people's lives. The existence of literature foreshadows the existence of the relevant existence above the literary stage, not only in the moral sense, but also in the sense of vocabulary. If a piece of music still allows one to choose the possibility of a role, that is, to act as a passive listener or an active player, literature—in Montaire's words, hopelessly becomes a work of semantics—is destined to make one choose only the role of the player.

In my opinion, a person is exactly the one who should be in the role of the player, and appears more often than in other roles. Moreover, it seems to me that as a result of the population explosion and the more atomized societies that accompany it (i.e., the more isolated individual), this role is becoming increasingly inevitable for a person. I don't think I know more about life than my peers; but it seems to me that books are more reliable than friends or lovers in terms of interlocutor abilities. A novel or a poem is not self-talk, but a conversation between an author and a reader, and I repeat, it's a very personal conversation that excludes all the others, and is world-weary of each other if you will. And, in this moment of conversation, the author and the reader are equal, whether the author is great or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness, which remains in the form of a memory, vague or clear, that accompanies a person for the rest of his life; and, sooner or later, when or not, it regulates one's actions. It is with this in mind that I speak of the role of the performer much more natural for a man, because a novel or a poem is the product of the solitude of an author and a reader with each other.

In our human history, in the history of modern mankind, books are the development of anthropology, essentially similar to the invention of the wheel. A book is produced to provide us with a certain idea, less about our origins and more about everything within human power, which constitutes a mode of transport, passing through the space of experience at the speed of turning the pages. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to raise a denominator that has never before been higher than the waist, to our hearts, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This kind of escape is a flight to otherworldly faces, to elements, to autonomy, to privateness. We have five billion people, no matter whose appearance we are, and for a man we have no future other than the one outlined by art. Otherwise, the future is the past — the political past, and that is, first and foremost, the pleasure of all the mass police.

In any case, in general art, and literature in particular, as a social state of property or privilege of a minority, seems to me to be unhealthy and dangerous. I am not calling for libraries to replace the state, although this idea visits me from time to time; but I have no doubt that if we choose our leaders, based on their reading experiences, rather than political plans, there will be far less sorrow on earth. It seems to me that the question that the potential master of our destiny should be asked is, first of all, not the process of how he conceived his foreign policy, but his attitude towardStendha, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If the mere absence of literature is indeed unusual, then literature becomes a reliable antidote to any attempt, whether familiar or invented— a package solution to man's survival. At least as a form of moral insurance, literature is far more reliable than belief systems or philosophical doctrines.

Since there is no law that can protect us from our own harm, and therefore no criminal law that can prevent a real crime against literature, and although we can condemn the material oppression of literature—the persecution of writers, censorship, book burning—when it reaches the worst of destruction—when we do not read, we are powerless. For this sin, a person has to pay the price of a lifetime, and a nation has to pay the price of its history. In the country in which I live, I would have been most willing to believe that there is a series of dependencies between one's material superiority and one's literary ignorance. But the history of the country where I was born and grew up made me less gullible. This is because, according to a minimal causal relationship or crude formula, the tragedy of Russia is precisely a social tragedy, in which literature becomes the prerogative of the few, the prerogative of the famous Russian intellectuals.

I don't want to dwell on this topic, I don't want to make tonight so dim, to think back to the destruction of millions of lives by millions of others. What happened in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, before the introduction of automatic weapons, was in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine, and the fact that the realization of that doctrine required human sacrifice had long proved its abnormality. I'm just saying, not empirically, but theoretically, that a man who has read many dickens's works, shooting his kind in the name of some idea, is much more problematic than someone who has not read Dickens.

I'm talking about reading Dickens, Stern, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert Balzac, Melville, Proust, Muzier, etc., that is, about literature, not cultural education. An educated literati, having read one political treatise or pamphlet of one kind or another, is of course capable of killing his kind, and will do so with the ecstasy of conviction. ...... What these people have in common, however, is that their strike lists are longer than the book list.

Source: Poet Joseph Brodsky gave a speech at the Swedish Academy of Literature on December 8, 1987, translated by Zhang Yu.