Beauty contra God

Nietzsche

Nietzsche places aesthetics at the core of his theory of culture. The context is his famous declaration that ‘God is dead’. ² If God is no more, then the danger, Nietzsche contends, is that once humans strip away the illusions that give sense to their lives they will find themselves confronted with a single base truth – that life is either horrible or absurd. Nietzsche (1968: 56–60) reads Hamlet as having reached this conclusion, and being paralysed by the utter meaninglessness of existence.

Nietzsche’s argument starts with the assumption that there is a primal unity (Ur-Einen) at the core of things, and it is associated with pain and contradiction. Music is the human expression that comes closest to this primal unity, producing a copy of it, ‘a repetition and recast of the world’. Through music we are taken out of ourselves by tuning into the eternal rhythms. The tragic artist or poet, as the highest example of human genius, then produces a second order of mirroring, in images and symbols. These images and symbols show the artist his own identity with ‘the heart of the world’, in the form of ‘a dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure’. The poet has two selves. One is the subjectively willing and desiring man – descendant of the satyr. The other is the objective creator of the image who transcends his individuality and regains the primal oneness. The dream scene he creates plays the role of a redeeming illusion; but it is mere appearance (Schein), covering over a profane and chaotic reality.

Nietzsche goes on to posit a primordial artist of the world – a kind of god figure. The poet, in the act of creation, coalesces with this primal artist. We individual humans are merely images and projections for this primal artist, so that we have ‘our highest dignity in our significance as works of art’. As a consequence, existence may only be justified aesthetically.

Let me try to translate as much of this as I can into a language that may make sense. At the base level, the life of the individual is swept along like a rudderless boat on a stormy sea of passions, drives, ambitions, anxieties and insecurities. This reality is arbitrary and chaotic, without sense – not much different to animal existence, hence the reference to the satyr. Meaning is superimposed in the form of images, symbols and, above all, stories – at the highest level, ones provided by poets and artists. If the poet manages to tap into primordial underpinning forces then there may be a fusion of the passions and drives with the dream images, a fusion that brings vitality and exuberance. In the most profound example of this for Nietzsche, that of Greek tragedy, the ‘I’ – with all its self- conscious pretensions, its egoism, and its vanity – is annihilated through suffering, freeing the individual from self, thus liberating him or her to join the primal oneness of existence. The experience is both consoling and exhilarating. The form that has been created (say, the Oedipus tragedy) gains a timeless archetypal quality, one which then lives on in many of the later dream-creations of the culture.

Where does aesthetics fit in here? Let me extrapolate. Oedipus gains stature and dignity through the story that Sophocles tells. We, the audience, are moved, even inspired, by the form, a carefully worked structure, with precise dramatic orchestrations, which comes to a climax – the climax itself as if preordained from within the logic of the story. It is the aesthetic form – the written and performed drama – that provides the meaning, and justifies the existence of Oedipus, and of all those who identify with him, those who walk imaginatively in his shoes. The drama is larger than the individual, its form timeless, and stamped with the authority of perfection. Oedipus’ existence is hereby justified aesthetically. Hamlet’s dying request to Horatio to ‘tell my story’ may be read in the same way.

The German verb that Nietzsche uses for existence and the world being ‘justified’ is rechtfertigen, meaning literally to ‘make right’. In one of his assertions Nietzsche puts his maxim even more forcefully, as ‘eternally made right’. The suggestion is that what is at stake is not so much the transcendent inspiration of the beautiful moment; it is rather the making of right order. There is an order of things. The work of art lifts individuals out of the chaos, the absurdity and the profane squalor of ordinary life, and connects them with that order, thereby justifying their existence. (In fact, Nietzsche is ambivalent about the existence of such an order, regularly switching to a more nihilistic view, even in The Birth of Tragedy.)

Religious dread

Kierkegaard wrestled with the same issue but took a quite different tack. He distinguished the ‘aesthetic’ from the ‘religious’: they are different spheres, with the ‘ethical’ posited as a third. Kierkegaard satirizes the ‘aesthetic’ at length in the section of his book Either–Or titled ‘The Diary of a Seducer’ (Kierkegaard, 1959). The seducer strings out an exquisite sequence of beautiful moments in the slow seduction of an innocent young woman – his main pleasure is in imagining each calculated stage of the conquest. This Don Juan personality shows no hint of attachment to anything sacred. The aesthetic is the realm of fantasy, sensation and pleasure.

