Is great art beyond good and evil?

A thoughtful reader asked this Nietzschean question, which would take a longish book on aesthetics to answer properly. Answering it in a shortish article is impossible, but one has to try one’s best.

There’s a corollary second question: Is a great artist beyond good and evil? And a third question coming out of the second: Can an evil man create great art?

Such difficult questions have simple answers within a cogent moral and intellectual system. As someone whose universe is mainly demarcated by Christian coordinates, I find it easy to say, no, nothing and nobody is beyond good and evil.

Yet there comes Nietzsche with his Übermensch, in effect a demiurge, who soars above such philistine or, worse still, religious precepts. The question is, who, other than Nietzsche himself, is the Superman in our midst?

Here Nietzsche’s fallacy naturally overlaps with the glorification of the artist omnipresent in the Romantic Age. God having been debunked, someone had to fill the vacancy thus formed. And, though the artist had no realistic hope of rising on the third day, he could at least take on some qualities of the Superman demiurge.

After all, he, the artist, was a god-like creator. He might not have created the universe, but at least he created a vision of reality more real than reality itself. And, since his audience no longer believed in God, the artist could claim the distinction of being the only creator around, a God surrogate.

That elevation provided a vantage point from which the writer could look down on the world and feel entitled to usurp another one of God’s functions: teaching what was good or evil, moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly.

Some, such as Tolstoy, took that hubristic tendency to a risible extreme, eventually abandoning their sublime art and beginning to pontificate on morality, philosophy, aesthetics, politics and economics with the self-confidence of a jumped-up ignoramus.

Such artists saw no contradiction in preaching one thing and doing another. As self-appointed demiurges, their earthly actions mattered nothing compared to their celestial pronouncements. Thus Tolstoy could happily combine a sermon of sexual teetotalism and the evil of property ownership with siring a platoon of illegitimate children by the serf girls on his baronial estate.

When the subject of art and morality comes up, another great Russian writer, Alexander Pushkin, inevitably makes an appearance. In his drama Mozart and Salieri, Pushkin makes Mozart say: “Genius and evil are two things incompatible.”

This betokens a belief that, far from being beyond morality, the artist forfeits a claim to genius when he transgresses against it.

Of the two incompatible things, evil is easier to define. A theologian will define it as merely the absence of good, a secular thinker as a propensity to perpetrate or at least vindicate evil acts, a philosopher as perhaps the advocacy of evil ideas.

But how is an artist of genius different from one of mere talent? Schopenhauer answered this question epigrammatically, as he often did: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Accepting this brilliant aphorism as a working hypothesis, we can each compile our own lists of artistic geniuses. The lists may differ, but they’ll largely overlap. Everyone will probably agree, for example, that William Shakespeare was a playwright of genius, whereas Terence Rattigan was one of mere talent.

Now let’s backtrack to the original questions. Can an artist of genius be an evil man? If he is, can he keep his personal evil from his art? Does a work of art fly free of its creator, acquiring a life of its own, or is it stigmatised for ever with the scars of the artist’s personality?

That art has an essential moral dimension has been known since Hellenic antiquity. Thus, for example, Plato on music: “Music is a moral law… It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”

By inference, music emanating from an evil man can also lead to all that is bad, unjust and ugly – let’s not forget that Plato also invented the concept of dialectics. One way or the other, music or art in general can’t be beyond good or evil by definition.

I find the view that art, once produced, is divorced from the artist to be simplistic, if superficially attractive. This notion became popular when modern critics, typically of the left, began to see works of art as mechanical reproductions of the artist’s ideology, class or race.

Hence it became fashionable to counter that the artist’s personality has little if any bearing on his work. He lives as one man and creates as another (Pushkin, incidentally, propagated this view in many of his poems – he wasn’t immune to the fashionable view of an artist as a demiurge).

That may be true superficially, but it’s false at a deeper level. The artist’s personality informs every aspect of his art, but it often does so in ways invisible to the naked eye.

Thus a discerning observer could deduce Wagner’s views from much of his music, including his rabid anti-Semitism that, contrary to a popular misapprehension, Nietzsche shared (as any reader of his pamphlet Der Antichrist will know).

In his philosophy, Wagner jumped backwards, leapfrogging Christendom and landing in the midst of German sylvan folklore replete with proto-Nietzschean – and proto-Nazi – visions of Teutonic titans rising above the masses. These motifs are clearly audible in Wagner’s work, and would be even if one were unfamiliar with his pamphlets.

Wagner was a great innovator, arguably one of the most influential composers in history. At its very best, his music approaches genius without, in my view, ever quite reaching it. Germany’s sylvan past could inspire much coarse sensuality and soupy emoting, but little subtlety of feeling and thought essential to Christian art.

Tolstoy’s person also often interferes with his art, seldom in a positive way. For as long as his artistic genius could keep his personal failings at bay, he remained an artist of genius, one who wrote about death and childbirth with a poignancy unmatched by anyone else.

But even his magnificent novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina creaked at times under the weight of his supposedly moral, in fact moralising, sermons and pseudo-philosophical asides. His artistic genius pulled through there, but his last big work, Resurrection, sank to the bottom of cheap philosophising.

Both he and Dostoyevsky failed to see how their commitment to preaching through their novels caused artistic damage. Thus both were prone to replacing sentiment with sentimentality, dragging in banal, beaten-to-death protagonists, such as the whore with a heart of gold first ruined and then saved. Their artistry couldn’t resist the toxic effects of their personalities.

If art can never cast away the moral and intellectual failings of its creator, nor can it rise above the morality governing the world in which the artist lives. Beyond good and evil? Absolutely not. Art can’t be; and if it tries it stops being art, never mind great art.