Some interesting excerpts from a review by Terry Eagleton of a book I'd like to pick up some time, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins by Peter Conrad:
Most aesthetic concepts are theological ones in disguise. The Romantics saw works of art as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were self-originating, self-determining, carrying their ends and raisons d’être within themselves. As such, art was a secular version of the Almighty. Both God and art belonged to that rare category of objects which existed entirely for their own sake, free of the vulgar taint of utility. The third member of this category was the human being. In their freedom, independence and glorious pointlessness, works of art were images of men and women – or at least of what they could become under transformed political conditions. In this sense, art was a politics all of its own, pointing to a future society in which human beings would be treated as ends in themselves. It was a foretaste of utopia in its very uselessness.
. . .
It was a pity, though, that only a few thousand individuals actually bothered about art, whereas countless millions had devoted themselves to God. This meant among other things that art, or culture, was to prove a far less potent ideological force than religion had been. However much the artist recycled himself as a secular priest, art could not hold a candle to religion. But art at least had the advantage of indubitably existing, which was more than could be said for the Supreme Being.
. . .
From Baudelaire to Yeats, the work of art was believed to reconcile the sensuous and the spiritual, or the concrete and the universal. It embodied a kind of mini-Incarnation, the point where time and eternity intersected.
. . .
What is striking about art is that this obscurity is combined with an unusually heightened degree of awareness. No doubt this is what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he said that poets were both more primitive and more sophisticated than the average run of individuals.
. . .
The dethroning of God was not only the elevation of art. It was also the invention of Man. Because God had created human beings in his own image and likeness – that is to say, fashioned them as free – they were now able to press that freedom to its limit by abolishing the source of it and installing themselves in his place. Man was now the transcendent peak of creation, owing almost as little as the Almighty had to nature and biology. As Nietzsche scornfully pointed out, surprisingly little was thereby altered. Instead, the religion of Yahweh gave way to Feuerbach’s religion of humanity. There was still a stable metaphysical centre to the world; it was just that it was now us rather than a deity. Idolatry accordingly gave way to narcissism. In Nietzsche’s view, the toppling of God, if it were to constitute a genuine revolution, would have to involve the subversion of Man as we know him as well. Otherwise God would simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality.
. . .
Like aesthetics, then, humanism was covertly theological all along. It had its satanic side too, as humanity came to lord it destructively over its world with all the imperiousness that had once been ascribed to God. Moreover, just as creation is a delight in itself, so can destruction be. The two are closer than the naive Romantic supposes. The devil is a fallen angel. To destroy just for the hell of it, without any purposeful end in mind, is what is traditionally known as evil.
. . .
For some postmodern thinkers, we are clay in our own hands, artist and artefact together, free to mould our bodies and psyches into whatever shapes we find most appealing. Behind a belief in the endless plasticity of the world lies a rather less congenial faith in an iron will which stamps its imprint on these shapes.
Some excellent points here, and they deal with what is probably my main intellectual interest: how, after the disablement of God, man sublimates his need for religious fervour into secular pursuits of the transcendent like utopianism and art. The modernists actually thought art could change the world. That led to some fascinating art movements--Futurism, Surrealism, Vorticism--but ultimately, art could never achieve the same popular reach as religion. Thus we have the current rather sad state of modern art, where it aims to shock a bourgeoisie who are its only remaining audience. Art is elitist but most artists are still in denial about this elitism, which brings us to Eagleton's summation of Nietzsche. Despite being "post-Christian," the cultured West and its core of secular humanists still persist in ascribing to watered-down versions of Christian morality like socialism. Nietzsche is the most relevant of philosophers because he diagnosed the problem but the solution hasn't arrived yet. God is still living a "shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality." Art seemed the greatest contender to take His place as the religious focus of man, but very few people are willing to die in the name of Art. They will, however, die in the name of their nation. Thus fascists answered the post-religious search for meaning with ultra-nationalism as the new aesthetic-spiritual nexus, with politics and the manipulation and orchestration of the masses as a higher art in itself. Thus we have the genetic link between postmodernism and fascism: postmodernism, or an academic rejection of all absolute values, is an elitist position. The masses need values. Thus fascism fills the gap postmodernism created by providing new absolute values for the masses as directed by elitists no longer in denial. Nietzsche was neither a fascist nor a postmodernist: he was rather a prophet of the emergence of both. The question for us now is how to create new values that rise above the nihilism of postmodernism and ultra-nationalism, the limitations of art's popular reach and the unsatisfying mediocrity of post-Christian suburban morality. Many have rejected this entire line of thought by returning to religion itself: the complete set of answers provided by Evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, absolutist Islam, etc. But if the secular world wishes to be more than a battleground for opposing forces of religious fundamentalism, it will have to come up with some new answers of its own.
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