For Kierkegaard, the religious has nothing to do with pleasure. It is associated with dread and paradox. It would have been dreadful to be Mary, the mother of Jesus, or to be one of Jesus’ disciples (Kierkegaard, 1954: 75–6). Kierkegaard alludes to the experience of being in the presence of the divine as overwhelming the individual with some kind of incomprehensible dark awe. The ancient Greeks held it to be deadly for a mortal to look directly on the face of a divinity – Semele is incinerated when her lover, Zeus, shows himself to her as he is, undisguised.

Raphael gives tangible expression to a similar line of thought. In his Sistine Madonna, Mary and the infant Jesus enter the world from behind green curtains – both have a wild and tragically haunted look in their eyes. Both seem to see into the future, including the son’s adult mission – taking on the world, with all its conflicts, confusions and evils, and knowing the way his life will end in thirty years time, in betrayal and crucifixion. The mother’s dread is compounded by the sense that her cherished little boy will, inevitably, grow up and leave her. The effect that the presence of Mary and Jesus has on the viewer is to induce a mood of gravity and awe, of having entered into another realm, one that is timeless, resonantly mysterious and steeped in deep truths. It makes sense, in line with William James (1960), to call this experience ‘religious’. Here, an aesthetic object – the beautiful painting created by the virtuoso artist – is the means to the religious. The aesthetic is a vehicle for the religious.

In Mark’s account of the life of Jesus the followers, or disciples, become increasingly fearful of their teacher. In one episode, as the master (as they call him) approaches them in the middle of the night, walking across the Sea of Galilee, the wind rising, they are terrified – and see him as some sort of monstrous phantasm. He taunts them: ‘Don’t fear!’ The command has the opposite effect, inducing mindless terror (Carroll, 2007: 43–62). What they experience is of a quite different order from the titillating sensations and pleasurable fantasies of Kierkegaard’s seducer. Mark very carefully builds up to the walking-on-water scene and then dramatizes it so as to focus on the unholy fear traumatizing the disciples. In English, dread does seem to be the apposite word, for the ghastly unhinged mood that has overwhelmed the followers.

Edmund Burke, writing almost a century before Kierkegaard, aestheticized a parallel distinction. In his book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke contrasted the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime in nature arouses astonishment, ‘and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’ (Burke, 1821: 97). An ocean may, in its vast power, induce terror – as such, it is sublime. To give a later example, J.M.W. Turner’s paintings of ships buffeted by storms at sea are sublime. Burke adds that the fear of death may stimulate feelings of sublime terror.

Kant, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790), continues Burke’s distinction, defining the sublime as the ‘absolutely great’, and agreeing that nature is dynamically sublime, and thereby a source of fear (1952: 94, 109). Kant reflects that war has something sublime about it (1952: 113).

The beautiful, by contrast, induces love, or a passion of a similar type. Yeats played on this polarity with his line, ‘a terrible beauty is born’. Some of the news photography that captured images of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, and the collapse of the towers and the ruins that were left, gained its power by tapping into the sublime as Burke conceived of it (Bowler, 2007). Breathtaking and terrible, the images are intensified by the grandeur of the scene, of 110-storey skyscrapers brought down, leaving a vast gothic ruin. It was as if, in the news story that followed the disaster, it was the buildings themselves that became the tragic heroes, not the 3000 people who were killed. In this setting, the human victims were too small, too familiar and too ephemeral to be able to call upon the sacred powers of compassion when overshadowed by sublime terror.

Are we straying back into the religious domain here? It may be that the moment we move into proximity with death we shift from the aesthetic into the religious. And, indeed, the effect of the news photography from 11 September depends on the profound tragic undercurrent, of the knowledge that 3000 people died on this site, and in nightmarish circumstances of fire, fumes and collapsing mountains of steel, concrete and glass. Looking on, it could have been any of us who inhabit Western cities trapped inside – New York merely served as the prototype.

