Spiritualities of Life: The Neglected Role of the Artistic Paradigm JCR 25.1 Jan 2010
Takes up Heelas’s notion of ‘life’ spirituality and extends it beyond New Age spiritualities to encompass expressivist values characteristic of contemporary mainstream culture, normally considered ‘humanist’ and ‘secular’. This extension is justified by the integral connection-neglected by Heelas-between the rise of these expressivist values and the emergence of a symbolic paradigm of expressivist art with strongly immanentist spiritual implications. In its expressivist form, art was imbued from its Romantic beginnings with spiritual immanentism and has remained, it is argued, the most significant channel for the diffusion of life spirituality. A focus on this paradigm and its implications for the world of the expressivist self-namely its cult of the phenomena of subjective experience-leads us to discover manifestations of life spirituality in contemporary culture that are enormously wider ranging than Heelas’s New Age spiritualities.
Introduction
My point of departure for this article will be the shift, which, according to Paul Heelas’s recent book Spiritualities of Life (p.26), occurred in his thinking with the realisation that ‘life’ and not ‘self’ was ‘the term’ enabling him to grasp what lies at the heart of contemporary spiritualities:
The ‘life’ of so-called ‘alternative spiritualities’ is what provides the crucial link with the greatest, the most fundamental of all our cultural values – life itself and the fulfilled experiential life.
The shift is more than merely terminological; its full significance, as I will argue below, lies in the underlying idea of ‘life’, which gives adequate expression – as the idea of ‘self’ does not – to those specifically ‘alternative’ aspirations in contemporary spiritualities that tend to characterise them in opposition to the aspirations of traditional Christianity. It also recognizes the genuinely ‘religious’ nature of those aspirations, which, for all the immanentist character of their religious object (i.e. ‘life’), do not deserve to be relegated, as they often have been, to the category of groundless and solipsistic self-preoccupation.
The first goal of this article is to give the notion of life a more general relevance and a broader definition. Life, I argue, provides a perspective from which not only alternative spiritualities, but the domain of practices and beliefs associated with supposedly ‘humanist’ and ‘secular’ forms of expressivism can be viewed as embodying a spiritual aspiration.[1] The immanentist character of this aspiration marks expressivism in general, no less than Heelas’s alternative spiritualities, as inherently opposed to transcendentalist Christianity.
My justification for extending the idea of life spirituality into the realms of the supposedly ‘secular’ rests on the argument that expressivist art has an inherently immanentist spiritual agenda. Consequently, the expressivist artist who, as I shall argue, has exercised, since his/her emergence in the Romantic period, a pre-eminent function as the paradigm case of the expressivist self, has greatly contributed to the diffusion of immanentist spirituality. This immanentism is coterminous with the spread of expressivism and is metaphysically grounded in the values of art.
The second goal of this article is to give more precise expression to the notion of life, in the sense in which we propose to apply the term – not just to the context of alternative spiritualities, but to that of expressivism as a whole. Life, I argue, is the term we give to the distinctive world inhabited by the expressivist self. The paradigmatic role already attributed to art in the constitution of the expressivist self leads us to seek the meaning of expressivist life in artistic production and the particular configuration it offers of the relationship of the expressivist self to its world.
Towards a Broad Application of the Idea of Life Spirituality
What is proposed here may be illustrated more concretely by juxtaposing two texts, both evoking an expressivist world view in terms that suggest ‘holism’ and features of immanentist spirituality. The first, from Heelas’s book (34), offers testimonies characteristic of ‘holistic’ practitioners:
Gill Green says, “What I’m aiming for really is a union of body, mind and spirit; to make people feel more integrated”; kinesiologist Jan Ford Batey talks of “dealing with emotional, mental, physical and spiritual aspects of the whole being”.
The second emanates from a poet whose views, for all their distinctive modulation, could be considered fairly representative of the high cultural mainstream (Hughes 234):
To live removed from this inner universe of experience is also to live removed from ourself, banished from ourself and our real life. The struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words, to regain his genuine self, has been man’s principal occupation … ever since he first grew this enormous surplus of brain.
The immanentist credentials of the poet emerge more strongly still, in a later essay (275) where the author claims that
Through re-introducing with a bang the heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, [the individual self] may represent and may even contain, in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual, which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all.
From a spiritual point of view, one cannot but be struck by the resemblance of these testimonies: the return to ‘the inner universe’; the ‘reintegration’ of self and life; the regaining of a ‘genuine’ self.
Heelas would no doubt consign Hughes’ poetic testimony to the category of ‘humanistic’, as opposed to ‘spiritual’, expressivism. For Heelas, the ultimate criterion for inclusion in the spiritual category is the presence of a therapeutic dimension: simply, in the case of the poet, “the [healing’, etc.] powers of the sacred are not in evidence” (76).
Such a criterion is hard to defend. Firstly, it is a rather narrow criterion by which to distinguish the secular from the sacred; it would, for example, exclude as ‘secular’ the inner-life romanticism of Schiller and Wordsworth, whom Heelas reckons to be antecedents of contemporary well-being culture. Secondly, the possibility of holistic integration (hence of ‘healing’ in a broad sense) is an expressivist notion of the self. Is Hughes’ psychic integration really distinct from the notion of healing?
