Beauty Trouble: Identity and Difference in the Tradition of the Aesthetic

The following is the text of a talk I gave at the Naropa Institute in 1999. The topic, beauty, was requested by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who curated the series of talks to which I had been invited to contribute.

"Some there are who say the fairest thing seen on the black earth is an array of horsemen; some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say she whom one loves best
is the loveliest. (Sappho [c.610-c.580 BCE] fragment 3.
Lattimore tr.)

While I was thinking over what I would say about beauty, I heard a radio report about a new kind of brain scanning machine that gives doctors a more detailed picture than the
old brain scanning machines. The reporter said that with the new machine, Doctors can see "exactly what is going on in a patient's mind." Then he said that this machine could enable scientists to "finally establish what consciousness is." It occurred to me that the assumption that we can arrive at exactly what's going on and finally establish things has
very much to do with beauty. That's what I want to talk about.

Well, what's it going to be? Consciousness is a chemically-induced electrical charge? Beauty is a jolt to the pineal gland? We laugh because it's terrifying. That's where terror comes from -- an absurd, categorically fixed position. And beauty is implicated in this absurdity and in its unmasking. So that's my topic in a nutshell.

This is beauty trouble and it has two aspects and each aspect has an effect. I will call the first aspect identity, and say that its effect is death, and oppose it to difference, the effect of which is life. That's the nucleus of the problem I want to address. Identity = death; difference = life; and beauty is in between. Beauty occupies both sides of this dialectic. It is the third term that mediates the opposition. It's the apex of the equilateral triangle which, says Bucky Fuller, is basic to the architecture of matter and which Plato says is the most beautiful form. It is the balance of processes between organism and environment which is life. It is the ritual sacrifice that restores balance and shows us that life goes on. This is what I want to say about beauty.

So we have three terms, identity, difference, and beauty, and to begin with I want to situate the first two in relation to some English words that share a common Greek root -- ecology, economy and ecocide. Ecology: eco-, from oikos, house, -logy: from logos, word, discourse, or reason -- so ecology is the study of our home. Economics: eco- and nemein to manage, so economics is home management. When what we learn from the study of our house does not inform the management of our home, the result is ecocide, eco- and cidium, a slaying, so demolition. We are demolishing our house.

Now what do I mean by equating identity with death? Identity comes from the Latin identitatem, sameness. So to take an example from ecology: environments change; organisms that adapt to difference live, and organisms that replicate sameness don't.

Here's an example from economics. The dominant mode of economics in our world centers on commodities -- moveable goods valuable by a common measure which is money. Commodities are objects that, for purposes of exchange, are rendered equivalent. For example, let's say that ten pounds of gold is equal to ten tons of coffee, which equals a brand new Ferrari, which equals a small house in an unfashionable neighborhood, and so on. So commodification emphasizes sameness.

This also applies to persons. Commodity economics requires the mass production of persons consistent with the mass production of products. Identity is the mold for this
production process. Difference is downplayed, and obvious or irreducible difference may be despised. Critical theorist Theodor Adorno says we purchase superficially different
identities by identifying with products, automobiles, clothes, music, which themselves are superficially varied replications of "the Same."

So the modern notion of identity in the sense of that which supposedly makes a person unique, is a mistake. We might say it is a 180-degree error: the opposite is the case. Identity means sameness. That uniqueness would mean sameness is a paradox, from para, beyond, and doxon, belief: a paradox is an absurdity. It is a rule of thumb for analysis of power structures that if you locate the paradox, you've found the source of power. In George Orwell's novel 1984, the government agency that fabricates a history of lies is called the Ministry of Truth, and the slogan of the ruling party is "freedom is slavery." Remember I said terror comes from an absurdity? This is one application of that.

In the social realm, just as in the ecological realm, general sameness is a dangerous maladaption. The elimination of biodiversity and the elimination of social and cultural
diversity are equally deadly, and of course the two processes go hand in hand, often quite insidiously.

This is why, for example, recent feminist scholarship has warned of the hazards of trying to invoke or definitively establish some sort of feminine essence. The idea of an essential "feminine identity" is itself the mechanism of oppression. This is why Monique Wittig says she is not a woman, why Luce Irigaray says that all systems of identity formation are patriarchal, and why Julia Kristeva says it is not possible for a woman to be. All systems that drive toward identity replicate conditions of oppression.

