Roger Scruton - A Verdade, O Bem e a Beleza

[Music] you eminent writer and philosopher professor Sir Roger Scruton has for over three decades taught at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic including Birkbeck College Boston University and more recently the University of Buckingham he is an author of over 40 books in his work as a philosopher he specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture he has written several works of fiction as well as memoirs and essays on topics of general interest he engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a

powerful polemicist he is a fellow of the Royal Society of literature and the British Academy he has been officially honored by the Czech Republic by the city of Pleasant I hope that's close and by Virginia's General Assembly in 2004 he received the Ingersoll Weaver prize for scholarly letters in 2015 he published three books all of which were chosen among the people's books of the year in 2016 he was recipient of the Polish lek Kosinski foundations medal of courage and integrity was awarded the Italian Massey prize for the culture of wine in recognition of his book

I drink therefore I am and was knighted in that year in the Queen's Queen's Birthday on her list we're glad to have with us professor Roger Scruton well as you can have you heard that was on the verge of becoming a list of my sins but I realized that in this place I've got to be my very best behavior so I shall begin by thanking the weekly institution and Richard Williams especially for inviting me and for have people thinking about this important question and what you see if I admit this work the question of what

these three great concepts really embrace and what they have to do with each other Richard Williams got in touch with me saying look you're an expert on aesthetics and we here in the Church of latter-day saints we believe in the beauty of the beautiful or the good and the true but we don't know how to say what we believe and you have been working all your life on this so you should come and tell us that all I can say at this point is that perhaps because I've been working all my life on this I

don't know how to say anything about it well well it always I come back to questions and the only benefit of having thought about these questions for so long is that there's a certain clarity in asking them but no further clarity in answering them now that shouldn't depress you because in a true philosophical approach to things it is the clarity of the question in the end that really matters because that enables you to fit the subject matter into your own life and make the decisions that you have to make about it now so let me

say a few things about art and truth first of all the enlightenment which by which I mean that that mass of thinking and and idea mongering that began in the beginning of the 17th century and went on through to the beginning of the nineteenth that period in our intellectual history brought with it as you I'm sure you know a certain loss of the religious anchor in everyday life maybe in this part of the world that loss was not felt so much of course there was nobody living in this part of the world just then but

there was your ancestors lost somewhere on the way to this place who did probably Hatfield a residue of this great movement of ideas that began in Europe and recognized that the scientific worldview which had come to the fore with with Newton was posing a certain threat to the more naive of one's religious beliefs and among educated people especially in in France and and Britain the and in Germany too there was an attempt to find a rival source of meaning to the religious to find that rival source of meaning in art because of for various reasons

art struck people as having a different status from science science was a threat to religion that's true it because it was undermining the old explanation of things in which God took such an important place but art seem to represent a different way of looking at the world from a science and one which as it were preserved the mystery of things and didn't undo the mystery and since it the mystery was so important why not look to art as a source of meaning so art suddenly became prominent as a human enterprise and with it the birth

of the subject of aesthetics aesthetics being the philosophy of art and the philosophy of beauty and now that there's three important figures as I mentioned there Shaftesbury van garden and count Shaftesbury was an English philosopher 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury he was a pupil of John Locke who who wrote very influential essays about the role of the beautiful in the formation of the humans spirit he was an educationist and somebody who felt that he was his duty to to draw the attention of his contemporaries to the complexity of human life and to the consolations that we

find in human life and beauty is one of them he was very influential that though his theories are somewhat all over the place bound garden was the person who invented the word aesthetics as a name for a discipline he wrote a book called Aesthetica which was about the art of poetry aesthetic ice thesis as the original word is the Greek word as I'm sure many of you know for the feeling we have it in our word an aesthetic and the the burden of his book Aesthetica was that poetry communicates a truths about our condition but

