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PILLAR 4: FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

We should have unmitigated freedom of expression as a law, and, more importantly, as a shared value in the hearts of the people.

Freedom and Obligations
Difficulties Involved in Freedom of Expression and Why It's Still Worth It
Art and Its Value

What Is Art?
The Individualist and Cultural Conceptions of Art
Art and Objecthood
Art and Morality
In Defense of Escapism
The Tyranny of Interpretation

How Freedom of Expression Is Attacked

Shifting the Blame
Blurring the Lines
Collapsing Distances
Marketing to the Moral Majority
Being a Copyright Bully

How to Protect Freedom of Expression

1. Freedom and Obligations

A society like I sketched out in the third pillar can only be truly acceptable if it has unqualified freedom of expression. Only then do all the social roles and obligations become acceptable. And at the same time, such a harmonious society helps protect unqualified freedom of expression become something we can tolerate and entrust ourselves to. I use the phrase "freedom of expression" instead of just "freedom of speech" because it is much more broad than speech alone. I don't just want to TALK about anything and everything, but being able to draw pictures of it, write stories about it, inform others about it, post about it online, reproduce and copy it, etc. I am in favor of it all.

This is why, in my opinion, Japan has the greatest realization of the Confucian ethical system that I sketched out in the previous pillar. Unlike China, for example, Japan not only puts a high social value on harmony and social duty, but also has some great protections for freedom of speech and expression, and more importantly has them as a shared value among its people. Thus Japanese people get the best of both worlds: in their public lives they can enjoy blending in with the crowd, being a nail that doesn't stick out, and becoming part of a mass wave of people. There is great security, reliability, and solidarity in this. But they also get to have private social and cultural spaces where they can be "wild" and "authentic" and let themselves cut loose for a bit. At least this is the ideal. This is the way Japan has been at its best. Some of its great freedoms have been lost already. Like all other countries on earth, the defense of freedom of expression is a constant battle and enemies are plentiful.

The important part of this Japanese system that I want to call attention to is that in Japan there is not a view of "rights" and "obligations" as necessarily in conflict. There's one quote that gets passed around a lot these days, usually by retards who think that vaccines are a depopulation scheme by George Soros and Bill Gates. The quote is by Benjamin Franklin and it reads:

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

The quote is taken completely out of context to make Franklin sound like some ancap libertarian, when its original context has barely anything to do with civil liberties or resistance to tyranny or anything close to that and actually argues in favor of taxation and "government intervention." It is from a letter, written in 1755. Read all of it here if you are really interested. But I'll summarize: As this is pre-Revolution, the colony of Pennsylvania was still ruled by the wealthy Penn family from overseas. He argues in the letter in favor of the Pennsylvania legislature taxing the lands of the Penn family in order to create a militia to defend against the natives and the French. The "little temporary safety" that he is talking about is thus not the government restricting rights and liberties, but the Penn family securing their assets. Does this sound like some incredibly boring minutiae of day-to-day governance in the early American colonies that doesn't have any relevance to the modern day? That's because it is. The quote was pretty much completely ignored until Friedrich Hayek dug it up in 1944 and first made it into a motto for LOLbertarians [1]. I know, one of the founding fathers being quoted completely out of context to fit someone's perverse ideology, what a shocker.

Still, we can engage with what people WANT this quote to say. Really, it's just the other side of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forward in the theory of the social contract. Rousseau said that absolute freedom exists only in the state of nature. If we live alone in the woods, the only laws we have to obey are the laws of nature. But when man chooses to enter society, he necessarily enters into a contract of sorts where he gives up some of his freedom. We can no longer shit or piss wherever we want, walk around nude if we choose to, kill and eat anything as long as we can catch it, etc. A society has to function by us forfeiting some of those "freedoms" so we can live among each other in some degree of peace and trust.

Having some limitation on our freedom is not only the foundation to any civilized society, but even to our existence as natural organisms. Because, in truth, we don't really have absolute freedom even in the woods. Rousseau's "state of nature" is more of a theoretical idea that can't really exist in the real world. In fact, you could argue that we have a lot less freedom when we live apart from society and in nature. That's because we still have to give and take with other organisms and environmental factors around us. Take too much fruit from a tree at once and you will cut off your food source. Invade the territory of some ants and they will bite you. Sleep too late and you'll miss your opportunity to catch whatever bird or fish you want to eat. A reciprocal give-and-take relationship with the other beings and objects around us is simply a necessity in nature, and being apart from society makes it even more apparent. Fuck around with the natural world and you will pay the price.

But in a society we can afford a bit more leeway. Therefore, the view that people want this Franklin quote to represent is that we sacrifice some of our freedoms to make our society more safe and peaceful, but we also sacrifice some of our security to make our society more free. For example, our society would probably have far fewer crimes if every home had a Big Brother-esque security camera that recorded us at all times. But we would all object to that for being a gross perversion of our liberties. I certainly care a lot about freedom and despise whenever it is restricted, as you'll see if you keep reading. But I do find this freedom vs. safety binary to be a little misinformed. I want to show that the most free society is actually one where people are very strongly "obligated" to others.

I think my rights stem from my obligations, versus a colonial mindset where your rights free you from obligations. You know, being a human on this earth means that I have obligations. It also means I have rights, but one comes first. If I can fulfill my obligations and my responsibilities, from there my rights come, my rights of freedom and my rights of finding happiness... These words have negative connotations, but no, I should want, as a human being, to be obligated to my family and to be obligated to my loved ones.
Raquel Ramirez [2]

We have all our freedoms on the basis of fulfilling our obligations. When you were a kid, you were allowed to watch TV, play video games, or whatever else only after you finished your homework, chores, etc. And that's exactly how it should be as an adult. If you abide by the rules of polite, civil society, you should have freedoms on the basis of your responsibility. I often experienced this in high school. I was a very diligent, respectful, strait-laced student. But that meant that I often got to "bend the rules" (say, for example, on writing assignments or whatever) more than the other students who were worse behaved. We only have to place "rules" limiting each others' freedom when we don't trust them. With people we trust, like our friends and family, we allow them more freedom because we know that what they do won't harm us. The same rule basically applies for society at large. A society that can trust each other more can be free.

This does, however, necessitate some degree of cultural (=/= racial) homogeneity. When you're alone with your friend, you can laugh at a racist joke together because you know both of you aren't really racist. But the reason we don't make those jokes in mixed company is that both of us don't really know the degree to which our values are shared. The same principle applies when you scale it up. For example, a lot of Buddhist and Hindu organizations in the United States or Europe cannot display swastikas, because there isn't enough trust that they aren't really using the symbol in an antisemitic way. But in India or Japan, everyone knows that the people there don't attach any hidden Nazi sympathies to their appreciation for the ancient symbol. So they are more free to display it. It's only with these kind of broad societal obligations being fulfilled that true freedom arises.

I say "true" freedom because I'm talking about freedom on the level beyond being enshrined in law. After all, in the United States for example, it is completely legal (in terms of the law) to display swastikas, confederate flags, or anything else you want to on your private property. But you'll probably get people tearing them down, putting flaming bags of shit on your porch, etc. A lot of people nowadays realize that there's something wrong about only having legal protections for freedom of expression. Your legal protections don't matter much if you'll be "cancelled" every time you do say something that is slightly out of the ordinary. The only way out of that puritanical society of fear and repression is to create a society that is more trusting, more aligned in values, more responsible towards each other, and more loving of freedom. That is a difficult and abstract thing to advocate for, but it is the only way.

2. Difficulties Involved in Freedom of Expression and Why It's Still Worth It

It's very hard to put into words why freedom of expression is so important. There are plenty of reasons we can appeal to: speaking truth to power is important in the evolution of society, fewer restrictions leads to more intersting variety in the art we can experience, having the assurance that you can't go be punished for what you say allows people to feel more at ease, etc. But all of those feel like extensions of the simplest reason: It is fundamental to the human experience to be able to express ourselves. When we cannot, we are incomplete. Expression and thought are tied, and humans are thinking reeds. Take away the freedom of humans to express themselves and you take away their humanity. We have evolved to need it. You might as well try to roll back our ability to stand erect and walk on two feet.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.
Noam Chomsky [3]

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H.L. Mencken [4]

There's no such thing as "non-absolute" freedom of expression. The moment you start to add a few exceptions, it is not freedom of expression anymore. I believe that all of it should be allowed by law and as a cultural value of liberty: Holocaust denial, conspiracy theories, manifestos by spree shooters, blasphemous pictures of Muhammad, lolicon, insulting heads of state and religious leaders, etc. Of course, a lot of things should only be allowed for people over 18, but I think there is absolutely no justification for keeping them from adults.

I think very few forms of expression should be punishable. The following come to mind as exceptions:

＊DIRECTLY putting people in danger (shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, etc.). "Hate speech," "stochastic terrorism," and even "incitement" are perfectly acceptable. The line between "incitement" and directly putting people in danger might be a bit blurry, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a difference. People still have the ability to resist. That's why I think that doxxing is acceptable but swatting isn't, for example.

＊Creation and sale of pornography featuring REAL, NON-FICTIONAL, 3-D MINORS (that is to say, people under the age of consent in the country of its production). I am firm in my belief that the creation, sale, and ownership of 2-D or computer-generated lolicon images/videos and child sex dolls is perfectly acceptable for people over the age of consent.

＊Some forms of expression for people in certain professions (therapist, doctor, judge, priest in a confessional, etc.). I'm thinking generally of restrictions in the interest of protecting the privacy and fair treatment of others. There are some professions like these where you voluntarily choose to give up some of your freedom of expression by pursuing them, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you know what you're getting into. That said, there may be some cases where people do something more virtuous by becoming martyrs for the sake of exposing "classified information," such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

＊Commercial fraud. This includes things like lying about the materials and ingredients used in a product, the effects of that product, etc. I think that doing it in an indirect way (i.e. a fossil fuel company not explicitly spreading misinformation about climate change but funding other groups that do) is just as bad. I think that if we consider a corporation to have rights, then they also should have limitations on their freedom of expression like the above professions do. The same should apply for scientists and academics misrepresenting the results of research for sociopolitical reasons.

When I say "punishable," I don't necessarily mean by law. Not all of the above are, strictly speaking, "illegal." For example, it is a common misconception that shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater is illegal in the United States. It actually isn't. But it is legal and expected for the theater to ban you from coming back if you do it. I think that's generally the way these things should be enforced. In any case, I would say these are the ones that should be "punished" in every case. No other expression should be illegal or immoral in and of itself. It's only a matter of when and where we use it. And that should be decided in the same way that public manners are: collectively as a social norm, not as a law that the state can wield over us. What we can do in art, writing, etc. should be a socially accepted potential portal to a realm of chaos and immorality that we balance out with strong moral consistency, compassion, manners, and shared values in our public lives. Art, writing, etc. is a kind of "pressure valve" that we can use in responsible degrees to keep us from going insane among all of our obligations.

Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewell left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousnesse. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis'd in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so: such great care and wisdom is requir'd to the right managing of this point. Suppose we could expell sin by this means; look how much we thus expell of sin, so much we expell of vertue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike. This justifies the high providence of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet powrs out before us ev'n to a profusenes all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety.
John Milton, "Areopagitica" [5]

In short, instead of censoring expression, the problem should always solved by fixing the morals of the surounding society. A lot of people, especially in the United States, make similar arguments for other social liberties. For example, they say that it's wrong to restrict ownership of firearms and that instead we have to focus on making society more moral so that the people who own guns are less likely to use them to commit crimes. Or that it's wrong to restrict the use of certain drugs and that instead we have to focus on making society more moral so that the people who use drugs in their free time will remain healthy and responsible citizens. I'm not here to argue about what laws and rules for guns or drugs are best. I'm not knowledgeable enough to do so, and, since I don't care much about guns and despise almost all drugs besides alcohol, I personally really wouldn't mind even if they were made altogether illegal. But what makes them different from freedom of expression?