Why Extend the Idea of Life Spirituality?
There remains, of course, the question of why it should matter how life spirituality is defined. What is to be gained from the broader extension of the idea of life spirituality?
Firstly, there is the light that this broader application throws on the relationship between orthodox, transcendentalist Christianity and a range of cultural practices (such as art). A second important impact is, however, on the way in which we understand ‘individualism’ in relation to religion. A tradition of popular sociological literature (Riesman; Lasch; Sennett; Bellah et al.) has seen the rise of individualism as taking place at the expense of religious and communal (non-individualistic) values. The balance of accounts between old and new typically ranges religion on the side of old-fashioned communal values as an important element of that social capital which must be conserved against erosion and regards individualist values as inherently anti-communal and metaphysically ungrounded.
What is at issue in our broader application of the idea of immanentist spirituality is that important strand of individualism, conventionally evoked by terms such as ‘individuality’ (as opposed to ‘individualism’) or ‘expressive individualism’ (as opposed to ‘utilitarian individualism’). If – pushing further Heelas’s association of ‘the subjective turn’ with immanentist spirituality – we see the expressivist strand of individualism as imbued with an immanentist spirituality, a range of phenomena examined by Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and others from a purely ethical standpoint, enter the purview of spirituality.
This is where I see the value of Heelas’s innovation: expressivist values are seen as possessing an immanentist spiritual agenda of the own. Crucial to this religious perspective is also the recognition of the place of ‘life’ within expressivist spirituality. It is the focus on life that differentiates Heelas’s position from Charles Taylor’s. Taylor’s ‘self’ seems to betray an absence of metaphysical grounding and invites us to see expressivism as either recuperable within a traditional religious position or philosophically indefensible. Heelas’s notion of ‘life’ draws attention to the real difference between two viable religious positions, based respectively on the immanence and transcendence of the religious object. From the perspective of Heelas’s notion of life spirituality, the traditional opposition of old and new, in terms of communal religious values as against metaphysically ungrounded individualism, is replaced by an opposition between value systems grounded in different spiritual beliefs – respectively those of theistic transcendentalism and of immanentist life.
Outline of the Argument
My argument for the broad interpretation of life spirituality develops in three stages. Firstly, the emergence of modern forms of immanentist spirituality will be shown to be integrally linked to the rise of modern, expressivist art.[2] Secondly, it will be argued that the practice of expressivist art, inaugurated by the Romantics, did not cease, with the demise of historical Romanticism, to function as the paradigm of an expressivist self with strongly immanentist implications. Thirdly, I will establish the kinship between the paradigmatic experience of the artist and the representation of everyday experience, and tentatively offer a theoretical account of the nature of this relationship.
Romanticism and the Emergence of the Idea of Life Spirituality
Heelas neglects the fact that ‘inner-life spirituality’ would seem first to have emerged in integral relation to an aesthetic revolution attributing a central, and indeed redemptive, role to a new concept of expressivist art. The integral nature of the Romantic enterprise – its spiritual immanentism residing in its distinctive conception of the aesthetic – emerges in Meyer H. Abram’s account of its basic cosmological structure.
What underlies the conceptions of both writers and artists, Abrams discerns, is a unifying myth which translocates into history the biblical narrative of redemption. The new myth attributes what was formerly the role of supernatural grace to the action of an immanent historical principle. Sin becomes that state of fragmentation (often equated with the operation of the analytical intellect), through which humanity, along with the rest of life, must pass on the way to a redemptive integration of life. Just as the orthodox Christian narrative (Heilsgeschichte) sees the fulfilment of the cosmic act of redemption as finally brought to accomplishment in the individual believer’s experience of spiritual salvation, so, in the transformed myth, the whole of life is seen as an evolution of consciousness, which reaches its highest expression in an individual work of redemptive vision that ‘transvalues’ the world.
However, the question is: what kind of work produces this redemptive vision? Patently not the ‘sensible’ vision of the outward eye or the intellect. That kind of vision is the cause of the initial fragmentation. Integrative vision has, at times, been equated with the inner enlightenment achieved through prayer or meditation; but as far as the Romantics were concerned (and their artistic and literary successors), it is the work of the artist that represents the avant-garde of human consciousness – indeed, of life consciousness; imagination itself becomes the cosmic ‘Messiah’.[3] The relationship of ‘immanentist thought’ to artistic practice, of philosopher to poet, is not therefore one of message to medium – as though art were simply one vehicle among others for the diffusion of immanentist ideas. The true relationship is rather one of a prophecy to its fulfilment; the new art is called to be a demonstration and vindication of Romantic ideas. Joseph Koerner (23), for example, cites as typical the reaction of the Romantic ideologue, Ludwig Tieck, to the new art of Friedrich. Recalling a conversation with Novalis, he claims that, while Novalis’s views had at the time seemed unintelligible, the artist Friedrich had “out of his own rich poetical character” been able to make these ideas largely a reality”.
