LINKING AESTHETICS AND POLITICAL THEORY:

This article and the one by Stephen Brown included in this volume attempt to link together the disciplines of aesthetics and political theory and are part of a larger project that grew out of a course we developed on these two subjects. The saga of that course’s development from idea to reality is relevant.

We proposed to use the course for a general exploration of the relationship of aesthetic theory and political theory and, therefore, chose the rather generic title “art and politics.” A more specific title, we believed, would too greatly restrict the focus and prevent a free exploration of the subjects from different perspectives and in different historical eras.

At the outset, our assumption was that the relationship between art and politics would exhibit radical differences, Foucauldian gaps, as we moved from, say, the classical to Romantic period or from romanticism to realism; and we wanted to explore those differences in as many areas as possible. This open-ended approach, however, appeared to be too “imperialistic” to many and a kind of guerrilla warfare by committee began at all levels. Debilitated by months of ambushes, we tried to throw off the opposition by stratagem, agreeing with feigned reluctance to surrender the indefinite “art and politics” for the slightly more specific “art and revolutionary politics.” The ruse, however, failed and, worn down by further low-intensity warfare, we acquiesced to “Art and the French Revolution (there were, we consoled ourselves, so many of them: 1648-1653, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1968). This approach, however, also met strong resistance and we received the Diktat: “Art and the French Revolution of 1789” or nothing. But at least we had a course.

Confined to this restricted space, we probed here and there for an opening: the first time through, we explored the art and politics of 1789-1815; the next time we emphasized the art and politics of the Baroque, Rococo, and Neo-Classical eras as a “prelude” to 1789; then came the art and politics of 1830—the “logical conclusion” of the 1789 revolution. Following those forays came explorations of 1848 and 1870 because they had their “roots” in 1789. We even toyed with the idea of doing 1776 on the ground that that is the revolution the French should have made; and we could see the possibilities of 1917 as the one they should not have made, and so on.

What struck us about all of this, however, was not the expected diversity in the various links between aesthetics and politics, but the persistence of certain relationships that appeared again and again. Indeed, we found that in nearly every permutation and combination of the course the themes remained essentially the same; and we could take paintings from almost any era to illustrate themes that seemed never to change. This struck us as exceedingly odd; for we had undertaken the whole enterprise with a strong post-modern bias against any kind of permanence—and yet permanence, albeit of a unique sort, seemed to appear again and again.

In this article, I concentrate on the painting The Oath of the Horatii by the French painter Jaques-Louis David (1748-1825) as an example of the kind of permanence we found. The painting is curious for a number of reasons. First, it was an example of the use of the aesthetic medium to make a political statement in 1784; but it celebrated an event that had taken place two thousand years earlier. Second, the event, though certainly singular in its horror, had such enduring meaning that everyone from Livy to Cicero to St. Augustine to Machiavelli to Corneille and many others felt compelled to take sides on it. Third, the painting illustrated not only an event of the past being used to make a statement about the present, but it also illustrated the future political conflict between bourgeois liberals and the republicans of “the Terror” of 1793-1794. Lastly, and perhaps most remarkably, the painting portrayed in art precisely the issue seen today in the conflict of contemporary republican thinkers like J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner against liberals like John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin. In an era when “the local” in both time and space is supposed to be only the “Grund,” and “incredulity” the proper attitude toward all enduring messages (4), we had found something curiously transcendent in the story of the Horatii.

Livy gives us the story in a few brief chapters (History of Rome, I: 22-26). It concerned, among other things, the nature orf virtue in the ancient Roman world. Virtue, for the Romans, was the willingness to set aside private interests for the public good. This willingness is illustrated, in several complex ways, by the grim story of the Horatii during the civil war between Roman and Alban tribes in the early years of Rome.

In each of the two tribes, it chanced that there were two sets of triplet brothers, three heroes for each side, all matched in prowess and age. These brothers were the Horatii and the Curiatii. The two tribes decided that rather than commit their entire armies to battle, their conflict could be settled more economically by simply having the Horatii and Curiatii fight each other to the death; and swearing that the losing tribe would surrender its liberty to the victor of that limited combat. The leaders of both sides solemnized this ridiculous arrangement, (Machiavelli, Discourses I: 22 and 24) with the sacrifice of an unfortunate passing pig and the blessings produced by waving about a certain “sacred herb.” Without a thought for their private interests or why they alone had been chosen to sacrifice themselves, the triplet brothers then made ready to lay down their lives for the public good.