communicates them not through abstract thought but through concrete feeling and that therefore it's a different kind of truth and it has a different role in our lives and a different value for us so we he began the whole enterprise of distinguishing the artistic way of looking at the world from the literal-minded and possibly scientific way and Kant who was a much influenced by Baumgarten took this up and wrote the first systematic work of aesthetics so these some great thinkers raised the question what do we learn from art and is what we learn from art a

kind of truth a truth that we perhaps couldn't learn from any other human activity well for a start art is not one kind of thing there is abstract art and representational art abstract artists like music or like abstract painting abstract sculpture it doesn't actually have a subject matter that's the whole point of it you're supposed to appreciate it for what it is in itself for the harmony of lines and figures for the way it ways in which things balance against each other it's supposed to attract attention purely for its own sake and not for the

subject matter that it represents right so already that makes that it rather difficult to say exactly what it is that we that we learn from art and then of course what about fictions the realm of art includes things like novels plays films poetry all of which are about the world in some way but they don't give you literal truths about the world they are about fictional worlds and it requires an effort of the imagination both to create a fiction and also to appreciate it when you will read a great novel that Kurt let's say Jane

Austen's Emma it's not in order to find out about some person called emma Woodhouse you know there is no such person but you do know nevertheless that in the creation of this fiction Jane Austen has put some part of herself and some part of her deep observations of the human condition but there aren't literal truths about a particular person's lives a life so what kind of truth are they or is there another kind of truth so that's one of the problems that that we encounter in this area then there is the quite a problem of

the role of experience if you read a poem to yourself or recite a poem you know that what matters is the sound of that poem the structure of it that the way the verse unfolds the form of it but not what it literally says but at least not what it literally says when it's when extracted from that form it is not like a text book if you were curious about a nuclear physics you might pick up a textbook of nuclear physics read it and having absorbed it in being diligent students memorized the whole lot you

put it on the shelf and that's it that's the last time you look at it because you've extracted the information from it but that's not the way that people appreciate poems is it it's not that they extract the information and then never visit it again on the contrary a good poem is one that gains from repetition even when you know it by heart and even when it says something that seems extremely light even if it touches with a light touch the realities of this world and like say Robert Frost stopping by woods no it doesn't

say very much but the form the rhythm and the way in which it seems to touch something deep in you mean that you will want to repeat it want to go on reading it again again so one thought then is that we don't actually go to art for information the information content is not the primary thing it's the experience but of course anyway not all truth is information we have lots of different ideas of truth Christ said famously I am the way the truth and the life he didn't mean truth in the sense that scientists

use that word but he that he he is somehow a true representation of the world he meant something deeper event that you can trust in me and that by trusting in me you come to know something about yourself how far you can go in whatever direction and with what kind of hope so that use of the idea of truth which brings in a notion of trust perhaps ISM is a more important one for considering art as we find support in the person we trust and it's like that with art as well you know in many

works of art we feel that we're in the presence of a genuine spirit many people feel this of course about the work works but of Beethoven who described his his missus alumnus in the practices from the heart to the heart what he meant was that that this was an utter sincere outpouring of what he felt and he expected the audience to engage with it in the same spirit as though trusting in him to to be the guardian of their emotions for the for the hour-long experience that he was offering so there's a that kind of

idea of truth is a very different one from the scientific one but it still seems to be an idea of truth now this brings up the topic of desire and pleasure huge topic now I have to say that I'm talking here as a professional philosopher I know many people in this audience are studying other subjects are simply curious about the intellectual world and don't are not used to thinking in this abstract philosophical way so I apologize but just hope that I will inspire you to to go on and pursue the matter further so there is

a connection between desiring something and feeling pleasure on obtaining it if you really want a a glass of water then of course on obtaining that glass and drinking you feel pleasure the pleasure of satisfying a desire but it's not a simple connection because we know that many things that we desire don't give us pleasure when we obtain them this is one of the most important parts of moral education to recognize the difference between those things that you desire which will bring satisfaction when you obtain them and those things which you desire which when you taste