The Artistic Legacy of Romanticism and its Relation to Life Spirituality
Heelas argues that the immanentist spirituality of the Romantics subsequently emerged in various areas of life other than art. This article seeks to establish that spiritual immanentism has remained integral to the notion and practice of art itself. This involves making the claim that aspects of the Romantic paradigm have remained foundational to the subsequent and contemporary notion and practice of art and the artist, and that those aspects have maintained their integral connection with immanentist spirituality.
Evaluating the Artistic Legacy of Romanticism
If we wish to identify this surviving residuum of Romanticism, a balanced evaluation of the legacy of Romanticism is needed. Such evaluations are to be found in at least two sources. The first is Charles Taylor’s Sources of Self. Here, the Romantic revolution is seen as a watershed moment in the emergence of the contemporary cultural landscape, separating – as by an unbridgeable chasm – modern ‘epiphanic’ art from its pre-Romantic antecedents. Strongly corroborative of this view is recent work on the nature and origin of the notion and practice of literary authorship, produced in the wake of the controversy about the ‘Death of the Author’, triggered by Roland Barthes’s notorious essay of that title from 1968 and Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” of 1969. Among other issues (such as printing or copyright), the importance of the Romantic revolution figures prominently. Barthes and Foucault themselves identify the Romantic era as the period in which the modern conception of authorship emerges. Andrew Bennett, citing Sean Burke (Authorship xix), corroborates this from the standpoint of a scholarly investigation of the conception of authorship from ancient Athens to the present day; indeed both Bennett and Burke go considerably further in their estimation of its importance, since they see the conflicting attitudes to authorship associated with Romanticism and anti-Romanticism (including the anti-Romanticism of Barthes and Foucault) as developing a tension already latent in Romanticism itself:
The Romantics, in other words, both inaugurated a certain sense of authorship and, at the same time, in the very same breath, announced the author’s imminent demise. (Bennett 70)
Epiphanic Art
On the artistic level, the continuity with Romanticism is represented by what Taylor calls ‘the epiphanic’. Preserved in this notion is the Romantic idea of an imaginative vision that is transvaluative and creative, according to which visionary ‘seeing’ constitutes the realisation and manifestation of radically new possibilities of experience. Testimony to the epiphanic nature of artistic expression is that familiar profession of the author as ‘unknowing’, not conscious of what s/he does – practically a commonplace of contemporary artistic discourse. The artwork is thereby implied to be the emergence of something new and unpremeditated:
The poem, Charles Simic comments, “mostly writes itself”; “The poet does not write what he knows but he does not know”, concurs W.S. Graham. “Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place”, remarks M.M. Coetzeee; “In fact it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say … Writing shows or creates … what your desire was, a moment ago.” (A. Bennett 69-70)
Taylor considers artistic creation the “paradigm mode” in which the modern self “finds definition” (Sources 481). There is consequently a continuity between the epiphanic understanding of art and an expressivist understanding of individual experience – viewed as the progressive manifestation of something inward. Like the epiphanic artwork, “what I truly am” emerges only through its realisation:
The direction of this élan wasn’t and couldn’t be clear prior to this manifestation. In realizing my nature, I have to define it in the sense of giving it some formulation; but this is also a definition in a stronger sense: I am realizing this formulation and thus giving my life a definitive shape (Taylor, Sources 374-5)
A secondary characteristic of epiphanic and expressivist art follows from the primary one: that its revelation will always be embodied in the particularity of experience that it represents or constitutes. Naturally, if the principle that determines the artwork only emerges in the process of its realisation, it follows that every artwork will evolve in its own way. For post-Romantic art, this does not necessarily imply subjectivism. Art may be representational, as it is for David Hockney, but in the modern epiphanic context, representation is never divorced from a way of seeing that is felt to inhere in the particularity of lived experience:
The urge to represent is very deep in us. […] And this urge is there because each individual person feels or knows that he or she has a unique sort of experience. (Hockney 15-16)
Hockney’s way of seeing – his style – is not abstractly codifiable in the manner of classical rhetoric, where the superlative skill of a Cicero, or Bossuet, consists in a more perfect implementation of recognized principles; it is utterly individual, inseparable from the particularity of a unique experience of the world (Koerner 50). This secondary aspect of the epiphanic is, like the primary one, continuous with an aspect of the expressivist experience of the self – which Taylor calls “individuality”:
That each individual is different and original, and that this originality determines how he or she ought to live. Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new. Nothing is more evident, or more banal. What is new is the idea that … each one of us has an original path which we ought to tread; they lay the obligation on each of us to live up to our originality. (Sources 375)
Possible Discontinuities with the Romantic Notion of Self
It is important to stress at this point that an emphasis on the uniqueness and particularity of experience has not – outside Romanticism, at least – implied the foregrounding of self as the primary focus of the artwork. In fact, one early form of reaction against Romanticism (realism) entailed an evacuation of authorial detail. Art, such as Flaubert’s, however, is hardly a devaluation of subjective experience. As in Hockney’s case, cited above, what actually occurs is the migration of subjectivity from the representational content of the work into its structuring vision. For Flaubert (345-6), as for Hockney, “style” becomes “an absolute manner of seeing things”.