Tradition gives the Roman brothers the name Horatii and the Albans Curiatii. It may well be, however, that the Curiatii were the Roman heroes and the Horatii were the Albans, and, as in some absurdist existential drama worthy of Anouilh, the Romans had for centuries celebrated the virtue of an enemy. But, as the cynical Livy noted, it really makes little difference; for the point was not the names of heroes, but the lesson in virtue they provided.

In any case, the battle ensued, and as it drew near its conclusion, one surviving and unwounded Horatius faced three wounded Curiatii. With the wit and cunning of a fox, young Horatius feigned cowardice and began to run from his opponents—tiring them and thinning their combined might into three weakened and widely separated individuals. The ruse having worked, he then swiftly turned and killed his enemies one by one. “Two I dedicate to my brothers, the third I dedicate to the cause of the war, that Romans may rule over Albans.” (I: 25)

The armies then returned home, the surviving Horatius carrying the triple spoils of his victims as a mark of virtue. Upon his entrance to the city, he was met by his young sister who, in happier times, had been engaged to one of the dead Curiatii. Seeing her dead lover’s cloak upon the shoulders of Horatius—the cloak she herself had woven—she weakened and instead of demonstrating public virtue and saluting the victor, she yielded to a merely private grief and “called out her dead lover’s name.” Horatius, enraged at his sister’s ignoble surrender to private feelings, ran her through with his sword: “‘Begone to your betrothed, with your childish love,’” said the virtuous hero. “So perish every Roman who mourns a foe. Sic eat quaecumque, Romana lugebit hostem. (I: 25) Thus did Horatius demonstrate again his virtue by setting aside his private feelings for his sister, killing her, and so setting an example celebrated for centuries. Such greatness of soul is rare and must be valued for its power to instill virtue in the public spirit of a timorous people. Never, says Livy later on, “was an age more productive of virtues. Nulla aetas virtutem feracior” (IX: 16).

Following the killing of his sister, Horatius was arrested and brought to a series of trials, the last before the assembled citizens. The trial, however, was not, as we may suppose, for murder, but treason; for Horatius, it seemed, had usurped the power of the state by killing the girl before Rome could judge her. He, like his sister, had yielded to a private feeling.

But Livy was not done there. In the trial, Publius Horatius, the father of Horatius and, of course, the murdered girl, defended his son’s actions saying that, had young Horatius not slain his sister, he, Publius Horatius, would have been forced to punish his son—presumably by killing him, too. What would Rome come to if public virtue was surrendered to private love of family? The population then decided for acquittal.

But the sentimental people, said Livy scornfully, did not absolve the young Horatius for killing his sister, but because they were swayed by his courage in battle and thus acquitted “more out of admiration for his valor than for the justness of his cause.” (I: 26)

Cicero’s remarks on the trial are interesting and “virtuous.” In the De Inventione (II: 78), he used the case as an example of “when the defendant /Horatius/ admits the act of which he is accused, but shows that he was justified in doing it because he was influenced by an offense committed by the other party/the sister/.” Thus, Cicero agreed with the earlier Roman citizens: Horatius’s crime was that he had killed her before she was convicted of treason, that is he had killed her “uncondemned,” (indamnatam necari). Cicero then went on, untroubled by the killing, to give advice on how to defend figures like Horatius.

At first glance, this seems to be a case where Foucault may have a point: the gap between the ancients and the moderns is too great to bridge. It is difficult for us to put ourselves in the position of these Romans, of the younger or older Horatius, difficult not to be appalled by the idea of running a defenseless girl through with a sword. We, corrupted moderns, have surrendered the idea of a public virtue to the idea that the public is but the sum of the private virtues. We can, therefore, only comprehend these acts of virtue as mere wanton cruelty and disregard for individual feelings.

But this is too simple of an explanation. It is not that we do not comprehend the Roman concept of virtue, the sacrifice of the private for the public interest. What we cannot understand is the arrogant and smug confidence with which these unreflective Romans believed they understood how to apply the concept. “Good heavens, Euthyphro,” says Socrates, “and is your knowledge of religion and of things pious so very exact, that . . . you are not afraid lest you too may be doing an impious thing?” (Euthyphro, 4)

In short, what makes the ancient idea seem remote from an age of uncertainty like this one is Horatius’ and his father’s apparent lack of doubt, the absence of any fear that they might be wrong. We only find ourselves on common ground with the ancients when Horatius is brought to trial. Likewise, we are comforted to read St. Augustine’s remarks on the incident. “To me,” said the Bishop of Hippo, “this one girl seems to have been more humane than the whole Roman people. I cannot think her to blame for lamenting the man to whom she had plighted her troth, or perhaps as she was doing, for grieving that her brother should have slain him to whom he had promised his sister: (City of God. III: 14) There is, in short, something familiar in the conflict over which person—Horatius or his sister—is the virtuous one.

