Art as Play

 

     A dramatic performance is aptly called a play, though a sonnet or a sonata might deserve the name no less.  All art is a form of play, though not all play is art.  When goat kids tussle and cats knock a ball around, they are playing.  Their end is amusement, just as opera-goers and sonnet-readers are pleasantly passing the time, though art aficionados might call what they are seeking beauty.  All are enjoying recreation in a diversion from the pursuit of practical goals.  The dog slavering while pursuing a stick and the gallery visitor cocking a discerning eye have a good deal in common. 

     Play might be defined as activity done for its own sake without any function other than the satisfaction arising from the act itself.  Throughout the centuries those defending the arts from moralists who regarded aesthetic pursuits as frivolous or hedonistic have maintained that exposure to aesthetic objects makes the consumer more noble and more moral, but, should it ever happen, this effect is incidental.  The same is true of more modest claims that art increases sympathy or sensitivity, or, indeed, that its study benefits general intelligence.  While it is true that art encodes and transmits cultural values and spiritual convictions, this function, too, is nonessential.  Pleasure is the chief and essential end of art, though critics yet today, in an odd vestige of moralism, shrink from admitting it.

     This week’s New York Times Opinion section, for instance, includes the promise that the study of art will “improve your taste, your judgements, your conduct.” [1]  The notion that culture will sharpen both cognitive and moral discernment, while broad and unqualified, seems modest when juxtaposed to the article’s extravagant title “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,”  Such claims are likely to be in part defensive, reacting to today’s educational stress on science and devaluation of humanities.

     For centuries of European criticism had accepted a compromise in the authoritative formula “delight and instruct,” with the second term justifying and diluting the first.  Yet recognition of people’s fondness for symbolic  representation goes back to Aristotle who recognized this distinctive human taste, saying “from childhood to imitate is inborn in people and in  this they differ from other animals,” since “by nature we have an instinct for representation.”  The contemplation of such symbols or representations or “imitations” in Aristotle’s term, brings us “pleasure.”  [2]  in the Politics Aristotle is quite clear about the uselessness of art, saying that the young must not be taught skills that are merely functional (he uses the term χρήσιμος, useful or serviceable), as his activities should not be corrupted by what is “not free” (ἀνελεύθερος),  This is, of course the basis for the value long placed on the “liberal arts,” those of free men, unbound by compulsion, wages, or practical ends. [3]  This sort of disinterested pastime is a self-justifying activity, the highest human occupation.  For the ancients this noble purposelessness characterized not art alone, but all intellectual activities. 

     For Schiller more than two millennia later human beings are motivated by both a constantly mutating sensuous drive (sinnliche Trieb) arising from physical stimuli and an unchanging structural drive (Formtrieb) which, like mathematics, leads toward the rational. [4]  For him the dialectic of these opposing tendencies is resolved through the play drive (der Spieltrieb), which mediates between the world of phenomena and that of ideas. 

     The sensuous drive excludes all independent activity and freedom from its subject, the passive receiver of sense data, while the structural drive, situated in the conceptual realm, excludes all dependence and all pain from its purely formal values.  The exclusion of freedom reflects a physical reality, while the exclusion of suffering is a spiritual inspiration. Both drives therefore involve the mind, the one through natural laws, the other through cognitive operations.  In the play instinct both work together, and, when one is led both by inclination and by reason to love another individual (or, likewise, an objet d’art) the synthesis generates a playful attachment in which coercion has no part.

     Building on these conclusions in the twentieth century Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens derives art from play while accepting the biological origins of a play instinct in “the habitual tendency of every living creature to leap; and the human creature, by acquiring, as we said, a sense of rhythm, generated and brought forth dancing ; and since the rhythm is suggested and awakened by the tune, the union of these.” For Huizinga “rhythm and harmony,” surely mathematical elements Schiller would have considered “formal,” are “invariably accompanied by pleasure.” (263)  

     He usefully defines the nature of play, listing five distinguishing characteristics.