The modernist German composer, Stockhausen, described the destruction of the twin towers in New York as the greatest modern work of art. His comment was met with outrage. The outrage is instructive. It implied that to view an actual tragedy purely in aesthetic terms is inhuman. Intense suffering – in this case that of victims, their families and their friends – demands respect, tact and empathy from those standing outside the intimate circle. Face to face with a fellow human in profound pain, it is natural to lower the eyes, to go silent and to share some of the gravity. Here, detachment is shameful. And, to continue further along this line of thought, shame is the holy emotion – blushing, lowering eyes and head, exposing the reddened neck, with the spirit sinking, all suggestive of the feeling that one is being judged from above.

Stockhausen’s insensitive remark helps us to distinguish the aesthetic from the religious. The remark is cold to human suffering. The implication is that once we enter into the vicinity of tragic suffering we have passed through into some kind of sacred domain, perhaps a bit like Alice passing through the looking glass. Once inside this sacred domain, the sense of shame is awakened, and a mood of devout trepidation humbles us. We feel inwardly the need to tread softly and to speak with reverence. The experience does not feel ‘aesthetic’ – the word here jars, and seems inappropriate. Its tone is false. Likewise, when Kant reflects that war has something sublime about it, he is straying close to tastelessness.

The beautiful moment does not allow for shame. As such, it lacks religious depth. But the beautiful moment does allow for wonder and awe – as, for instance, experienced on solitary excursions into grand and wild settings in nature, perhaps intensified by extreme weather. The Byronic tradition in Romantic poetry celebrated this type of experience, as did the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner. There can be a hush, a reverence, and an awed transcendence of self, say, out alone at night in a boat on a lake, under the stars (an example used by Rousseau). Indeed, it is not far-fetched to talk of ‘worshipping in nature’.

Gerald Manley Hopkins linked the beauty of nature directly back to God. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Nature becomes a metaphor in Hopkins’ poetry for the religious dimension. In ‘The Windhover’, the majesty of a falcon’s dawn flight stirs the poet’s heart, but it is merely a pale anticipation for him of the presence of Christ. Inspiration through beauty in nature is a kind of meditative stimulus for the true object of meditation, Christ the chevalier:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

The God that Hopkins worshipped has dimmed, if not died for most in the contemporary West, yet the spirit evoked in a poem like ‘The Windhover’ survives undiminished. How can this be?

There is a potentially helpful parallel in sport. The ancient Greeks often attributed sporting excellence to divine intervention – a god breathing through an athlete, or bathing him in a sacred glow. Their many sporting carnivals, led by the Olympic Games, were religious festivals. Human achievement was celebrated within the context of profound religious forces (and in the case of the Pythian Games, held every four years in Delphi, this achievement included musical and dramatic competition). More specifically, there was the concept of eurhuthmia – ‘beautiful rhythm’. The belief was that humans may transcend their profane everyday selves through excellent performance – finding union with the divine, and achieving a type of religious redemption. The spectator too would be inspired by beautiful performance. Plato, in his theory of education, praises the teaching of ‘beautiful rhythm’, as producing a more general gracefulness in the individual, and a harmony of spirit (Plato, 1935: 552a and 400d).

The Greeks justified the existence of their winning athletes through art. The poet Pindar wrote odes celebrating victors at the different Games. Celebratory memorial sculptures (the Charioteer in Delphi is the notable survivor) were also common. Polyzalos, one of the Deinomenid tyrants of Syracuse, the Greek colony in Sicily, entered a chariot in the Pythian Games of 478 BC or 474 BC, and won. In order to celebrate, and perpetuate the memory of the victory, he had a bronze group sculpted. It included charioteer, chariot, and two separate horses with their grooms. The charioteer, minus one arm, and a number of fragments from the other figures have survived. The whole was dedicated to Apollo – according to a partly preserved inscription on the pedestal (Petsas, 2004: 115–18).