The story of Horatius, regarded as a case of excess by St. Augustine, passed out of favor in the Christian Middle Ages and was only revived in the Renaissance when humanists began to recover the ancient pagans and their idea that virtue could be achieved here on earth. The recovery was, however, not always with enthusiasm. Thus even Machiavelli, who had praised Brutus for the execution of his own two sons (Discourses III: 3), twice condemned Horatius as a criminal and the state for having exculpated clear criminal behavior simply because of the defendant’s previous valor. (Discourses I: 22; 24) “In a well-order state, a man’s merits should never excuse his crimes.”

Machiavelli, certainly not parsimonious when it came to bloodletting, did not even entertain the idea that Horatius’s slaughter of his own sister was a case of public “virtue.” To him it was murder pure and simple. But perhaps Machiavelli had been made soft by the long domination of the Christian Middle Ages.

In the Neo-Classical era, when familiarity with ancient themes was widespread, it is obvious that it is in this contest of public virtue with private interest that we must view David’s painting. We do not have time here to explore David’s enthusiastic participation in Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue, in The Terror; but it should be clear that The Oath provides a framework for judging certain aspects of the 1789 Revolution in terms that are far more complex than the mere overthrow of a corrupt Bourbon government by a progressive middle class interested in establishing “liberty” and a modern state rooted in laissez-faire self interest.

“Reading” the painting as it has been done in the past—as a vague, near unconscious expression of the desire for revolution, “freedom” from a corrupt ancien regime—let alone a neutral objet d’art —misses the artist’s political-social agenda. It overlooks the painting’s use of image and memory in a neoclassical era to create a vision of that agenda. In fact, David’s Oath celebrated the ideology of the extreme wing of the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, muscled by the sans culottes, who, far from being advocates of bourgeois liberty, were in fact reactionary partisans of Roman virtue. David’s Oath, in short, was a demonstration of the sort of virtue that Robespierre meant to instill in order to curb the excesses of bourgeois private interest, a salute, albeit an extreme one, to those who believed then and now that virtue is the sacrifice of private interest to the public good.

David’s Oath is, however, not only an example of the way a particular artist used painting to advocate a particular political end—and, therefore, of the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional boundaries between art and politics. The painting also demonstrates, in our constant need to address the issue it raised, that there are certain timeless ideas with which we must come to grips. It is the nature of those ideas that I want to explore here.

Postmodern philosophy is useful in this endeavor, of course, because it rejects the old boundaries between traditional subjects—but it gives us no guidelines for doing anything beyond deconstructing those traditional borders. In this article then, we come to grips not only with the problem of the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional boundaries, but we make at least a preliminary attempt at constructing a new framework for viewing art and politics together and for understanding how it is that we do understand David, Horatius, and many other figures over the ages.

To build this new framework, we viewed painting as a lens through which the artist examined the conflicting forces in play during his life and according to which he shaped them into aesthetic images. It was with these images that he came to grips with and, if successful, shaped the course of history. The artist’s lens, however, seems, according to postmodern thought, to shape images, narrate events, and twist the world into shape, only within some remote and inaccessible historical-contextual perspective or paradigm.

But it is not only that David’s lens is, according to postmodern thought, unapproachable; our project was complicated by the fact that our own lens, the one through which we examine the lens of a painter like David and his Oath, is also thought (Gadamer, for example) to be “flawed,” colored by our own paradigm and our natural desire to make sense of David’s world—but in terms of our own. And yet, we—and many others throughout history—seem plainly to have understood the story quite well. We differ only on how to judge it.

We began then by acknowledging the difficulty of coping with Benedetto Croce’s charge that “all history is contemporary history” and admitting the impossibility of arriving at pure truth or pure history wie es eigentlich gewesen. Escaping the current “cave,” to use Plato’s word, is a formidable task and we have various contemporary metaphors for illustrating how formidable it is: the power of intellectual design of the “current paradigm” (Kuhn); the “trace” of the logos (Derrida); the “gap” between various (groundless) “epistemes” (Foucault); the linguistic structure (Gadamer); the local determinism of the petits recits (Lyotard); the necessary mode of emplotment (White); the unreality of neutral ground anyway (Rorty, MacIntyre, Sandel Walzer, Williams and many others).