Neither does the value of particularity imply the existence of a unitary self. Here, modernism has pushed this anti-Romantic tendency to its limit in the radical “decentring” of the self (Taylor, Sources 461-6). Indeed, for artists such as Proust or Joyce, it is precisely the escape from such a notion that constitutes the condition for the authentic retrieval of subjective experience. The end point of this process may be a fragmented self or even a reunified and trans-subjective notion of self beyond the limits of subjective experience. However, what is never put into question is the role of subjective experience as the exclusive means which allows access to that decentred self. Thus, the value placed upon the particularity of lived experience is an important continuity between contemporary epiphanic art and its Romantic prototypes.
The Artistic Legacy of Romanticism and Spiritual Immanentism
The legacy of Romanticism having been defined, it remains to consider the relationship between epiphanic art and spiritual immanentism. To appreciate this, we only have to consider the meaning and implications of the authorial profession of ‘not knowing’ that was earlier cited as a hallmark of epiphanic art. Registered by such expressions is the author’s sense of the remoteness of the epiphanic experience from his conscious control and its radical otherness; translated into the familiar Foucauldian language of Burke and Bennett, it becomes the “absence” or “disappearing” of the author from the text (A. Bennett 71). On the one hand, this resembles descriptions of conventional religious experience – possession; thus Andre Breton speaks of the intuition that he is “not alone at the helm” (Nadja 20) and of the surrealist ambition to be a “modest listening apparatus” (“Manifeste” 29) placed at the service of the unconscious. On the other hand, the artistic revelation seems to differ from the conventional religious revelation in that what it refers to could not be said to exist independently of the subjectivity through which it is expressed; its revelation is incapable of alternative articulation, whereas the notion God, for example, transcends any given experience of His presence. As Taylor says of the poetry of Pound, its revelatory discoveries “come indexed to a personal vision” (Sources 481). This is why, in seeking to articulate this ‘otherness’ in terms that do not imply transcending the epiphanic experience itself, artists may often be drawn to theories of the inner self, as Michael Tippett is to Jungian theory or Hughes (in the essay cited above) is to Indian mysticism. Thus, there is in post-Romantic notions of art a curiously simultaneous juxtaposition of authorial presence and absence. This is what Andrew Bennett sees as both the hallmark of the Romantic literary artist and the enduring legacy of Romanticism in contemporary culture. It is also, of course, instantly recognizable as a form of that inner-life spirituality of the subjective turn, which interests Heelas in the context of the holistic milieu.
Possible Discontinuities with Romantic Nature
Immanentism does not, however, imply the continuation of a Wordsworthian celebration of ‘nature’ as the source of creativity – or even of an understanding of creativity as part of a cosmic evolution that is theoretically describable (both of which Taylor argues to have been subsequently untenable). In the transition from Romantic to modern, ‘nature as source’ gives way to ‘interiority’, the life which is simultaneously without and within the artist gives way to the life that is within: “the world as transmuted in sensibility and consciousness” (Taylor, Sources 460). Here again, however, is an important continuity between Romanticism and modernity in the element of what Abrams calls ‘transvaluation’. Even the Romantics had sought ‘transvaluation’ of life through art, rather than just its representation. However much the emphasis subsequently shifted from the phenomena transvalued (‘the common things of the green earth’) towards insight into the process of transvaluation itself, the transvaluative aspect of epiphanic experience remains, to prevent the collapse of interiority into solipsism; ultimately, transvaluation implies a form of engagement with the world, however subjectivized. In the words of Rilke (qtd in Taylor, Sources 482):
And these Things,
Which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
They look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
Within – oh endlessly – within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Art as Anti-Nature
It is Mallarmean symbolism that has famously pursued to its ultimate extreme the goal of a severance of life from art (l’art pour l’art). At first sight, the Mallarmean poem, and its language, appear excluded from any transvaluative effect such as might be expected from the poetic epiphany. Even the materiality of the poem’s language becomes a residuum – a trace – of something it is powerless to embody, serving to elicit an “inimical smile” from its parent (Mallarmé 95):
… when it showed the relic
To his father who chanced a hostile grin
It made solitude shudder, blue and barren.
(Mallarmé, Don du Poème 6-8)
What invariably redeems the transvaluative, however, is the demonstrable unrealizability of this goal. Life takes its revenge: the further the artist pushes towards its severance, the more virulently it returns. In fact, the symbolist alchemy is precisely an effect of this. The transvaluation that poetry and life seem (for all the artist’s explicit intention) nevertheless to undergo comes to appear all the more authentic for having taken place in the realm which escapes the artist’s explicit intentions, seeming to force itself upon us. The “solitude” of the Mallarmean inspiration comes, for all the “father’s” shame, to embody the “Woman” whose promise at the end of this poem (Don du poème 13-4)
…. In white oracle shall flow
…. For lips starved by the virgin blue.
The Artistic Paradigm and Everyday Expressive Individualism
Taylor’s formulations of expressivism and individuality concern the expressivist self. The material cited, however, relates exclusively to what Taylor supposes the paradigm of the expressivist self: the artistic subject. This leaves us with two important questions. Firstly, is it the case that the everyday self does manifest the same structure as Taylor’s artistic subject – its expressivism and individuality? Secondly, is there any way that the paradigmatic effect of artistic practice on the everyday experience can be adequately demonstrated? These questions will be explored in the following sections.
