Philosophy of art assignment

“What is Art?”

By Leo Tolstoy

1

"What Is Art?" (excerpts)

by Leo Tolstoy

Note: This essay was originally published in 1896 and is translated by

Alymer Maude (first published in 1899). Paragraph numbering below has

been added to facilitate class discussion. It was not included in the

original text.

CHAPTER FIVE (excerpts)

#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary,

first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to

pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of

human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to

observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between

man and man.

#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a

certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or

is producing, the art, and with all those who,

simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the

same artistic impression.

#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of

men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in

a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of

intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of

words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man

transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he

transmits his feelings.

#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man,

receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another

man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the

emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the

simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears

becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels

sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man

seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his

movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses

courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this

state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers,

expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this

suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses

his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love

to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are

infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion,

“What is Art?”

By Leo Tolstoy

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fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and

phenomena.

#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another

man's expression of feeling and experience those feelings

himself, that the activity of art is based.

#6. If a man infects another or others directly,

immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives

vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he

causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help

yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to

laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering -

that does not amount to art.

#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining

another or others to himself in one and the same feeling,

expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To

take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let

us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that

encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he

has experienced, describes himself, his condition before

the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own

lightheartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its

movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc.

All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again

experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects

the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had

experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but

had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke

in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter

with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers

share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world,

that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art

if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering

or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in

imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in

marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also

art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of

delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency

and the transition from one to another of these feelings,

and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers

are infected by them and experience them as they were

experienced by the composer.

#8. The feelings with which the artist infects others may

be most various - very strong or very weak, very important

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By Leo Tolstoy

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or very insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of

love for one's own country, self-devotion and submission to

fate or to God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers

described in a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed

in a picture, courage expressed in a triumphal march,

merriment evoked by a dance, humor evoked by a funny story,

the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening

landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration

evoked by a beautiful arabesque - it is all art.

#9. If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the

feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

#10. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once

experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by

means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms

expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others

may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of

art.

#11. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one

man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands

on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other

people are infected by these feelings and also experience

them.

#12. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the

manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it

is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in

which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is

not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it

is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all,

it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men,

joining them together in the same feelings, and

indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being

of individuals and of humanity.

#13. As, thanks to man's capacity to express thoughts by

words, every man may know all that has been done for him in

the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and

can in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand

the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity

and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and

descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as

well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks

to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of

others by means of art, all that is being lived through by

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By Leo Tolstoy

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his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the

feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he

has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings

to others.

#14. If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts

conceived by the men who preceded them and to pass on to

others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts,

or like Kaspar Houser.

#15. And if men lacked this other capacity of being

infected by art, people might be almost more savage still,

and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to,

one another.

#16. And therefore the activity of art is a most important

one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as

generally diffused.

#17. We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we

hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions,

together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But

all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we

communicate with each other in life. All human life is

filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong,

jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and

utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and

triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that

by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean

all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that

part which we for some reason select from it and to which

we attach special importance.

#18. This special importance has always been given by all

men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings

flowing from their religious perception, and this small

part of art they have specifically called art, attaching to

it the full meaning of the word.

#19. That was how man of old -- Socrates, Plato, and

Aristotle - looked on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and

the ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still

is, understood by the Mohammedans, and thus it still is

understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.

#20. Some teachers of mankind - as Plato in his Republic

and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict

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Mohammedans, and the Buddhists -- have gone so far as to

repudiate all art.

#21. People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to

the prevalent view of today which regards any art as good

if only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that

art (as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened

to) is so highly dangerous in its power to infect people

against their wills that mankind will lose far less by

banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art.

#22. Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all

art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of

the indispensable means of communication, without which

mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people

of civilized European society of our class and day in

favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i.e., gives

people pleasure.

#23. Formerly people feared lest among the works of art

there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they

prohibited art altogether. Now they only fear lest they

should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and

patronize any art. And I think the last error is much

grosser than the first and that its consequences are far

more harmful.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

#24. Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not

only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the

very perception of what art really is has been lost. In

order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it

is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art

from counterfeit art.

