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Books 77 This book contains many views about the realm of cbnsciousness,for Nishidadeveloped a subtlestructure founded on the a priority of the act that encompassesand integratesboth the moral and the aesthetic. Moreover, I find the breadth of scope that Nishida ascribed to the aesthetic refreshing, for, insofaras Western culturetends to be committedto the rational ideal, Nishida’s formulation offers an alternative. Even philosophy, that domain of rational thought, he believes must relinquish the exclusivity.of its pretensions to reason: ‘In philosophy conceptual knowledge becomes aesthetic.’ Still, the book has seriousshortcomingsfor Western readers. Perusing it is like treading along a path in a Japanese garden. There is no bold vista, no unifying scheme. Instead there are many subtle turnings, intimate views, unexpected details and surprising combinations. Despite Nishida’s proclivity to Western systematicphilosophy,architectonicstructurethe book has not, nor is there any compelling argumentation. Indeed, thereismuchin thisbook that doesnot bear on the issuedenoted by the title, nor are there any references to individual artists or works of art. Moreover,this is a rather dated book for presentdayreaderssinceitsscholarlyfoundationsare largelyovergrown by this time, and it does not have enough strength of internal structuretosupportitsownweight. Art andhforality,then,apart from its scholarly and historical interest, is mostly a source of occasionalinsightand tantalizingobservationson intuition and pureexperience that found fullerdevelopmentin Nishida’slater works. The Pornogrclphy Controversy: Changing Moral St.nd.rds in American Life. Ray C. Rist, ed. Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J., 1975. 279 pp. Paper, $3.95. Reviewed by RiehudM.COUill* ‘Galeotto fu il libro’, declared Dante’s uxorious Francesca, indignantabout a pornographicbook even while luxuriatingin her own erotic memories. The same strained moral ambivalence-one cannot call it hypocrisy-affects most discussionsof the subject; with pornography esthetic criticism failsandeffectivecriticismtakesover,asif the art werethe act. In 1970a PresidentialCommissionin the USA. issued a report on the effects of pornography, finding little or none of public concern. It was promptly rejected by President Nixon and attacked by others who persisted in believing that displays of sexual fantasy are somehow aphrodisiacand therefore socially degrading,even dangerous. Thisis apparentlythe ‘controversy’ referredto in the book’stitle; what is meant by ‘changingmoral standards’inthesubtitleisnot madeclear.Thebasiccontroversy is, of course, centuries old, renewed each time a new acknowledgementof human sexualityrises into popular culture orart, shockingby itsdisplayin an unfamiliarcontext.Thisbook presents a range of contemporary attitudes especially toward depictions of sex in the public media. It isan anthologyof 14essays, most of them written for other purposes during the late 1960sor early 197Os,most of them by behavioralscientists. Even so, most of them areinnocent of Social scientific rigor, being moralistic or impressionisticrather than descriptiveor analytical.A fewview with amusementsomethenrecentphenomenainthe U.S.A., suchastherise of pornographic movie theaters,the developmentof Playboy’s or Cosmopolitan’s soft-coreformulas,or adviceto teenagerson sexualrole-playing, seeing in them commercial styles liberating patrons from the tensionsof actualsexuality.A few view with alarm the increased access to such displays, findingin them a violation of sex as a ‘citadel of privacy’ (George Steiner), diminution of ‘essential humanity’ (John MacGregor),substitutionofvoyeurismforlove (WalterBerns)or violationof human dignity(Harold Gardiner, S.J.). Mosthold conservativelythat humansexualityisimproper when autoerotic,merely corporeal, or insincere, and a number believe that worksconcernedwith but one human proclivity,as with pornography, arelimited asliterature.Theseare interesting ideas if not new, but they are not self-evident, and as critical stricturestheyapplyequallyto other kinds of literature;yet they are more often asserted than discussed.One writer (Abraham Kaplan) finds the objectionable quality ‘obscenity’not in the subjectbut in the ‘expressivesubstanceof the work of art itself‘, an obscure distinction, but he redeems it with the observation that pornography is usually grim, rarely celebratory. Thus these essayiststread where jurists and humanists have gone before, exemplifying a continuing social concern that it matters what consenting adults do with their imaginations in their spare time. The book cites a Commissionreport denying evidence of a causal relationship between pornography and sexual criminality (elsewhere in the book tersely contradicted), and it prints Chief Justice Warren’s optimistic account of U.S. Supreme Court accomplishments during his tenure (since retrenchedby the Burger court);and in his firstessay the book’s editor worries the old conflict between individual liberty under the law and society’sstandardsenforcedaslaw. But little is said about these...

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