The Meaning of Modern Art; A Philosophical Interpretation (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 477 the hearts of Western liberals anxious to promote cultural exchanges and other forms of East-West co-existence, the reviewer feels duty bound to observe that there is nothing specifically Marxist about it. tt is splendid news that the humanist credo has penetrated to the lands behind the Iron Curtain, but do we really need to be confronted once more with an irrational option of this kind? The failure of contemporary philosophy to bridge the seemingly impassable gulf between a positivist methodology and an existentialist decisionism is just what renders our intellectual situation so precarious. One may "opt" for a humane and rational attitude ff one so chooses, but this does not preclude other options, most of them disastrous. What one asks of a radical philosopher is not an existential act of decision-making in the Sartrean manner, but an analysis that enables one to ground practice in theory; instead of which the reader is presented in this volume with an irrational choice in favor of rationality. Leopold Labedz, in his editorial preface, places Kolakowski "in the line of Stoic philosophers" such as Seneca. He fails to mention the circumstances of Seneca's death. In a later essay not included in this volume t Kolakowski does confront the real issue. After dealing critically with Dilthey's historicism on the one hand, positivist scientism and pragmatism on the other, he undertakes a defense of materialism which substantially amounts to identifying it with a humanist standpoint freed from the precritical dogmatism of "Democrit or Holbach," and capable of absorbing the legacy of "Kant, Hegel, Marx, Hume or Hussefl" (op. cit., p. 282). The general conclusion amounts to reinstating the reasoning faculty as specifically human, and at the same time "not simply an additional instrument for the satisfaction of animal needs, in the pragmatist and generally biologizing interpretation." So far from being merely instrumental , Reason constitutes "a denial of animality; the conflict between the two fundamental aspects of human existence expressed in the opposition of science and metaphysics cannot be eliminated without abolishing man's being as such." Written and published before the author's expulsion from the party, and from his native country, this statement represents what may fairly be described as a return to the central tradition of western philosophy. GEORGELICHTHE~ London The Meaning of Modern Art; A Philosophical Interpretation. By Karsten Harries. (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1968. Pp. 166) This book is an attempt to define how modern art differs from earlier art and is directed at contemporary aestheticians, who "especially, seem to feel that modern art does not depart in any essential way from the art of the past" (p. xi). It is thus meant to provide aestheticians a philosophical understanding of modern art--supposedly to help update the principles of aesthetics. However, as one reads this work it becomes increasingly clear that this is not so much an attempt to establish the meaning ot modern art as it is a plea to move beyond it. Modern art is attacked for its subjectivity and judged harshly for not being able to clearly demarcate itself from sentimentalism. Although somewhat one-sided in his concern with subjectivity, Harries does thereby raise some important issues for aesthetics. The book begins with almost fifty pages of historical introduction, in which the meaning of traditional art (primarily painting) is reinterpreted in light of a modern "Ist der verstehende Materialismus m6glich?" in Georg Lukdcs: Festschrifl zum 80. Geburtstag (Luchterhand, Neuwied and Berlin, 1965). 478 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY existential interpretation of life. For instance, according to Hurries, the pol~trity of beauty and sublimity in eighteenth-century aesthetics can a[reac~y be formulated in terms of the problem of man's sense of alienation. Whereas bea~tty provides a feeling of beil2g at home in reality (~ it~ a Hobberaa landscape), the sublime reveals to us that this comfortable feeling comes at the price of forgetting what lies beyond the dikes of civilization. The sublime experience of the oceanic aspect ot nature can have a dual character: It can be both terrifying and liberating. Man's sense of alienation amidst the infinity of nature forces him to turn within himself and affll-~ his freedom...