Everyday Expressive Individualism
The study of Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart offers an abundance of empirical evidence which tends to corroborate Taylor’s assumption. The fieldwork involved interviews with over 200 respondents, conducted during four research projects undertaken in socially diverse locations of the United States between 1979 and 1984 (Bellah et al. xliii-xlvii). Bellah et al.’s expressive individualism broadly coincides with Taylor’s expressivism, although it is less precisely defined. In Bellah et al.’s account, expressivism is most frequently indicated negatively by the insistent refusal of external modes of ethical authority on the part of respondents. Such a refusal is evidence – as Bellah et al. admit for all their misgivings as to the moral adequacy of expressive individualism – not of blatant immoralism, but of an alternative mode of articulating obligations and aspirations, elsewhere articulated by more conventional modes of ethical thinking. Typical, for example, is the discussion of the views of Ted Oster, a Silicon Valley lawyer, who stated: “life is a big pinball game and you have to be able to move and adjust yourself to situations” and “I’ve always loved that thing Mark Twain said about something moral is something you feel good after”. The self, Bellah et al. comment (77-8),
Becomes a crucial site for the comparative examination and probing of feelings that result from utilitarian acts and inspire expressive ones. It is to enhance the efficiency and range of such examination that Oster suggests the need to “try everything at least once.” The self must be maintained as the intuitive center of the wants and impulses that define right action, and as the unimpeachable evaluator of the good or bad feelings by which the utility of our acts can be calculated and the depth of their self-expression intuited. (emphasis added)
As to the value attached to individuality, this emerges with particular force in relation to Bellah et al.’s comments on the way respondents talk about their experience of marital relationships. Typical here is the tendency, discussed in relation to a number of respondents, to speak of the expressive self as a form of personal asset, which confers value in the eyes of both the individual and his/her partner, but is capable of being forfeited through an excessive deference to the partners’ desires. Regarding Melinda, who “came to feel that the problem with her marriage was less her husband than the loss of her self”, Bellah et al. comment (93):
Thus, losing a sense of who one is and what one wants can make one less attractive and less interesting. To be a person worth loving, one must assert one’s individuality.
Demonstrating Influence of the Artistic Paradigm on Everyday Life
Given the prevalence of the values just described and their centuries-old dominance within Western high culture of a symbolic practice implying spiritual immanentism, the existence of a relationship between the two would see self-evident. Still, empirical evidence is needed of the influence of the one on the other, so that we could affirm confidently, with Taylor (Ethics 61), that
Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition.
It is frustrating that, while Taylor presupposes the representativeness of his paradigm artistic subject, Bellah et al. ignore the artistic paradigm entirely. They do so, despite deriving the historical source and paradigm of expressive individualism from the great writers of American “Renaissance” (pre-eminently Whitman) (33). From there on, however, Bellah et al., like Heelas, focus on the therapeutic applications of Romantic ideology, as if expressivist art had vanished from the face of the earth in the mid-nineteenth century.
It is to Pierre Bourdieu’s study Distinction: the Social Critique of Judgement that we must turn for evidence of a connection between Bellah et al.’s expressivist ‘lifestyle preferences’ and the practice of art.[4] The key concept is what Bourdieu calls the ‘aesthetic disposition’, which proves, on his own account, inseparable from a certain ‘ethos’. It is, of course, this ethos that will provide the link with expressivism. However, we first need to understand what is mean by ‘aesthetic disposition’.
To explain the concept, Bourdieu uses one of the questions from the survey on which his study is based. Participants were invited to respond to photographic images, such as, for instance, a pair of aged, gnarled hands (46-7). Aesthetic disposition is reflected in the tendency of the respondent to react to the photograph in formal and aesthetic (as an artwork) rather than commonsense, ethical terms. Bourdieu’s study is devoted to establishing how this tendency relates, not just (as might be expected) to education, but to social class. Such is the breadth of application that Bourdieu attributes to aesthetic disposition – ranging from home decoration and culinary practices to sport – that it encompasses, in respect to content, much of what Bellah et al. call “lifestyle preference” (71-5). However, what distinguishes aesthetic disposition is, firstly, its implication of ‘distaste’ for the non-preferred options. Thus, what Bellah et al. call individual ‘preferences’ is shown to occupy a position within a relational field. Secondly, aesthetic disposition implies the ideological pre-eminence of the aesthetic, as that in regard to which the exercise of aesthetic disposition can serve as an index of social status.[5] Bourdieu’s cultural field is therefore not only relational, but hierarchical; the capacity to take the aesthetic view, required pre-eminently in the production and consumption of art, is seen as an – and perhaps the – most important constituent of the habitus of class.