 

1.  “Play is free, it is in fact freedom.” (8)

2.  Play is separated from the rest of experience.  It is a wholly voluntary activity.

3.  Play is isolated from other activities both in duration and location.

4.  Play “creates order; it is order.”  “It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.” (10)  “All play has its rules.” (11)

5.  Play is connected with no functional end whatsoever beyond recreation.  “It interrupts the appetitive process.” (9)

 

     On this basis he concludes that  Poetry “is born in and as play – sacred play, no doubt, but always, even in its sanctity, verging on gay abandon, mirth and jollity.”  (122)  He proceeds to provide anthropological data to support the conclusion that myth, art, and religion are all founded in play.   While “Poiesis is, in fact, a play function,” (119), he notes that poetry sometimes rises to the level of  “ideation and judgment,” but “music never leaves the play sphere.” (158)

     Though the similarity is profound, distinctions remain between the frisking lamb and the balletomane, the Superbowl fan and the cinemaphile.  All may be said to be playing, but only the film and dance aficionados are engaged with art.  The unique aspect of art is that its play involves manipulating symbols and patterns rather than objects or other creatures.  In this way art is distinguished from such human activities with no end other than pleasure, such as travel, gourmet dining, and certain sexual encounters, each of which depends on stimuli more substantial than the play of images and ideas in the mind.  In most music and much dance and abstract painting the gap is even greater, as the formal design of the work dominates while reference to the world of lived reality is absent or slight.

     Further, whereas in play one amuses oneself and only possibly fellow players or perhaps a bemused parent, art is typically made by one individual (in a process that may or may not be subjectively pleasant) and then consumed  by others.  Play is open-ended while art aims at a coherent unified object, finished in some sense and an artifact thereafter whereas non-aesthetic play is generally forgotten after it is enacted.  Finally, the rules for art are remade with every work, while those of chess or a game of catch are unchanging. 

     Art, then, is a recreational amusement, a way to pass the time while waiting to die.  Its primary end is always pleasure.  In this a play by Sophocles and the “playing” of a violin resemble the “play” of bridge players or that of frisking kids in a meadow of sweet grass. The painter may wish to make money and the gallery goer may consider his purchase an investment, but art is in its essence free of motive outside itself.  It is born of the exhilarating exercise of the human expertise at the manipulation of symbols when done for its own sake, or rather purely for fun and, with the more sublime works, perhaps some moments of that satisfying (if mysterious) sort of fun experienced as mental equipoise. 

     Artists build symbolic structures in the chambers of the imagination.  Beyond giving pleasure the works they create can, though their beauty and their order, serve as a “supreme fiction” (in Stevens’ term) redeeming a world known imperfectly, in fragments, and too often laden with suffering.  Art may realize that grand ambition or it may simply serve as diversion (doubtless itself a useful goal).  In a dark theater members of the audience amuse themselves with the play of entering another consciousness.  In an easy chair one reads a sonnet of Shakespeare and enjoys playing that, one day someone may spoken such lines direct from the heart, though the reader knows it is all make-believe.  The universality of both play and the entire spectrum of art – poetry, drama, music, sculpture, dance, and painting – throughout the world and in all ages, among hunter-gatherers and among urbanites, demonstrates the critical value of such activities in making human life livable.

 

 

 

1.  David Brooks, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” New York Times January 28, 2024.  Note the.  Brooks, a Yale professor but not a literary scholar, would have agreed for the most part with James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism (2016), the most compelling exposition of the humanistic value of literature in recent years.

2.  Poetics 1448b μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἐκ παίδων  ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων and “κατὰ φύσιν δὲ ὄντος ἡμῖν τοῦ μιμεῖσθαι.” The word for pleasure, which appears in this passage in several forms, is “ἡδύς.”

3.  Politics 1337b.  Note also the origin of school in σχολή, meaning “leisure” or “that in which leisure is employed.”  Such men could, of course, attain freedom only by depending on slaves to perform the labor to support them.

4. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), letters twelve through Fourteen.  The quoted lines are in letter fourteen.

Scholarship as Recreation in Aulus Gellius

 

As this essay is in part intended to acquaint readers with the Attic Nights, I include several fairly long passages from it.  Quotations from Gellius are from the translation of J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Library edition of Attic Nights (1927), which the reader may conveniently consult online at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/gellius/home.html.   

 

     Surely the most critical adaptation of our species is our facility at manipulating symbols.  The evolution then of language enabled surely the more effective pursuit of prey but all subsequent thought, science, and culture as well.  Just as we perceive that cats relish stalking and imagine that orb-weaving spiders must take pleasure in a fine web, people enjoy practicing their most highly developed skill, sometimes simply as recreation in such verbal forms as jokes, songs, stories, and flights of conversation.  Since the Palaeolithic era people’s verbal play has constituted their primary form of entertainment.

     A taste for such semiotic dancing in both composer and consumer is the initial motive for all literature.  In certain written works, however, the human fondness for symbolic play is more highlighted, more naked, more joyously enthusiastic.  In journals, notebooks, and commonplace books, the jottings and sketchings of the mind may rarely rise to the level of the sublime, but they directly indicate our human pleasure in symbolic play, creating, carving, juggling, forming ever-new patterns in the immense catalogue of possibilities generated by grammar.  Among the greatest of such works are surely The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, and the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius.