The various manifestations of our mania for identification have been related by a number of theorists to the quest to identify universal laws through rational method that got its start among the philosopher scientists of ancient Greece, and which ,in the 18th-century, became a major trend. We call this period the Age of Reason and its project the Enlightenment. Adorno portrays the Enlightenment as a noble effort gone wrong. The goal was liberation through knowledge. All the darkness was to be illuminated, everyone was to be free but, Adorno says, the rational method was valued above its consequences and the eventual outcome was the opposite of the initial intention, slavery and slaughter on an unprecedented scale.

Another way of saying this is that the eternal explanation, monumental truth, is a con game, a false god, an idol, what critical theorists call a fetish, and what Friedrich Nietzsche called prejudices baptized as truth. The word "true" comes from the Gothic trauan meaning to believe, to trust, to be persuaded. Nietzsche said that the idea that the universe is lawful is the invention of dolts who only wish to project their belief in themselves or to avoid taking responsibility for themselves, who "prefer even a handful of 'certainty' to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities." He says, "Some abysmal arrogance . . . inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to terrorize yourselves . . . nature, too, lets herself be terrorized." He says our prejudices and self-interest mislead us into mistaking our particular interpretation for the explanation.

Is universal law the ploy of a paranoid control freak? Some of the recent scholarship on Isaac Newton would support this. And come to think of it, examples abound! But I can't go into this at length here; let's just say that our obsession with law reflects the extent to which we are policed. We're a cop-happy culture. As Islamic studies scholar Hakim Bey has it: "Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard."

So where do we go from here? And what has all this got to do with beauty?

I said beauty has two opposing aspects, and beauty trouble is of two kinds. On the one hand, beauty is troublesome because it can be complicit in the imposition of identity -- of absolute law, unquestionable values, oppressive universals -- and on the other hand, beauty troubles such impulses through insisting on difference -- Nietzsche's "carload of beautiful possibilities."

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4 December 1998) says that in the academic world, beauty has had some problems in the last few decades. The article describes an opposition between on the one hand, aesthetics, which is defined in this context as the study of beauty or the philosophy of art, and on the other hand cultural
studies, a broad interdisciplinary field that draws upon arts criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences. Now as a student of cultural studies I have personally never had any difficulty embracing beauty. But there is trouble in the academy on this, the Chronicle of Higher Education is right. The problem is like so: beginning in the late seventeen hundreds, there was an increasing tendency to regard art as a thing above worldly circumstances, something that must be kept apart from material concerns. This view, which was popularized by a small circle of scholars at Oxford in the 1880s, finally became the conventional view, something taken for granted. Beauty is seen as an absolute value that transcends historical and cultural context.

For cultural studies, on the other hand, the question is not how art invokes the transcendental, or whether a particular artifact is or is not beautiful. The question is what are the historical circumstances that gave rise to the idea of transcendent beauty in the first place, and what are the implications for human relationship invoked by this.

What has happened is that the assumption that there is an isolatable experience called beauty has forced aestheticians into uncomfortably close company with those who insist on imposing other sorts of abstract universals. Allan Bloom, for example, has written, "The fact that there have been different opinions about good and bad in different times and places in no way proves that none is true or superior to others." The problem here is that the criteria of truth and superiority are also different according to time and place. Professor Bloom mistakes culturally-determined values for universal truth. Once and future Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan puts the position more bluntly: "Multiculturalism is an across-the-board assault on our Anglo-Saxon heritage . . . Our culture is superior to others."

This is a view that first came under attack in European philosophical literature in the 1780s when the German theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder wrote: "Men of all quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature." Particularly interesting here is that Herder associates the triumph of European culture with injuring nature and with the end of time. Johann seems to have been a prophet.

