by Mark Greif
Happiness has its own history, but by the end of the eighteenth century its dominance was reflected in the intellectual triumphs of the age. In America, Jefferson amended Locke’s life, liberty, and property to enshrine among our inalienable rights “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Utilitarianism in Britain gave a practical cast to a life lived not only for maximizing the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” but for individual pleasurable experiences, whether Bentham’s push-pin or, later, Mill’s higher pleasures. The Romantics, with a poetry of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” and transports in nature, helped recast private happiness as a search for the right kinds of experience. Underlying much of the new energy for happiness was a secular version of the quest for inner experience in Protestantism, particularly an inheritance from the Puritans and Quakers—apostles of private experience-diaries and public “experience meetings”—who had made experience an exaltation that might come at any time, in any activity, as an indication of God’s grace. Now the exaltation was uprooted, coming from nowhere.
The first intuitive methods to use experience to fight the new concept of experience came out of the sense that something had gone wrong in respectable living—in living for utility as happiness, or duty as happiness, or wealth or property as happiness. The two writers I most associate with the two solutions are Gustave Flaubert and Henry David Thoreau.
Their names are hardly ever put together in the same sentence, yet they were nearly exact contemporaries. Thoreau was born in 1817, Flaubert in 1821; the American published Walden in 1854, the Frenchman Madame Bovary in 1857. Sometimes the earliest individuals to face a situation get its description exactly right, since they know the shock of change, with the old condition right behind them. Nor should it be surprising that such careful observers could have laid down the early basis for resistance to problems of modern life, which, over 150 years, have only intensified.
Each man reached adulthood in a postrevolutionary middle class that let him see he could choose any one of multiple lives, without ensuring him any inherited livelihood at all. Thoreau got his Harvard degree and worked at schoolteaching, management of the family pencil factory, and finally surveying—knowing no one would pay him for the thing he wanted most, which was to discover his true life. Flaubert escaped law school only by falling down with epileptic fits until he could come home and live as he pleased. Each saw and was fascinated by a market culture, with its multiplication of goods and interchangeable items, and asked himself whether one could freely choose or acquire the good things of a life—spending “life” itself, not money.
Each knew nature deeply, but as something one had to go back to, whether in deforested and railroad-transformed Concord, where Thoreau could watch the trains running near his cabin, or in Flaubert’s provincial Normandy, which looked to Rouen and Paris for instruction in the new modes of life. The random, premature, and unnecessary deaths of close siblings, at the dawn of the triumphant age of modern medicine—by tetanus from a shaving nick for Thoreau’s brother John, by puerperal infection for Flaubert’s sister Caroline—made the brevity of life more urgent, possibly, even than we feel it to be today. So Flaubert and Thoreau withdrew, to Croisset and to Walden, to try to figure out how to survive their time.
As doctrines, aestheticism and perfectionism have the worst names imaginable. Aestheticism is thought to be the pursuit of beauty. Perfectionism is supposed to be the pursuit of perfection. Neither idea is right. In ordinary language, perfectionism is so forgotten as a goal of life that “a perfectionist” is a neurotic who can’t finish his work. Aestheticism is equally forgotten; all aesthetic philosophies are held in such low regard that, for us, an “aesthetician” is a hairdresser who also gives facials. The two solutions were not just suitable for an earlier era, however, but are equally so for now. In the nineteenth century, Flaubert and Thoreau foresaw mud where others saw a perfectly rewarding way of life. Today we’re up to our eyes in it.
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Aestheticism asks you to view every object as you would a work of art. It believes that art is essentially an occasion for the arousal of emotions and passions. You experience a work of art. You go into it. Not just a calm onlooker, you imagine the figures in the painting, and relish the colors and forms, the style becoming as much an object of experience as the content; you feel or taste everything; you lust for it, let it overwhelm you, amplify it to titillate or satisfy or disgust you; you mentally twist the canvas to wring it dry.
The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just that same way. Art becomes a training for life, to let you learn how to perceive what you will ultimately experience unaided. Let anyone’s ordinary face fascinate you as if it were a bust of Caesar; let the lights of a city draw your eyes like Egyptian gold or the crown jewels; let a cigarette case you find on the road evoke the whole life of its imagined owner; let your fellow human beings be bearers of plot and motivation as in a work of fiction, possessors of intricate beauty or ugliness as in a painting, objects of uniqueness and fearful sublimity as in a wonder of nature. Over time, and with practice, the work of art will become less effective at stimulating these art experiences than your renewed encounters with the world will be. Art may improve on life, as a painter focuses and humanizes what he sees; but art experience, learned in the aesthete’s stance, applied to real objects, improves life.
“Look more closely” is the basic answer of the aesthete to any failure of experience: “For anything to become interesting you simply have to look at it for a long time,” wrote Flaubert. Life becomes the scene of total, never-ending experience, as long as the aesthete can muster the intensity to regard it in this way. We all have a power to find the meaningful aspect of a thing by going onto or into it; by spreading the surface world with experience, and pressing your imagination and emotions into any crack. You must let it into you, too: “External reality has to enter into us, almost enough to make us cry out, if we are to represent it properly.” Flaubert became a representer because he wished to live.