     I have lately been reading in Aulus Gellius.  It is not a volume to read through one page after another, beginning to end.  I am opening the Loeb Library volumes at random and reading ten or twelve pages at a stretch.  The work invites that sort of approach.  It is a miscellany, an omnium gatherum, a rag-bag, and the author readily admits that the book lacks structure; its construction follows no discernable order but the wanderings of a human mind, all digressions and no central path.  The very title seems to hint at something torrid and tropical, warm zephyrs playing over a bare torso under loose robes, a cool glass of retsina at hand, and the book does indeed pursue a sort of hedonism.  For the author, though, some of the greatest pleasures are intellectual, undiminished in intensity by the fact that the fox his mind was hunting may bd either grand, such as the question of whether the phenomenal world be real, or minute, such as an obscure linguistic detail or an odd shred of natural history.  The primary association of the title for a Roman would have been its invocation of the revered Greek rhetorical and poetic traditions, inviting the reader for a bit of play in the realm of the recondite.

     The book is a collection of short comments and narrations, a paragraph or two or three on every sort of topic, but frequently concerning language or history.  As a result of this form Gellius is less often read for his style or for the impact of the book as a whole than remembered for the many fragments of lost writings he preserves which scholars may mine for historic and linguistic details.  Considered in itself the Attic Nights is a charming example of cognition as recreation, intellectual riffing as play.  The book’s unstructured form, its interest in oddities and details invites the reader to turn a curious imaginative gaze as the author points out the dramatic trees, pretty scenes, and unlikely hillocks of a great variety of scenes, whether encountered in lived experience or in books.  Gellius’ aesthetic intention is unmistakable.  He explicitly defines his aim as to be “entertaining,” that “recreation might be provided for my children, when they should have some respite from business affairs and could unbend and divert their minds.”  He describes his method as “haphazard,” “without order or arrangement,” “off-hand, without premeditation” (Praefatio).  Such randomness is appropriate since the free process of ratiocination and the play of imagination are the goal more than any apodictic conclusion.

     Gellius displays his rhetorical sophistication even as he disclaims it, deploying the humility topos as he claims to write “almost in rustic fashion.”  While “bearing in mind my limitations,” he says he falls as far “short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style.”  Yet he goes on to define an ambitious goal, promising his book might be “a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts,” offering “the germs and the quality to make men's minds grow more vigorous, their memory more trustworthy, their eloquence more effective, their diction purer, or the pleasures of their hours of leisure and recreation more refined.”  For Gellius verbal facility is a source of pleasure as well as the chief means of cultivating the mind and, most importantly, the fountainhead of all intellectual work. 

     He goes so far as to warn off potential readers who do not delight in language, those “who have never found pleasure nor busied themselves in reading, inquiring, writing and taking notes, who have never spent wakeful nights in such employments, who have never improved themselves by discussion and debate with rival followers of the same Muse.”  Such people prefer to waste their time, he suggests, “in the turmoil of business affairs.”  Without criticizing earning a living, Gellius suggests that people do not become fully human until their time is their own. 

     A passage in Attic Nights (III, 1) provides a nearly cinematic enactment of what he is talking about.

 

     When winter was already waning, we were walking with the philosopher Favorinus in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun; and there, as we walked, Sallust's Catiline was being read, a book which Favorinus had seen in the hands of a friend and had asked him to read.  The following passage from that book had been recited: "Avarice implies a desire for money, which no wise man covets; steeped as it were with noxious poisons, it renders the most manly body and soul effeminate; it is ever unbounded, nor can either plenty or want make it less."  Then Favorinus looked at me and said: "How does avarice make a man's body effeminate? For I seem to grasp in general the meaning of his statement that it has that effect on a manly soul, but how also it makes his body effeminate I do not yet comprehend."  "I too," said I, "have for a long time been putting myself that question, and if you had not anticipated me, I should of my own accord have asked you to answer it."

     Scarcely had I said this with some hesitation, when one of the disciples of Favorinus, who seemed to be an old hand in the study of literature, broke in: "I once heard Valerius Probus say that Sallust here used a kind of poetic circumlocution, and meaning to say that a man was corrupted by avarice, spoke of his body and soul, the two factors which indicate a man; for man is made up of body and soul."  "Never," replied Favorinus, "at least, so far as I know, was our Probus guilty of such impertinent and bold subtlety as to say that Sallust, a most skilful artist in conciseness, used poetic paraphrases."