In fifth century BCE Athens, where Professor Bloom gets his groceries, the idea that the Athenian citizen was a higher order of human was unlikely to be challenged. It's a
small town mentality. Herder notwithstanding, a similar situation applied in nineteenth-century Europe, because science was the mouth of truth and evolution was all the
rage. Everything had to be a science and everything had to be evolving. So you've got the science of child rearing and the science of swatting flies and the science of canning
peaches and the scientific ladder of social evolution with savages on the bottom, barbarians in the middle, and civilized people on top. The middle-class Christian European male is the pinnacle of biological evolution and his values are the pinnacle of social evolution; and since values are among the least examined aspects of a world view, they've outlived the scientific racism paradigm. Prejudices often outlast their rationale.

How do you justify claims to superiority? By aggression: physical violence and/or claiming some special access to "the truth." Adorno says, "Only those thoughts are
true which fail to understand themselves." The simple truth, the truth that is supposed to transcend its cultural and historical context is ignorance, and aggression is its material manifestation. The test for the presence of such truth is to question it. Things can get real nasty real quick.

Back in the 1780s, Herder advised that we regard our culture as one among many -- a new idea then and now -- and when you actually get down to comparing cultures you come up with a lot of troubling questions. For example, if in a certain milieu, beauty requires that a girl have her feet bound so that they don't grow, or grow into what we would consider
deformity, are the foot-binders mistaken about the nature of the beautiful? Are they not yet evolved to our level so they don't see true beauty? Why does their idea of beauty require that women be unable to walk? And could it be that our notions of the beautiful are also connected to oppressive agendas?

The belief in universals avoids such questions precisely because universals are connected to such agendas. If we examine these things from a historical perspective, we find that truths and values that we are expected to accept without question because they're supposed to transcend worldly circumstances have had a huge impact on the world in which they pretend to have no interest. There's that paradox again, and it's a power node. The most disinterested values are connected with the most vested interests. This is why in the nineteenth century, at the same time that the notion of art apart from worldly concerns is coming to the fore in Europe, guess who develops a critique of metaphysics.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was schooled in philology, which means he was by training a linguist. In 1887 he published a book called On the Genealogy of Morals
in which he points out that the words in Indo-European languages that mean good and bad can be traced to historical root-words meaning things like high born and low born,
advantaged and deprived, master and slave, and light-skinned and dark-skinned. Nietzsche's method was, as the book's title suggests, genealogy, the study of historical descent. You hire a genealogist to find out about the history of your
name. Nietzsche turned this method to investigating the origins of the taken-for-granted, in this case, conventional bourgeois morality. He did what many innovators in
philosophy and science do. He asked a question that had never been asked before. Everybody had asked whether this or that was good or bad, and many people had asked what is the meaning of good and bad in an abstract sense, but nobody had asked what is the history of the idea of good and bad. Suddenly good and bad appear to have been tied up from the start with issues of social advantage. "The simple truth" doesn't seem so simple after that.

Marx called the truth that doesn't understand itself ideology. Ideology in this sense is the interests of a particular social group masquerading as eternal truth. Ideology can only operate if we are ignorant of history. It's like a confidence man. Suddenly, one day, there he is, one of those guys you feel you've always known. Where did he come from? It's impolite to ask. His past is not discussed, in fact it is continually erased, that's how he stays in business. A concept or value or category can only pose as transcendental by hiding the fact that it was invented by particular persons with particular interests. This is why knowledge of history is basic survival equipment. A society in which history is increasingly regarded as irrelevant is a society in which people are increasingly powerless.

Literature provides a good example of something that appears to embody eternal, transcendental values, but if we look at history we find that literature has meant different
things at different times. Up until the eighteenth century, it meant what we now call literacy, both the ability to read and the quality of being well-read. It was said of a person
who could read and write that he or she had literature, or that someone who had read a lot had literature. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton says that in the eighteenth century literature came to mean "the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays, and letters as well as poems" and that the novel and the drama were of dubious status. Literature at this time was quite frankly books that embodied the values of the ruling class. But with the need of the old aristocracy to form alliances with the increasingly powerful middle class, literature began to take on a kind of mystical importance. The thing now became cultivation of noble values and sentiments, so at this point literature means social and aesthetic treatises, sermons, and manuals on morals and etiquette.