Well, the argument might have a similar structure, but I think these two examples are actually very different from freedom of expression. We can develop and foster the intellect and will as people to resist bad ideas and defeat them with better ideas. A good idea can't stop a bullet. Nor can it stop the physical effects that certain drugs have on your body's lungs, liver, motor system, etc. But people have much more of an immediate ability to "guard" against the "temptation" of bad ideas and the effect of certain modes of expression in the form of good ideas, knowledge, and moral education.

I'm not even arguing that human beings are inherently rational and truth-seeking. Anyone who's taken a basic psychology course knows that they are not. Human beings are full of biases and self-delusions that make even the best of us susceptible to propaganda, misinformation, emotional appeals, rhetorical trickery, and all other forms of psychological manipulation. And yet, I think that human beings still have flexibility in the way that they break down and interpret information to a degree that is truly remarkable. We can learn to be smart and moral enough to resist bad ideas for more intelligent reasons. But we don't even need that to guard ourselves against bad ideas. We even have the ability to reject them for stupid and irrational reasons! Think of the difference between "neoliberalism is bad because its empirical results have been the destruction of social cohesion and the natural world" versus "neoliberalism is bad because Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were Jews." Human beings have the ability to hear ideas and resist them. And it is this ability that gives us the right to freedom of expression.

And again if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrain'd will be no hindrance to his folly. For if there should be so much exactnesse always us'd to keep that from him which is unfit for his reading, we should in the judgement of Aristotle not only, but of Salomon, and of our Saviour, not voutsafe him good precepts, and by consequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certain that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will do of sacred Scripture.
John Milton, "Areopagitica" [6]

The only reason to want to censor someone's speech or expression is if you think that the idea or impression created is so powerful that it is completely impossible to resist and has the power of an irresistable mind-virus. And I don't think there is any idea which is so powerful that it can do this as a matter of necessity. The proper education can make anything lose its appeal or authority. What looks like convincing evidence that the Holocaust was a hoax can fall apart as soon as you know a bit about the real history. What looks like an argument that there is no other solution but violence can fall apart when your moral system is different. What looks like a statue of a confederate soldier erected simply to glorify warfare and slavery can be turned into a monument that condemns them as evils if you know enough about the American civil war to shift the way it comes to appear. It is good to have things that deeply challenge us morally and intellectually. Otherwise we get lazy and no longer are able to defend what matters.

Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl

As a good case study, let's take Leni Riefenstahl's paean to the greatness of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In some countries with shitty laws about freedom of expression like Germany, there are heavy restrictions involved in screening this film. But the film is truly a work of art. The steely, fashy romanticism of this movie is undeniably appealing. In our deep lizard brain, part of us seeks order and discipline against a world that is complex. We have a secret, evil desire to see faceless uniformed soldiers pouring down the battlefield, shouting crowds in blind allegiance, tradwives in wheatfields with healthy young babies, and a god in the form of a dictator to cut through the red tape of democracy and lead us to salvation. But if you have an appropriate knowledge of history and moral conscience, you will find the film's appeal to this deep-seated, anti-democratic, and immoral part of us to be a horrifying and eerie portent of future evils. So far from being apologia for the Nazis, it instead becomes transformed into a great warning to never repeat history's mistakes and to exorcise the part of us that is not as different from the ordinary citizens of the Third Reich as we might wish it were.

It is possible to improve the society around expression instead of censoring it. And this is a much better way to do it, because it is much more stable and long-lasting. Of course, this requires some degree of cultural homogeneity. But it can be done. Just look at some books that have been banned in the United States in the past to see how far we've come by collective moral advancement: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Candide, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, The Grapes of Wrath, Howl, Naked Lunch, etc. A society that evolves to greater wisdom and moral righteousness is MORE entitled to obscene and controversial pieces of art and expression, not less. If you ever hear someone say "you could never get away with that now," it's a sign that we are moving in the wrong direction. And we hear it all the time about all the great classic movies, games, anime, etc. these days.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary.
John Milton, "Areopagitica" [7]

The biggest difficulty these days is the internet. Back in the day, you could pretty consistently prevent a child from buying something pornographic by keeping it in a physical 18+ area of the store. Nowadays it's harder to keep certain materials out of the hands of children, which almost anyone can agree should be done. I think it is a massive overreach for the state to be the one to do it, but I think that parents and caretakers should have the moral duty of keeping the vulnerable from certain pieces of media, etc. And the internet makes it a lot harder to keep those boundaries clear. Of course, the internet has been the single greatest advantage to freedom of expression in the history of mankind, so the answer is absolutely not internet censorship.

The only answer is to not let your kids use the internet unsupervised until they are a mature age, make them stay completely anonymous in all their internet activity, and not to give them a smartphone with internet access. The sad part is that, of course, all of these would have worked in 2003 when there was a huge, unbridgeable divide between the internet and real life, but it's just not the era we live in anymore. The worst things that ever happened to the internet were would-be Reddit moderator of the human race Mark Zuckerberg hanging a big "normalfags welcome" sign over the entire damn thing and child labor enjoyer Steve Jobs giving them all a way to access it 24/7 on their phones. And while we can carve out areas of resistance that are more like the old internet (starting your own private site like mine is a good way to!), we all have to live with these consequences. I don't envy parents who have to figure out how to allow kids to both enjoy YouTube etc. and also keep the internet free and wild. But I do know that they simply have to uphold the latter. The greatest opportunity for freedom of expression that mankind has ever had is on the line.

3. Art and Its Value

Art is the most valuable place we have to express ourselves freely. It is often a good test of how deep a society cares about freedom. I use art in the absolute broadest sense. I don't believe in "high art" or "low art." Fuck that. When I talk about art I'm talking about anything and everything: paintings, sculptures, poetry, novels, music, photography, films, video games, anime, manga, toys, graphic design, architecture, pottery, gardens, urban planning, dance, furniture, YouTube videos, drawings of cute anime girls, etc. And even the worst examples of them aren't disqualified from the "art" label. Being shit doesn't mean something isn't art. But I suppose that it should be understood that when I use the term "art" in the following essay and speak of it in glowing terms, I'm using it as a shorthand for "art of consequence" or "art that is valuable." There is plenty of art that is completely worthless dogshit. So what I'm talking about is the art that matters. But we should have freedom for all of it. The good art is allowed to display itself as even more great when you have shit to compare it to. And the value of art will show the value of freedom of expression more broadly, because more art can exist in a greater variety of ways when there is freedom.

a. What Is Art?

Trying to define and explain exactly what art is and why it is important to us has been an ongoing discussion for over 2000 years. I can't possibly expect to be the one to put it to an end once and for all. Whenever we seem to come up with a definition of art or "rules" for what makes something a work of art, some new piece of art just comes along to wreck it. Whenver we try to define what art is or even what the "experience" of art is, some new art piece comes along and ruins the definition we had. I want to sketch out my view of what art is. It is influenced by a lot of thinkers, but in particular Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Kuki Shuuzou.

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.
Barnett Newman [8]

The term "aesthetics" and the concept of an analytic and philosophical study of art and beauty did not exist in the west until the 18th century. That doesn't mean that people didn't speak meaningfully about art until then. Plato and Aristotle both spoke quite a lot about the subject. But it does mean that, in my opinion, "aesthetics" is alien to art in its purest and most original state. "Aesthetics" in fact threatens to rob art of the full range of its meaning and value. This is the first point I want to make clear: "art" is prior to and not dependent on "aesthetics." "Aesthetics" is, in fact, often contrary to the spirit of art.

John Dewey made a similar point in critiquing what he called the "museum conception" of art. The "museum" came into existence in the 18th century along with "aesthetics" and completely changed how the western world engaged with art. With the invention of the museum, art becomes delimited and set aside from "daily life." "Art" becomes a distinct field from the rest of life. It becomes something to be enjoyed purely "for its own sake" in contrast to "craft," which is made with the intent of being "functional." This is all deeply in contrast to how art emerges in a society in a state of nature.

To make it clear, let's think about the role that art played in the earliest societies. I'm talking about "prehistoric" peoples: the earliest agricultural societies and even the hunter-gatherers before them. Many of them made objects that we would consider "art" because they have "aesthetic value." This includes things like carvings and paintings in caves, pottery that has non-functional features of design, representational figures of people and animals, etc. A modern person might look at these and see a fundamental difference from the other, "non-aesthetic" objects around them like arrowheads and bows, fishing poles, utensils, clothes, bedding, furnishings, etc. But this is a completely modern imposition. For the ancients, these were all just "things" that they "used." [9]

This might sound like an unwelcome consequence since it robs art of what makes it special. But it is actually the modern "museum" conception that is more limiting. For the ancients, seeing "art objects" as just one set of things among others doesn't mean dragging them down to a lowly level. It means elevating everything else around them to the power of art. For these ancient peoples, all these objects were used and conceived of in relation to a ritualistic lifestyle where every aspect was involved in "the worship of gods, feasting and fasting, fighting, hunting, and all the rhythmic crises that punctuate the stream of living." [10] Art is "an extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life." [11]. Art was one way among many that the ancients lived in a way that is full of meaning and connected to things higher than themselves. Turning art objects into just "things" among others by no means meant that they lived an artless life. It meant that their life was constantly imbued with profundity.

Joumon Pottery

Joumon "fire-flame" vessel from Sasayama site in Niigata, Japan (ca. 3000-2000 BC)
Touykou National Museum
Source

Now here's the important part: at its core, nothing has changed. Civilization has evolved and progressed through history, but art is always just a slightly upgraded form of the above. Martin Heidegger talks about something similar. In ancient Greece, there was no concept of "fine art." Art, to the ancient Greeks, was a "techne." The term "techne" could be translated as "art," but in a much more broad context. It is "art" in the sense of the "art of conversation," the "art of war," "martial arts," etc. Techne is what might be called "practical" knowledge. It is a kind of "know-how." The important point is that art is one "techne" among others. But what kind of "techne" is it exactly? What distinguishes it from ship-building, playing sports, cooking food, or any other "techne" in society? [12]

This section will largely follow the opinion of Martin Heidegger, especially in the essay "The Origin of the Work of Art." Of course, this is a notoriously obscure and difficult essay, so ultimately I will be giving my own interpretation of it. And I do have my own opinions that may differ. An important thing about "techne" is that it's a kind of knowledge and is a way that we apprehend truth. In Aristotle, the term "techne" becomes distinct from the term "episteme." This is essentially the beginning of the division between "practical" and "theoretical" knowledge. But the division between these two is pretty suspect. Before Aristotle, "techne" and "episteme" were almost used interchangeably. Both of them simply indicate "happenings of truth." And since art is a "techne," it is always a "happening of truth." [13]

Now, to really understand how this works, we need some familiarity with Heidegger's (and my) conception of truth. I explain it more in my second pillar, but I'll summarize it again quickly: In order to have a conceptualization or understanding of anything, and thus to have the bedrock necessary to judge anything as "true" or "false," we need to, as it were, "draw out" or "delimit" a bit of coherence from a vast darkness of the unknown. Whatever gets drawn out and framed for us is thus the "world." The "world" for Heidegger is the framework of what there is and the network of meanings that those things have in relation to ourselves and what we choose to do. "Worlds" are largely dependent on time and location. The ancient Greek "world" was very different from the medieval European "world," as they had fundamentally different ideas about what there was and what it meant to exist.