For the adept of aestheticism, experience is not rare; it is always available. There should be nothing that can’t be an object of experience. It is characteristic of Flaubertian aestheticism to make a specialty of taking experience even from the ugliest things: if you can manage it with the ugly, you’ll never want for experience—beautiful things will just be a bonus. Daily life far surpasses art in its depth, its freakishness, its absurdity, its accidents, its vehemence, its way of making fancy real, or of breaking the barrier between imagination and fact. But attention to the rejected also becomes a principle of the activity of living, refusing to leave anything out, and finally preferring the despised appearances that everyone else neglects, precisely because they are despised—this is the Flaubertian aesthete’s peculiar morality. “There is a moral density to be found in certain forms of ugliness.” No one should dare to destroy or change them.
Since I don’t want to be accused of offering a method that is no method at all, or promising a solution to the deficiencies of experience without giving a step-by-step procedure, let me list again the steps to aestheticism:
Regard all things as you would a work of art;
Understand that it is never wrong to seek in art the stimulation of desire, wonder, or lust, or to search for resemblance to things in the world. You encounter art, and the result is experience;
Apply this flexibility of experience, taught by art, back to all objects not considered art—practicing your skill especially on the trivial, the ugly, and the despised. You will find that your old assessment of experience as something rare and intermittent, or bought with wealth or physical effort, was too narrow. By setting an endlessly renewed horizon for experience, from the endless profusion of objects, the aesthete guarantees that life-as-experience can never be diminished—not by age, by sickness, by anything, short of death.
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Perfectionism, in contrast, puts the self before everything. It charges the self with weighing
and choosing every behavior and aspect of its way of living. The process of weighing—so as to “live deliberately,” in Thoreau’s phrase—becomes the form of experience in perfectionism. You learn to consider the people and things of the world—a farmer, a stockbroker, your friend or enemy, but also any conversation, or book, or even a pond or tree—as if each might suggest an “example” of a way you, too, could be. In becoming an example, each thing invites you to measure and change your self—and therefore change your life. Perfectionism makes you weigh every experience against the state of your self, and accept or refuse it.
Perfectionism thus makes experience total, not by viewing outside people and things as art, but by feeling how each directs its summons to your self, and letting it enter and the self respond. This is easiest to understand with other people. Your neighbor who can’t stop working because he’s out to make his mortgage payments, like the one who lives for his family, or politics, or observing the weather, is presenting an example of a way of life that he may or may not know he has chosen. In his habits and behaviors, he presents even finer-grained examples of the way you, too, could be. Thoreau’s perfectionism sought examples in natural objects, in part to get away from people and their (to him) disappointing ways—and this can be a bit harder to understand. Because Thoreau responded to nature, it made sense that the woods and ponds should summon him and point out ways to improve his self. Because he disdained anything unnecessary to life, he tried to understand the simplest living things. He could sound Walden Pond to learn its shape and depth, and then also ask of his self whether it too was clear and deep, and its proportions equally just.
Though Thoreau was peculiar in his habit of finding so many examples in nature, there is no reason in principle that nature needs to dominate perfectionism. For Stanley Cavell, the major philosophical exponent of perfectionism in our own time, it extended from Thoreau to the things Cavell himself knew: a twentieth-century world of the city, and talk, and especially of the relations between men and women, not men and trees. In Cavell’s perfectionism, the major incitement to becoming oneself turns out to be marriage—where the self takes continuous instruction from someone who is intimate and yet different, always a little unknown.
The self that responds to each summons isn’t a fixed entity in perfectionism. To each example, each person and thing, the self answers, “This is me” or “This is not me.” Each response by the self constitutes an experience; each discovery of an example worthy of your self pushes forward a change toward a “next” or higher self, or opens a new aspect of “who one is.” The self may only truly exist in responding and corresponding to the world, and it may in fact be a series of selves, each drawing a new circle around the objects with which it finds new correspondences.
Perfectionism, too, has its simple steps:
Regard all things as if they were examples, which state simply the way of life they incarnate;
Understand that each of these examples, when experienced, makes a summons to your self. Experience things in this way, always inquiring of them, “What way of life do you express? What do you say to me?” and you’ll learn what it is that lives in you;
If you are called to change your life by any example, and your self responds—you must change your life. And once you change, change again.
Your next self, too, will be challenged by examples, to find a next self still waiting beyond. Thus there is no perfection in perfectionism; the process of experience and correspondence never stops. If there could be any end in view, it would only be this: that the circle of things corresponding to you grow not wider, but infinitely wide, touching everything that exists.
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Whenever the steps of aestheticism and perfectionism are laid out, people want to know the result before they try them. “How will I actually live?” they ask. In principle, no one should know for you.
