principle” can be tweaked to apply to the arts.^11 Mill’s harm principle is
one developed out of a concern for protecting the conditions that enable
human liberty to flourish, while curbing injury to innocents. One may
never use freedom to cause unjustified harm to others. It is my view that
a harm principle for the arts might help us guard against the tendencies
that do harm to art itself, thus undermining art’s humanizing function.
Just as freedom is essential for the flourishing of human society, and so
is something that needs to be protected from forces that would under-
mine it; the humanizing function of art is essential to the vital role that
art can play in human life, and may need to be protected from the forces
that might undermine it.
Levi’s work is essential to the case I want to make for the humaniz-
ing function of art. Levi was an Italian chemist turned essayist, whose
accounts of what he suffered in the Nazi death camps provide ample evi-
dence of the evils and dangers of political tyranny; he experienced and
insightfully expressed art’s humanizing function. While Adorno’s
provocative claims regarding the impossibility of art after Auschwitz
have received wide attention, Levi’s insights regarding the role of art in
Auschwitz have been largely overlooked by philosophers. Adorno offers
a quite pessimistic view of art’s future, while Levi’s reflections on the
power that art exerted in Auschwitz, rather surprisingly, given the con-
ditions that gave rise to his reflections on art, provide us with reason to
be optimistic about the enduring role that art can play in human life.- Art in Auschwitz: The Humanizing
Function of Art
Let us turn to a time when something much more sinister than any fore-
told end of art cast a looming shadow and to a historical place where the
human spirit was crushed and threatened with extermination. I refer to
the death camp of Auschwitz as reflected in the narrative of Primo Levi,
who was a prisoner there and who survived his ordeal, his subjection to
the darkest side of humanity. Art, he claims, helped him survive:
[Art] was useful to me. Not always, at times perhaps by subterranean and
unforeseen paths, but it served me well and perhaps it saved me. (The
Drowned and the Saved, Random House, 1998, 139)How did art help save Primo Levi, as the dark tides of a bleak, evil world
engulfed him? Levi goes on to reflect upon the importance of some lines
from “The Canto of Ulysses,” Canto 26 of Dante’s Divine Comedy78 Elizabeth Millán