For Heidegger, artworks "found" or "open up" a "world." This sounds kind of strange at first. But he doesn't mean it in a simple temporal way. For Heidegger, a great piece of art reveals something about the "world" that we dwell in. It presents the "world" in its most original and pure character. In experiencing great art, we get a hint at what our "world" is. We are given the chance to "step out of" the "world" that we normally never experience because we are so embedded in it. Therefore, we get a better idea of what is really important and meaningful. So on the one hand, the artwork reflects what we already implicitly know and makes it salient. But this is only half the story.

World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [14]

Heidegger, never a stranger to using his own idiosyncratic language to get at new concepts, sets up a dichotomy between "world" and what he calls "earth." "Earth" in this context does not at all mean "the physical, material planet that we live on." Let me try to explain what it does mean. The emergence of "world," like all "happenings of truth," always occurs against an unspoken background of darkness and unknowable mystery. Every "truth" can only appear as truth on the basis of an equal amount of concealing. Great art therefore makes the "world" salient, but in so doing also forces us to confront what is on the other side of it: the unspoken, the concealed, and the ineffable. Heidegger calls this "earth." For him, the work of art is where "world" and "earth" exercise their "primal conflict." The two are always in conflict, but it is not a negative conflict. It is the conflict of opposing forces that creates a positive tension that gives things their vitality. The analogy that Heraclitus draws is of a well-strung bow. [15] [16]

In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people's saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave (cf. Heraclitus, Fragment 53).
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [17]

The important takeaway is that the experience of art is coming in contact with something higher than us. What is more appealing about Heidegger than other thinkers like Hegel, who have put forward a similar idea, is that he understands something important that few western thinkers put into words before him: What makes art great is that it is mysterious. On the one hand, there is "world" revealed in the artwork, which accounts for the way that art can carry "content" or "represent" something either real or abstract, but since this is in conflict with "earth," the great unknown that which we cannot put into words, the piece of art continues to shimmer, to resist our attempts to pin it down, and thus to remain valuable to others. It's interesting that the idea of "beauty" plays almost no role in Heidegger's view of what makes art valuable. For him, beauty is a downstream aftereffect of "truth." To sum up, art is one "techne" among many, and it is a special one since it is the "techne" that both makes our own "world" come into focus and threby also gives us a glimpse at "earth." It is similar to spirituality in how it draws us into awareness of something higher than ourselves.

b. The Individualist and Cultural Conceptions of Art

When we consider Dewey's conception that art is one form of ritualistic expression of living in a community and Heidegger's conception that is one "techne" among many, it raises an interesting question: to what degree is art the product of a culture at large versus the product of a particular individual artist? Who do we "give credit" to?

We can sketch out two rough ideas of WHO it is that should "get the credit:"

1. An artwork is something that has a singular, personal meaning. It is made by a particular artist. That artist has something unique and original to convey to the world at large. Of course, in order to be meaningful, there has to be something broadly human expressed in the artwork. But ultimately it "belongs to" the creator. And that is why great works of art are "timeless," because they are not bound by their era and location. First of all because they are created by individuals who have listened to their own artistic genius over the norms and expectations of those around them, and second of all because they speak to something broader and deeper than their own humanity. For example, the reason that the plays of Shakespeare, the paintings of Vermeer, and the compositions of Bach are so valuable is that they speak to us across time and communicate their beauty even without greater context. The same basically applies even if it is a "group" that created the art. I will call this the "individualist" conception of art.

2. An artwork is something that has a cultural, historical meaning. While a work of art is sometimes made BY only one individual, it is never made with only one individual IN MIND. All art is created in a particular pocket of culture and time. And any artwork therefore is in some sense a "spokesman" or "ambassador" of the values of those around it. Certainly it would be unacceptable to have a definition of great art that excludes things like the temples of ancient Greece or the gothic cathedrals of medieval France. But it makes no sense to conceive of these as the works of "individuals." The idea of the modern artist-architect like Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier simply didn't exist back then. So we have to see them as works that define and give expression to the values of a temporal-cultural epoch. This was the whole impetus to create museums in the first place: to create an assemblage of objects that can "stand for" a people and their culture. I will call this the "cultural" conception of art.

If art is something created as a way of expressing the ritualistic bonds of a community and grounding their lives in something meaningful, as Dewey and Heidegger both seem to believe to some degree, then it's hard to not see the "cultural" conception as being more immediately promising than the "individualist" one. It is very tempting to completely accept the "cultural" conception at the expense of the "individualist" one when you start to study art history. When you put a piece of art behind glass in a display or on a white wall with nothing else around it, you remove it from its "world" and everything else around it. But if you leave it in its original space, it becomes less "delimited" and is allowed a greater range of meaning.

What do I mean by this? Well, a temple in the ancient Greek world would have rarely been appreciated simply as a piece of architecture. Whenever you went to the temple, there would be other things going on that formed a part of your experience with it: the giant procession of worshippers, the sounds and smells of the rituals, the ruggedness of the surrounding landscape, the dramas and Olympic games that occurred together with the festival, etc. In the museum conception, all of this juicy contextual stuff gets excised from the "meaning" of the artwork, but not in the cultural conception. Simply looking at the material structure of the temple would be to lose sight of this full range of meaning.

Les Statues meurent aussi

Statues Also Die (1953) by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, & Ghislain Cloquet

In the span of history, most art has been surrounded by its "world" instead of "de-worlded" in an art gallery. The "museum" and "gallery" is a fairly recent invention. The totem poles of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest or the nkisi ("fetish") figures of the tribes of the Congo completely lose their context and social meaning when put behind glass in a museum. Their meanings are shared in an entire engagement with the surrounding culture. This is why some people have called the "individualist" conception a Eurocentric way of conceiving of art, but the truth is that it's actually a very romantic-era conception that is ahistorical even for most of the history of Europe.

The great statues of ancient Greece and Rome were for the most part put in temples, government buildings, bath houses, etc. Even ones that were privately owned were put in domestic interiors, gardens, etc. in a way that we would think of as much more "decorative" and "functional" than the modern white cube of the art museum. And all the great Renaissance artists like Giotto, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Lucas van Leyden, etc. made their paintings not as spontaneous expressions of a lone genius, but with entire workshops and in the close association of artists' guilds. And they made them explicitly for churches and other wealthy patrons who wished to put these paintings to "use." Thus even the Renaissance artists made works in the context of a social web of meaning.

The School of Athens (1511) by Raphael
Apostolic Palace, Vatican City, fresco
Source
Raphael's The School of Athens was originally installed in Pope Julius II's library. It was not meant to only be gazed at in deep "aesthetic" contemplation. It was meant to be USED as a backdrop to study against.

For Heidgger, artworks open up a world. But in order to be "completed," they must be received or, in his language, "preserved" by those around them. A totem pole stands aloft in the village center. People see it regularly. The leaves blow past in in the autumn and the snow piles up on top of it in the winter. It rises up in the midst of the whole way of life of those around it, and they begin to judge all things by the totem pole, this thing that stands still in the midst of constant flux. It is almost like a mountain, a river, or a lake: something substantial that the whole society orients itself around as a source of meaning. The same goes for all great artworks. Indeed, like the totem pole, the Greek temple, the medieval cathedral, or any other great artwork that Heidegger has in mind is not necessarily to be understood as one individual material object, but rather a "type" of artwork that appears again and again for a given people and allows a society to orient itself around it. [18]

Whenever art happens--that is, whenever there is a beginning--a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people's endowment.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [19]

Heidegger thinks that we call pieces of art "works" precisely because they WORK. We might ordinarily think of the root "work" as referring to the work that the artist put into the piece during creation. But for Heidegger it more importantly refers to the fact that the piece of art "works." It works by "founding" a world and then standing as a cohesive beacon of that world for others to revolve themselves around. It's an extreme form of the "death of the author" in a way. In Heidegger's view, it's almost as if not only does the author not directly control the meaning of the work, but the audience or receiver doesn't either. In his view, the artwork itself appears to be the one that "ordains" a people with their "endowment" (i.e. the particular significance and meaning that they will have as a people in their historical epoch).

But that doesn't mean the great work of art has "autonomy" from its surrounding "world." It is completely related to it, but the direction is the opposite of what we might expect: a great work of art is not birthed out of the cultural context it exists in. Rather, the artwork creates the "world" around it. It proclaims a meaning by revealing "world" and "earth" alike, and the people around it have to choose whether to respond to it or not. The word he uses is that they "preserve" the work of art. The impression is similar to a festival or ritual. Like a festival or ritual that is important for a certain culture and "world," the artwork also makes the "world" clear and helps a people get back to what is most fundamental. And just like keeping a festival or ritual alive, the people need to keep the "world" alive by continuing to keep the artwork central. It is possible for "world-withdrawal" to occur, as has happened with the Greek temple and medieval cathedral. Now they stand as powerful archaeological pieces, but as they are no longer "preserved" by their people, their lifespan as "artworks" has ended. So while the artwork might be the thing that first creates the "world," we can ultimately think of his view as being closer to the "cultural" conception, since it is up to the people to keep the artwork "preserved." [20]

Temple of Apollo at Corinth
Source

World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but they themselves are gone by. As bygone works they stand over against us in the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth they remain merely such objects. Their standing before us is still indeed a consequence of, but no longer the same as, their former self-subsistence. This self-subsistence has fled from them.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [21]

Some people have objected to this view. They have some critiques which at first glance seem very reasonable. First and foremost, it would seem to be a very limited subset of artworks that can be said to have this mass, unifying power. Heidegger's view of an artwork almost seems to necessitate that it is widely popular by the entire culture. There is no way to make sense of the idea of an artwork that is "ahead of its time" in his conception, since by necessity great artworks have to be taken up and "preserved" by the people that they appear among. Of course, I don't need to mention all the great artists who were not appreciated in their own time. The list is endless. It also seems to deny the legitimacy of art that "challenges the status quo." While great art to him seems to challenge a PEOPLE and call that PEOPLE to something higher, he seems to think it is only successful if it does so by uniting the entire people at once. These are legitimate difficulties with the "cultural" conception of art broadly, and I want to address them here.

First, to clear up some issues with Heidegger in particular: there is some good evidence that his view of art was not as unforgiving and ironclad as some may have interpreted it. It is worth remembering that the primary text I have been summarizing and drawing on, "The Origin of the Work of Art," was mostly written during 1935-1936. As anyone who's studied Heidegger's biography knows, he made a regrettable decision to throw his lot in with the Nazi Party during this time. He was very much caught up in the populist nationalism of the Nazis, and seemed to have been influenced by the idea of grand spiritual renewal to the German "Volk" and thereby to the western world as a whole. Heidegger was a genius but also a man of some definite character flaws, and one of them was being too proud to admit fault. So it is not surprising that he refused to ever say something like "I was too blinded by nationalist fervor and my view of art lacked nuance as a result." But we do sense in his later writings a coming to terms with this and a more nuanced engagement with the idea of great art.

