On Creating Meaningful Art

To start with, in order to maintain any ground gained in the attempt to define the boundaries of what constitutes the fine arts, namely that which is both meaningful and beautiful, one thing that seems to be necessary is to retain the adjectival designators thus claimed, e.g. “fine” in the fine arts. This will at least provide a distinction between that which manifests the beautiful, and the aesthetic pleasure that is derived from an experience, or from one’s τεκνη. However, this does not go nearly far enough in providing a conceptual basis for art and beauty that is rooted in truth and goodness, and one that provides a foundation for creating meaningful art that is also beautiful. Though Kant and Hegel offered meaningful insights, their aesthetics did not get us far enough either. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to finish tracing out the fall of art, if it can be so called, to reveal what line of thinking led to its postmodern demise. This will hopefully afford a view of the aesthetic landscape that can be built on properly.

As stated previously, Tolstoy’s definition appears, at first glance, to communicate a noble definition of art: “Art is that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” 26 On closer inspection, however, it falls considerably short of those examples offered at the beginning of the paper. This is because Tolstoy’s definition of art excludes beauty outright. To Tolstoy, art is nothing more than a communion of feelings between people via external signs. Perhaps this seems to be an unfair indictment against the famed author of the classic novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina . But a brief look at his work on aesthetics, What is Art?, will most certainly demonstrate otherwise. Following his aforementioned definition of art, he summarizes his position on aesthetics, writing,

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the mysterious idea, beauty, God; not, as the aesthetician-physiologists say, a form of play in which man releases a surplus of stored-up energy; not the manifestation of emotions through external signs; not the production of pleasing objects; not, above all, pleasure; but is a means of human communion, necessary for life and for the movement towards the good of the individual man and of mankind, uniting them in the same feelings. 27

In what he affirms, his is not necessarily a bad definition of art, as far as it goes. The problem is his affirmations do not go far enough; and in what he denies, he goes much too far. For example, there is merit in his assertion that art is a means of human communion. Recall, art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. Additionally, Tolstoy is correct in saying art is necessary to life. At the very least, it is the manifestation of creativity innate in every human. As Tolkien noted in Mythopoeia , because humans have been created in the image of God, humans are sub-creators, expanding God’s creative genius, as it were, in obedience to the “dominion commission.” 28 And at its very best, art is a mirror into the soul of humanity. Art is what humans work for, what humans war for, and what humans wish for. Finally, art does move us toward the good, and transcendently unites humanity in a way nothing else can. All that Tolstoy affirms here is true, yet his affirmations fail to go far enough; and, in what Tolstoy denies, he deprives art of its essence—that which manifests beauty.

Perhaps Tolstoy was a curmudgeon. But his view on aesthetics was not developed overnight. He spent a lifetime thinking about them. In his published work, he comes to his definition by first working his way through a fairly unabridged bibliography of aestheticians, taking each one to task for what he believes are their errors. Ultimately, he boils down all aesthetic concepts of beauty to two fundamental views: “one, that beauty is something existing in itself, a manifestation of the absolutely perfect—idea, spirit, will, God; the other, that beauty is a certain pleasure we experience, which does not have the personal advantage as its aim.” 29 In other words, he demonstrates how all theories of beauty either fall into the category of subjective beauty, where beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” so to speak, or the category of objective beauty where beauty is some intangible perfected thing that exists in the object of art itself. One can certainly hear echoes of Kant and Hegel in his summary. Yet, in Tolstoy’s estimation, both of these ideas fall short because they both mean beauty is “nothing other than the recognition as good of what has been and is found pleasing by us—that is, by a certain circle of people.”30 In other words, if art must be defined as manifesting beauty, which is another name for the pleasure of certain upper class people, it is an inequitable aristocratic construct in Tolstoy’s view of things. Tolstoy is not a friend of beauty in the aesthetic sense of the word because, in his estimation, it is a two-fold enemy of humanity. First, beauty is the enemy of the good:

28 Genesis 1:26-30 records the command God gave the first man and woman to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. The word dominion implies something more than stewarding the earth, but fashioning it in relationship to human flourishing.

29 Tolstoy, Pevear, and Volokhonsky, What is Art? , 31.

The good is the eternal, the highest aim of our life. No matter how we understand the good, our life is nothing else than a striving towards the good—that is, towards God . . . the beautiful is nothing other than what is pleasing to us. The concept of beauty not only does not coincide with the good, but is rather the opposite of it, because the good for the most part coincides with a triumph over our predilections, while beauty is the basis of all our predilections. 31

If the good is the highest aim of the human life, then beauty is the biggest adversary of humanity’s striving toward it. As Tolstoy saw it, it is the good that leads mankind to triumph over his predilections (i.e., desire for worldly pleasures). Since beauty is pleasure, then it is the opposite of the good, and the very foundation of those predilections mankind 30 Tolstoy, Pevear, and Volokhonsky, What is Art? , 34.. 31 Ibid.,