The life-size bronze Charioteer is a masterpiece of elegant poise and concentration. He is timeless, in his embodiment of the human individual totally focused on a performance at which he is highly trained and skilled. Through his complete absorption in the task at hand, driving the chariot, he becomes selfless – he has lost all self-consciousness, having given himself over to the act, subjecting himself to its demands. In this, there is transcendence of self, and transcendence of the physicality of the furious chariot drive around the narrow Delphi stadium. His beautifully balanced form and composure of expression gives an otherworldly, spiritual cast to his presence. It is an austere, elegant and simple beauty.

There is one vital aspect of this sculpture closed off to modern viewers. The Delphic charioteer was created as an offering to the god Apollo – in praise, gratitude and homage. Apollo has long disappeared from our cultural universe, which raises the question of whether the Charioteer has become an example of the aesthetic stripped of its original religious content.

There is more going on in this case, even today, than pure aesthetics. Delphi as a place is itself beautiful – the integrated ensemble of sanctuary, town and physical location. Yet, in addition, there is a deeper mystery in the Delphic air, an enchantment. Some places on earth, and some spaces inside buildings (Bourges Cathedral comes to my mind), seem charged with a special mood or aura – one feels one has entered into a realm that is outside the normal. These may plausibly be deemed ‘sacred sites’. ³ We talk about ‘the spirit of the place’ – as if there are some extraordinary locations which have their own persona, a persona with a metaphysical dimension. Delphi is one of these places, and the category ‘aesthetic’ seems an inadequate representation of the experience of being there.

Transcendence

Peter Berger coined the phrase signals of transcendence to refer to ‘phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our “natural” reality but that appear to point beyond that reality’. Berger uses the example of a mother cradling a child who has been terrified by a nightmare. She plays the role of the ‘high priestess of protective order’, giving the child the sense of an order of enduring stability greater than the threat of the moment, an order in which it can trust (Berger, 1970: 52–61).

The mother embodies a fixed and eternal higher order for her child. By her authority – illustrated in the child’s trust – she bestows legitimacy on that order. As long as that order exists, the child need have little fear.

The nihilistic Nietzsche would dismiss this order as illusory, even if it plays a redemptive role – as such it belongs for him in the aesthetic sphere. Here is a pivotal either–or for the discussion at hand. There is no categorical proof which will decide the issue; no definitive argument on either side. Whether it is the case that there is some kind of absolute order which the mother represents in this scene; or rather, according to the alternative view, that she is helping to create a useful fiction to calm the fears of her child, we cannot answer definitively.

Let me shift to a quite different example. The wedding ceremony attempts to put the stamp of eternity on a temporal union. There are, of course, a range of other motives behind the expenditure today of $30,000 typically on a wedding, or $100,000 regularly, or vastly more exceptionally. There is vanity driving the public demonstration of wealth, status and taste. There is fantasy identification with celebrities – the bride dressed in royal extravagance; travelling by limousine; being photographed in locations with aristocratic associations such as grand neo-classical buildings, exotic public gardens or exclusive beaches backed by yachts and private piers; and celebrating later at a reception designed to mimic a five-star hotel banquet. It is little wonder that brides often suffer the ‘post-wedding blues’, on discovering that they were fairy-tale princesses just for a day, and that their mundane living has not been transformed or redeemed. For them, the term ‘redemptive illusion’ does seem to fit the wedding, an illusion that quickly lost its saving power.

However, while there is truth to the cynical interpretation, for many, probably most, there is a higher aspiration. The beautiful moment is celebrated in communal ritual. The bride and groom take vows that commit them to each other ‘until death do us part’. The vows used to be taken ‘before God’ – it was his authority that witnessed and sealed them, confirming the bond with his sacred injunction. Today, the site may shift from church altar to out-of-doors, with the vows taken within a beautiful landscape, witnessed as it were by the vast and timeless beyond – or whatever higher forces are imagined to move there. The wedding guests also serve as witnesses. The whole is designed to transform a mundane relationship between two mortals, subject to the potential fickleness of desire and circumstance, into a timeless union woven from sacred thread. The driving ambition here is religious.