Julian Young argues that this comes across in particular in his later writings on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. One thing that becomes very clear when you read Heidegger's picture of the epoch-defining artwork is that we simply do not have anything comparable in our modern age. There is no temple or cathedral that ties the whole western world together. All of this is deeply connected to his other writings on technology and "enframing" which I go over in my second pillar. The point is clear. We live in a time of desolation where the gods have "flown off." As such, he argues that the artwork needed by the modern era is fundamentally different than that of the past. This is all too apparent by him choosing the notoriously obscure poet Hölderlin as his choice for the defining poet of our times. The idea of a poet like Hölderlin becoming popular for the masses is absurd. But that is exactly why we need him. Heidegger says that the ancients lived in constant awareness of the great mystery, the ineffable, and "earth" (or "holy fire" in his new terminology borrowed from Hölderlin). Therefore they needed something that would create order and clarity through unifying the masses. But today we are out of balance in completely the opposite way: we live in an era of overwhelming clarity and a domineeringly calculating, scientific, and extractive relationship to everything around us. Our age has an overabundance of "world" and a great want of "earth." So a great artwork in the modern era would have to balance things out in the opposite way: making them less clear and more opaque. [22]

I think that ultimately what is really important about the work of art is not the number of people who take it up. The value of the work of art comes through the fact that it allows for the co-presence of "world" and "earth," and therefore allows us to balance out whichever one is in overabundance for us so that we can come to a greater understanding of the truth. I should mention that I'm not the first one to put forward this interpretation contra Julian Young. Iain Thomson basically argues the same point. [23] But now to finally return to the point of this section: What role does the individual artist have in the artwork? How do we make sense of artists who are deeply unique, misunderstood by those around them, or otherwise unappreciated at large, but who still deserve recognition for the quality of their artworks, in a "cultural" conception of art?

First things first, we should be clear that Heidegger's division between the ancient world needing artworks with strong clarity while we need ones with strong mystery is more allegorical than anything. There are plenty of artworks from the ancient world that are positively laden with what he would call "earth." And many of these are from highly "individualist" artists. I already explained how the "individualist" conception of art is by no means a purely Eurocentric idea. In fact, I think there is a good argument to be made that the idea existed in East Asia long before it did in Europe! In Tang Dynasty poetry and Ming Dynasty painting in particular, the idea of an artist being original, unique, and having their own personal style, cut off from the rest of society and privately nurtured in solitary contemplation was seen as close to enlightenment and sagehood. There is a reason so many Zen Buddhists and Daoists studied and emulated the poetry of Tang Dynasty poets so closely.

The important point is, however, that this can still fit in a "cultural" framework. Many classic landscape paintings, poems, etc. were made in East Asia under what looks like an extreme "individualist" conception. Indeed, the audience for these works would have probably been tinier than the average audience for any great Renaissance artist. Many poems were originally "meant for" a very limited group of people, like a certain monastery, a certain group of friends, etc. Many landscape paintings were only displayed in gentlemens' private residences and a great deal were never "displayed" at all, but only unrolled to be perused with other learned gentlemen on special occasions. And yet, there is something important here, which is that this is ultimately still a way that art unites people together as a binding glue in the rituals of their daily existence. It's just at a much smaller level than the entire tribe, village, or nation.

The general principle still applies. Art is a "techne," it binds people together, and it does so by allowing the co-presence of "world" and "earth." But I think that the bounds of the techne are loose. The "artist" can sometimes be one solitary figure and sometimes it can be an entire community. But the "artwork" doesn't end at the artist. In creating, the artist draws up a particular bit of truth out of the primal wellspring of "earth" and makes the "world" salient against it. The early Greek poets personified their creativity as a divine force: a Muse. And this is deeply significant. A great artist is usually original and offers up something particular, but it is never born from the artist alone. The artist instead becomes a sort of medium for something higher. What makes an artist original is the particular confluence of forces that they wield and respond to.

I have a very simple definition of an artist. The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back.
James Benning [24]

The unholy, as unholy, traces the sound for us. What is sound beckons to the holy, calling it. The holy binds the divine. The divine draws the god near. The more venturesome experience unshieldedness in the unholy. They bring to mortals the trace of the fugitive gods, the track into the dark of the world's night. As the singers of soundness, the more venturesome ones are "poets in a destitute time."
Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" [25]

It is essential that the artwork finds its "people" to "preserve" it. But this can happen in all kinds of scales. The people could be the entire tribe, village, or nation. It could be a particular household with its own heirloom artwork. It could be a likeminded internet fanclub, sprawled across the globe and speaking many languages, but united in their ability to appreciate and "preserve" something higher than them. As "earth" is never able to be limited and constrained, there will be an infinite variety of deeply original ways to make it present itself together with "world," or "rise up through" it, to use Heidegger's terminology. And the shared preservation of it is something living, something involved, and something far removed from the "museum" conception of art.

c. Art and Objecthood

One important point that we should never lose sight of in spite of all of the above is that artworks are THINGS. Even works of poetry and literature have their character of being collections of words that can be written down, copied, typed, etc. and thus have a definite material condition that must be appreciated. The printing press has in a sense severed the work of literature from the material appearance of its lettering, the feel of the paper, the material it is bound with, etc., which in the past came part and parcel with it. Artworks have all of the above power, but they are still, at the end of the day, objects. Western civilization has grown into having a very strange and deeply-seated fear of objecthood. I think that this has to be overcome if we want to have a healthy view not only of art, but of all material THINGS in general.

Most of western civilization has had to inherit the Abrahamic religions, and with them the Abrahamic conception of objects. And it is an exceedingly negative one. What is the first relation of man to art object in the bible? This one:

The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-1634) by Nicolas Poussin
National Gallery, London, oil on canvas
Source

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness OF ANYTHING that IS in heaven above, or that IS in the earth beneath, of that IS in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
Exodus 20:4-6 [26]

Which is soon followed by Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and destroying the "idol" of the golden calf. This is the primal relationship that has set the stage for the western relation to "objects." Objects are regarded as "idols" and thus as offending to the vengeful god Jehovah. This doesn't mean that the western world hasn't created beautiful art objects. They clearly have, even in the Islamic world where the fear of "idolatry" is much more intense than anywhere else. But there remains a deeply-ingrained, petrifying fear of material THINGS at the core of the western worldview. And it has been to the detriment of western civilization.

It is worth noting that Judaism was not the only ancient religion to be "aniconic" (e.g. to not try to visually "represent" anything with its objects of worship). It is true that pretty much every society immediately surrounding Israel was different in this regard. The Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans all made visual representations of their gods. But there have been other societies that seem to have never done so. While it is a debated topic, there is good evidence to support the theory that the Buddha was never visually represented in religious art until the Buddhist world was introduced to the Greek tradition of creating statues of gods after the conquests of Alexander. Most early Buddhist art uses a number of symbols in place of depicting him as a person. Many ancient faiths in places like Japan or the Americas also didn't feel it was appropriate to "constrain" the divine forces of nature in representational art. The central object of worship in most Japanese shrines is a mirror, not a physical statue of the god. So the idea of the divine being so transcendent as to resist being delimited into a material representation is not necessarily the problem.

Great Stupa at Sanchi (ca. 3rd-1st century BC)
Madhya Pradesh, India, stone
Source
One of the oldest Buddhist structures, an image of "the Buddha" teaching, represented as an empty throne.

However, the relation of the Abrahamic religions to objects is distinct from the ancient Buddhist conception or the Shintouist conception in that it is not just a "tendency" toward generally avoiding representation, but a paralyzing, pathological, obsessive FEAR and unease of representation that these other traditions do not have. That is what makes the Abrahamic relation to objects so deeply unusual. And the effects have been truly regrettable. It is what made the earliest Roman Christians smash ancient statues with hammers, what made Byzantine Christians destroy their own holy icons, what made Al-Aziz Uthman put a huge gash in the side of the Pyramid of Menkaure, what made Turkic invaders destroy Buddhist monasteries in India, what made Savonarola burn Botticelli's paintings, what made the conquistadors demolish Mayan temples, what made the Taliban blow up the Buddhas at Bamiyan, and what made ISIS destroy countless ancient heritage sites across Iraq and Syria. This deep-seated fear of objects and of "idolatry" is a plague on mankind. And it seems so fundamentally opposed to the human desire to create that we have to ask where it originates from.

Besides the Abrahamic scriptures, we can find one other major source of fear and unease towards objects in the history of western thought, and one that actually gives a non-dogmatic argument for why: Plato. I do not by any means want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. There is no western civilization without Plato. He is an important figure who we should continue to come back to for spiritual sustenance. And yet, I think that his deep-seated fear of "mimesis" has combined with the Jewish fear of idols to create something very corrosive. What is "mimesis?" It is derived from the Greek verb mimeisthai, meaning "to imitate." This is the etymological root of the word "mimic" in English. Plato is very clear about his opinion: mimesis is bad. Why? Because something that is an imitation of the real thing is essentially dishonest and deceptive. It makes people more confused about reality. And for Plato, knowledge is inherently a good thing and ignorance is inherently a bad thing. And since all "representational" poetry, drama, and visual art is some form of mimesis, all of it is unacceptable. This is why he infamously said that the ideal state would exile all of its poets, painters, and dramatists.

This idea of Plato's sounds incredibly bizarre to the modern reader. Sure, a statue is an "imitation" of the real thing, but surely we can tell the difference between the two, can't we? How much of an idiot would you have to be to mistake a statue for a real human being? Well, the truth is that the fact that people tend to automatically think this is actually just proof that Plato's conception of art has in a sense won. What do I mean by this? Well, this is a somewhat extreme claim, but I think it is one that has a lot of evidence: The idea of division between "thing" and "representation," "reality" and "fiction," etc. was not nearly as clear and explicit before Plato took up the subject of "mimesis". In a more natural conception of art, "representations" become just one part of all the mass rituals and activities of expression and the barriers between the invisible god, the visible world, and the representation of the god are all superfluous.

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus IS the god himself.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [27]

There is a very difficult but rewarding book called The Graven Image: Representation in Babylon and Assyria by Zainab Bahrani which is informative on this topic. It essentially makes the argument that we misunderstand representational art in Babylon and Assyria when we interpet it in Plato's paradigm of artworks being mimetic "imitations" of some other, separate, and more "real" thing (be it the king, the god, or whatever else). In the ancient Mesopotamian world, making a statue was not a "substitute" for what it represented, but rather was an extension of it. The process of creating a statue was thus not a mere "imitation" of the essence of the original thing, but rather a means of "doubling" it and "extending" it. This is why "idols" were so terrifying to the Israelites: they were not just mimetic "imitations" of other gods, they actually were a way that these gods came to have a sense of "presence" in their domain. It is also why such an importance was placed on the desecration of visual images in ancient Mesopotamia: destroying an image of the king was taken as a way of attacking part of the extended presence of the king, and thus, to some degree, the king himself. [28]

Symbolic base with a cuneiform inscription of Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243-1207 BC)
Pergamonmuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, alabaster
Source

I think that Babylon and Assyria are far from unusual in this regard. In fact, I think almost all societies were this way before the introduction of Abrahamism on the one hand and Platonism on the other. There are many stories across the world of tribes first coming into contact with photography and being horrified by it, believing that a piece of their soul or self had been stolen from them. Indeed, many Christians found the act of photography to be inherently blasphemous when it first was introduced, because it let people give birth to "real" and "living" things on the same level as god. Perhaps it would then logically entail that if the "perfect" representation of a photograph is a "perfect" method of reproducing and extending the essence of the thing thus photographed, then the "less perfect" representation of "mimetic" artworks is simply a lesser form of reproducing and extending the essence of the things they depict. The boundaries we draw between the "real" and the "representation" thus ultimately depend on our cultural context, and there is every reason to think that we have simply adopted Plato's boundaries as a matter of convention.

The apparent "danger" involved in this earlier, naturalistic way of blending representation and reality is why Plato felt that he needed to draw the lines between the "imitation" of the art object and the real thing that it was a "lesser" form of. In the next section, I will address his particular argument and why I think the idea of there being a "danger" to this naturalistic conception of art and objecthood is bogus. But here I want to talk a bit more about what this internalized hatred of objects has meant for the western world. In short, it has been a disaster. I also want to contrast it with what a society that has cast off the shackles of the Abrahamic-Platonic fear of "objects" could look like.

