How to Write Better Essays

where whatever seems right can only be decided by referring to the

exclusive personal states of the user, there can be no such rules.

Despite its internal coherence any art built upon exclusively per-

sonal experience is in danger of having no anchor in a common

shared reality its flotilla of symbols adrift with no charts. The modern

liberal artist is left with the problem of trying to communicate what

being alive is like without the assurance of a common social frame

of reference without an identity etched in the complex interactions

of social relations of family, friends and acquaintances, he is left with

just his abstract humanity known only to himself.

Answer

Peeling the Onion – Art in Western Liberal Democracies

The problem for liberal democracies is that they have an inveter-

ate habit of dissipating the social context that seems so important

if art is to flourish. They break down the interpersonal, isolating

each individual both from one another and from society. Conse-

quently, in such societies art must, out of necessity, turn away from

public themes towards private pursuits and preoccupations: the

exploration of emotions, the glorification of sex, even the invocation

of death.

As a result, 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.

But our easy acceptance of these assumptions conceals two

serious problems. First, talk about revealing our essential selves

might in fact be quite meaningless. Like stripping away each suc-

cessive 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 challenge 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

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