     There was with us at the time in the same promenade a man of considerable learning.  He too, on being asked by Favorinus whether he had anything to say on the subject, answered to this effect: "We observe that almost all those whose minds are possessed and corrupted by avarice and who have devoted themselves to the acquisition of money from any and every source, so regulate their lives, that compared with money they neglect manly toil and attention to bodily exercise, as they do everything else.  For they are commonly intent upon indoor and sedentary pursuits, in which all their vigoor of mind and body is enfeebled and, as Sallust says, ‘rendered effeminate.'”

     Then Favorinus again asked to have the same words of Sallust read again, and when they had been read, he said: "How then are we to explain the fact, that it is possible to find many men who are greedy for money, but nevertheless have strong and active bodies?"  To this the man replied thus: "Your answer is certainly to the point. Whoever," said he, "is greedy for money, but nevertheless has a body that is strong and in good condition, must necessarily be possessed either by an interest in, or devotion to, other things as well, and cannot be equally niggardly in his care of himself.  For if extreme avarice, to the exclusion of everything else, lay hold upon all a man's actions and desires, and if it extend even to neglect of his body, so that because of that one passion he has regard neither for virtue nor physical strength, nor body, nor soul — then, and then only, can that vice truly be said to cause effeminacy both of body and soul, since such men care neither for themselves nor for anything else except money."  Then said Favorinus: "Either what you have said is reasonable, or Sallust, through hatred of avarice, brought against it a heavier charge than he could justify."

 

     As the anecdote opens, a group of friends appears at leisure, enjoying a stroll as the last days of winter give way to early spring “in the court of the Titian baths, enjoying the mild warmth of the sun.”  Among the party is the philosopher Favorinus, an Academic Skeptic and Gellius’ teacher.  One of the party carries a copy of Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline and reads aloud as they walk.  The modern reader is struck by the depiction of a culture in which a promenade might be accompanied by reading aloud, and abstract questions are discussed for the sheer joy of debate more than in the interest of problem solving or academic rivalry.  Thinkers naturally lead the group, here the center is Favorinus, advocate of a strict skepticism and, incidentally, described as a born eunuch, yet celebrated for his philosophic powers.  Favorinus became sufficiently controversial not because of his ambiguous sexuality but due to Hadrian’s arbitrary disfavor that Corinth tore down the statue the city had erected in his honor, causing him to remark drily that it was a pity that had Socrates had such statue to serve as his proxy, he might have been saved from execution.

     Here, however, Favorinus is simply moderator of a discussion to which all present are welcome to contribute.  The coterie is preselected; one participant is identified as “a man of considerable learning” and another as “an old hand in the study of literature,” giving their remarks depth and weight, and instructing the less experienced by their tone and manner more than by their opinions.  A modern American reader is likely to be struck by the issue they consider: whether avarice saps one’s strength, rendering a person effeminate.  This idea recalls the preface’s contemptuous dismissal of those who devote themselves to “business affairs,” a refreshing attitude to those of us who inhabit a culture in which making money is considered the hallmark of manly vigor. 

     For this party of leisured ancient Romans, though, the question in the end is left open.  Sallust may or may not be correct or he may be correct in part; he may have expressed himself accurately or perhaps in a misleading, “over-artful” fashion.  There is no certainty, only inquiry, the Greek meaning, in fact, of the word skepticism.  These Romans revel in practicing cognition, in juggling ideas, and in the social contact with other thinking beings capable of the same amusement, Plato’s clique freed from great ideas and allowed the smallest of small talk for the simple fun of it, just passing the time on a warming afternoon.

     Though Gellius’ entries are more often presented as third-hand accounts of opinions than in dialogue dramas like this, in each the author carries on a colloquy with acquaintances, writers of the past, and inevitably with the presumed reader.  Gellius interests himself, it seems, equally in every topic.  He discusses the smallest details of language and usage or of history with the same absorbed interest that he accords major issues of epistemology.  Always animated by the spirit of disinterested inquiry, pure self-justifying research, ludic thought, the weight of each section of text is equal to any other.  A review of a few passages, chosen as randomly as my desultory reading of Attic Nights, illustrates the author’s sensibility.

          This Favorinus who asked that Sallust be read aloud was an Academic Skeptic in the tradition of Arcesilaus.  At one point in the Attic Nights Gellius defines their position.