#25. There is one indubitable indication distinguishing

real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness

of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without

altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing

another man's work, experiences a mental condition which

unites him with that man and with other people who also

partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that

condition is a work of art. And however poetical,

realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is

not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite

distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual

“What is Art?”

By Leo Tolstoy

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union with another (the author) and with others (those who

are also infected by it).

#26. It is true that this indication is an internal one,

and that there are people who have forgotten what the

action of real art is, who expect something else form art

(in our society the great majority are in this state), and

that therefore such people may mistake for this aesthetic

feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement

which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it

is impossible to undeceive these people, just as it is

impossible to convince a man suffering from "Daltonism" [a

type of color blindness] that green is not red, yet, for

all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to

those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor

atrophied, and it clearly distinguishes the feeling

produced by art from all other feelings.

#27. The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the

receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the

artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not

someone else's - as if what it expresses were just what he

had long been wishing to express. A real work of art

destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the

separation between himself and the artist - not that alone,

but also between himself and all whose minds receive this

work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its

separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with

others, lies the chief characteristic and the great

attractive force of art.

#28. If a man is infected by the author's condition of

soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others,

then the object which has effected this is art; but if

there be no such infection, if there be not this union with

the author and with others who are moved by the same work -

then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign

of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole

measure of excellence in art.

#29. The stronger the infection, the better is the art as

art, speaking now apart from its subject matter, i.e., not

considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.

#30. And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on

three conditions:

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By Leo Tolstoy

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1. On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;

2. on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;

3. on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels

the emotion he transmits.

#31. The more individual the feeling transmitted the more

strongly does it act on the receiver; the more individual

the state of soul into which he is transferred, the more

pleasure does the receiver obtain, and therefore the more

readily and strongly does he join in it.

#32. The clearness of expression assists infection because

the receiver, who mingles in consciousness with the author,

is the better satisfied the more clearly the feeling is

transmitted, which, as it seems to him, he has long known

and felt, and for which he has only now found expression.

#33. But most of all is the degree of infectiousness of art

increased by the degree of sincerity in the artist. As soon

as the spectator, hearer, or reader feels that the artist

is infected by his own production, and writes, sings, or

plays for himself, and not merely to act on others, this

mental condition of the artist infects the receiver; and

contrariwise, as soon as the spectator, reader, or hearer

feels that the author is not writing, singing, or playing

for his own satisfaction - does not himself feel what he

wishes to express - but is doing it for him, the receiver,

a resistance immediately springs up, and the most

individual and the newest feelings and the cleverest

technique not only fail to produce any infection but

actually repel.

#34. I have mentioned three conditions of contagiousness in

art, but they may be all summed up into one, the last,

sincerity, i.e., that the artist should be impelled by an

inner need to express his feeling. That condition includes

the first; for if the artist is sincere he will express the

feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is different

from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for

everyone else; and the more individual it is - the more the

artist has drawn it from the depths of his nature - the

more sympathetic and sincere will it be. And this same

sincerity will impel the artist to find a clear expression

of the feeling which he wishes to transmit.

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By Leo Tolstoy

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#35. Therefore this third condition - sincerity - is the

most important of the three. It is always complied with in

peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so

powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent

from our upper-class art, which is continually produced by

artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or

vanity.

#36. Such are the three conditions which divide art from

its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of

every work of art apart from its subject matter.

#37. The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a

work form the category of art and relegates it to that of

art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the

artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not

individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has

not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression -

it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are

present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even

if a weak one, is yet a work of art.

#38. The presence in various degrees of these three

conditions - individuality, clearness, and sincerity -

decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from

subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit

according to the degree in which they fulfill the first,

the second, and the third of these conditions. In one the

individuality of the feeling transmitted may predominate;

in another, clearness of expression; in a third, sincerity;

while a fourth may have sincerity and individuality but be

deficient in clearness; a fifth, individuality and

clearness but less sincerity; and so forth, in all possible

degrees and combinations.

#39. Thus is art divided from that which is not art, and

thus is the quality of art as art decided, independently of

its subject matter, i.e., apart from whether the feelings

it transmits are good or bad.

#40. But how are we to define good and bad art with

reference to its subject matter?