The wedding is preserved, and potentially for eternity, in photo and video. Afterwards, when the images are viewed, the category of praise is aesthetic – ‘how beautiful it looks’, ‘how stunning she was in her wedding dress’. Yet, this is another instance of the aesthetic serving as a means to express the religious. The wedding occasion, at its best, casts a charm over the couple. This is secular benediction, a type of blessing. It infuses the union with magic – making of it a charmed union. Here ‘enchantment’ serves as the fitting interpretative category, and it is religious not aesthetic. Thus the wedding acts as a form of resistance to the ‘disenchantment of the world’, posited by Max Weber as the leading symptom of nihilism in Western modernity (1948: 139–56).

The later Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, quotes Stendhal’s definition of the beautiful with approval: ‘a promise of happiness’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 539–42). This casts the beautiful illusion in a more favourable light, as something transcendental, pointing beyond the human plane. The wedding may provide just such a promise. Nietzsche, by the way, was mocking Kant’s central argument that judgements of taste must be disinterested, that beauty brings pleasure without interest – a discussion that is not relevant here.

Tolstoy

Edmund Burke suggested that the sublime may be experienced in proximity to death. Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace, devoted several chapters to the death of Prince Andrei (Tolstoy, 2007: 978–86). Tolstoy’s death scene is free from any formal religion or conventional religious belief – Andrei is typical of the Russian writer’s principal characters in finding himself entirely left to his own resources in seeking meaning in the course of his life. Dying brings on an existential confrontation with whatever truth might be lurking in the shadows, if any.

Andrei knows he is dying and in his final days swings between clinging on to life, because of his beloved Natasha, who nurses him, and feeling an exhilarated liberation, losing himself in a euphoria of benevolence and love. Death comes easily in the end. His mood transmits itself to the two women who love him and who are close by, his sister Marya and Natasha. The women do not weep. Their feelings are so strong that they are not affected by the dreadful surface manifestation of death; they don’t speak of him to each other, because words would not convey their feelings, and in any case, towards the end, he is not really with them any more. Then he dies:

Natasha and Princess Marya also wept now, but they did not weep from their own personal grief; they wept from a reverent emotion that came over their souls before the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before them.

Proximity to death for each of Andrei, Natasha, and Marya, but in different ways, infuses them with a sense of the transcendent. They are transported out of normal life and into a sort of cosmic sacred chamber – a chamber in which no explicit god is present. ‘Dread’ does not seem the right category to describe the mood that Tolstoy evokes. There is gravity, solemness, euphoria, deep grief – and reverence. One might say, at the most, that the presence of death, followed by its reality, creates a backdrop charged with dread. But the drama enacted in front of that backdrop is conducted in a different emotional key. The experience is religious only in the most diffuse way, religious in William James’ sense of having the gravity and power to wash away the fear of death (James, 1960: 64).

Religion without beauty

The religious does not necessarily require the aesthetic. Experience of the transcendent may have nothing to do with beauty in any of its forms. In modernity, perhaps truth is the one enduring, universal category, the one living tree left standing in a metaphysical wasteland from which both God and beauty have been blown away like ephemeral leaves. (The ethical category of the ‘good’ also survives, but it lies outside the scope of this discussion.)

Art and personal experience are the best teachers when it comes to the central and difficult truths. It is art that works at the frontier of our understanding, taking account of changing times, helping us understand the world we inhabit, and our place within it. The sociology of culture has a long tradition of using works of art as archetypes through which to illustrate and explore social motifs and their evolution – notable examples are Max Weber’s use of Pilgrim’s Progress in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and David Riesman’s use of stories from many sources, including comic books, in The Lonely Crowd.

The question then becomes, which works of contemporary art stand out in terms of finding a language that may speak to the times? Where has new territory been gained in relation to the big questions? The selection is justified, or not, by how much the work helps to illuminate, and with what degree of power and originality.

My personal choice is Deadwood, an American cable-television series of 36 episodes, made by Home Box Office (HBO) between 2004 and 2007. Deadwood is suggestive of a metaphysics that challenges the discussion so far. The setting is a frontier gold-rush camp bereft of civilized order: life is a struggle for survival in which power is the only law, and the powerful are driven by greed, lust and sadism. Deadwood casts its characters into a world of Hobbesean anarchy, stripped of all security and predictability, and it observes how they behave.