Certain things are hinted in the lives of those who tried the methods. It’s possible that these methods make people appear to withdraw from “living.” Flaubert and Thoreau seemed hermited, by the standards of their friends. Both testified explicitly that a small amount of experience, by ordinary standards, went a long way with them. Since experiences had become totally available and inhered in everything, they seemed strangely unhurried in chasing after them elsewhere, though Flaubert didn’t lose his taste for sex, or Thoreau for nature.
It’s also possible that the pursuit of these methods becomes confusingly connected with wanting to be an artist. Both Flaubert and Thoreau became writers. For each, their famous, finished works coexist with unusual, voluminous documentation of daily living, in letters or journals. Was the daily recording their true life, and the finished work a by-product, or was it the reverse? I want to believe in principle that one could live by aestheticism or perfectionism without accepting the need to become an artist, but we’ll have no proof—since anyone who did so live would leave no public record.
The best-known idea about aestheticism is that you’ll make your life a work of art. This isn’t incorrect, and it may come close to the principle that unites perfectionism with aestheticism—since perfectionism understands life as the work of making your self, either by advancing to another self or by “becoming what one is.” It should be obvious, though, for each solution, that the work must remain unfinished; the stress falls on the active heroism of perception or deliberation. Their common principle is the learned ability, by method, to make your life at every moment—and not lay yourself out on a bearskin, waiting for life to paint you.
Against the obvious criticism of these solutions as solipsistic, the effort to remake your inside world inevitably turns you outward. Mature forms of each solution return you to the community of other people, albeit in an unfamiliar way. In aestheticism, this involves the sensation that one is not only the painter of one’s life and the viewer who observes it, but a figure no different from the panoply of other forms in the painting, equally subject to their painting and viewing. In perfectionism, it emerges from an understanding of yourself as an example in the lives of others, even a negative example. Other people will surely find that you don’t correspond to their selves, and they will advance through rejection of you to a next self that leaves you behind—but your only duty is to prod and provoke, in disclosing who you truly are. You have to give yourself up partly, on both methods, to find out what you will be for others, and even invite this discovery—it will change further what you become yourself.
I hope it is obvious why these solutions are needed now—even more than when they first appeared—but maybe it needs to be said. Either you know aestheticism and perfectionism as philosophy today, or you’ll get them, disfigured, in weaker attempts at the solutions to the pressures of experience. The dawn of the twenty-first century illuminates a total aesthetic environment in the rich nations of the world, where you choose your paint colors, and drawer pulls, and extreme makeovers, and facial surgery, in the debased aestheticism called consumerism, to make yourself by buying, when you could make yourself by seeing. The radical perception of aestheticism doesn’t need always-new, store-bought beauties, and doesn’t feel them cloy and fade as soon as they are owned. In the debased perfectionism called self-help, each struggler against the limits of life is already considered wounded by experience, deficient and lost. He is taught to try through acknowledgment of common weakness to reach a baseline level of the “normal,” rather than learning perfectionism’s appreciation for peculiarity and refusal. He is kept ignorant of perfectionism’s hope for a next, unique, or higher self for everyone.
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I mistrust any authority that is happy with this world as it is. I understand delight, and being moved by the things of this world. I understand feeling strong in oneself because of one’s capabilities. I know what mania is, the lust for powers not of the ordinary run. I sympathize with gratitude for the presence of other people, and for plenty and splendor. But I cannot understand the failure to be disappointed with our experiences of our collective
world, in their difference from our imaginations and desires, which are so strong. I cannot understand the failure to wish that this world was fundamentally more than it is.
Experience tries to evade the disappointment of this world by adding peaks to it. Life becomes a race against time and a contest you try to win. Aestheticism and perfectionism make a modern attempt to transcend this world by a more intense attention to it—every day and in every situation. The concept of modern transcendence admits the hope that this world could be more than this world, though it acknowledges this is the only world there is. It holds that there is nothing behind reality, above or beneath it, but that the mind inevitably wishes there were. The human capacities for thought and desire are always excessive. We can imagine everything as other than it is. And so aestheticism and perfectionism develop ways of entering an experiential world, to apply mind to it, to add excess directly to the inert matter we know. The only way beyond, to something that truly rewards the extent of our minds, is not up and away, but in and onto.
I think each of us winds up obliged to answer what would give life meaning, no matter what we do. Many of us say today we live for happiness. The defects and vagueness of happiness lead to the choice of experience as the method of our lives. Experience, when we begin to seek it self-consciously, causes its own trouble, bringing back the permanent conditions of life—brevity, isolation, multiplicity, mortality—with renewed vehemence, and making us blame ourselves for them.
By a process of mind, the completion of the search for experience in aestheticism and perfectionism, making experience always available, turns the dynamic around once more. Here, at least, we do find the transcendence of limits, in the expansion of a mind by its own powers, reaching out to the world in experience that is ceaseless, and endless in extent as the number of worldly objects themselves.