 

Those whom we call the Pyrronian philosophers are designated by the Greek name σκεπτικοί, or "sceptics," which means about the same as "inquirers" and "investigators."  For they decide nothing and determine nothing, but are always engaged in inquiring and considering what there is in all nature concerning which it is possible to decide and determine.  And moreover they believe that they do not see or hear anything clearly, but that they undergo and experience something like seeing and hearing; but they are in doubt as of that nature and character of those very things which cause them those experiences, and they deliberate about them; and they declare that in everything assurance and absolute truth seem so beyond our grasp, owing to the mingling and confusing of the indications of truth and falsehood, that any man who is not rash and precipitate in his judgment ought to use the language which they say was used by Pyrro, the founder of that philosophy: "Does not this matter stand so, rather than so, or is it neither?" For they deny that proofs of anything and its real qualities can be known and understood, and they try in many ways to point this out and demonstrate it.   On this subject Favorinus too with great keenness and subtlety has composed ten books, which he entitled Πυρρωνεῖοι Τρόποι, or The Pyrronian Principles.                                  (XI, 5)

 

     The following section of this entry goes on to emphasize the absolute skepticism of the Pyrrhonians who in contrast to the Academic Skeptics question even the certainty of uncertainty.  The schools are so similar that he says they are often confused.  Both base their inquiries into the meaning of appearances (φαντασίαι) which both Pyrrhonians and Academics regard as reflecting not “the nature of the objects themselves,” but rather “the condition of mind or body of those to whom these appearances come.”  These data are unreliable since they consider “all things that affect men's sense” to be “τὰ πρός τι,” that is, "things relative to something else," a notion resembling the Buddhist “pratītyasamutpāda,” or dependent origination.  For this reason everything possesses only a qualified and ambiguous reality.

     Accepting that nothing can be finally verified might seem to disable research before it begins, but the skeptic is an inquirer.  The denial of a dogmatic conclusion need not halt the process of seeking truth.  The assumption of the tight web of causality apparently linking every element in what seems the phenomenal world endows every bit of information with a gleam as numinous as the next bit.  A sensibility like that reflected in this book will look with interest on any information at all, but, as a homo sapiens, with a particular fancy for the play of signification in language.  The meaning may hold secondary importance of none at all.  Gellius can manipulate abstractions based on observation like a painter imagining the design of a picture while observing decorative fountains.  He elevates what might be an idle fondness for trivia into a philosophic enterprise by celebrating the pure play of thought.  Though Gellius exhibits no piety as such, his relish for every detail illuminates his inquiry like an interior lit by stained glass windows; his book is a lengthy series of tiny side chapels in the cranium.

     Modern readers who are not specialists in historical philology may have little sympathy for the appeal of a topic like the question of “Whether affatim, like admodum, should be pronounced with an acute accent on the first syllable; with some painstaking observations on the accents of other words.” (VI, 7)  In Gellius’ circles, however, such minutiae engaged many.  He records, for instance, that when he wrote a friend, noting that he had written twice before, making this the third time (tertium), his correspondent raises an issue of usage, asking why he had written tertium and not tertio and going on to inquire whether “one should say tertium consul, meaning "consul for the third time," and quartum, or tertio and quarto.” (X, 1)  Is the author a tiresome pedant or a crusader for precise language?  I suggest he is neither as much as he is simply a denizen of a semiotic realm, enjoying his environment, swimming in an ocean of words as the shark glides through the sea, in his case by making conversation with a friend.  The topic of their talk is of little moment.

     Even the most sympathetic reader would concede that a good deal of Gellius’ book consists of matter that looks rather like abstruse nit-picking.  At times the Attic Nights seems a monument of pedantic minutiae like those grand tomes of Chandler on accents or Denniston on Greek particles with the difference that Gellius’ work has less practical use.  While those works were composed to aid the reader of Classical texts, only by unlikely coincidence might a topic Gellius addresses be useful in reading a text or solving a problem.  The only excuse for reading Gellius is to pass the time pleasantly, but any human end higher than this must rest on shaky ground. 

     Gellius’ imagination possesses not only a microscope to examine with detail and precision the niceties of language; he had as well a telescope capable of a focus far beyond the horizon.  His grand topics enter through the same intimate social context he uses for what seem more trivial issues.  His approach to basic issues of semiotics and epistemology goes far to account for his sensibility and the character of the book that preserves, as though in amber, indications of his consciousness.