Al Swearengen is the central character. He runs a bar-room brothel. He has no illusions about life, having deliberately left places of comfort and stability farther east, for an elemental Darwinian frontier where there is no moral law, where everything is permitted, life is cheap, and men survive on their wits and their capacity to mobilize effective violence – Swearengen beats women and kills men, and does so mainly unblinkingly, without conscience. His central ambition is to survive. He explores his own thoughts in long Hamlet-like monologues devoted to reflecting on life, human character and the strategies he needs to employ whenever new threats appear, which they do regularly throughout the series. Swearengen gains satisfaction from acting as the de facto head of the town, directing events, keeping balances, and outsmarting those who challenge his power. An ironic detachment from life, a freedom from illusion and a formidable practical intelligence combine to make him a kind of political genius, able to see through the motives of others, and plot, chess-like, the sequence of moves he needs to make in order to get his way.

In spite of his own cold-blooded brutishness, he displays some care for his staff, who all love and admire him. He grudgingly likes some other inhabitants of the town, whom he treats with a bemused but harsh indulgence. Through his own complex personality, and the precarious civic order that he manages to preserve, he makes possible acts of selflessness that shine as beacons of hope through a ghastly medieval nightmare. Deadwood has space for human goodness. Charity is embodied in half a dozen wilful, strong-minded and eccentric characters. These include the gentlemanly Wild Bill Hickok, his devotee Charlie Utter, a manic doctor, the drunken man-fearing Calamity Jane, Swearengen’s favourite whore Trixie, the gold-miner Ellsworth and Joanie Stubbs the proprietor of another brothel.

The Deadwood camp is a society without beauty. The streets are awash with mud and excrement, which soils the garments of everybody who crosses them. Corpses are fed in full public view to the local Chinese boss’s pigs. The communal meeting-places are bars, brothels and gambling houses – or combinations of all three. These places are stocked with semi-naked, unwashed and malodorous prostitutes who are treated like cattle – as, for instance, when they are examined for venereal disease. When the richest mining magnate in the world arrives he buys the hotel for his accommodation, smashes walls down to give himself more space, but does not bother to repair the damage – this is not a town in which one wastes energy on pleasant decor. The language spoken spews out of the sewer – a constant staccato of foul swearing (the main reason the series was never shown on free-to-air television). Odd characters try to maintain a contrasting decorum by speaking with wooden Puritan formality, or florid Victorian pomposity. Deadwood is a wasteland, without a shred of aesthetic charm.

Yet, the series Deadwood is uplifting. It paints a world without god or moral law, viciously misogynist, centred on a town that floats on mud and shit, murder, drunkenness, gambling and prostitution, with a pig-sty serving as the combined funeral parlour/cemetery. Four of its endearing characters – Utter, Jane, Doc and Ellsworth – are explicitly cast without style, elegance or refinement. Their manner is deliberately and flagrantly anti-aesthetic. Swearengen has charisma, but he generally appears with greasy hair, unshaven, dressed in a dirty and crumpled suit, or in his underwear, drinking heavily, urinating or abusing one of his prostitutes as she performs fellatio on him.

So, wherein lies the redemption, the signal of transcendence? There is a rugged, irrepressible vitality in this town. Life is stripped of its canopy of comfort – customs, rituals, pastimes, pleasantries and sociability – and above all stripped of the normal illusions and hopes that buoy individuals along their mortal journey. There is no hiding the viciousness and the vice that infests the human condition when it is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Everyone in Deadwood lives close to the existential bone, often driven to question the whys and the wherefores. Swearengen leads, with mordant eloquent monologues querying the sense of it all, some delivered to the head of a dead Indian chief that he keeps close by in a box.

The good characters are engagingly likeable – partly because of their raw honesty of perception and acidly expressed opinion, and a warm, companionable, derogatory banter they trade amongst themselves. There develops an unspoken code of respect and trust loosely binding them, a code of honour that is the more intense and admirable because it flourishes in an entirely unsympathetic environment. A strange type of epic heroism rises out of the slime.

