How to Write Better Essays

Passage

Peeling the Onion – Art in Western Liberal Democracies

The problem for liberal democracies is that they have an inveterate

habit of dissipating the social context that seems so important if art

is to flourish. They break down the interpersonal, isolating each indi-

vidual both from one another and from society. In such societies art

must out of necessity turn away from public themes towards private

pursuits and preoccupations the exploration of emotions, the glori-

fication of sex, even the invocation of death.

In these individualised cultures talk of uncovering our essential

selves has become the orthodoxy of the age our struggle for self-

fulfilment has led us to believe in a form of essentialism that there

lies a hard core of reality within all of us if we can only strip away

the successive layers of misleading appearance and reveal it.

Psychoanalysts seem to regard the self as an entity that is always

striving for self-realisation and fulfilment – an essential nature

bursting to get out.

Our easy acceptance of these assumptions conceals two serious

problems. Talk about revealing our essential selves might in fact be

quite meaningless like stripping away each successive layer of an

onion, we might find at the end we’re left with nothing at all. If this

turns out to be the case, we will then be forced to accept the chal-

lenge that we are only what we make ourselves in the world as we

find it.

The second problem, however, is even more worrying it strikes at

the very viability of art in these individualised cultures. We talk of

self-realisation as if it is the common-sense rationalisation of every

artist struggling for self-expression. In effect, it leaves the artist cow-

ering from the real world, sheltered within the safe, though barren

confines of solipsism. If we believe that all we can ever really know

is our inner personal states, then the outside world can only ever be

a product of our own consciousness. This is incompatible with a lan-

guage to express it, whether in music, painting or literature.

In effect it can only be expressed through a private language, the

terms of which are defined by reference to our private sensations and

whose meaning can only be known to us. As Wittgenstein points out

inPhilosophical Investigations, such a language is not logically pos-

sible, because a language is designed to communicate with others,

and this requires commonly accepted rules. In a private language,

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