them you push them away with revulsion now I won't go into that but of course you might think that maybe art has something to do with that - maybe it can teach us in advance about the things which we won't enjoy or me but when we possess them well there are many kinds of pleasure there's pure sensual pleasure like what no you get you sink into a hot bath at the end of the day this is a pleasure of the of the senses as the warmth spreads through your body it doesn't tell you anything about

the world it's not it's not based on any kind of thinking but it's just the kind of pleasure that animals have but we also have intellectual pleasures and pleasures which come from thinking things the pleasure of reading a book is not a sensory pleasure at all is it it's a pleasure of the mind the pleasure of following an argument of playing with words and so on and then there's what I call intentional pleasures in the word intentional means directed directed outwards onto the world like the pleasure you take in somebody's giving you a present the

pleasure you take when you go to see your child take part in it say in the 100-meter race or in the long jump or whatever and you see in the playing field there he did he's done it he's got he's got the he's he's got the first prize that's a pleasure about something and when when you have a pleasure about something that means you can make a mistake as well it was the race was at the other end of the field and it looks exactly as though your son had won it only later do you

discover it was someone else look-alike so so was your pleasure real or not in a sense it was real but it was also a mistake so there's mistaken pleasures and that's a very interesting fact so pleasures can be at the I could take pleasure at the the beautiful scene out of the window I can take pleasure about the the triumph of my son in the long jump and so on now aesthetic pleasure is of the first kind it's it's pleasure at something it's not not like pleasures of taste when you when you eat a strawberry

ice cream and take pleasure in it yeah that's a pleasant taste in the mouth when you look at a profound picture and are moved by it that's not a pleasant feeling anywhere in you is it it's not a sense sort of sensation of pleasure you'll please at this this thing that you're looking at and pleased by it may be pleased about what it's saying and so on but it's a it's completely different from a sensory pleasure that's great question therefore what is the relation between tastes in food and drink and tastes in music and painting

they're not the same kind of thing at all you like strawberries and I like blueberries fine there is no real disagreement between us just different tastes but you like Beethoven and and I like heavy metal this is a bit more like a disagreement especially if you then go on to say you know that you're liking heavy metal as a sign of the degeneracy of your soul and that the argument can begin then it may not be possible to resolve it but the fact is when in matters of artistic and aesthetic judgment judgment we do argue

and the arguments are very important to us maybe you don't think this about because you're not interested in in Beethoven on heavy metal but there are always going to be areas where you are interested suppose you have live in a little town which has the beautiful houses and beautiful streets and you're really pleased with it your neighborhood is charming and and somehow consoling because of the it's orderliness and someone builds a huge skyscraper in the middle puts in a planning application for a big skyscraper in in bright orange tiles you know you'll then start getting

together with your neighbors to campaign against this you will be there'll be another our arguments we will put forward as to who is right and who is wrong so and these matter enormous ly these arguments to people looking at the architectural mess between Salt Lake City and Provo I suspect that Americans don't think about this as much as they should but on the other hand if you anybody who's been to Europe will recognize that their people do think about these things and argue about them all the time and as a result the tourists all sensible

tourists don't spend their holidays here but in Europe anyway that's a another matter but so the great question then is what is the value of this kind of pleasure the pleasure that we feel in works of art and aesthetic objects can it be a vehicle of truth well it's very interesting we can feel pleasure in works of art even when the works of art are sad or even tragic we take pleasure in a sad story because the story it does something to the sadness you know the the weepy movie may have enormous appeal and you

may fully it hasn't worked if you hadn't had a bit of a weep during the course of it you know the the sadness is part of what was promised it's part of the deal and yet it can't be real sadness because nobody voluntarily submits himself to that but it's something like sadness put in a frame and the story puts it in a frame and makes it such that it doesn't hurt you in the way that prints the for instance the death of someone you love would hurt you and that's that framing of our emotions seems