Then, with the increasing dominance of industrial capitalism, the focus shifts to fiction and poetry. Eagleton cites several reasons for this. First, the middle class tends to value most those things that turn a profit, which results in a distancing of art from "real life." Secondly, the shift of the majority of people from farming and tradesmanship to wage slavery creates social upheaval on an unprecedented scale. In the face of widespread penury, massive unrest, and brutal political repression, the leisure classes increasingly favor escapist art and literature. The Romantic artist and his work begin to be seen as the last holdout of humane values in the face of barbarous exploitation and mass alienation, the last remaining connection with the good old days when people were closer to nature. So the artist is seen, in a sense, as the last unalienated laborer. A final factor completes art's move into a realm beyond worldly circumstances. Again I'll take
Eagleton's example of literature.

Up until the late Victorian age, every young man who was destined to be somebody had access to a private library and might read histories, plays, novels, philosophy, religious tracts, essays, and poetry, whatever kind of books were in vogue according to various social trends. And when he reached a certain age he went to Oxford or Cambridge and studied Classics or Philology or History, but nobody studied Literature because it didn't exist as a field. English literature as a field of study arose when it became necessary to educate the lower classes so that they would be capable of participating in modern industry and empire and like it. So at that point literature became mostly fiction and poetry. Essays, social treatises, histories, and philosophical works were not included. You can't educate the underclass in the same way as the upper classes; you can't have them reading philosophy and deciding that truth is negotiable. It is interesting to note here that Literature was considered a fitting major for women and the "second rate men" who would become teachers of the lower classes.

At this point art, which for centuries had more or less frankly served various social agendas, is utterly divorced from social reality. A work of art is a transcendent thing, and to speak of its relation to social phenomena is now blasphemy.

So this is one kind of beauty trouble, beauty as something apart from real conditions that's supposed to be somehow more important than the real and so is implicated in
the whole raft of supposed transcendental truths that license oppressive relations.

Now I want to discuss the other kind of beauty trouble, which is beauty that troubles identity and ideological fixation by embodying difference. Aesthetics is conventionally thought of as the study of beauty, sometimes called the philosophy of art, and this sense has persisted. But there's a broader sense to it which will lead us to the
synthesis I mentioned at the beginning.

The modern use of the Greek aesthesis got its start in the 1750s when Alexander Baumgarten titled his book on art Aesthetica. Thirty years later, Immanuel Kant shifted the focus from art to perception and made the term into aesthetics. Aesthesis is Greek for sense perception. So in Kant's usage aesthetics is close to the Greek sense and means the science of sense perception. Now as I've been saying, new developments in philosophy or art or politics don't just pop up in isolation. Culture, society, World Spirit, history, Mind, whatever you want to call it, is a living system, and new developments in one part of an organism or system impact the whole system.

Philosopher historians have pointed out relationships between various aspects of social and political life taking place in the period during which Europe went from a patchwork of medieval fiefdoms to a collection of large modern nation states.

One such line of inquiry finds that the consolidation of large numbers of people under increasingly remote centralized governments meant that citizens would have to internalize the means of control. This is a different perspective on "self-government" than the one we usually get, and it can be illuminating. The idea is that when the authorities can no longer keep their eye on all of us, we have to be taught to keep an eye on ourselves and each other. We have to internalize the interests of the ruling class through values that have the appearance of being natural and untainted by political motives. This is accomplished through ideology and it's incredibly effective. For a long time, for example, many
North Americans internalized the notion that in the US there is no class system. This internalization of the interests of the ruling class through ideology, is, again, identity, it is built into who we think we are.

Kantian aesthetics, the science of perception, emerged around the time of the American and French Revolutions, the middle-management take-over that signaled the arrival in
political reality of the modern concept of self-governance. So just when rule by overt repression is replaced by rule by ideology, we have a new science, the science of perception. In Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), the universe takes an inward turn where it becomes indistinguishable from mind. No longer is the cosmos a series of nesting spheres with God in the middle, and then the archangels, and then the six-winged seraphim covered with eyes, and then the lesser angels, and then man, and then the outer darkness; nor is the universe a machine that obeys universal laws, as the Deists had it; now the universe is the set of all possible perceptions and at its center is the human mind. Kant says the universe has the shape of the mind, otherwise we would not be able to perceive it.