The abiding sense left by the series is of the power of human potential – of the capacity in some individuals for a resilience, ingenuity, benevolence and empathy that blesses them with a kind of nobility of soul. What might be called ‘redemptive’ here resides in the character of the chosen individuals and how they act within the harsh circumstances into which they find themselves cast. It is to do with being, with the quality of the ‘I’, and with the way its presence resonates in the world. Neither beauty nor the existence of some external divinity has relevance.

The category of the ‘aesthetic’ cannot be excluded entirely from Deadwood without qualification. The series is filmed with high aesthetic values – it is visually striking. The sets, the costumes, and the staging of characters and crowds are all carried through with stylish care. The casting and the acting work to brilliant effect, conjuring up a Dickens-like vividness of character. The script, led by the Swearengen monologues, often achieves Shakespearean virtuosity. Finally, what engages the viewer is a composed story – an aesthetic form woven out of the rough and greasy wool of actual everyday life, in just the same manner as Sophocles wove Oedipus the King.

Conclusion

Max Weber emphasized that the central problem facing the modern West is that of meaning; a challenge of culture, in the face of a pervasive trend towards disenchantment. The main culprit is the driving force of ‘rationalization’ embedded in the capitalist economy, a force that is underpinned by science. Science, Tolstoy bluntly put it, is meaningless (Weber, 1948: 143). As the gods of the old religions die out, what is emerging to take their place? Here is the background context for this article, and the question of whatever continuing role the religious and the aesthetic may be playing as sources of meaning.

The aesthetic has not replaced the religious in modernity. If there has been any change, it is that the aesthetic has become more prominent, in serving as a vehicle for religious experience. For one, it has largely taken the place of church ritual. The quest for a beautiful moment that is more than a pleasurable sensation has moved centre-stage in the drama of life-meaning; this is the quest for the beautiful moment that signals some form of transcendence. For most of those for whom God has withdrawn from the scene, he has been replaced by the sense of a beyond in which timeless, if obscure, metaphysical forces move.

As the discussion has progressed, the question of beauty replacing God has, stage by stage, become marginal. We have discovered, unwittingly, that it is not the vital question. Three more significant issues have arisen in its place.

The first issue is that of truth versus illusion. Once God is dead, does meaning merely come, as Nietzsche was inclined to assert, in the form of redemptive illusions? Nietzsche pioneers the nihilistic trend in modernity, which denies that there is any such thing as absolute truth. He asserts that everything is relative.

The argument that might be put against Nietzsche has two components. A code of absolute moral laws is known instinctively among humans. There is a shared inner knowing that hurting another human being without due cause is wrong. At the extreme, radical evil, such as was perpetrated at Auschwitz, elicits the immediate reaction that this was fundamentally wrong. The reaction is absolute and categorical, and does not need reflection or intellectualization. Likewise, humans respond with collective warmth and affirmation to acts of selfless heroism. It is as if knowledge of moral law is inborn; such knowledge is one of the constituents of being human. ⁴

That is the ethical argument contra Nietzsche. There is also a religious argument. The sociological fact is that the overwhelming majority of people, even in modern secular Western societies, claim to believe in God or some metaphysical force or entity existing beyond the material plane. ⁵ Popular culture provides a range of examples of transcendent experience, from Romantic love to sporting glory, to the fulfilment in vocational work found by doctors, detectives, master chefs, and the top performers of dance and song. Above all, there is the experience, to which I am about to return, of ‘religious dread’. Nietzsche would reject this argument, asserting that in all the cases cited here humans are deluding themselves, out of fear of the abyss of meaninglessness.

By means of what criteria might we judge Nietzsche’s argument? He is not able to provide a logical case based on incontrovertible facts. Metaphysics never works with such a degree of surety. His argument needs to persuade in the court of human opinion, a court in which the jury decides on the basis of the evidence and how plausibly it accords with its experience of character and life. In that court, the overwhelming weight of opinion will find, today, against Nietzsche.