to be one of the things that that works of art do for us isn't it that that we we seem to be able to come to terms with the sadness of human life partly because we can represent it in ways that make it more meaningful framed and isolated so to pleasure we always say come again but to knowledge we say thanks and you know once you've obtained the knowledge that's it you've got it but the pleasure okay you've had it once but you want it again and especially in the case of works of art the

repeatability of the pleasure is what it's all about but perhaps sometimes there is repetition there is knowledge in repetition so let's just think about that for a moment I want to say something about first though about art and virtue and moving on now from truth to goodness what what is the moral value of art what kind of moral improvement cannot generate in us has it got a particular role in presenting the moral world and in improving our own engagement in it well obviously art is a source of moral examples but the work of art does

not merely present the example you know there's lots of examples which are just you can sketch for yourself as they're out of good behavior and bad behavior it puts us in a position of judgment I mentioned there Henry James's portrait of Isabel Archer which I'm hoping that that you young people will be about to read if you haven't read it yet in portrait of a lady in which Henry James presents to us a good woman who is also naive and exploited by a cunning and and it's and evil man and he doesn't judge himself but

he puts us in a position to make a judgment and to make the judgment through her eyes the reader gradually comes to understand her situation as she comes to understand it so that's what that's real art he never says anything that the the writer Henry James he makes you think it but think it for yourself and that might have a special moral value magnet rather than just telling you what to what the what to think morally making you think it for yourself so is it were your your it's a course of education in the emotions

that is directed at you well that all looks quite plausible for a fiction and for for representational art but what about abstract art people think you know the abstract art art which doesn't have a representational content can also have some kind of moral value that's what Beethoven was saying about his Missa solemnest what many people say about about music generally but but it is telling us something about our emotions by leading us to feel a second hand so to speak what those emotions are there's a kind of emotional education going on there too but then

there are real problems and this is one that Richard Williams wanted me to talk about and and it's a very difficult one to talk about what happens when there is when you encounter a work of art that presents vais really vicious behavior but aesthetically in such a way as to make the Vice attractive when I take the example here of Salome there here is the the problem as you remember of Salome the the story of the daughter of Herodias who who danced before the the King or well did she or didn't she but anyway she

coveted the head of John the Baptist perhaps because her mother had put her up to it and finally persuaded the King to give it to her in other words to to kill the Prophet whom he had been reluctant to do that to that moment because of his manifest holiness well this was made into a play by Oscar Wilde the rather clever play and then that was set to music by Richard Strauss and his music is full of a kind of distraught lasciviousness but is is very beautiful and and seductive I won't play it to you

I'll leave it to you to to encounter it it's all over YouTube of course and this music kind of brings you to Salamis side you feel that somehow she's in the grip of an emotion that she can't deal with she's got to satisfy it and she but as represented by Strauss and what Oscar Wilde salomé goes the whole hog and takes hold of the head and kisses it and here's the kind of thing that you see in modern opera productions modern opera productions are designed specially to be offensive to members of the Church of the

Latter day Saints so don't worry they're usually much worse than this but here is Salome having sung her incredible area of sensual ecstasy over the over the severed head with John the Baptist's seizing it and kissing it in this unacceptable way well most people would feel that's going too far and perhaps people did think feel that it was going to phone this opera did have quite a bit of trouble in its early life but now it's part of the repertoire and and yet it seems to to take a kind of ghoulish pleasure in utterly perverted

behavior and to the music seems to put that behavior in a you know in a kind of enchanting light you know because because the music is drawing you in all the time you find similar things in other works of art of the late of the mid to late 19th century art that rescues evil by making it seem beautiful Baudelaires Fleur du mal which I'm sure some of you who doing French here will have will be reading and studying is a very good example of this it's he takes the excesses and the DeGeneres's of life in

a modern city and looks for a meaning that lies concealed within them and he does this by through incredibly powerful imagery and beautiful verse forms that make it look as though there is a spiritual meaning behind all this that redeems it you know the spiritual is revealed even though what is described it denies the possibility of the spiritual it's as though by denying things in the right way we can affirm them and I think that's what Baudelaire himself thought that I mean often people have described him as a Christian poet precisely for this that he