His theory of the beautiful can be exemplified as follows: we think that a sunflower is beautiful because it does a fairly thorough job of approximating the shape of the
mind. Let's say mind is bright, has complex symmetry, and is swirly in the middle, and so is the sunflower. So the beautiful is a kind of map of the mind and the universal
authority is individual consciousness. Far out. Now, here's
the trouble.

The new bourgeois capitalist order got a mixed deal by placing the new "autonomous individual" in the position of authority. It enabled a profitable exploitation of a universe of dead objects, but it also objectified persons, generating a paradox that resulted in, on the one hand alienation and on the other, genocide. Beauty, viewed in the Kantian sense as that which mirrors or maps the complexity of consciousness, can be complicit in the imposition of abstract universals and manipulative ideologies, but it can also trouble unquestioned categories, values, and ulterior interests. Beauty troubles generalized truth and universal identity because beauty embodies the particular. It troubles sameness because it manifests difference.

The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson called this poetic estrangement. When we get a message that calls attention to itself as message apart from its descriptive content,
everything, even ourselves, appears different, strange. Jakobson was talking about poetry, but Adorno applied this idea to painting. He said that we do not paint a picture of
a vase in order to create the illusion of a real vase, but rather to make the real vase appear strange. The primary effect of what Adorno calls "genuine art" is that it makes
reality appear constructed, which it is. In other words, having a powerful impression from an artwork, something that is frankly artificial, makes everything appear artificial and therefore subject to change.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of the Naropa Institute, also used the term "genuine art." He said, "Genuine art -- dharma art -- is simply the activity of nonaggression."
To me, this means that when everything is revealed as constructed, we become responsible for it, and we become more compassionate, more careful. Adorno says
genuine art shows us the world as it could be. Art hints at alternatives to a situation that we never even thought of as a situation. Our circumstances demand certain constraints
that we take for granted. We don't even realize that we're in a constructed and constricted situation, and suddenly there's Matisse's Celestial Jerusalem and the world looks exquisite and tragic, like it's made out of colored glass, and we'd better take care of it.

It's a matter of the universal versus the particular. Universals, completion, wholeness, fixed, immutable values are fetishism, the sin of idolatry that licenses abusive relations, the god of fire to whom we sacrifice our children, Molech. God told Moses: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech" (Leviticus 18:21). In his poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg made Moloch synonymous with the inhuman madness of modern civilization. "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? . . . Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!"

The aesthetic process, genuine art, beauty, defies idolatry, it reveals all claims to permanence and completeness to be the projections of the paranoid control freak Nietzsche alluded to. Genuine art supersedes human sacrifice, balancing two worlds without bloodshed. We could say that the golden calf itself becomes the sacrificial offering. In art, the idols die.

Adorno says "the whole is the false," and he refers art's perpetual incompleteness to its origins in ritual process. The cultic element, the open-ended revelatory process, the sense of multiple views or multiple worlds has never been extinguished. The work of art could never come into being without moments of apparent discreet wholeness, but the work continually undoes itself. Adorno likens this to Penelope's unraveling of her weaving each night.

Odysseus has been away so long at the war that the local bullies want to take over his house and his wife and she's afraid to refuse them, so she says, "OK, you can take over
when I finish my weaving," but she never finishes it because she weaves during the day and unravels the work at night. This is a metaphor for art's defiance of that illusion of
stability and inevitability that allows the bullies to take over. There is no permanence or discrete wholeness, and this applies also at the level of the individual. Nietzsche says,
"There is no being behind the doing, the doing is all."

The self is a selective remembering, a mistake, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, there is no "identity" except in "misrecognition." Identity is always a case of
mistaken identity, and this is a fundamentally aggressive state, a kind of love-hate loop between self and other. You can find this view echoed quite simply and elegantly in
Chögyam Trungpa's Dharma Art. Ego identification, thisness and thatness, is the fundamental ignorance that sets up the loop of passion and aggression. What we need to do is occupy two worlds at once, to be at peace with ambiguity, gap, potential, all the beautiful possibilities. It's really important that we do so. It's a matter of survival at this point.