 

     Chrysippus asserts that every word is by nature ambiguous, since two or more things may be understood from the same word. But Diodorus, surnamed Cronus, says: "No word is ambiguous, and no one speaks or receives a word in two senses; and it ought not to seem to be said in any other sense than that which the speaker feels that he is giving it. But when I," said he, "meant one thing and you have understood another, it may seem that I have spoken obscurely rather than ambiguously; for the nature of an ambiguous word should be such that he who speaks it expresses two or more meanings. But no man expresses two meanings who has felt that he is expressing but one."                            (XI, 12)

 

     The Stoic Chrysippus, (who may have been acting the provocateur) argues that all utterance is ambiguous and indeterminate in meaning.  He here approaches the position of Gorgias and, a few generations later, Pyrrho that communication is impossible.   His interlocutor objects that every speaker has a meaning in mind which must then be considered the single correct meaning.  Such meaning is unchanged even if one’s audience misunderstands.  As always, Gellius simply presents both sides of a question (just as Diogenes Laertius [VII, 7, 183] says that Chrysippus would do), and Diodorus’ confidence is unpersuasive since intentions may be far from clear even to the individual, and language that may sometimes convey signification accurately is little better than language that always fails.  For Gellius there is always more to talk about tomorrow.  

     His anecdote of the Greek Cynic Peregrinus Proteus introduces a character more intriguing perhaps than his teaching. 

 

     When I was at Athens, I met a philosopher named Peregrinus, who was later surnamed Proteus, a man of dignity and fortitude, living in a hut outside the city. And visiting him frequently, I heard him say many things that were in truth helpful and noble. Among these I particularly recall the following:

     He used to say that a wise man would not commit a sin, even if he knew that neither gods nor men would know it; for he thought that one ought to refrain from sin, not through fear of punishment or disgrace, but from love of justice and honesty and from a sense of duty.  If, however, there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment.  "But," said he, "if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly."  Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:

See to it lest you try aught to conceal;

Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.

     Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

 

    In the opening of the story, the reader glimpses once more the social context for Gellius’ sensibility.  He and others knew Peregrinus personally, a man not only with opinions, but with a distinct lifestyle as well, living in a “hut” outside of town in imitation of Diogenes to indicate his contempt for worldly values.  Peregrinus had, like Augustine, passed through phases in his spirituality, having for some years practiced Christianity in Palestine.  In the end he announced his intention to commit suicide go demonstrate his indifference to death and carried out this intention during the Olympics when crowds might appreciate his gesture.  Lucian who witnessed the event described his motive.

 

He said that he wanted to put a tip of gold on a golden life; for one who had lived as Heracles should die like Heracles and be commingled with the aether. And I wish, said he, to benefit mankind by showing them the way in which one should disregard death.                                                             (De Morte Peregrini, 33)

 

In Gellius’ story, the philosopher himself cites a line from a tragedian as support for his ideas and this line reminds Gellius of another passage which he cites, though unsure of its author.  The fact that the source of his phrase has slipped his mind only emphasizes the casual quotidian character of his inquiries.  They are like his breathing a matter of daily experience. 

     Many of Gellius’ anecdotes reflect the social world of his day, in which it seems everyone (among the elite) was a verbal artist and everyone a philosopher.  One story relates how a student risked death in order to hear Socrates speak, in contrast to the dissipated youth of the present generation.

 

The philosopher Taurus, a celebrated Platonist of my time, used to urge the study of philosophy by many other good and wholesome examples and in particular stimulated the minds of the young by what he said that Euclides the Socratic used to do.  "The Athenians," said he, "had provided in one of their decrees that any citizen of Megara who should be found to have set foot in Athens should for that suffer death; so great," says he, "was the hatred of the neighbouring men of Megara with which the Athenians were inflamed.  Then Euclides, who was from that very town of Megara and before the passage of that decree had been accustomed to come to Athens and to listen to Socrates, after the enactment of that measure, at nightfall, as darkness was coming on, clad in a woman's long tunic, wrapped in a parti-coloured mantle, and with veiled head, used to walk from his home in Megara to Athens, to visit Socrates, in order that he might at least for some part of the night share in the master's teaching and discourse. And just before dawn he went back again, a distance of somewhat over twenty miles, disguised in that same garb.  But nowadays," said Taurus, "we may see the philosophers themselves running to the doors of rich young men, to give them instruction, and there they sit and wait until nearly noonday, for their pupils to sleep off all last night's wine."                          (VII 10)

 

Taurus had been, in fact, Gellius’ own teacher, so this note likely records an actual lecture.  Euclides of Megara went on to write dialogues and commentaries himself (though very little remains) maintaining a monistic view still based on his master’s teachings, a kind of revival of Parmenides’ non-dualistic thought.  According to Diogenes Laertius (II, 6, 106) “he held the supreme good to be really one, though called by many names, sometimes wisdom, sometimes God, and again Mind, and so forth. But all that is contradictory of the good he used to reject, declaring that it had no existence.”  Apart from this simple yet radical view Euclides was receptive to rhetoric and eristics, attracting criticism from Socrates himself who preferred the pose of a disinterested pursuit of truth.