finds he rescues from the heart of corruption and despair that little germ of spiritual purity which lies in the imagery of his verse and which we take away and then can as it were make to grow within us not sure that is true but it's an interesting thought in Shakespeare of course there's a lot of evil the evil of the character of Iago in Othello and also Macbeth who was a self-doubting evil evil man but it's straightforwardly Shakespeare doesn't expect you to be on their side in any way he certainly doesn't do a Salome on

them although at a certain point there is a lot of sympathy for Macbeth and Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost is another very important example of an evil character who is so portrayed by the verse the verse is so powerful that you cannot fail to be on his side his wounded pride is something you immediately identify with and you come to see that that that there's a kind of nobility about it and the this is what the verse is doing is this is this a immoral verse therefore it's bringing you to the side of Satan and

Blake in his illustrations seems for the Paradise Lost seems to think that right so some other examples I give you there Claggart the bosun in Herman Melville's tale of Billy Budd another one that you're probably about to be to read sets were made into a brilliant opera by Benjamin Britten and then there's Dimitri and the brothers karamazov by Dostoyevsky what do we think about him is he just confused or are we being again met brought in to the world of a character who is unable to make moral judgments for himself and we also perhaps confused

as to whether we can make those judgments so one of the questions that arise here is well what is the distinction between moral art and moralizing art here is a piece of Russian revolutionary art from the 1917 revolution which is manifestly moralizing is telling you that these these people are obviously mistreated so what you know is it saying anything that helps you to understand that mistreatment or to take a different stance towards it or is it just like a moral tale and just an illustration to something else so many people feel that art shouldn't moralize

us directly as this it's too crude it should be more like Henry James in portrait of a lady making you do the moralizing rather than doing the moralizing itself well that may be so but and let's go on I want to say a little bit about Beauty now so I've said some things about arts relation to truth something about its relation to goodness both stand both sent both cases extremely complicated seems there's nothing simple that you can say what about Beauty there's a certain kind of habit that arose especially in the late 19th century connected

with people that Oscar Wilde which of putting aesthetic values first saying that these are the things that matter and Wilde famously said in matters of the greatest importance it is style and not sincerity that counts and he lived his life or at least pretended to live his life as though that were his guiding principle to be elegant and soothing to the eye but and to ignore all those those simple old-fashioned moral values which got in the way of that but he didn't also in his works of art he didn't think that but to put aesthetic

values first is or might be a kind of immoral ism Osmond who is the husband of his Abell Archer in the portrait of a lady is somebody who really does put aesthetic values first and his delight in collecting beautiful things and and living this aesthetic way of life has led him to a great integrate pecuniary need he needs in his money and she has money so he marries her in order to get hold of that money and also in order to collect her because she was beautiful too so he collects her as a beautiful object

but doesn't love her Oscar Wilde as a sight accrued a version of the same idea in the character of Lord Henry Wotton in the Picture of Dorian Gray but there are two sides to the aesthetic experience there's the kind of relishing side and the exploring side relishing a beautiful work of art as a sublime work of music that's something that you can do without necessarily exploring the depths of the human heart even though the work of art touches on them and perhaps this kind of asceticism means we're getting the cognitive dimension of aesthetic pleasures that

they're not just a sensory pleasures they're not just pleasures in the way you experience things they are also directed towards a vision of the so each of those goals that I've talked about with truth and goodness and beauty there they are important because they are what you're focusing on but they seem to reduce art itself to an inadequate means you know they seem to leave out the aesthetic dimension so only when combined in a unity the kind of truth and the kind of goodness of which beauty is the sign to these values mark out a

path for art that then you know if beauty is it's the way in which truth is presented the way in which goodness comes to your consciousness then we we seem to have a something like an account of the value of art well there is a question here about meaning and form that the meaning of a work of art and this goes back to Baumgarten it lies in the form and is not really detachable from it if you try to translate a poem into stress into straight prose say what it means give its equivalent in in

