from the demands of liturgical or social use, and they value it and insist on its
continuance. But they are also aware of the loss of the widespread social
communicative function that once accompanied artistic making when it was
more firmly embedded in contexts of liturgy and ritual.
One of the fullest discussions of this development, with attention to both
gains and losses, occurs in Friedrich Schiller’s essay“On Naïve and Sentimen-
tal Poetry.”Schiller argues there that what we love in nature–in“a modest
flower, a stream, a mossy stone, the chirping of birds, the humming of bees,
and the like”as well as“in children”and“in the customs of country folk”–is
“the silent creativity of life in them, the fact that they act serenely on their
own, being there according to their own laws; we cherish that inner neces-
sity, that eternal oneness with themselves.”^7 For us, creatures who grow up
within richly articulated social systems with intense division of labor, and
hence with opposed social roles that are relatively opaque to one another, it is
different. We are aware of living not just as a human being naturally lives,
but within one or another specific social role, against a wide background of
possibilities, where it is not always clear why that role exists, what its value
is, or how to fulfill it well. Anxiety about one’s social role, its basis, and its
value is especially likely for creative artists who have“betaken themselves to
their work as an isolated means of‘self-expression’”without clear social
function. Where once the making of art was an integral part of knowing
and worshipping and reproducing social life from generation to generation,
it is now optional–freely, gloriously, and individually so, but also freighted
with anxiety. How is anyone to achieve oneness with oneself or at-homeness
within a social role, so as to act“serenely”and with“inner necessity”?In
particular, how might artists do this, where they directly confront the
problem of making individual works that have sensuous expressive meaning,
rather than manufacturing fungible commodities? It may well be an expres-
sion of modern social anxiety that werepresentorimaginethe lives of children
and primitive peoples to be natural, serene, and dominated by inner neces-
sity, like the chirping of birds. In all probability, technologically more primi-
tive human lives and the lives of children were never quite like that. Yet our
imagination or representation that they were so indicates the intensity of
our longing for fuller sensuous meaningfulness and at-homeness within
(^7) Schiller,“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, in Schiller,
Essays, pp. 180, 179.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 257