When we look at the history of the western world, we see that they have been very reticent towards fully rejecting the beauty and value of objects. Just go into an old-fashioned Catholic or Orthodox church if you want to see a whole bevy of "mimetic" objects of Jesus Christ, the Holy Mother, the saints, and sometimes even God the father himself. They may say that these objects are not being "worshipped," but as I spelled out in my previous section, the boundary between "worshipping" and "honoring" something is almost meaningless in a naturalistic conception of religion. The reason that they have all these "idols" is because it is a fundamentally humane urge to love, cherish, and be in "conversation with" objects. But there is always a qualification to this. They say that these are "mere" objects. They say that we have to engage with them in a dispassionate way. They say that we can enjoy them as a simple form of "decoration" but certainly never gain any spiritual meaning from them. And they say that above all, certainly, we can NEVER believe that an object can speak to us. This is all absolutely against our human nature. It is one more part of the Abrahamic yoke that the western world must cast off.

The sad part is that this way of thinking has infected much of the modern, secular western world as well. Even when we have freed ourselves from the Abrahamic religions proper, we still have their object-hate inherent in our societal structures. Why did the western world arrive at such an irresponsible reckless use of natural resources and start CONSOOOOMING disposable plastic junk en masse? Because of the unspoken assumption that objects do not have dignity and worth of their own and therefore can simply be devoured as we wish. Why do you think that western second-wave feminists (or, as I call them, "a bunch of humorless limey cunts with a stick up their ass") like Laura Mulvey are so afraid of women being "objectified"? Wouldn't it be better to be treated like an object if we treated objects with reverence and dignity?

Hyakushu Kaibutsu Youkai Sugoroku (1858) by Utagawa Yoshikazu [detail]
Source
This is a "kasa-obake," which is one example of the Japanese idea of the "tsukumogami." The legend goes that when an item like an umbrella is cast off even though it can stil be used, it will grow sad and resentful and come back as a ghost. This is the kind of idea that is born in a society that loves objects and treats them well.

This is why I like Japan. It is a country where men and women alike can enjoy all that fun "objectification" of both the opposite sex and of their own. That is because it is a country that treats objects well, so being "objectified" is not an unpleasant experience. They are sadly very rare these days, but it used to be commonplace to have an "elevator girl" on the elevator with you, who would stand up straight, show a pleasant smile, push the button for you, and welcome you off and on. In a sense, she is little different from a robot. But that is precisely the joy of it. In Japan, people find becoming a "thing" to be an enjoyable experience. Being "used" by others and truly melting into your particular "role" is something that creates harmony and security. Because others will reward you with the same courtesy. Of course it is balanced by a rich inner life, so that things are in perfect equilibrium.

Elevator girl in Japan
Source

This is a general principle where I find more in common with the Japanese view of life than the western one. The elevator girl is an obvious example, but there are many of these transitional, liminal human figures in Japanese society who are encouraged not to show any emotion but professionalism and perhaps a warm smile, to not make needless small talk with others, to not express individuality. A lot of western people feel like this is suffocating and a denial of our individual humanity. They would rather have the cashier make a bit of small talk with them to show their fellow humanity. For the Japanese person, you show your humanity by blending into your role. Because that is how you create compassion and societal harmony. The ideal stranger in Japanese society should appear as a Nou mask, a stock character or modeled form with no expressions and no personality. The closer they are to a statue, a wooden carving, a robot, a material and inert THING, the better. The more empty, the more beautiful.

The ideal person in the eastern world is so empty and blank because they are a slate for others to project their ideals onto. So the emphasis on being so blank and so undefined is not in order to limit freedom; it is in order to grant it. The more people hide their true selves, the more we can project everything we want onto them. We can walk through life assuming that everyone agrees with us, feels as we feel, etc. You might think that this could lead to problems where we assume too much about others and hurt their feelings because we project too much of our own feelings onto them (i.e., about what they may or may not find offensive, find pleasurable, find funny, etc.). But because we avoid acting out and turn into the same empty Nou masks as everyone else, this does not happen. Everyone deserves this right. It makes a world with a very peaceful, tranquil exterior and a very vivid, dynamic interior.

I mentioned this a bit in the third pillar, but the attention on keeping the private self away from public life is not done because Japanese people do not respect or care about the self. They do it precisely because they DO care about the individual self so much. But their view is that the individual self has to be nurtured and kept special. Sharing it with anyone and everyone will cheapen it and degrade it. This is why all of the above is only one side of the coin. A society that only had the above denial of the self would be suffocating and oppressive. But one where everyone is loose and open and free about everything is just as bad. Both formality and informality are enjoyable in different contexts, and society needs both to give people a full range of pleasure.

Admittedly, this is hanging in the balance, which is one reason why Japanese people need to resist letting western feminist cunts and their infiltrating agents dictate to them what their values are. Japan is unique in that we can see this in a modern, wealthy, industrialized society. Therefore we can see this principle more clearly, because they have the resources to give full cultural expression of it. But we can see something similar in a lot of rural tribes and other peoples on the "periphery" who have not been brainwashed by the Abrahamic-Platonic fear of objects. Art is so valuable because it is a way to make objects speak to us and reclaim their status as our fellow-travellers and companions.

d. Art and Morality

With the above, I've sketched out what an alternative to the Abrahamic-Platonic fear of "idolatry" looks like. I argued that the "mimetic" nature of art is not to be degraded as a "mere imitation," but cherished as a form of extending the presence of the things that art-objects depict. I also argued that the boundary between our lives and our artistic practices is not so firm and should indeed be kept fluid and open. I finally argued that it is more moral to be "in dialogue" with objects and treat them with respect and love. I do this mostly to show the positives of recovering this ancient conception of art and objecthood. But now I want to address what Plato conceived of as the "danger" in this view of art. It is deeply related to concerns over censorship and freedom of expression.

Remember, Plato says that "mimetic" art is bad because it makes people confused about what is real and what is fake. As much of a pivotal figure as he undeniably will always be, Plato was kind of a retard when it came to this. He was essentially the first soccer mom. He was the first busybody who said "don't you think all this violence and sex in the media will have a bad effect on my kid's mind?" He thought that seeing too many violent plays would make people think that violence was acceptable in real life. He thought that reading about the gods behaving strangely in poetry would make people think they were base and human instead of transcendent and divine. Plato's political solutions are often disturbingly anti-democratic and totalitarian, and here is no exception: he believed that the only way to respond is through mass censorship, because he didn't have faith that people could become smart enough to not be "duped" by the mimetic nature of art. [29]

Mimetic art was largely "saved" by Aristotle, who had a much more reasonable view. He agreed with Plato that, yes, art is imitative of life but is distinct from it. A real person can move and speak but a statue of them cannot. Poetry describes experiences with gods and mythological creatures in ways that we cannot experience in real life. Plato, the soccer mom, was afraid that watching violence or cruelty in dramatic plays would make people think that violence or cruelty were acceptable in real life. Aristotle saw that, clearly, this overwhelmingly did not happen. But it does raise an interesting question: Why do we enjoy experiencing tragedy in plays or poetry? Why do unpleasant things become pleasant when we experience them through art instead of in person? Why do we have different "standards" for things in plays or poetry than we do in real life?

For Aristotle, the answer is essentially that it is a way to "blow off steam." It is a way to escape the bounds of our daily life and funnel our irrational feelings into something more constructive and responsible. One of his examples, reminding us that this text was written over 2000 years ago, is the female Menalippe in one of Euripides' plays speaking "philosophically." [30] The Greeks would never take a female philosopher seriously in real life. But in a play, we are allowed to "get out of" these bounds. This example is as chauvinistic as you'd expect from ancient Greece, but we can think of plenty of examples that would be analogous today. For example, we might watch a movie or play where a character responds furiously in righteous indignation to a degree that would never be acceptable in real life, because it would break the bounds of social normalcy. But in a movie, it feels good and indeed even feels more "believable" to see the feelings spelled out in such an exaggerated manner.

It makes sense that we might enjoy something funny in a play even if it's too crude for everyday life, or that we might enjoy a feeling of "justice served" even if the means are a bit too vengeful for everyday life. But the question that Aristotle is most concerned with is why we enjoy things that are sad and tragic and have no just resolution. Indeed, the plays that are often thought of as the greatest and most sublime of ancient Greece, then and now, are the tragedies. This is where Aristotle introduces the idea of "catharsis." The word etymologically is derived from the word "katharos," meaning "pure." Catharsis is thus a kind of "purification." The word has religious roots. We enjoy these negative emotions in the medium because we are given a more constructive way to come to terms with and "master" them by "playing with" them in the mimetic and make-believe medium of a play or poem.

I certainly believe that art has cathartic power. In fact, I think that is one of the greatest values of it. But there's something difficult about this. The entire idea of catharsis depends on the idea that the art-object is fundamentally FALSE. After all, it is only because we fundamentally see the art-object as separate from everything else around us that we are able to experience "sadness" and "tragedy" in a way that is rewarding instead of genuinely sad and tragic. Aristotle makes an interesting move here. He accepts the same presupposition of Plato, that art is inherently imitative and "deluding." But his conclusion is the opposite. He says that rather than leader to greater confusion, it gives us greater clarity. Because we can allow ourselves to be "deluded" and then return to the "real" with a greater awareness of what is different between them. Therefore, his conclusion is the opposite of Plato's: art has a greater license to be "unrestrained" and "wild."

You can guess that I agree with Aristotle's conclusion. But how does this accord with the "naturalistic" conception of art that I sketched in the last section? How can we treat objects with compassion and see art as an extension of the "real" world without carrying our morals over towards it to? How are the soccer moms not right then, that playing violent video games will make you a violent person?

Well, I think that this is answered by the previous section. Remember the great lesson of virtue ethics: there is no one-size-fits-all way to treat people or "right" way to act to them. We treat different people with different standards in our lives. We treat our boss differently than our best friend. We treat our parents differently from a stranger in the bus. We treat a 5-year-old differently than a 35-year-old. So why would it be any different for an art-object? We should treat objects with respect and reverence, but there is no singular way to show respect or reverence. With a child, you might show respect by patting them on the head. You wouldn't do that with your boss. For art-objects, there are all kinds of ways to be respectful and thus all kinds of "rules" of what is correct or incorrect. Seeing art-objects as fellow companions doesn't mean that they can't provide an "escape" from the normal rules of reality.

In fact, I believe that this is precisely the value of art. Art is so great because it is a way to be free of the obligations of societal morality. Art's value is the freedom to be tasteless, the freedom to be obscene, the freedom to be stupid, the freedom to be childish, the freedom to be meaningless, the freedom to be indulgent, or anything else like that. I believe that art, in being that which lets "earth rise up through world" is also always a way to escape the constraints of our own societal moral structures. It sounds paradoxical, but I believe that art teaches us how to be moral by giving us the freedom to be immoral. There are appropriate levels of "immorality" to expose any age group to, but absolutely nothing should be off-limits for people over the age of 18.

