An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

The special pertinence of this artistic achievement is that human life

continually presents materials about which we do not know exactly how to

feel and judge. Patient domesticity in human life can be an appropriate object

of both pity and fearandexhilaration and admiration; so can heroic uncon-

ventionalism. It all depends on the details of the case, and these details may

often accumulate in ways that leave us puzzled and divided with ourselves,

not knowing quite what to feel or think. We can feel puzzled and divided

with ourselves about Tawana Brawley as victim versus Tawana Brawley as

fraudulent exploiter of racial antagonism; we can feel puzzled and divided at

religion as an ordered but pale social institution versus religion as a thing of

blood and mystery. We can wish to have our puzzlement worked through

and clarified, and successful art will do this, in a way that does not resolve

the puzzlement into a dogmatic moral, but which clarifies its complex

particularities in relation to its object.

One good example of the working through of divided emotions and

attitudes is Irvine Welsh’s novelGlue.^99 Gluetraces the lives of four boys

growing up in the Edinburgh housing projects as“schemies,”from their first

days at school in about 1970 to the present, as they are in their mid-thirties.

In many ways, Edinburgh housing project life is straightforwardly awful and

in need of more than a little reform based on sound ethical reflection and

understanding. There is brutal casual sex, without much regard for conse-

quences, escapism via Ecstasy and heroin and rock music, not so petty

housebreaking and thievery, and omnipresent violence, including knife

fights and football brawling for fun. One of the four central characters

commits suicide by jumping from a bridge. Another shoots an acquaintance

through the throat with a crossbow. None of them achieves a stable sexual

relationship with anyone. Growing into their forties and beyond–if the

remaining three make it–will not be easy for them.

Yet, apart from a much smaller number of passages of third-person

narrative and the voices of a few outsiders, the novel is written in the heavy

interest and we have an interest, is that he represents it as contingently historically

emergent, perhaps optional. I would argue that commitment to this project comes rather

with our possession of Kantian practical reason or conscience or, in Nietzsche’s terms,

with our being“interesting animals”capable of repression and self-formation, though

this project may take a long time to come into articulate awareness and in some

circumstances may never quite do so.

(^99) Irvine Welsh,Glue(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
248 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art