How is the aesthetic disposition related to ethos? This is not clearly spelled out in Bourdieu, largely because, for all its inseparability from aesthetic judgment, ethics is not the focus of his study; aesthetic criteria are examined (with the exception given below) largely where they relate to decisions within the sphere of aesthetic judgement. Nevertheless, the ethical dimension remains inescapable for Bourdieu, since it emerges in relation to an ideological suppression, which is crucial to the functioning of the aesthetic disposition as a social discriminator; the suppression of the fact that aesthetic disposition can and must be acquired through background and education. As a result, taste becomes an ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ quality of the individual, expressed through a supposedly spontaneous affinity with the object of preference, homologous to the attraction of romantic love. “What is at stake”, Bourdieu argues (319-20),
Is the “personality”, that is, the quality of the person, which shows itself in the appropriation of objects of quality. The objects that are endowed with all the highest capacity for distinction, are those that most clearly attest the quality of their appropriation, and thus the quality of their owner.
Thus, the bourgeois who claims to seek in the objects of his choice “what has intrinsic value”, “is unique of its kind”, and “cannot be made twice” seeks the attestation of the object to his own possession of the qualities so designated (310-16). The self requiring such affirmation, is, of course, instantly recognizable as the expressivist self of individuality.
Yet Bourdieu’s study offers us one important case where the ethos of culture receives extensive treatment: the highly relevant example of the “new professions” (348-62, 409-31). What Bourdieu has to say of this ethos, with due allowance made for the very negative cast of his views, identifies it clearly as a form of expressivism that has everything to do with subjective well-being and bodily expression, the importance of communication inter alia (422-31, 410-13).
Clearly, the new professions are not themselves attributable to the ideology of art. However, Bourdieu does represent them as opening a fresh field for the deployment of strategies of cultural distinction, essentially homologous to those deployed elsewhere. In fact, Bourdieu returns frequently to the ‘homology’ that exists between the ethos of the new classes and the ethos of the artistic and intellectual lifestyle. The end result amounts to a ‘vulgarisation’ of the artistic ethos and its characteristic attitudes. Bourdieu also attributes the formal content of the art de vivre to the intellectual milieu which he assumes to have been the source of whatever symbolic capital the new professions enjoy (430-1):
One hardly need point out the element of cultivation and scholarship in this Romantic evasion from the social world which, because it elevates the body and nature, sometimes conceives of itself as a return to the wild, or to nature; sharing with the dominant culture its tendency to leave its principles in the realms of the implicit, the counter-culture is well able to fulfil the functions of distinction, by putting at everyone’s disposal the particular games, the distinctive poses and exterior signs of “inner wealth” which up to that time had bee reserved for the intellectuals.
In other words, the cultural orientation of the practices and beliefs disseminated through the alternative milieu in particular replicates exactly that of the dominant intellectual culture of artistic production, diffused through the educational institutions.
Giving More Precise Expression to Heelas’s Notion of Life
The second aim of this article is to re-define the notion of life in a manner indicated by the broader application of the idea of life spirituality.
Heelas’s notion of ‘life’ denotes the distinctive form of the cosmological ‘world’ inhabited by the expressivist ‘self’. This is not explicit in his Spiritualities of Life. However, earlier work by Heelas and other authors (Heelas and Lock) develops the notion of the existence in every culture of a complementary and reciprocally defining relationship between cosmology and the indigenous notion of self. In the words of Hallowell, “Experientially, the world of self and the world of myth are continuous” (qtd in Heelas and Lock 35). In this light, Heelas’s shift from ‘sef’ to ‘life’ is sanctioned by the consideration that, if every indigenous notion of self implies a cosmological vis-à-vis, so must the distinctively modern notion of the expressivist self. ‘Life’ defines the distinctive world of the expressivist self – the cosmological horizon delimiting its individuality.
So far as Spiritualities of Life is concerned, Heelas seems to have found his notion of ‘life’ in Abram’s account of Romantic cosmology and assumed its on-going relevance to post-Romantic and contemporary forms of immanentist spirituality. What is proposed here is that the precise form of the contemporary notion of life can be deduced from the characteristics of the expressivist self, as represented paradigmatically in artistic production.
The Expressivist Self and its World
The expressivist notion of art promises a unique creative transvaluation of subjective experience. Presupposed by the value placed on the transvaluative capacity of the artist’s subjectivity is an appreciation of what is thereby transvalued – namely the phenomena of his/her experience. In other words, the advent of expressivist art brings along with – and as a corollary of – the exaltation of the expressivist self a decided enhancement in the status attached to those phenomena of human experience capable of artistic transvaluation. As the cultural historian Karl Weintraub puts it, “a conception of cosmic order where creative individuality adds forever to the growing richness of the world” presupposes “a loving admiration for the diversity and manifold richness of life” (379). It is the globality of such life phenomena that constitutes the cosmological world of the expressivist self, denoted in this article by the term ‘life’. A cult of these phenomena, on the one hand, and the expressivist ideal of self, on the other hand, presuppose each other as, respectively, the cosmological and psychological poles of our contemporary post-romantic mythology.