simple language then you lose the meaning so the meaning is not just what it says it's the it resides also in the form and is not detachable from that no this is a little bit like religion and revealed truth it there's a much religion there's a promise of another way of seeing the world or you might call a God's eye perspective that that it's not just that that there are theological doctrines you know God exists Christ is the son of God etc although those are important to the Christian religion there is also revealed truth when

you meditate on these things and suddenly you see the world in another way as though from God's perspective and perhaps that in those circumstances the form of of the language that you're studying in a sacred text for instance it's very important just as it is in poetry that's why those great texts have been preserved because they not just for what they say but for their way of saying it and again in religion too as in art repetition is very important you repeat so the service every every week a prayer you've seen that the Lord's Prayer

you say it every day so if somebody said to you what a waste of time you know you said it once well I say it again you know what it means you know the words what does it what's all this about you know that that's not what what prayer is for prayer is about putting you back into the relation with God that that you're constantly slipping out of and that therefore it demands repetition and there are truths that have to be rehearsed if they are to be owned when it to know exactly how to feel

something what what to feel towards the world around you you might feel you know it one moment but you've lost it the next and getting the right words helps you to recapture it so that idea of revealed truth that comes to you through repetition as in prayer is a bit like the aesthetic experience as I've been describing it perhaps it gives you a a secular version of revealed truth that's what people like Nietzsche and Wagner thought and they they went further and thought that actually art could therefore be a substitute for religion that's what we

really should be now devoting ourselves to we have art as Nietzsche says so so as not to you know not to die of despair and that our art is still there giving us this meaning even when we've lost faith I won't talk about this that but all right just to finally some thoughts about the intrinsic values of art poetry and plays and paintings they presented mansion Airy worlds so representational art gives us an opening on to the world of the imagination and they all rescue their subject matter from a purely instrumental conception of its significance

whatever things portrayed in art are not portrayed as useful they're portrayed as interesting for their own sake they're rescued from their instrumentality and that's why every illusion matters the image is a distillation of the thing depicted in poetry and painting work in the same way here is a landscape by upon hawk which everybody knows probably that the brushstrokes they're imbue the landscape with an observing consciousness their marks of the moral being for whom this is not a thing but a vision and you know to absorb that it's you recognize that it's a very long way

from the way a field of wheat with a flock of rooks above it would look but nevertheless says restarts required and it's referring to me so right I'm restarting it doesn't look and in any way realistic but somehow it has a power that you wouldn't have if it was wholly realistic because the brushstrokes have been painter imbue that landscape with his own soul and it's as though the imagination of the of the painter had riri worked the thing that he's painting so that it isn't just the thing it's also that thing distilled into his own

consciousness and so in the imagination we are thinking about absent and non-existent things but the consciousness involved is a creator of its own object as in as in that case of Bangkok the imagination is something that we can will I can ask you to imagine some things I should say imagine a field of wheat you won't be able to imagine it like when hocked it but nevertheless you will summon it up in in obedience that order and that that is an interesting thing and through the works of the imagination we bring distant things into close

relation with each other that's what we do in figures of speech in poetry we're bringing things into relation with each other and with the brushstrokes in the painting we're bringing a human action in relation to a landscape and the these imaginary worlds that we create come strike us as true or as false and I want to guess at this contrast that penticoff with a painting by Thomas Kinkade this is one of his visions of paradise this is a controversial painter as you know van Hawks died in Provence poverty Kincaid died leaving 53 million dollars and

died of drink and was a I think one in 10 American households have a Kincaid above the mantelpiece because it's a soothing thing that for some people this is a vision of what painting should be is it's much truer to the appearance of things than van Gogh but there's a question about it what is that question many people say that there's a falsification behind this kind of painting I don't want to cast judgment on it but just to say a few things about it what why does this strike so many people as false in one