All of these ideas stand in the way of discovering a lens to see the “truth.” We do not, however, aim at the truth. Our aim is more limited. We wish to find out why it is that we share some common ground between paradigms—a ground that neither disintegrates into Heraclitian flux nor provides us a dogmatic truth.

This search required an exploration of the conflict between philosophy and history in aesthetics and political theory: the philosophical view that there are timeless essences of art, politics, justice, and so on, which are uncovered by pure thought; and the opposing view that ideals of beauty, politics, and justice make sense—but only in particular contexts.

Turning first to aesthetics, we hoped to bridge the gap between philosophical (so-called intrinsic or New Criticism) and historical (so-called extrinsic criticism). The New Critical view was stated by Clive Bell, who in his 1958 work, Art, wrote, “I care very little when things were made, or why they were made; I care about their emotional significance to us. To the historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything that matters is a direct means to emotion. I am writing about art, not about history.” (73)

Now quite out of fashion, the New Criticism held that there was some timeless essence of beauty that would produce an aesthetic emotion in all readers or viewers regardless of time and place. Such a form of criticism is frequently, if somewhat simplistically traced to Aristotle’s Poetics.

Carried forward a few millennia, we find the idea, more or less, represented in the ideas that grew up in London around 1910 with the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulm, W. B. Yeats, and then later in the U. S. with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransome, and others. New Criticism appears as the literary philosophy of modernism. Modernist styles, though often in conflict, were at least united in the view that art was outside of history, “autonomous,” autotelic, personal and private visions divorced from historical reality, rhetoric, and the common sense of what Pound liked to call the “bullet -headed many.”

This idea of art as esoteric essence, opposed to rhetoric and historical reality, had a certain appeal, for, assuming one could ever find or define its characteristics, it would allow us to sort the wheat from the chaff and come to grips with those who think something art that we think trash. On the other hand, there is something murderous and life-threatening about a standard that, when finally determined, would exclude all individual and private insights of the true. Adorno and Horkeimer express these reservations with their reluctance to admit a positive dialectic. This contempt for the rhetoric of “the earthly city” of Aristophanes, expressed by modernity and the New Criticism, produced the inevitable reaction—historical criticism.

Historical criticism or extrinsic criticism is frequently traced back to Plato, usually on the thin basis that Plato, in Book X, had excluded poetry from the Republic because it corrupted morals. Historical criticism, therefore, is extrinsic and links all art to time, place, and world. But historical criticism may take several forms: criticism can be combined with an arbitrary structuralism (Claude Levi-Strauss, Vladimir Propp, Noam Chomsky, e.g.) or some “philosophy of history” (Lukacs, Benjamin and others e.g.). In this latter case it then becomes a “metacriticism” rooted in a universal metaphysic. Or historical criticism can, as in contemporary postmodernism, be combined with a nihilism that rejects all transcendence and meaning in history and situates criticism in a meaningless jumble of arbitrary local codes.

Historical criticism, therefore, transcends the more narrow work of art as essence and focuses on the effect of art on local society—but also of a local society on the art of the author, reader, citizen, or on the world in general. Postmodernism may constitute the ultimate rejection of New Criticism’s search for a timeless essence of beauty for, ultimately, a postmodern “history of art” position must regard everything as undergoing constant mutation—not only so-called essences, but even the distinctions between artistic activity and critical or philosophical activity. Everything is, therefore, as Eco put it, an “open work.”

We think, however, that this goes too far. Some delimitation of transcendent beauty must be provided in order to prevent disintegration, and some context must be provided to explain beauty. We do this by a new mimesis that is informed by a postmodern rejection of theory and a New Critical rejection of practice but which also holds that these rejections are too extreme. Instead, we root, or rather, re-root beauty not in the abstract, but in life’s real tensions. Perhaps beauty is not, in other words, the “resolution” of tensions into some abstract essence, but the dramatic portrayal of the universal difference, tension, and conflict we see in life, in history, the trial of Horatius. In short it is not resolution but an illustration of the impossibility of the resolution of tensions.

To see this requires a return to the way Aristotle treated these matters. In the Poetics (II: 1448a; IV: 1448-1449.) Aristotle explained drama in terms of a mimesis which “is natural to us.” That Poetics looked back to a wisdom that was pre-philosophical, where the struggles of theory with practice and one virtue with another mirrored the reality of life before presumptuous philosophy promised a reconciliation it could not deliver.

