An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

in her room upstairs from Mr. Collins, by the failures of reciprocity between

Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, and by implication in the roots of enabling wealth in

exploitation.) Throughout the nineteenth century, however, as the social div-

ision of labor intensifies and manufacturing becomes increasingly industrial-

ized, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine even a qualified authentic

reconciliation of inner longing for the ideal with social actuality. Realism drifts

toward a documentarian“false objectivism,”as realist writers such as Zola

isolate objectivity [in representation] from practice, eliminate all motion and

vitality and set it in crass, fatalistic, romantic opposition to an equally isolated

subjectivity...A scrap of reality is to be reproduced mechanically and thus

with a false objectivity, and is to become poetic by being viewed in light of the

observer’s subjectivity, a subjectivity divorced from practice and from

interaction with practice.^22

Alternatively, there can result a“false subjectivism”as, first, in impression-

ism (in painting and in literature) and, second, in moves toward abstract art

(in painting, in literature–for example in thenouveau romanof the 1950s–

and in music, in its increasing rejection of the vernacular). These movements

reflect an “ever-intensifying subjectivization in artistic practice”^23 that

amounts to a flight from social actuality.

Yet Lukács holds out hope that false objectivism and false subjectivism can

be avoided and that the infinite task of art in relation to social actuality, as

Schiller describes it, can be taken up with some degree of effectiveness.

Within [the] richness and subtlety [of“life,”of“ordinary experience,”and of

longings struggling for expression within these spheres] the artist [must]

introduce a new order of things which displaces or modifies the old

abstractions...[The work of art must be made through] a process in which from

the outset the order within the new phenomena manifesting the subtlety of

life is sensed and emerges in the course of the artistic climaxing ever more

sharply and clearly.^24

To say this is to hope that what Marcuse calls“aesthetic affirmation”^25 is still

possible, through this kind of artistic making, where the artist engages with

both social actuality and subjective aspiration.

(^22) Lukács,“Art and Objective Truth,”p. 794B.
(^23) Ibid., p. 795A. (^24) Ibid., pp. 797B, 798A.
(^25) See Marcuse,Aesthetic Dimension, p. 22.
262 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art