Mapping the Phenomena of Life
The ‘phenomena of life’ include above all those achieved transvaluations of experience that are the worlds of the artwork and the phenomena they contain, but also, by extension, the entire realm of phenomena capable of such transvaluation, both natural and cultural. To the extent that the individuality of the artist becomes a pattern for everyday living, mundane phenomena acquire a presumptive value as things which are potentially redeemable through the transvaluative touch of the creative spirit. Where any passing girl, or even a pair of old shoes, can be fit material for art, Everyman’s backyard becomes a poem in the making. The obvious result of this evolution of attitudes is a form of post-Romantic cult devoted to the mundane phenomena of the natural world, which offers a modern transformation of the old-fashioned Christian awe before the wonders of creation. In the words of Owen Barfield (143):
Man has found the possibility of an entirely new and very charming emotional relation to nature. […] The possibility of a selfless and attentive love for birds, animals, flowers, clouds, rocks, water, permeates the whole modern mind, its science, its art, its poetry and its daily life.
But the phenomena may also be cultural; for example, those indigenous ‘cultures’ which, no less than natural ecologies, have become the object of conservation and documentation. Phenomena of life include all those things held intrinsically valuable as sources of human experience, such that their loss could be deemed a contraction of potential human experience – capable of eliciting the familiar response of ‘Life will be the poorer!’ Excluded from the category of phenomena are communally binding and supposedly eternal religious principles, such as those deemed by pre-modern cultures to underlie the diversity and transitoriness of time-bound subjective experience.
The phenomena of experience are, unlike conventional religious symbols, valued not for whatever meaning they might have in a realm external to the experiencing subject, but for the experience we have, or could have, of them. The supreme value placed on what is experienced implies a cultural preference for the (relatively) transient, subjective, and diverse over the eternal principles. Modernity values for its own sake what Platonic philosophy denigrates as the realm of ‘appearances’, Chinese philosophy as ‘the ten thousand things’, and Hinduism as ‘the veil of Maya’: that realm of the sensible that we must somehow get beyond in order to reach what is eternally valid. This shift of values is felt in the strongly positive valuation of diversity – positively valued because experience is seen as itself intrinsically good; thus, breadth of experience is described as ‘rich’. How far this attitude towards diversity diverges from the traditional norm is abundantly clear from the contrasting valuation we find, for example, in the writings of the classical Greeks, for whom diversity carries strongly negative connotations (Vidal-Naquet 335).[6]
The full spectrum of the phenomena that qualify to be considered phenomena of life is precisely mapped by the preoccupations of the museum. Centring on creative art, these range into the various cultural and natural phenomena of life, including phenomena of history, anthropology, and natural history. The museum, as it developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century, offers at the very least a metonym of the cult of life – if not to some degree its institutional expression.[7] Certainly, its emergence was contemporary with the development of expressivist art[8] and in its beginnings it was closely linked with the emergence of the idea of the autonomous artwork.[9] On the whole, museology, dominated by Foucauldian theory, tends to view the museum from the perspective of power and knowledge. By no means absent from many studies, however, is the aspect of celebration, suggestive of a continuity between the cult of life and the cult paid to the gods of earlier ages.[10] Of course, the development has a scientific and utilitarian side.[11] However, the popular spread of these institutions, and the cultural proselytism of their founders, reflect the affective and emotional component of this cultural development. One only need to consider the place of the contemporary avatars of this cult – the popularity of countless TV wild-life programmes and the enormous diffusion of environmental and ecological concerns. Of course, in all these manifestations, the element of utility persists, but there remains a celebratory and altruistic element. The concern for species conservation, for example, reflects – far more than the possible utility of the extinct species – the sense that, as people say, ‘Life will be the poorer’; in other words, that the loss will result in an absolute contraction of the possibilities of human experience, which is the diametrical opposite of that expansion of experience that is associated with creativity.
Particularly intriguing, on the grounds of its occupying an intermediate zone between the transvalued phenomena of mundane experience and those of art, and illustrative, therefore, of what these two categories have in common, qua phenomena, is an instance of the cult of life that has every reason to be considered one of the most distinctively post-Christian. The preoccupations of the anthropologist – as much rooted in the altruistic and conservational instinct as in scientific investigation – resemble both those of the environmentalist and those of the artist. On the one hand, cultures are, as James Clifford argues, collectible manifestations of the particularity and diversity of life, rather as natural species exhibit the wealth of nature. On the other hand, the indigenous culture is revered as a subjective myth world, in much the same way as the idiolectal myth world of the modern poet. The mythologies of all cultures are thereby accorded the same dignity, the same celebration as particular and irreplaceable manifestations of the human imagination, as the mythologies of Greece and Rome. The celebration of culture is perhaps the most paradoxical and obviously irrational case of the modern cult of life. There is no serious utilitarian justification of this species of concern. So seemingly altruistic is it that we feel compelled to conserve (and, where that is impossible, record for posterity) cultural systems, the intrinsic values of which are entirely at odds with the values implicit in our own passion to conserve.[12]
The spiritual component of our concern – its manifestation of values of life – is registered in that feeling of imaginative identification that leads us to say: ‘Life would be the poorer…’ We all feel the need, like some benevolent Noah, to gather all this precious diversity into a place of safety against the coming storm. It is not by accident that this Old Testament story speaks so powerfully to the pagan spirituality of today. Was not Noah the first zoo-keeper, the first museum curator? Modernity takes God’s covenant promise at the letter: no future cataclysm; no brave new world beyond the cataclysm; no ‘I will make all things new’. Modern pagan spirituality applies at the cosmic level that strange little axiom – the stranger the more one thinks about it[13] – of ‘You only live once’. Hence the immeasurable value of all there is and the myriad forms of it in all their inestimable diversity, precious, not because God made them, but because they are irreplaceable and their disappearance, should it occur, is as irrevocable as that of the white rhino, in this ‘precious only endless world’. The fragility of the phenomenon offers a mute appeal to the exertions of poet and conservationist alike. Finally, the story offers us the rainbow, that emblem of the phenomenality of life in its diversity and evanescence.
