SUMMARY MUST ART TELL THE TRUTH? BY DOUGLAS N. MORGAN

MUST ART TELL THE TRUTH? BY DOUGLAS N. MORGAN

            Yes, art always reflects and tells the truth. I answer this by invoking and assimilating the thoughts of Douglas Morgan in the article, ‘Must Art tell the truth?’ Art, says Morgan, has a cognitive significance. Douglas Morgan in this article presents four formulations of the cognitive problem in art but is more concerned with the fourth. The fourth formulation is perhaps the most widespread and dangerous of all. It begs the entire question heroically and asks: What kinds of knowledge are found in and through works of art? This question is answered by the rife erroneous conception that unless some kinds of knowledge are to be found in art, art is simply not worth our time. This erroneous conception is the thrust of Douglas’ attack and revisionary response in this article. According to the premises of this erroneous conception, art is not to be taken seriously because it diverts us from the strait path of technologically useful, and or theoretically interesting truth. Truth (being scientific) is here conceived as cognitive and antiseptic. Art, by contrast, is felt to be emotional and therefore somehow suspiciously germy, irrational and dangerously disbalanced by comparison with the sane safety of truth.

            This understanding of art, says Douglas, is glaring because of what he calls an ‘addiction to truth.’ The root-cause of this truth addiction in our understanding of art is a healthy refusal to rest content with the notion that art is a trivial plaything, to be set resolutely aside as soon as Life’s going gets rough, together with the unhealthy suspicion that the only alternative to sugar-icing frivolity is speciously scientific truth.

            According to Douglas, art begins in our best developed and most characteristically human sense organs, which we use (along with touch and taste) as our primitive avenues for contact with the world about us. Through them, the world around us becomes a world within us. Through our eyes and ears, objects beyond our skin are given to us and experience can be structured subtly anew. In audition and vision, we discriminate delicately, and our discriminations fall into natural orders of color and tone, shape, texture, volume, and harmony. The very quality of almost any simple sensation can be enjoyed by eye or ear, on a naïve and unaffected level of human response. Simple qualities seen or heard can cohere into complexes of delightful sensation, even before we make any conceptual or informational demands upon our worlds.

Living imagination is the most precious of human faculties we know. Men willingly and unwittingly cash in the breadth of their imaginative visions in exchange for efficacious manipulation of their environments. Our scientific-theoretical life is narrowed in its exercise of human imagination. Data do not display themselves; they must be ferreted out. Nor do data automatically array themselves in imaginatively revealing patterns, nor can they by any innate fertility principle fecundate new theoretical directions to excite our wonder and invigorate further discovery. All this is the creative work of the scientific-insightful mind. Fine arts are adventures that deserve to be taken seriously. To subordinate them to the sciences or insist on some rigid conformity to scientific principles, by reducing each work of art to the status of a scientific truth-vehicle, is to take each art less than seriously. This maneuver, Morgan asseverates, evidences the addiction in question, namely, that people almost never ask whether art essentially conveys truth, unless he/she had only already taken it for granted that life’s important business lay only in listing and relating scientific truths.

OBJECTIVE CORRELATION BETWEEN WORKS OF ART WITH TRUTH AND REALITY

 Art therefore, says Morgan, tells truths that need not conform to standards of science. Variety is the spice of life. Works of art like those of Franz Schubert conform to musical truths and present a reality that is inter-subjectively verifiable, same as the Sistine ceiling.

There is therefore an objective correlation between works of art with truth and reality. This is evidenced in the fact that, for instance, many truths about music can be discovered from the beauty in music, like, the fact that music is natural to man; music is one of man’s few basic and universal expressions, and the truth that music can move man profoundly. Drawings in visual arts are often useful and sometimes indispensable in communicating information. Paintings are profound sources of knowledge

An undeniable truth about art is that, poetry (for instance) like every art, begins and breathes in this our world, and speaks from and to and often in this world. An undeniable truth that art tells is that, art speaks about existent realities (whether physical or spiritual).

PRACTICAL ASSESSMENT OF ART’S TRUTH-TELLING CHARACTER

            Although with Plato and Aristotle we find that art is an imitation. While for Plato art is an imitation of a shadow of reality, Aristotle avers that art is imitation of what is really real. Aside these, the coherence theory of truth tells us that something is true if it corresponds to a certain supervening state of affairs. This true with art. The various paintings and drawings reflect certain realities which are accessible by our cognitive structures. Musical renditions evoke certain emotions of pain, lust, joy and cries; these show that such artistic renditions have spoken to our different individual realities which has elicited such emotions. If they had not touched any of realities, such emotions cannot be evoked. Poetic or prosaic artistry describe historical realities and human realities, like Chinua Achebe’s ‘There was a Country’.

From the above, to deny that art tells the truth will be to say that paintings tell us nothing out there; that music reveals nothing and cannot touch us; and that historic and human accounts are never real.

THE TRUTH OF CONTEXTUAL TRUTH-CONDUCIVENESS AND THE FALSITY IN TRUTH GENERALIZATIONS

From Morgan’s submissions, truth-conduciveness is contextual, and as such, extrapolation of truth-conduciveness from one context to another is inadmissible. On the basis of this, we need not be reluctant to affirm the claim of the contextuality of truth-conduciveness; we need not impose upon a painter for instance, the scholar’s burden of finding, reporting and interpreting mere facts. Franz Schubert would have done virtually nothing if he had given us a few scraps of truth instead of the B flat trio. The same is applicable to the beauty of the Sistine ceiling. These and many more illustrate the contemporary truth-addiction which confines art to being a stepchild to science which is practically untrue.

            Freud on this note was surely correct in his unremitting insistence that every aspect of human behavior, however wild, wanton, and irrational it may at first appear, must in principle submit to scheme of meanings, if we can but discern it. We ought to, says Freud, deepen and broaden our interpretations of ourselves, because no simple straight-line chain of generalizable implications or causal entailments will ever suffice to explain the inward-turnings, overlappings and tortured twistings that make up our minds. We are paradoxical beasts.

In the medieval era, there was an uncritical adulation of truth which has almost totally succeeded in its innocent corruption of the human spirit. This is because, says Morgan, we have confused faith, duty and beauty with belief, action and truth. Because, finding no serious scientific alibi for our traditional devotions, made us suppose that these devotions must be worthless, instead of recognizing that there are other human richnesses and rewards besides scientific truth and beyond it. Any attitude therefore that sees in art only a sickly substitute for science is itself sick.

MY POSITION

            On the whole, while knowledge and truth of every kind are precious, it is a pedantic, philistine mistake to suppose that everything precious must be translated into bits and pieces of scientific knowledge and truth in order to be honestly enjoyed.

            It is therefore inadmissible, a farce and illegitimate to cast an aspersion of worthlessness on art, on the grounds that it simply does not fall into the categories and standards of scientifically-modelled truth. Every discipline is distinct and we can only determine the truth-conduciveness of art if we wear the lenses of art and not those of the natural sciences.