     Gellius would have stood with Euclides in his extravagant use of regardless of truth-claims.  Specific teachings are hardly an issue in Attic Nights.  Whatever the theme or the conclusion, what is important here is the process, the social dialectics, people tossing ideas about in public and at dinner parties, recreational discussion, playful inquiry, and artful use of words, people acting people-like.   

     The taste for linguistic discernment and verbal play evident in Gellius animates as well the world of Petronius’ Satyricon, for instance, which antedated Attic Nights by about a hundred years.  The characters depicted by the arbiter elegantiae play with words as often as they play with each other’s bodies.  They debate the merits of teachers of rhetoric, spout poetry to make a point, play word games, refer to Homer, and discuss issues of no immediate relevance.  Today, a not dissimilar taste is evident in contemporary bumper stickers, graffiti, advertising slogans, and internet memes as well as in popular music and drama.  The character of some of the earliest human burials indicates that this taste for the symbolic has existed since prehistoric times.

     Wherever the reader opens the Attic Nights, there is Gellius exercising his gratuitous ingenuity, a kind of joyously superfluous symbolic manipulation, semiotic fooling for its own sake, toward no end whatever but the celebration of our oh-so-human minds.  And the reader may perform the part of silent dance partner, relishing the grace notes, the subtleties, the fine texture of another’s consciousness as though it were an abstract pattern.  Here is the very fountainhead of art, science, and philosophy.  Arguments about the origin of language may be always unresolved, but perhaps our species began communicating simply because it was so much fun.  If the hunters bagged more game that way, they also afforded themselves greater leisure to talk away the long evenings of their days.  And Gellius was doing much the same in antiquity as I do now, reading Gellius on my computer screen as he read from  manuscripts, and you the reader have joined as well, an equal partner in the endless conversation.

