Vichara 4: The experience of pure goodness
When we find there to be something truly good about a piano performance or a pistol...
At the end of the last dispatch I had written that there is one important case of our having the sense, whether or not valid, that certain things are better than others that I will treat separately. This is the domain of art and other social productions.
One of the many refrains of our society is that there is no such thing as good or bad art, but that there is only art that one likes or doesn't like. My claim for today is that, at the very least, our experience when we are confronted with some cultural productions or works, is of something that seems like objective goodness, i.e., we tend to relate to many entities of art or culture as if they are truly good or bad, not just something we like or don't like.
I will explain as best as I can with a personal account: Despite the fact that I always tell myself that I will stop having classical music (Western, Indian, or any) on as "background music" while working, I was listening to Alice Sara Ott's performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition as I was starting to think through what I would write here. Mussorgsky did not interfere in the task—though that had less to do with the quality of his work (which is considerable) than my interest in thinking about this. But after Pictures at an Exhibition, for her first encore, Ott played Liszt's La Campanella. That did what classical music should do—make it impossible for one to simultaneously ponder philosophical questions or strategic matters regarding their dissemination. Listening keenly to it, I could not help but feel that I was communing with some quality, in or through the beauty or skill of her performance of it, of goodness as such. It felt that in or between the notes, there emerged some pure positivity of its very being. It wasn't a quality that was good for something else, it was itself intrinsic, non-instrumental value. It also wasn't reducible to the pressings of keys or the sounds themselves or even their composite coming-together, it seemed to be a property or substance, this beauty (or whatever it was) that was in excess or surplus of the music itself, that was a quality independent of the music itself that applied to it, was coextensive with it, emanated from it or dispensed itself thoroughly upon it—but was itself distinct. And finally, it was there "on that side", so to speak; it didn't seem to be my projection, but seemed an objective quality—an objective quality of pure value, the nectar or light, one could say, of the Good.
This was an experience of pure goodness or value or quality. I didn't just like it; I found that there was something truly, objectively good there, and I was happy or had some pleasant experience because of that perception or experience. Furthermore, it is my strong belief that it's not just me—what I described, even if not for this very work of art, is a natural tendency that all humans have. There is something about our very essence of being, something about what we definitively are, that has us not just like certain things, but really see to or through them genuine, objective value.
The previous versions of finding or affirming possible value—to the existence of the world, to our individual potential if we keep on existing—are perhaps more palatable to the modern sensibility compared to this. It's one thing to believe, "If I could get my life together, I could contribute to the world in a way that's actually good" or to believe "It would be actually, objectively good if society didn't collapse." These views can be held with a belief in happiness or individual human well-being as the ultimate good—one may contribute to the happiness of others, or one may believe society collapsing would reduce happiness in a very significant way (at least while it collapsed). But the case of art is not so easily reducible to such a logic. It need not be classical music; it need not even be "art". Connoisseurs of wine or firearms get some positive experience from engaging with high-quality specimens of their particular niche. But this positive experience is not that of simple, pleasant sensation. A firearms enthusiast (or as known in common parlance, a gun nut) may be made happy by some characteristic such as the smoothness, weight or break point of its trigger pull, the smoothness of its cycling, its weight distribution and natural pointability, or even the wood grain quality. These are qualities about the thing in-itself; they are objective properties, as I have so far been using the term "objective". They are also not qualities that are instrumental to making others happy (if anything, one could argue that wine and firearms, on the whole and overwhelmingly so, have served to reduce net human well-being). Yet, it may be said, that there is goodness, again some light or spark of intrinsic value, which is apparent in their features when at their best, and which gives joy to their connoisseurs on account of the objectivity itself.
We find there to be objective goodness, thus, in or along with high-quality works of art or other socio-cultural productions.1 Even in such cases, where there is no necessary utilitarian element, i.e., value is not ultimately reduced to happiness, we at least seem to feel or think there there exists the Good. As we will see ahead, it is in such cases that we may have the rawest experience of the Good. That is, the kind of value covered today isn't a different kind of value from the value we have an intuition society or our individual existence could be for, but is the purest form of the latter. When we find there to be something truly good about a piano performance or a pistol, we are apprehending the essential form, substance or principle of value.
I have put this point now in enough forms. Next time we will finally start to examine matters beyond just the phenomenology of experiencing value—that we find there to be value in scenarios or entities such as the ones discussed today and last time. That was (maybe) useful to get us into a frame of being that is in touch with our natural tendency or instinct, whether or not mistaken, to think and feel the existence of objective value. Having done so, we can begin to investigate the actual attribute/s of the Good, and whether and how they may exist.
The examples I’ve worked with today, as well as this terminology, raise the question of where technology fits in. Guns, of course, fall under “technology” more than they do under “art”. While technology can be appreciated as one appreciates art (that’s how I’ve treated it here), there is an essential cleft between the two, and there is separate metaphysical importance to both. That of technology will be arrived at later than that of pure art, which we will get to soon here.