You can easily find two contradictory characteristics of Japanese cultures or Japanese characters: one is elegance, one is brutality. But the two characteristics are very tightly combined sometimes, and our brutality I think comes from our emotion. It is never mechanized or systematized like Nazis' brutality. And I think our brutality might come from our feminine aspect, and our elegance comes from our nervous side. Sometimes we are too sensitive about refinement or elegance or a sense of beauty or our aesthetic side, and sometimes we are tired of it and we need sometimes sudden explosions to make ourselves free from it.
Mishima Yukio [31]

Art is the place where we express everything out of the bounds of the everyday. It has to be for everything which is too beautiful, pure, and holy for this world, and also everything that is too ugly, corrupt, and base for world. If it starts being judged by the standards of the real world, we lose access to something important.

e. In Defense of Escapism

To reiterate my view: art is a "techne" among many, it reveals "world" and "earth" alike, and at least some of it gives us a space to indulge in the freedom to be immoral. By my naturalistic definition, I think that art should be present in everything we do as a form of ritualistic behavior. A lot of people use the word "escapism" negatively about things like video games and anime or whatever else they consider "lowbrow" art. The idea seems incredibly stupid to me, because if you make a distinction between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" art (which is tenuous at best), then most "highbrow" art is arguably even more "escapist." Nothing is more "escapist" than going into a pristine, air-conditioned white cube to stare at a painting in disinterested aesthetic contemplation. It's the opposite of engaging with the "real" or "practical." Of course, that's not a bad thing! A human's life is incomplete without some "escapism." Art is an extension of all the ritualistic behaviors engrained in our life, but a lot of our life will be spent alone. And that is why some escapism is a good and healthy thing.

Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
Andrei Tarkovsky [32]

Everyone needs some art-object to "soak up" feelings that are not acceptable to express publicly. This is just obvious to me. When you feel angsty, you listen to angty music. When you feel angry, you play a video game where you beat people up. When you feel lonely and lovesick, you read sad stories about unrequited love. In the western world, I think many people attach too much weight on these things. The ancient literature of China and Japan is far more emotionally bare and "whiny" than that of the western world. But that is exactly why it is so great. A poem like Qu Yuan's Li sao is unapologetically self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, but that is precisely why it has been so valuable to generations of Chinese. Reading it is therapeutic for those who feel shunned and unappreciated:

I take my fashion from the good men of old:
A garb unlike that which the rude world cares for;
Though it may not accord with present-day manners,
I will follow the pattern that Peng Xian has left.
Heaving a long sigh, I brush away my tears,
Sad that man's life should be so beset with hardship.
Though goodness and beauty were my bit and bridle,
I was slandered in the morning and cast off that same evening.
Qu Yuan, Chu ci, "Li sao," lines 73-80 [33]

This poem is best read in the same state of mind that an angsty teen is supposed to listen to Linkin Park. The poem is for when you're in a whiny, emo mood. But we need to stop thinking of that as a bad thing. This kind of "indulgence" and "escapism" can be one of the most moving and powerful contexts in which to experience art. It is very wonderful to see the emotions that we hide deep inside and never express to be given concrete form in an art-object. That is the whole beauty of a work of art.

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!
Wei T'ai [34]

The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena [35]

But this is just the most obvious form of what is negatively stereotyped as "escapism." Many great works of art that are "escapist" are not so because they console us by giving us what we want to see and hear, but because they confront us and confound us with something we cannot understand. Indeed, some of the most profound art is "escapist" because it is such an escape from the drudgery of our mortal existence and puts us into contact with something higher. Never let anyone try to convince you that a work of art is "lowbrow" because it reflects a feeling that would be embarrassing to express publicly. That person does not understand what art is for.

The Icebergs (1861) by Frederic Edwin Church
Dallas Museum of Art, oil on canvas
Source
"Escaping" into art is much the same as "escaping" into nature for a while. It should be no surprise that the two often go hand-in-hand.

I believe that a lot of people in western countries have a bad view of art-objects inherited from the Abrahamic-Platonic conception. They still believe that somehow artworks have to have a good "message." Or that they have to have some form of "moral instruction." This is inspired by a perverse religion that believes that art is an idol and an insult to god. Therefore the only way they could justify creating art to themselves was to say that it was a form of moral instruction. Contrast this to east Asia. In Asia, the Daoist and Zen Buddhist traditions believed that deep meditation (the original "escapism") is a very good thing to do. It gives us greater mental clarity, inner peace, and kind-heartedness towards those around us. They naturally saw the consumption of art as something similar. Therefore they did not inherit the same Abrahamic-Platonic sense of guilt at "indulging" in objects that give us emotional resonance. For those who follow Zen, the practice of creating art and enjoying it is not an indulgent pleasure that distracts us from reality. It is a way to engage more deeply and genuinely with reality and to be able to expand the scope of our own awareness and experience. For them, escapism can even be a holy thing, bringing us closer to enlightenment and nirvana.

f. The Tyranny of Interpretation

Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
2 Corinthians 3:6 [36]

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog [37]

Defining a commercial film? It's a movie where you know everything. So, it's a film you soon forget.
Yoshida Yoshishige [38]

I've returned over and over again to Heidegger's phrasing that great art allows the co-presence of "world" and "earth." It is a really, really important thing to me. "Earth" is Heidegger's term for that which is not understood, that which is the great darkness surrounding our little bit of understanding. In Japanese, the term "yuugen" is so similar to what Heidegger means that they are almost synonyms. "Earth," "holy fire" (Heidegger's later term), "yuugen," "mystery," "the ineffable," etc. Call it whatever you want. The point is that the best kind of art will always resist interpretation in some way or another. It will always keep changing and morphing before us and provide more and greater insights. Or it will be so simple and elegant as to be unable to be constrained in words in the first place. Art is always at its purest when it is freed from those who would constrain it by "interpreting" it.

This doesn't mean that the only great art is "incoherent" or "obscure" or "difficult." Something can sometimes resist interpretation by being abstract, complex, or vague (I mean that word in a good way). But sometimes it can also resist interpretation by being straightforward, simple, or "artless." Japanese aesthetics usually focus on both of these at once: being extraordinarily simple but appealing to something ineffable and mysterious because of that. Of course, there are many kinds of art. While I personally most like Japanese aesthetics, there is value in experiencing art that is wildly different from that. But the primary point is that the artwork should never be able to be "explained" or "interpreted."

Nocturne in Grau und Gold, Westminster Bridge (1871-1874) by James Abbot McNeill Whistler
Burrell Collection, oil on canvas
Source

In the late 19th century, the "art for art's sake" movement began largely in France, but also in Britain and America. A big inspiration for this movement was experiencing artworks from Japan. This was a movement which tried to remove the need to represent great, transcendent truths, moral lessons, or social responsibility from art and create things whose ultimate goal was their own artistic "beauty." It was a movement which asserted that art was inherently valuable, not just valuable as a tool to convey something else. They were inspired by this by seeing Japanese standing screens, woodcuts, etc. which were great, monumental works of beauty and some of the country's greatest triumphs, but were also devoid of broad moralistic messaging. And it was a good observation. If you tried to explain the idea of "art for art's sake" to a Japanese person of the time, they would probably be confused because they would understand that as being the default of art.

However, we will misunderstand the idea of "art for art's sake" if we only have a "museum" conception of art. A lot of critics of this movement believed that it makes our engagement with art too passive and disinterested. It makes art into something shallow and turns it into a product that just stands among many others. It all just becomes a mindless consumption if we only think of art as "oh, that's pretty." It makes all great art interchangeable and essentially turns the experience of it into that of eating junk food: every individual art piece blends together as much as every individual potato chip does when eating a bag of them. But "art for art's sake" does not fall into this trap if we don't have a "museum" conception of art. If we see it as a ritualistic extension of our natural life and make our engagement with it more active, engaged, and careful, we will keep the works from becoming too still and separate from us.

Cranes (18th century) by Ogata Kourin [right screen]
Freer Gallery of Art
Source

When artists from Europe first encountered Japanese art, they thought that it was shallow and simplistic. They only saw images of animals, flowers, plants, landscapes, etc. They found it very beautiful, but thought that it seemed devoid of "depth." They were correct that the art was simple and did not have explicit, symbolic, narrative content, but were very wrong in thinking that it thus had no depth. The truth is that the Japanese had recognized something far more quickly than the Europeans: There is no such thing as "style over substance." Style IS substance. There is no such thing as "being beautiful without meaning." Beauty IS meaning. And this is why Japanese art in truth does have a great moral and socially responsible role. It is such a great boon to and necessity towards the creation of a great, moral society PRECISELY BECAUSE it is only "art for art's sake."

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting THAT, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" [39]

And the most important things in life must not be reduced to words because if you do that you confine it. You shrink the meaning of what you experience by giving it words.
Ilarion Merculieff [40]

The highest good of art is to provide "meaning" that cannot be restrained in the bounds of words. Academic interpretation and the exercise of analysis of meaning is the opposite of the artistic instinct. It is not that art should be something easy and accessible that everyone can understand. It is the exact opposite! A critic and academic who seeks always seeks to explain, to delimit, and to make apparent the "meaning" or "real core" of a piece of art is mistaken. We should want this "meaning" to never be apparent or full. If it ever was able to be completely delimited, the work would be dead and its joy would be gone.

Nostalghia

Nostalgia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image--as opposed to a symbol--is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.
Andrei Tarkovsky [41]

There is a story I heard about European artists first meeting the bunjin (literati) artists of Ming China: The European artists were somewhat disappointed in the Chinese artists they found. In their opinion, Chinese artists were UNABLE TO represent the world in a realistic manner that accurately reflected what they saw with their own eyes. So they thought they were poor artists. The Chinese artists were equally disappointed in the European artists they found. In their opinion, European artists were ONLY ABLE TO represent the world in a realistic manner that accurately reflected what they saw with their own eyes. So they thought they were poor artists. I think this principle applies to this day and it is why I usually prefer the eastern conception of art.

Writing Books Under the Pine Trees (1360s) by Wang Meng
Cleveland Museum of Art, ink on paper
Source

Just as enlightenment is something that cannot be understood conceptually, the nature of the highest accomplishments in art are always inscrutable and even incoherent. They should not be analyzed and "understood," but responded to in great mental receptiveness and non-discrimination. The highest work of art should have a similar effect as a great kouan: it teases and provokes the mind towards higher states of consciousness and contact with the great unnameable. Whether you are a Buddhist or not and no matter what stock you put in the idea of enlightenment and nirvana, the access to mystery that art creates is always valuable. It is increasingly so in a world that becomes more and more logical and mechanized.

Reading in a Bamboo Grove (1446) by Tenshou Shuubun [detail]
Toukyou National Museum, light color on paper
Source

The effects of this way of thought continue into the modern day in all forms of Japanese arts and media. One thing I find very strange and frustrating about many westerners and like about Japanese is that westerners are so picky and obsessive about stories being "believable" or "making sense." Of course this is a stereotype and there are plenty of exceptions. So forgive me for over-simplifying here. For example, if a character in a film behaves in a strange, inexplicable, or even incoherent way, the westerner will say it is badly written. The Japanese on the other hand do not care about these things as much, as long as the holistic effect of the film is strong. The Japanese are more forgiving of a story that does not necessarily make sense every step of the way. And the reason is a fundamental disagreement over the role of any work of art, even a narrative one. To the westerner, it must follow a logical progression that conveys explicit meaning that is "convincing." To the easterner, it is supposed to be a collection of crystalline poignant moments that add up to something greater but leave the full weight of it unclear. If we look at the classical poems of Homer and Virgil and compare them with those of Du Fu and Li Bai (Chinese, but influential to generations of Japanese), this is especially apparent.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show HOW IT IS WHAT IT IS, even THAT IT IS WHAT IT IS, rather than to show WHAT IT MEANS. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" [42]

I always found the eastern view on this so much more immediately obvious and compelling, which is why I feel so at home with classical Japanese art. However, you might think that it renders the idea of "art history" or "art criticism" as worthless. It seems like it means that we can't talk about art at all, but only experience it in its grand mystery. But that isn't true. Art history is even more necessary in the conception of art that sees it as a "techne" because we need the surrounding context to understand it in full. And revealing that surrounding context can make an artwork even more rich. A truly great piece of art should retain all its mystery even if we knew its surrounding history in full. Art criticism is similar. The ideal art criticism should not focus only on the "meaning" of the work. Instead, it should do its best to "point out" what makes it so great, to compare it to other works, and to make it shimmer and beguile in its mystery even more.