One can, in other words, find in the Poetics of Aristotle and classical aesthetics in general an earlier and non-metaphysical form of wisdom. This is seen in the Janus mask of tragedy and comedy. Thus, Werner Jaeger reminds us (358ff.) that tragedy was the earliest form of philosophy—a merely mortal hero’s impossible struggle to know the eternal, the true, and the universal. Here, in tragedy, however, the emphasis was on the struggle and the impossibility of resolution. This emphasis on impossibility, on heroic struggle, however, was later lost when—for some anyway—there began to appear the possibility that man could know the truth, and the even more presumptuous notion that “the truth will make you free.” In the birth of presumptuous philosophy came the death of tragedy; and with philosophy came not only the belief in the possibility of knowledge, but the Cartesian and later New Critical belief that a timeless truth could be expressed in this world. The tragic, therefore, perished with the idea that practice could be made congruent with universal truth: in the assertion that theory could overwhelm practice.

According to Jaeger again, the claims of practice against this totalizing truth had traditionally been the subject of comedy, the other side of the Janus mask. We do not—as readers of The Name of the Rose are aware—have Aristotle’s remarks on comedy. But in extant elements of the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts tragedy with comedy by saying that, if tragedy was the imitation by noble figures of the heroic, then comedy was the imitation by ordinary men of the bad and contemptible: the earthly (and often earthy) scorn for virtue, the disdain of the ordinary man for pointy-headed intellectuals divorced from the “real life” in the city. Aristophanes’ spoof of Socrates in The Clouds illustrates the genre.

Here too, however, the emphasis was on the tension between the city with its practical, empirical approach to life, and the arrogance of philosophy which appears to the city to propose abstract and simple-minded (Lysistrata) solutions to real problems.

This tension in comedy was, however, like the tension in tragedy, later lost. If tragedy was replaced by an arrogant philosophy, then comedy was replaced by an equally arrogant rhetoric. Rhetorical thought ignored and jeered at abstract philosophy and promised, like postmodern thought, to solve the problems of the world by a war on metaphysics. Comedy, in short, was the early and dramatic form of prereflective wisdom, the historical criticism rooted in sensus communis or consentus gentium which rejected the answers of philosophy in favor of the “answers” of rhetoric. Historical criticism and postmodernism, therefore, with their defense of the local, of rhetoric and pre-reflective opinion, celebrate a life unaware of the tragic struggle for virtue, the life, as Aristotle said, of the “ridiculous.”

In short, if philosophy (and New Criticism) was the attempt to assert the primacy of universal truth in every local situation, rhetoric (and postmodernism) was the attempt to assert the primacy of the local situation over the universal. In fact, however, neither rhetoric nor philosophy are valid or eternal forms on their own; and neither ate tragedy and comedy. The two forms require each other; for a comedy without a truth to mock (that Lysistrata’s artifice really could produce world peace) or a tragedy that actually resolved everything in the earthly city (Antigone chooses “God’s way” over Creon’s; and Creon confesses the error of his ways) would be ludicrously out of touch with the world as we know it. The triumph of one form over another would be either an absurd and perfect world of life-killing theory or an absurd world of random movement without theory where everyone’s “philosophy” would be “just one damn thing after another.” What kind of tragedy-philosophy could set the world aright? There is none. What kind of rhetoric-comedy could annhilate the hope for theory? There is none.

It is, then, the struggle of philosophy to resolve practical life, and practical life’s refusal to fit into the theory, the struggle of tragedy with comedy, the attempt to resolve and the need to avoid resolution, that is eternal. True art portrays these tensions and agonies, as Sophocles does with Antigone, as Aristophanes does with The Clouds, or as Shakespeare does in Hamlet.

At the end of the Symposium Plato explained these links by noting (223d) that the true poet must be both a tragedian and comedian. In other words, a true mimesis is of a life that recognizes the claims of the comedy (the city) against tragedy (philosophy) and vice-versa. Life is the struggle for answers; and the destruction of practical life occurs when answers are applied universally.

Unlike Aristotle’s aesthetics, which were his “reflections” on pre-reflective wisdom, Aristotle’s Politics was more “modern” and presented a more unrealistic political world where a good man, well-taught, was supposed to be able to resolve the political conflicts unresolved in drama. We, however, wish to restore the tragic and comic elements to Aristotle’s politics.