Poet Gregory Corso, who was an occasional guest at Naropa over the years, used to say something that is a key to this whole issue of aesthetics. What he said was, "Given a choice between two things, take both." Now it seems to me that the academic argument between aesthetics and cultural studies comes about because of a certain stiffness, a lack of humor, a lack of willingness to take both, an inability to embrace ambiguity. Beauty is tricky. The middle ground is always tricky. Humor is of course tricky, that's its agency.

The middle ground is the place of art and the place of myth. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his chapter called "The Structural Study of Myth," says "the purpose of myth is to . . . overcome a contradiction." He says one of the ways myth does this is through characters who mediate paradox. All myth systems feature at least one character who in some way lives in two worlds. Sometimes its a coyote, or a raven, or a clown, or a blind man. The trickster characters, like raven and coyote are the obvious ones, the characters who can never be nailed down. You never know what they're going to do next. Ambivalence, ambiguity is their way of being. We can't reconcile life and death. But the trickster exists half in the death world and half in the life world. He or she mediates paradox by embodying it. The trickster is the third term that breaks the deadlock and restores movement.

Another character who has this mediating function is the god or goddess who is both good and bad at the same time, like Aphrodite, who is beauty. Beauty is both good and bad. She is very naughty. Look at the Iliad, beauty causes endless trouble for those mortals. Beauty disrupts the law. She can't be controlled. Beauty is always moving.

In Plato's Symposium Socrates relates that Diotoma, the wise old woman who taught him about love, had said, "When the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of pain and travail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful alone. [It is] the love of generation and birth in beauty. . . . Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality."

Beauty incites regeneration through ecstasy -- ex stasis -- out of place, not static, moving. We are moved by beauty and so are human communities. Participating in ritual or what we call art has been seen by many theorists as the very engine of social regeneration and change.

Sociologist Philip Ennis has examined the history of American popular music from the point of view of the struggle for control of the means of ecstasy. Those who wish to resist social change always intrude into the realm of ecstasy, whether it be via censorship, criminalization, regulation, or dogma, because ecstatic realms defy domination and embody change.

Beauty is between worlds; it is double-edged. Terry Eagleton says the construction of notions of the beautiful is inseparable from the construction of the dominant
ideological forms of modern class society, but that the aesthetic also provides a challenge to these dominant forms because, "the aesthetic is both the secret prototype of human subjectivity and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the enemy of all dominative thought." The aesthetic not only inscribes the body with oppressive law, it also signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, it represents [both] a "specious form of universalism" and "a liberatory concern with concrete particularity."

As Allen Ginsberg wrote in his ecstatic poem Wales Visitation: "The great secret is no secret. . . . What did I notice? Particulars! The vision of the great One is myriad."

The true universal is particularity. At the level of human relations this means respect for difference, what Adorno calls non-identity, against the drive to fixity and sameness which is death.

Julia Kristeva says: The role of aesthetic practices needs to be augmented. . . . Each artistic experience can . . . highlight the diversity of our identifications and the relativity of our symbolic and biological existence."

The true universal is freedom. Eagleton says: "The universal . . . is not some realm of abstract duty set sternly against the particular, it is just every individual's equal right to have his or her difference respected. . . . In pursuit of this political goal, there are meanings and values embedded in the tradition of the aesthetic which are of vital importance, and there are others which are directed towards the defeating of that goal, and which must therefore be challenged and overcome. . . . If we do not live in such a way that the free self-realization of each is achieved in and through the free self-realization of all, then we are likely to destroy ourselves as a species."

We have to occupy at least two worlds at once. We must be lovers of beauty and cultural critics. These days the artist has to also be a philosopher. Art does not occur in a vacuum. We have to appreciate beauty and take responsibility for its social implications. But we must be able to embrace uncertainty, because generalized certainty kills. Maybe that's what wisdom is, uncertainty with a sense of humor. And it's OK to invoke the gods, especially the ones who are good and bad at the same time. So I'll close with another
fragment from Sappho: "Throned in splendor, deathless, O Aphrodite / Child of Zeus, charm-fashioner, I entreat you / Not with griefs and bitternesses to break my / spirit, O goddess.