4. How Freedom of Expression Is Attacked

I've explained just how important I think art is for a society. It is even more important than having the right to speak in public and protest in my opinion (although these things are certainly fundamental as well). But although art is a natural extension of all our other rituals of existence, it is constantly under attack and pressure. Enemies of freedom of expression are plentiful, even in nations like the United States which has some of the best legal protections for it. It is true that art has always fluorished even under repressive laws in the past, but it has always been in spite of these laws and not because of them. In order to really have the power to move us, art needs to have the freedom to provoke, offend, and challenge. These are ways that this freedom gets infringed on. Many of them are systemic issues that require complex solutions, but we can all do our part.

a. Shifting the Blame

The "paradox of tolerance" is an important concept in liberalism. The idea is that a 100% tolerant society will be destroyed, because the intolerant will take advantage of our tolerance and use the opportunity to erode at our values of tolerance. For example, a completely tolerant society would allow Nazis to speak any time they wanted to at any length. Then Nazi ideology will permeate the society and destroy the very tolerance that allowed it to flourish in the first place. It would be like the equivalent of a democratic society coming together and democratically voting to shift to a monarchy. So while it seems paradoxical, a truly tolerant society has to be intolerant of intolerance.

The idea makes sense, but is commonly misunderstood. It only makes sense as an idea if we understand "tolerance" to mean "not saying or doing anything about it." The thinker who first discussed this idea, Karl Popper, did not support censorship or "deplatforming." His view of being "intolerant of intolerance" was what I've suggested earlier on: pointing out why the ideas are dangerous, harmful, mistaken, stupid, etc. In short, he was in favor of sunlight being the best disinfectant. Of course, this could be "aggressive" (demonstrations, etc.), but hopefully never violent. I also believe this. Everyone should have the LEGAL right to put forward their opinions. And they should never be censored for them, but only argued against.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith
A piece of racist propaganda and also undisputedly one of the most important films in history. We would lose so much if we couldn't watch it. Even omega-pleb Roger Ebert understood this:
The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.
Roger Ebert [43]

What is so great about art is that it allows us to have our cake and eat it. If you're a Nazi, you can listen to NSBM or martial industrial or some other music that expresses your feelings. If you're a pedophile, you can jack off to lolicon. If you are a psychopath who enjoys seeing people get hurt, you can play a game that allows you torture people. I think this is a great thing. It allows people to exorcise everything unacceptable in daily life and then re-enter society more peacefully.

Excel Saga (1999-2000)
Episode 14: "Prop"

The concept of "obscenity" is tested when one dares to look at something that he has an unbearable desire to see but has forbidden himself to look at. When one feels that everything that one had wanted to see has been revealed, "obscenity" disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation.
Ooshima Nagisa [44]

Whenever people want to censor or remove art that might be controversial, even extremely controversial, it is really just because they find it "offensive." Anything else besides that is just rhetorical fluff. It is also very convenient for bad actors in society. How convenient it is for the rich and powerful in society if you never call on the city to improve living standards for inner city black youth by better funding and investment in reforming infrastructure, education, etc. but only ever attack Hollywood movies for how they choose to "portray" black characters! How convenient is it for the arms dealers that fund our military-industrial complex if your enemy is the glorification of war in video games instead of those who profit off of real-life warfare!

The general argument is that it will make people more likely to act out in real life. For example, they will argue that looking at lolicon will make you more likely to rape a real child. The evidence for this is murky at best and there is in fact data to the contrary. [45] [46]. To me at least, it just seems intuitive that pornography is a "line of defense" for sexual deviants to get their urges out on instead of acting them out on real people. See this amazing comic by Miura Kentarou explaining the principle with good evidence. of any G8 country. Which means that the only other argument you have to rely on is that you find it "offensive," which is a stupid reason to ban something. I think it's obvious that liking lolicon doesn't necessarily mean you'll like real children. But even if it did "make someone more likely," I don't think that's enough of a reason to justify censorship. Because there is always a step that a person takes after viewing the material where they choose to act it out in real life. It is possible to view representations of something and not act on them. It feels so obvious to me that I feel stupid even saying it. I don't even think that being "desensitized" to material makes you automatically more likely to act it out. Otherwise criminal investigators would all become murderers and rapists as a matter of necessity, because they have to watch snuff films, REAL child porn, etc. for their jobs. But they don't, because humans can be more than mere empty vessels.

In the Japan I once visited, you could go into an otaku store, buy lolicon doujinshi, and then go into an onsen where fathers were trusting enough to bring their nude underaged daughters in with them. This is the sign of a society that is deeply trusting and understands that the "responsibilities" we have to 2-D representations and to 3-D people are different. It has to be fought for. The cucks cry out and scream: "Is this really the hill you want to die on? Drawings of naked anime children?" You're damn right it is. Because if they come for the lolis, nothing will stop them after that.

b. Blurring the Lines

After people realize that shifting the blame doesn't work because they don't have the evidence, they usually rely on being rhetorically sneaky instead. A common tactic is to try to blur the lines between the expression of something in art and the real thing. It's true that I'm a fan of art being a natural extension of our daily lives and not some separate thing that we only do in these expensive museums once in a while. But that doesn't mean that there's suddenly no difference between the visual representation of something and the real thing.

Rational discourse in the modern day is being destroyed by our inability to be specific and discrete. I can't count the number of times I've heard some stupid normalfag refer to lolicon as "child porn." When you hear the term "child porn," you think of some vile shit, like some sleazy fat fuck in Southeast Asia kidnapping some real-life, 3-D kids and filming himself raping them. Even if you find lolicon distasteful or horrible, there is a world of difference between it and real child porn. Lolicon is made without the involvement of any real life children. But nowadays everyone acts like it's the same thing.

And the state of discourse is even worse than that. People call it "pedophilia" when you have any sexualized imagery of FICTIONAL, 2-D characters who are under 18. Fucking ridiculous. Those poor, innocent pixels and animation cels must be thankful for their moral crusade. It's just another effect of social media brainrot. Everyone is desperate to make themselves look morally superior, because they have gradually accepted the erosion of all their privacy and anonymity and have learned to turn everything they enjoy into an "identity." So they view everything through a hyper-puritanical lens of hunting for the impure and immoral. It's pathological.

The truth is that it's completely natural for adults to be attracted to teenagers who have gone through puberty. Hell, it's even "natural" for people to be pedophiles to a degree, because the condition occurs to about the same degree as homosexuality. So what better way to find an outlet for these socially unacceptable urges than with fictional, 2-D drawings that don't harm minors in any way? Who exactly is being hurt?

It's basically the same as soccer moms wanting to ban violent video games after school shootings. All they can appeal to is that you find the not-real representation distasteful. They don't have the data that they make people more violent as a matter of necessity, so in order to make it appear unethical they have to blur the lines between the representation and the real thing. "Oh, look at this game he's playing where he shoots people... How could he NOT be being brainwashed into wanting to do it in real life?" Easy, because he knows the difference between fiction and reality. Sounds like YOU'RE the one with the problem!

Are there some mentally unstable people who can't tell the difference between how we should act towards an artistic representation versus the real thing? Of course. But the way a lot of stupid people respond to that is not by saying "Fiction and real life are different, so we can't act towards real life the same way we would act toward fiction!" but by accepting the crazy person's blurred-lines reality and then trying to make the art take responsibility for creating it. Madness!

c. Collapsing Distances

I am a big fan of unqualified protection for freedom of expression. But obviously I don't want to see it all in the same place. I think porno is awesome and that there's no reason to criminalize it if everyone involved in the production is over the age of 18 (as is the case for lolicon, since drawings aren't real children). But I don't think it should be in the presence of children. The same applies for all kinds of expression. We can enjoy offensive and crude humor in the presence of people that we have some degree of trust with, but not with strangers. This happens at the level of individuals, but also at the level of communities. The more broad and public the community is, the more "on edge" it has to be. The more underground and tightly-knit the community is, the more free it can be. Communities tend to self-segregate and set their own boundaries in a natural way, so usually these "rules" tend to be set without us even noticing them. That's why I don't think laws are necessary. But this is becoming harder these days.

One of the big problems with freedom of expression today is that everything is just too damn close together. Some people will say that it is the fault of the internet making everything accessible to everyone immediately. But it is not the fault of "the internet." It is the fault of the modern, corporate, social media-dominated Zuckernet that centers everyone around like five sites. This didn't happen to nearly the same degree back in the 2000s, because the internet was decentralized and specialized enough that the same natural borders emerged between communities. You wouldn't have some middle aged housewife from Alabama stumble on your website about anime or visual novels back then, because why on earth would she?

While it's important to foster the attitude of not wishing to curb others' freedom of expression, it's also important to create meaningful "distance" between different areas of our life. Putting it all together and mashing everything into the same infernal websites and platforms is destroying freedom of expression. First of all, it's largely because these websites (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, etc.) are overwhelmingly American companies. And even if they aren't (like TikTok), the largest English-speaking contingent is American, so that sets the standard. This creates a big problem where the American perspective and norms dominate even on a "global" platform. "Globalization" is often a byword for "Americanization," and it's especially true online. I'm not even saying this because I think the American way is always bad. It would be just as bad if any other country, be it England, France, Russia, China, or anywhere else, dominated the cultural norms of the entire world. "Culture shocks" are valuable and social media interconnectedness is slowly destroying our ability to have them.

Illustration of Zwarte Piet by Daan Hoeksma from a 1915 childrens' book
Source

For example, in the Netherlands there is a tradition where Santa Claus is joined by a man in blackface named Zwarte Piet. To American eyes, this looks "racist," but the truth is that European peoples have had a very different relationship to blackface and even to stereotyped caricatures of black people, because their history is simply much different than ours. Similarly, there are words in a number of European languages that are essentially their equivalent of the word "nigger." But because they have not had the same institutional racism as the United States in their histories, the word doesn't have the same overwhelming taboo that it does in America. It is closer to a word like "gringo."

Before the normiefication of the internet, Europeans like the above could act according to their own culture and not give a fuck what any American thinks. But now, all eyes are on you whenever you say anything, and the vast majority of the internet operates by the rules of Silicon Valley tech billionaires. Even if you won't be outright banned for expressing something, it's stifling to have to have the entire "public square" potentially able to access whatever you post. This is only compounded by the fact that these social media giants have gradually eroded anonymity as the unquestioned norm of the internet. It makes people censor themselves before you even need to regulate them. It's insidious. It's Orwellian.