sense it's truer than the van Gogh it's closer to the way things actually look but the falsification if it exists is a propulsive occation of the observer rather than of the observed it shows a world presented through a veil of self congratulatory sentiment that's at least what the critic would say tells you that you're a good person and no further efforts need to be made Bangkok is not telling you that at all he's telling you that the life is rough and you need to make efforts even to see this so it tells you that no

further efforts need be made and that meaning lies in the forms and the colors there's pastel shades smeared over the landscape like a disease so well is that right leave it to you to think but whatever this brings us back to the parallel between art and religion religion provides us with truth but it's not just straightforward literal truth about the way the world is there are stories all sorts of things that we believe but there's a much more important dimension to it a truth a spiritual truth and which tells us how things really are really

are for us and what our position really is in the world of human relations and human emotions and in religion we recognize that there's no redemption through falsehood and the same seems to be true of art that's what those two pictures I think at least lead us to suppose that art too has its own way of presenting the spiritual truth of things and if it falsifies then it doesn't produce the kind of redemptive consolation that we're looking for and this might explain going back to sadness in works about it might explain the power of tragedy

in tragedy you you go to the deaths but you find a kind of rescue there so only if you go to those depths however will you be rescued enjoying sadness for its own sake and just sentimental and pretense at at grief it is not going to help but actually going to the full encounter with human mortality and what it means as in a real tragedy maybe there is a help maybe that does take us to a point where we can actually learn something that we need to learn learn it in our hearts and in our

emotions and learn to bear this thing perhaps that is why we want to go to tragedies again and again so ours is certainly not going to be any help to us if it loses sight of what we are and what we need and we do recognize that there is a distinction between true and false emotion what a false emotion comes about when I the eye eclipses the you most most love most real love is about you the other but sentimental love pretends to be about you but it's really about me me feeling this wonderful thing

and showing there by my moral distinction you know we find that kind of sentimentality in art and also we find art which challenges that sentimentality Thomas Kinkade is all about me being a lovely person as Vanacore is all about you the you that appears to him through even in a field of wheat because of course that's God who's appealing that they appearing to him so as I'm going back to what I said about Henry James real art doesn't judge it opens the world to judgment and help let me go back and inspires that judgment in

us and then I wanted to finish with some difficult examples in The Brothers Karamazov another one book that you might be on the verge of of reading or or on the verge of of not bothering to read Dostoyevsky doesn't judge he invites us to judge in his stead but what he's inviting us to judge is a whole community of people who don't judge but just just do in the most horrifying way and this is a very challenging book for therefore Dickens in Old Curiosity Shop the death of little now little now lays it on with

a trowel they're trying to make us weep over the death of this innocent little girl who's forgiving everybody for her but for dying before her time and it's not only unrealistic and implausible but but real smells and Oscar Wilde famously said about this that a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell which is a variant way of summarizing it in a Salome case though this is a realization in imagined form of a grim state of mind a really horrible state of mind but realized without any negative

judgement that's the a great problem that this is music of sublime power which simply has to happens to have been applied to this horrible situation Strauss was able to do that he once said that if you gave me a railroad railway timetable I'd set it at the most beautiful music so is this a fault well again just to conclude get you to compare two poor trails of the crucifixion and worrying about the famous isenheim altarpiece in Germany gives a hyper realistic portrayal and of the horror of the of the crucifixion such that nobody can say

that he's denying the reality of this or that there is that he's turning away or falsifying there's no falsification but somehow it leaves you without hope this it's as though it really is just that the death and destruction of a of a person whereas in interet Tintoretto's case much harder to it's not too bad on the screen there you see most extraordinary sequence of events in which actually the redemption of not just of that not just the resurrection of Christ but the redemption of mankind is foretold in everything every detail of the painting and this

therefore is not a horrifying painting at all but actually a consoling one and one in which you see just why it is that Christ had to be sacrificed from grinev out you don't know why it is it's just yet another inexplicable and horrifying accident of the of human degenerate life so anyway those are two examples that you might take away to think about and I think I've gone on for long enough now I can invite some questions so thank you [Applause]