Alisdair MacIntyre, in his After Virtue (142-158) similarly wished to add a dose of Sophoclean agony to Aristotle’s ideas. According to MacIntyre, Aristotle did not see that the virtues were incompatible. But, perhaps, MacIntyre did not go far enough; for he seems to want to impose a theory on the world in order to recover an ancient virtue that had “simply” to balance one good against another. But it is not only that the virtues conflict, but that they are incompatible with the practical life of the city, of the comedy of history. Life, in short, as Derrida, DeMan, Feyerband, and other postmoderns love to point out, has no theory. We take this irreconcilable condition to be the nature of the human condition that art seeks to illustrate and politics must negotiate.

It is in this aesthetic celebration of eternal tension, questions without answers, that we find the link between art and politics. We think that a realistic political theory can be produced by stating the political in terms of the irresolvable conflicts illustrated by tragedy and comedy. What makes Anitgone and David’s Oath works of timeless beauty is that they represent in beautiful terms political questions that educated humans universally attempt to answer—and which cannot be answered universally: the decision, for example, as to when to compromise one’s individual or private vision of the good for the public vision of the practical good. Humans, in other words, will always have to choose between being swept along by rhetoric, by the historical comic-worldy forces represented by Creon and Roman virtue of Horatius; or by adhering to the private an dphilosophical vision of the true that may be personal, but no less a public lesson for that. This conflict is not new; for we see it illustrated in the life of Socrates and Athens.

As with questions about the nature of beauty, questions of political philosophy also have no resolution. Tensions are maintained because all answers eventually fail. They either present a liberty-killing theory or a theory-killing relativism. Over time, every answer fails; as does no answer.

Life, in short, is a constant struggle back and forth, a tension between the individual’s glimpse of the “true” and the community’s—in the nature of things—often diverse view of the true. A true and also mimetic theory of politics would represent these tensions. But it could not resolve them without becoming a universal and life-threatening theory; and it could not ignore them without becoming pure relativist skepticism. Stated in aesthetic terms, we find ourselves, therefore, somewhere between Eco’s “open work” with its room for individual reading and potentially atomistic insight, and Stanley Fish, with his more authoritarian-communitarian view that reading is not a private affair but takes place within a interpretive community with a set of norms.

The political question David seeks to answer with The Oath is “what is the nature of virtue or of the true or good?” A common view is that, until fairly recently, such virtue was, as Fish implied and many of the ancients believed, tied to the public good as interpreted by the community. Another common view is that, on account, (usually) of Descartes (or sometimes Plato caricatured as Descartes), the individual subject, the Cartesian ego, suddenly appeared and then community was threatened by individual interpretation.

Virtue slipped its anchor in the community and became, for many, associated with the individual’s right to choose his own good. Moreover, at the same time, human reason, the faculty for articulating the virtues, was also emancipated from the merely local community’s standard. Reason, though individual, was—it was believed—capable of objectivity; it could and should be shorn of local values in order to see the “true.”

But this now seems to have failed. Postmoderns reject the idea of the true as well as the individual. They, like David’s Oath, want to return to community, common sense, and a rejection of individual insight; and this is the heart of the post-Heideggerian communitarian and republican criticism of the individual as seen in the works of MacIntyre, Sandel, Wolin, Rorty, Foucault, and many, many others. According to these views, crippling atomism and nihilism can only be avoided by adherence to the petits recits. However, the petits recits are relativist and tied to nothing—and consequently also nihilist.

The question, in short, is whether the idea of virtue be up to the individual or the community. But this is a question to which no decisive answer can be given. One must defend the individual insight against community tyranny. But a community cannot be composed of so many Robinson Crusoes. The emphasis shifts according to the time, but a tension is always the best. Modern communitarians and republicans do not want tension. They want to raise the community against the individual. Modern liberals, on the other hand, want to make the individual responsible only to the self.

In short, it is—as in aesthetic theory—the struggle and tension between the requirements of practical political life and the attempt to supply universal answers to those requirements that we find the common ground with tragedy and comedy and hence of aesthetics and politics.

Notes

Bell, Clive. Art New York, 1958

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980

Jaeger, Werner. Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture. Vol. I. Archaic Greece; the Mind of Athens. Trans. Gilbert Highet. 2nd. ed. Oxford University Press: New York, 1960

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition postmoderne; rapport sur le savoir. Les Edtions de Minuit: Paris, 1979

MacIntyre, Alidair. After Virtue Notre Dame University Press: Notre Dame, 1981

Machiavelli, Nicolo. Tutte le opere. Sansoni: Florence, 1971.