Disenchantment – or a Redirection of the Religious Impulse?
There seems much, therefore, to challenge the view of Taylor – or Barfield – that the ‘subjective turn’, at least in its full efflorescence, is really about the “disenchantment” of the world (Taylor, Ethics 2-4). The spiritual revolution of modernity seems better characterised as the replacement of Christianity by a form of paganism than as the substitution of non-religion for religion. Certainly, on the intellectual level, the shift from the age-long preoccupation with eternal principles (Zeus, Brahman, etc.) to the phenomena of empirical experience corresponds to the rise of an attitude that is properly scientific, according to which experience becomes the sole criterion of truth. Yet on the affective level, the celebration of the phenomena should be seen as a redirection rather than a suppression of the religious instinct. In the words of Shelley’s essay “On Life”, the solid universe of external things is ”such stuff as dreams are made of” (634). A century later, and at the culmination of an illustrious poetic tradition, the Surrealist vanguard – those great celebrators of self – were no less obsessed with ‘la merveille’ than their early Romantic predecessors. The same vision has now leavened the cultural mass to the point of becoming commonplace. We would all now share Shelley’s view (634) that
Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of or being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient manifestations; but it is itself the great miracle.[14]
PART TWO: CAN WALTER WINK HELP US ‘UNMASK THE POWERS’?
PART THREE: CARL TRUEMAN AND EXPRESSIVIST INDIVIDUALISM
[1] The definition of expressivism adopted here is that of Charles Taylor (Sources 374-5). His ‘expressivism’ coincides with what is elsewhere called ‘individuality’ (Izenberg) or ‘expressive individualism’ (Bellah et al.). In relation to art, Taylor’s use of the term is more cautious.
[2] The term ‘expressivist’ is applied here to all the forms of art that Taylor calls ‘epiphanic’. Taylor reserves the term ‘expressivist’ to the forms of art in which a unitary notion of self is expressed. In this article, ‘expressivism’ refers to a structure common to the artwork and individual experience, whereby something comes to definition through the process of its realisation.
[3] Abrams (121) quotes Blake: “Imagination is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever.”
[4] References to Bourdieu in this article relate to the French original. The translations from Bourdieu’s text are my own.
[5] This explains the centrality of artistic practice (Bourdieu 250): “It goes without saying that the art object is the objectivation of the relationship of distinction and that it is consequently expressly intended to bring to bear such a relationship.”
[6] Daidalos, a term suggestive of the superficial iridescence and changeability, here associated with the indefinability of empirical experience, characterises Atlantis negatively, in contrast to the ‘sameness’ of ancient Athens
[7] For Bann (“Poetics”) and Hooper-Greenhill, it is the figure of ‘Man’ that is reconstructed through the experience of the museum; for Altieri (147-69), it is the Hegelian spirit: “A full sense of self depends on some structure of relations taken from the past. For as we work with these relationships, we must also recognize individual subjectivity as embedded within objectified conditions that establish terms of transsubjectivity.” The relationship between the museum and Romantic philosophy is also recognized by McClellan who cites Archibald McLeish, poet and Librarian of Congress (41): “the conception of the gallery or the museum as the glass in which the total community of the human spirit can best be seen.”
[8] On the timing of its emergence, see T. Bennett (17-58); Duncan; Bann (“Poetics”); McClellan.
[9] See McClellan (29) who states: “The Romantic ideal of autonomous creation had as its corollary the viewer’s autonomous communion with the work of art in a space divorced from what the poet Wilhelm Wackenroder termed ‘the vulgar flux of life.”
[10] See Duncan and Wallach (483, 497 n.3) who state: “Museums, although often compared to temples or shrines, are deemed secular institutions. But the separation between the secular and the religious is itself a part of bourgeois thought and has effectively masked the survival in our own society of older religious practices and beliefs … Germain Bazin, noting this new religious attitude toward art, writes, ‘No longer existing solely for the delectation of refined amateurs, the museum, as it evolved into a public institution, simultaneously metamorphosed into a temple to human genius.”’ See also Gombrich 103-5
[11] See McClellan regarding the respective positions of Benjamin Gilman of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and John Cotton Dana, founder of the Newark Museum in New Jersey.
[12] A good example is provided by Daniel Howden in the front page article of The Independent (6 August 2005), carrying the caption “The Destruction of Mecca: Saudi Hardliners Wipe out their Own Heritage”. The monuments of Wahabism are here valued in terms of what they mean to the West as cultural phenomena, for all that the Wahabism evoked by these monuments appears (at least to the author of the article) at odds with the passion for the conservation of cultural phenomena.
[13] Cupitt offers a lexicon of idioms, including ‘new-fangled’ ones, referring to Life.
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