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Conduct Without Belief and Works of Art Without Viewers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Paul Veyne
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Extract

It is said that reality is stronger than any description we can make of it, and we must admit that atrocities, when we see them, go beyond any idea we may have had of them. On the other hand, when it is a question of values and beliefs, the contrary is true: reality is much less than its representation and the ideas it professes. This loss of energy is called indifference. Madame Bovary believed that in Naples happiness was as firmly rooted as the orange trees and as strong as stone. The wisdom of nations knows that that is not the case: “We hope for Paradise but as late as possible,” affirms a Christian proverb. This indifference poses a problem or an entire series of problems (Georg Simmel's work could be considered from that point of view) unless it arises from all our errors, spontaneous or scientific, concerning man and society. I do not know where I read, or dreamed, the story of a young ethnologist who went to study a tribe that was said to believe that the world would come to an end if the priests let the sacred fire go out. He assumed that the priests were as anxious as though they controlled the detonator of an atomic bomb. Admitted into the temple of the fire, he saw the peaceful religious going about routine tasks. Reality is rarely emphatic. Rites and customs, for example, reflect the beliefs of a society. Paintings and sculptures show what the society believes or serve to make it believe what it sees. Sculpture in cathedrals were the bible of the illiterate. Is that really certain? We notice that most often people perform the rites without believing in their significance and, in any case, without interest in them, because the liturgy is not a means of communication giving information. They do not look at the images. (How many Parisians have looked at the Napoleonic bas-reliefs on the Vendôme column?) and if they tried to do so, they would not be able to decipher their iconography or even see them: placed too high, the images are often undecipherable. So it is necessary to sketch out a sociology of art in which the art work, far from conveying an iconography and an ideology, is a decor that we do not even look at, that we can hardly see and that is however very important. The study of all these insufficiencies would be a vast program. Here we will confine ourselves to art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 36 , Issue 143 , September 1988 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 G. Bateson, Naven, Stanford University Press, 1936, ch. IX: "The ritual significance of the ceremonies is almost completely unknown and the emphasis is exclusively put on their function as a means of celebrating something. One day when a ceremony relative to fertility and prosperity was being held, when a new floor was being installed in the ceremonial house, the majority of my informants told me that the ceremony was being held "because of the new floors." The men who had full consciousness of the ritual meaning of the ceremony were rare, as were those who took an interest in it. And those who did were not interested in the magical aspects of the ceremony but in its totemic origins, which is of highest importance for the clans whose pride in nobility largely rests on the detail of their totemic genealogy."

2 On the "geographical" level of the Column's frieze, see F. Bobu Florescu, Die Trajanssäule, Akademie-Verlag, Bucharest, 1969, pp. 52-56; Werner Gauer, Untersuchungen zur Trajanssäule, Berlin 1977, p. 14, which states that the images of these villages are not faithful or picturesque representations but conventional images.

3 Robert Klein, La forme et l'intelligible, Gallimard 1970, p. 234.

4 We quote: Lehmann-Hartleben, Die Trajanssäule, Vol. I, p. 1; R. Brilliant, Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine, London, Phaidon 1974, p. 192; R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Dall'ellenismo al medioevo, Milan 1978, p. 123: "La Colonna Traiana, o della libertà dell'artista,"; W. Gauer, Untersuchungen…, p. 45; Prospettiva, no. 26 July 1981, p. 2 (with interesting precisions, no. 11, on the polychrome of these reliefs, which completes G. Becatti, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der röm. Welt, II, 12, Kunst 1, p. 550).

5 Salvatore Settis has just made a brilliant study of the imitation of Trajan reliefs by the sculptors of Napoleon.

6 P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Univ. Calif. Press 1982, p. 20.

7 E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, Oxford, Phaidon 1979, p. 116.

8 A. Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, Albin Michel 1965, p. 143.

9 Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment, Univ. Pennsylvania Press 1982, which I know thanks to Jean Molino.

10 Ancient testimony relates that these paintings of matches were carefully and eagerly regarded.

11 A. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500 to 1700, Penguin Books, 1953, p. 157 (it is true that he adds, "but this is pure speculation").

12 E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, 1963.

13 G. Vattimo, La fine della modernità, (trans. Alunni, La Fin de la modernité: nihilisme et herméneutique dans la culture post-moderne, Editions du Seuil 1987, pp. 89-91).

14 See Raymonde Moulin on the subject of the market for "croûtes": Le marché de la peinture en France, Editions de Minuit, pp. 70 and 409 et seq.

15 Brown, op. cit., p. 202.

16 Cf. Pierre Hadot, Plotin, Traité 38, Editions du Cerf 1988, p. 69.

17 Rev. Fr. Huc, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet et la Chine, Edition d'Ardenne de Tizac, Vol. IV, p. 135.

18 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure et fonction dans la société primitive, p. 232.

19 Tchang Tche-T ‘ong, Viceroy of Hou-Koang, Exhortation à l'étude, translated from the Chinese by J. Tobar, Shanghai, 1898, p. 5. On the funerary beliefs of the West around the same period, see R. Linton, De l'homme, Editions de Minuit 1968, p. 391. "The average American Protestant at the beginning of the 19th century, could be deeply disturbed by a sermon on the Last Judgment, speak of his loved parents as waiting for him in Heaven and feel a dread of cemeteries after nightfall."

20 De Martino, lamento found in Lucania and published in Società in 1954.

21 G. Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, Wagenbach, Berlin, 1983, p. 37.

22 ibid., pp. 195-218. The response of E. Cassirer, Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, Darmstadt 1961, ch. 5, repudiates Simmel's thought which does not deplore the fact that the objective mind blocks individual spontaneity but on the contrary that the individual never succeeds in assimilating his objective creations. It is true that the tragic pluralism of Simmel is contrary to our natural inclination to conciliation and optimism. Simmel believes in the irreconcilable plurality of values and the internal discord of the individual himself (Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Scientia Verlag 1983, Vol. II, pp. 360-426). In the same way, the ambiguity between instinct and higher aspirations, a confused reality that for want of something better he calls "life" (his Fragment über die Liebe is characteristic: see Das Individuum und die Freiheit, Wagenbach 1984, pp. 19-28). Here we are far from Bergson, in spite of what has often been said. What Simmel calls "life" is the mixed nature of all reality, where essences, functions or orders are mingled or contradictory. Love is neither one essence nor a composite of impulses and ideals but an indissoluble mixture: "eine unlösbare Aufgabe " (p. 25). On the individual not being able to assimilate all the objective spirit (and, for example, fully profiting from the institution of museums) see Das Individuum und die Freiheit, p. 90 et seq.

23 René Char, Oeuvres complètes, Bibl. Pléiade 1983, pp. 466 and 55; G. Simmel, Das Individuum und die Freiheit, p. 203.

24 Simmel Philosophische Kultur, p. 150.