The second major issue that has arisen during the preceding discussion of aesthetics and religion is whether the truly religious depends on dread. The experience of a beautiful landscape may evoke transcendent wonder, but it lacks depth. There seems an ephemeral quality to naïve inspiration, in contrast to the lasting imprint left by some experiences of religious dread. The implication is that religious experience may occur on two quite different planes, a superficial and a profound one.

But Tolstoy’s description of the death of Prince Andrei is suggestive of an overpowering, life-shaking, even life-transforming experience in which dread was not the predominant emotion for any of the characters. This example puts in doubt the theory which posits a simple polarity between the beautiful and the sublime. That theory fails to adequately fit the spectrum of religious experience, especially in the modern secular West.

The third issue that has arisen during the discussion of the aesthetic and the religious pivots on Deadwood, taken as an exemplary case study. This television series has been used as a measuring stick to calibrate the religious in post-church modernity. In its world, individuals struggle to negotiate their lives without the help of any externally provided supports – not church, not community, not moral law or legal system, and not even shared customs and civilities. By implication, where these supports do exist in the actual contemporary West their contribution to existential meaning is illusory.

The question that thus arises is, once all the consoling and securing illusions have been stripped away, what is left, what survives? Deadwood works with the ugly – the brutish, the squalid, and the profane – as the base human reality, and examines whether any green shoots emerge from the mud. What it discovers is that half a dozen individuals of strong character throw themselves into the fray with relish, a wry smile and a defiant sticking to principle, and with loyalty to those with whom they feel affinity – those whom they judge good. They are like a chosen band, although they themselves would baulk at such language. They are cast in contradistinction from the others who inhabit this society: including a ruthless mining magnate, a psychopath, a slimy saloon proprietor, an unctuous mayor, a demented reverend and a diverse throng of drunks, drug addicts, simpletons, miners and Chinese.

The chosen endow the category of ‘goodness’ or ‘virtue’ with an absolute quality – they will die for it. They are all, however, secondary players in the drama, performing as a kind of Greek chorus. This does not make them lesser. Al Swearengen is the central, most intriguing and compelling figure. His character is different. Swearengen achieves moments of goodness, for which the chosen band love him. But he is not a good man, far from it, nor does he strive to become one. He does take some covert pleasure in being liked for his generous moments.

Swearengen’s story is rather that of the solitary journey. The surface motive is survival, but his monologues, both in their content, and in what they represent, indicate that he is on a quest. The quest has something to do with taking on very difficult circumstances, and wrestling his way through, not shirking any difficulty or conflict, using his wits, his will, his nerve and his charm. He is contemptuous of the weak, the pretentious, and those who live on false hopes and misty illusions (except for his protégés). While pitching himself full on into the fray, he yet retains a sceptical detachment. He provides a running commentary as he goes, reflecting on the sense of it all, and where he might find some small gratification.

Al Swearengen stands as a strong negation of Nietzsche’s nihilism, in that he lives without the need of redeeming illusions, yet maintains confidence in who he is and what he does. At the same time, he is an altogether different character from the absurdist anti-heroes of the mid-twentieth century, such as Albert Camus’ Meursault, from the 1942 novel L’Étranger. Swearengen feels no need to postulate some metaphysics of human dignity in the face of an absurd and indifferent universe, and he is much more vitally engaged with life than, say, the depressive Meursault. It is almost as if he has been created with Nietzsche’s argument in mind – for his shrewd, clear-eyed, unsentimental view of life is a defining character strength.

There is no god in the Deadwood picture, and the aesthetic is irrelevant within the story. But a blessing comes upon the chosen band, and even upon Al Swearengen himself, and with it a zest for life, and an affirmation. Life is endowed with fundamental value. All of this is religious in a quiet, implicit and secular way.

To sum up: contra Weber, the religious has not been disenchanted out of existence in modernity – if religion is conceived of in William James’ broad terms, as primal reality to be approached solemnly and with dignity, and linked with some feeling of transcendence beyond the normal human plane. Nor can it, contra Nietzsche, be plausibly reduced to a subspecies of the aesthetic. The religious is finding new, secular modes of expression in the modern West, in a world in which individuals are more likely to pursue their quests for meaning on their own, in experimental ways and with their main resource being their own given ontological qualities.