The problem isn't that we have to have some different standards in front of bigger groups. That's always been the case. The problem is that all communities are being pushed together and privacy is being eroded by tech companies. Indeed, the worst part is that it isn't even the morality of Silicon Valley tech billionaires at this point. It's the morality of an AI. On giant platforms like YouTube, we have to become encultured in an AI morality. I think this is a very troubling thing. An AI can't make a distinction between someone calling someone a slur in a hateful way versus reading from a Mark Twain book. And I think that this is having a negative effect on people: they have a very robotic "crtl+f for 'nigger' ---> IMMORALITY DETECTED" understanding of morality. All of these "arbitrary" distinctions that we make about how language is used among different groups are deeply human, and massive AI-moderated platforms destroy our access to them by trying to create site-wide moderating policies over sites that are just way too damn big. All of the above is before we even get into the issue of "cancel culture," which is a whole other can of worms. The problem exists in the very architecture of social media at this point.

d. Marketing to the Moral Majority

I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.
Tarr Béla [47]

There are a lot of movies made for nobody.
Stan Brakhage [48]

So far I've mostly talked about censorship in the most crude terms: being punished by being thrown in jail, being fined, being banned from a platform, etc. But this is not the only way that people are censored. In fact, it is usually the least common way that they are censored in a "modern" and "free" society. One of the most common ways is by the creation of a "moral majority" and the incentive of markets to tailor everything to it.

You could say that the most "authentic" and "unrestrained" forms of expression are those that are completely private. There are some great works of art that have been created this way. Take, for example, Francisco Goya's "black paintings." They were painted as murals on his walls after he became a recluse. He apparently never intended for them to be public and they were only discovered and appreciated after his death. There are other great works of literature, painting, etc. like this that truly seem to have been made without any audience in mind. And these are the most "free," because the feelings and responses of others don't even have to enter into our minds as a consideration.

Two Old Ones Eating Soup (c. 1819-1823) by Francisco Goya
Museo del Prado, Madrid, oil mural
Source
One of Francisco Goya's black paintings.

As the "audience" of an artwork spreads out and becomes larger, the creator has less and less freedom. That is because, when making the artwork, he has to consider the feelings of how it will be received by more and more people. But this is a spectrum. We give up some degree of "freedom" or "authenticity" in order to make the work reach more people and be enjoyed by more people. The smaller the audience is, the more authentic freedom is retained. The larger the market is, the more the artist has to self-censor. This would be true even if there was a society with no "cancel culture" (which has never existed, all societies have engaged in censorship through social pressure to some degree). Even if no one responded negatively, you would still speak differently to a group of only your closest friends versus to a group of your closest friends and all of their grandmothers. The same applies in creating a work of art.

The smaller a "market" is for any work of art, the greater freedom it has. But today, the distance-collapsing nature of the corporate internet makes it harder and harder for small markets to fluorish. Let's say you want to release a game that was your passion project on the internet. You could put it on your tiny website where a few people might see it, or you could put it on Steam, which practically every PC gamer on the earth uses. But to put it on Steam, you have to remove any 2-D sexualized imagery of individuals under the age of 18 (unless you are a triple-A western developer who makes ugly games for SJWs, apparently). All the modern markets in the internet age are becoming so huge and omnipresent that there is no distance, and thus no freedom of expression. Compare that to how video games used to be sold: to a small group of the dedicated in particular, discerete markets, usually spread by word of mouth. It's all too obvious how much more self-censoring enters into the picture when the size of the market is so enlarged. Back when I was a kid, all the good shit in anime had to be censored so it could be released in America. Ok, easy enough. Just get the original, uncensored ones instead. But that was back when there were two different enough markets that they could be sold separately. Nowadays, the creators make the material knowing that it will have to go to cucked countries and thus censor out all the good shit in advance so that they can make more money. That's because there isn't enough distance between the markets now. It's so fucking lame.

In a small market, the "sacrifice" you make to your own freedom can actually potentially lead to something greater. Very few works of art are created without caring what the audience would think. It's always a balance of making something that you find valuable and also thinking about what the likely audience of it will enjoy. For example, let's think of Comiket, the biggest event for doujin creators in Japan where otaku from all around the country gather and share their new works. They are creating for other otaku and often responding to trends and to what others find interesting, trying to make products that people will enjoy. But they are doing it for a particular subset of the population who share their own strange, distinctive interests. In a small market like this, creativity and "appealing to" the audience can actually coexist harmoniously. But it can't in a massive modern industry like Hollywood. When your audience is the entire world, people who have fundamentally opposing views to you will be part of that audience, and the only way to appeal to them will be to remove everything unique out of what you create. We all know how much modern American entertainment companies self-censor in order to have success in countries like China. But that's not China's fault. Or, more accurately, it's not their fault any more than it is the fault of any other major player in the "business" of culture. They're just playing the same perverse game of neoliberal capitalism that the whole world is. The problem is that there are no small, exclusionary, private markets anymore. Pandering to authoritarian regimes is just a side-effect of that.

In a world where people unfortunately still need money to survive and obtain most of the things to meet their basic needs, it's hard to say no to an artist wanting to gain more exposure and make more money off their creations. But resisting that urge is the only way to make art of genuine value today. In the past, even a massively censored work could still have a lot of value. Some artists have a special talent for making great art within these massive systems and testing their boundaries. Many of the great Hollywood directors like Nicholas Ray did it. But there was no Twitter in those days. Things were decentralized enough back then that not everyone would see every movie, and things could still have some degree of specialization. Even today, there are some figures who have managed to become rich and famous while always staying "real" and "honest." David Lynch is the best example I can think of. Love him or hate him, there's no doubt that what you're seeing is him being completely authentic, even when he's become rich and moved to the Hollywood hills. But it takes an enormous will and a lot of economic security to not start self-censoring in order to reap the biggest profit. And that "profit" consists of more than just money.

Indeed, our time is awash with culturalism. Its sticky hands cling to the underside of every cultural phenomenon. Culturalism is, in a word, that tendency which seeks to sever culture from its bloodstained womb of life and reproductive acts and judge it by some pleasant humanistic product. There culture is transformed into something harmless and beautiful, the shared property of mankind, like a fountain in a plaza.
Mishima Yukio, "On the Defense of Culture" [49]

If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it.
Bill Watterson [50]

This doesn't only apply for art. In an era where tourism is an industry like anything else, all cultural activities become commodities to be bought and sold to the biggest, blandest moral majority. Everything that doesn't meet the moral standards of the Americanized world gets left out or shoved to the side because that might offend some ignorant tourist or onlooker from another country who is connected to Twitter and can report on it globally. And therefore there is no authentic culture left, but only different shades of the globalized consumerist Amazon marketplace. There is no longer any real travelling to learn and soak in the richness of a different culture, but only to buy cheap crap from the souvenir store. Well, at least this is the end result if we do nothing to counter this force. And there are places that do counter it. That is a good thing. Culture is only authentic and real if somebody somewhere hates it. Otherwise it is eroded away at by a thousand well-meaning "cuts" of concession to outsiders and becomes a culture for "everyone," which is really for no one.

e. Being a Copyright Bully

I'm not far enough left to oppose property. I think ownership of physical, material property is fine. I think that people have secured property for as long as they have existed. Even animals guard over things like shells, leaves, etc. Of course there are limits. You can own and use a radio, but not so loudly that it bothers other people in your apartment complex, for example. But as long as we don't encroach on others with what we own, I don't think owning physical, material property is a problem. I think that "intellectual property," on the other hand, is a ludicrous concept. An idea can have an "originator," but never an "owner." Information wants to be free. Once an idea escapes into the world, any attempt to contain it is artificial. Copyright law is an oppressive tool, used by bullies to stifle creativity and freedom. Art existed for thousands of years without it and did just fine.

Pretty much everything we want copyright for can be handled with trademarks. Compared to the past, it is much easier to falsely take or assign credit for a work of art and obscure the nature of authorship. For example, you can rip some art assets from a game, or even an entire game, and pretend that it is your own by posting it somewhere else online. And I think that this is wrong. I have no problem with people appropriating the ideas and creations of others to remix, etc., but I do think that it is fair that the original creator gets the credit for what they originally created. Not only is it fair, it's also essential for art history to accurately track who first created what and when they did it to the best of our knowledge. But I do think there is a way that we can do it without copyright. After all, the poems of Virgil and plays of Shakespeare were copied hundreds of times before the invention of copyright without anyone losing track of who the original creator was. We're going to have to figure out this problem of proving that a particular human made something anyway with the advent of AI art. So we might as well kill two birds with one stone and say goodbye to the oppressive institution of copyright while we're at it.

As long as the proper attribution is known, I have no problem with piracy. I think that art has to learn to exist in a post-piracy world. Can people pirate your work? Then you have to give them something that makes them choose to pay for it instead. Steam figured this out by making it more convenient to buy computer games than to pirate them. Maybe the answer is just that your art is so damn good that people choose to give you money for it instead. Sites like Patreon are a nice way to support an artist while allowing piracy, but unfortunately they're often massively censored (don't allow lolicon, etc.). In any case, the economic model has to evolve around piracy. And it can. It's been around forever. No amount of copied cassette tapes ever killed the music industry. No amount of copied floppy disks ever killed the computer games industry. In fact, I would argue that a degree of piracy is essential in keeping the audience authentic. If the only people paying for your art are ones who could otherwise pirate it for free, you know that you're attracting people who actually give a shit.

5. How to Protect Freedom of Expression

＊Politically, always defend net neutrality and similar policies which encourage free, open communication via the internet and other forms of media. Oppose anything resembling censorship. But don't be partisan about it either. I find it very hypocritical to see left-wingers in the US look at right-wing governments banning books from libraries and school curriculums in horror when many left-wingers have essentially tried to play the same game with works that could be seen as "racist" or "sexist" or "triggering." Both are bad! We need to rather cling exactly to that which we find most disagreeable. In the Cold War, the CIA propped up Jackson Pollock and other abstract exprssionists as symbols of freedom. Unlike those commie bastards, we have the freedom to make any kind of art we want, even "meaningless" art like this! If America was morally consistent, we would do the same for lolicon today. But alas...

＊On a social level, you have to be accomodating, kindhearted, and promote harmony. In the world of art, you have to be uncompromising, elitist, and a gatekeeper. Anything less than that and you will sacrifice your freedom of expression in order to be "nice." The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

＊Of course, the above two things won't come into conflict if you always maintain appropriate distance and keep underground things underground. Never try to pander to normalfags. Cast not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. It would be nice if we could have advertisements with kyonyuu characters from Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai! or Getsuyoubi no Tawawa without a bunch of puritanical Christians calling themselves feminists getting their panties in a knot, but if we can't, retreat and keep your community pure until the world becomes wiser.

＊Related to the above, I highly recommend staying anonymous on the internet and not giving out a bunch of information about yourself. You should stay private when it comes to the art world, so you can not worry about it encroaching on your daily life. This was standard practice before that stupid faggot Zuckerberg destroyed the norm of anonymity on the internet. It still more or less is the norm in Japan where Facebook never became mainstream (thank god...).

＊Piracy is more than morally justified when censors try to put a cock-cage on you. But you should always monetarily support artists and companies who do not bow to pressure. Stand against the Purtians and their new witch hunt. Wipe your ass with ESG scores.

＊If you hear anyone say "you could never get away with that nowadays," challenge it. Never let them normalize oppressive censorship as the result of "evolving with the times." Consume art from the past that challenges your values and norms.

＊It should go without saying that I do not support changing old works of art to "accomodate" modern times and tastes. It's a very insidious form of censorship and historical revisionism. But I also do not support tearing down statues of controversial historical figures or renaming things named after them, unless they have an original name that has been obscured. For example, I'm fine with and supportive of the US restoring the name of the tallest mountain in Alaska to Mt. Denali instead of Mt. McKinley. But I think the two names can also coexist as part of its history. Otherwise, I think Noam Chomsky put it best:
My opinion is with those who want to leave the statues. I would say leave the statues with a plaque, or maybe another statue illustrating what actually happened. I think that's the right idea. Let's not erase the history. Let's expose the history so people understand it. (Source)