The Question of Literary Value

     I know of no satisfactory theory of literary (or indeed, any artistic) value. One might feel that the Divine Comedy is surely of greater value than an episode of Breaking Bad, but the proof of such discernment is elusive. For many years it was only too easy to blame the television fan for self-evident obtuseness while competing with other cognoscenti in appreciating the subtleties of Dante. In the past critics had no difficulty with the idea of the canon itself whatever negotiable differences they may have had over the exact list. The Romantics elevated Spenser, the Imagists liked Chinese lyric , and twentieth century found a worthy anticipation of metafiction in Tristram Shandy, but such adjustments occurred within a largely unquestioned structure. The critics of this bygone era were not wholly unlike religious scholars who, having settled on what to include in scripture, could then spend millennia commenting, interpreting, and interpreting the interpreters.
     Though it worked well, this assumption was vulnerable. The acceptance of a canon was convenient, since the question of literary value seems ultimately like other matters of taste to lack much foundation apart from subjective impression. One may praise a wine with an elaborate flight of descriptors, while another finds the same taste unexciting. Two people may perceive the same characteristics and yet assign them different values. What may make a sauce seem elegant and subtle to one diner may be considered bland and boring to another. Tokay that once excited the highest praise from kings and popes now holds little interest for many drinkers. No one thinks that values in cuisine are nonexistent or wholly arbitrary, though food critics will differ among themselves after the broadest distinctions are made, and the more refined judgments may depend on extraordinary competence developed from experience. Criticism and comment are subsequent to impressions. Surely the situation is similar in literature.
     Critics in the sense of the writers of reviews consider their primary responsibility to evaluate, to advise those who have found opportunity to read their remarks whether they would be well-advised to read the work under consideration. Such critics are necessarily free with value judgments, but their concern is not to present tightly reasoned proofs. This avoidance serves them well, since literary judgments,, like the first cause, are susceptible to the logical flaw of an infinite regress. [1] One may say a poem is great because of its concrete, specific imagery, yet whence comes the value of concreteness? Further, an ill-written poem may also passes the same sort of images, though clumsily phrased and ineptly utilized. A novel may be praised for its formal structure, yet use of analogous structure does not guarantee the success of another work of fiction. Surely the reader, no matter how knowledgeable, records a subjective impression and then cooks up a convincing basis for it.
     One of the most acute critics of his generation, Northrup Frye came close to mystifying value with his emphatic statement: “The sense of value is an individual, unpredictable, variable, incommunicable, indemonstrable, and mainly intuitive reaction to literature.” [2]
     Through history many critics have valued literature not so much for the aesthetic experience, the thrill of that “mainly intuitive reaction,” as for its extrinsic benefits. Its readers are thought by some to enjoy salutary effects such as a closer approach to truth, greater moral sensitivity, heightened social conscience, or some sort of vague increase in humanity. These judgments are wholly innocent of supportive reasoning or data. It may well be that few incarcerated felons have read Paradise Lost, but no one would regard the association between ignorance of Milton and committing crimes to be simply causal. This is unsurprising, given the fact that writers are expert in nothing other than the effective use of language; they are not specialists in religion or morality or politics, nor are they predictably more humane than most people, and the same can be said for their readers. Having studied a thousand Elizabethan sonnets, one will be familiar with the poetic form, language, and images, but will not necessarily be in any degree a better lover for his acquaintance with the poetry.
     The fact is that literary value is dependent on the encounter of the individual reader with the text. No text can invariably produce a certain reaction in all readers, but such reactions are nonetheless quite real. A work will be called good or great if one is taken with its beauty (or, on the lower peaks of the Parnassian range, if one is amused or moved or entertained or thrilled or titillated). Over the centuries certain works have accumulated a record of admirers that reasonably suggest a new reader might likely be rewarded as predecessors have been. [3] When I left a performance of King Lear with tears in my eyes, my reaction was similar to countless viewers before me, though it may not have been shared by the person in the next seat. Thus literary value may be most rationally assigned, as indeed it has often been, by a consensus of competent consumers. Reasons may be detailed, but the judgment rests on the initial subjective reaction. The process is dynamic with minority opinion and idiosyncratic reactions always lobbying and jockeying like politicians for higher poll numbers.
     As critics comment on a text, its significance grows. Eliot famously reminded readers of how comment can change the meaning of a work for the future and then his point was illustrated by his successful championing of the Metaphysicals. His appreciation for Donne gave new value to poems that had long been neglected. The Bible, an almost random miscellany of texts written over a long period of time, offers an example of a work which has gained value due to being closely read for millennia, resulting in richly developed interconnections and implications. What is more, they have yielded an immense hermeneutic harvest while being read (albeit only by Christians) as a unified work. The value is clearly constituted in the consumption.
     The issue of value has a particular value in the present era since “cultural criticism” and the like have largely exiled considerations of value from the academy. [4] Yet who can read without value judgments? From my youth until today, my study was motivated by the intention to spend my time in contemplation of the best writing (and the second-best). Something of the same motive must be common to virtually all devotees of literature. The fact that the basis for such distinctions may be elusive and that estimates of worth may never elicit unanimous agreement does not invalidate them.
The chief difference between taste in poetry and in other areas is that art is so subtle a carrier of meaning, so dense a pattern of signification, that it conveys far more precise and detailed a record of human consciousness than can taste in food or clothing or home décor. Apart from fabulous complexity, different works may have widely varying aims. For one author human psychology is the focus, while another may aim to present lovely landscapes lushly sketched; a third may seek to convey some insight into lived experience, a fourth to pipe the most captivating melody, the fifth to evoke laughter, and on and on. Each must be judged by its aims, but none is inherently superior or inferior to others. Each presents a separate case and can only be evaluated on the basis of the encounter of an author and reader, each unique but sharing much as well. While judgments of taste can never be proven, they are nonetheless the starting point of literary studies. Just as the Greeks considered praise and blame the very basis of considering people’s lives, literary value is at once the motive (in prospect) and the end (in experience) of considering the literature people produce.



1. The general philosophical problem is well-formulated by Sextus Empiricus, part of Agrippa’s trilemma according to Diogenes Laertius.

2. From “On Value-Judgments,” Contemporary Literature Vol. 9, No. 3, Summer, 1968, 311-318. The essay was later reprinted in The Stubborn Structure 1970. Frye’s direct engagement of the issue and his forthright statement exemplify his practice. He was a pioneer in the systematic analysis of literature, and his Anatomy of Criticism earns its title. Apart from theory, his work is full of brilliant specific comments. Frye is uneasy here, however, and he hedges this apparently unqualified characterization of literary value by saying in the same essay that greater knowledge can produce more accurate judgments. But what is the standard of accuracy?

3. This strikes me as similar to the way physicists tell us physical reality is best considered “a wave of probability.”

4. For an energetic response see James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Post-Modernism: The Humanistic Alternative. My review “On the Proper Ends of Literary Study” appears on this site.