(BLOG SERIES) Rebel Music - The Rise of the Ugly [Part 3.1]
III.
The
Rise of the Ugly
Ockhamite Insanity
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| William of Ockham |
Although we are not going to focus much on this part of world history,
the decline of traditional western civilization (and, inevitably, art) was
kicked off by (of all people) a Scholastic philosopher by the name of William
of Ockham (1285 – 1347). If Plato’s conception of the forms, or natures, started the building of the west; the demolition of it
started precisely by denying the existence of natures. Ockham started (or at
least popularized) the philosophical idea of Nominalism:
that there are no natures, only ways of “naming” things (hence the term
“Nominalism”, from the Latin Nomen,
translated as “name” in English). We “name” Harry and Sally as “human”, but
there’s no such thing as human nature. We “name” Fido and Rover as “dog”, but
there’s no such thing as “dog-ness” that objectively binds them together to a
single species.
What drove Ockham to think such a thing was his Theological Voluntarism: that God can do anything he wills. Regardless
of whatever the circumstances of the world, He could’ve willed otherwise. The
idea of forms seems for Ockham to limit God’s power over a created thing; that,
for instance, He can only actualize the potentials in human being in accordance
with the human’s human nature. In fact, Ockham’s voluntarism is so radical that
he even thought that, had God willed it, it would’ve been moral for us to hate
Him!
And so, insanity covered the land of the Logos! Ockham’s radically
anti-Thomistic ideas has affected his views, to give a specific example, on causality:
what, in the real world, is specifically caused to be (let’s call this “B”) by
a specific thing (this is “A”) could’ve been otherwise. For Ockham, A need not
necessarily cause B. Had God willed otherwise, B could’ve been brought to be by
C, or D, or E, or even nothing at all but God:
Whatever God produces by the mediation of secondary causes, he can
immediately produce and conserve in the absence of such causes… Every effect
that God is able to produce by the mediation of a secondary cause he is able to
produce immediately by himself.[i]
Friction may be the cause of match being lighted up by fire, but for
Ockham, it could have been a rabbit, or a tuna fish, or even nothing!
Ockhamism, unfortunately, overshadowed Thomism as the years of philosophical inquiry
passed by. David Hume (1711 – 1776), seems to have developed the nominalist
view on causation. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume writes that we regard two things
to be causally connected (once again, let’s use A and B) simply because we
perceive them as causally connected, but these connections are actually “loose
and separate”. When A causes B, we can only say so because it commonly happens
that B follows A, but there’s nothing in B that guarantees that A is it cause,
or that there’s nothing in A that guarantees that it is able to cause B. The
“causing” of A and the “being caused” by B are two separate events that have no
intrinsic connection with each other. The throwing of the stone and the stone’s
breaking of the glass are two separate events, and hence there’s no natural
connection with the stone’s being thrown and the breaking of the glass. Who
knows? The throwing of the stone could’ve caused raining instead.[ii]
The Ockhamite revolution has spread not only in Metaphysics, but also
in other areas of human life and culture. It has led to a philosophy of
politics that has its grounding only in the Lockean idea of mere conventional
“Social Contracts”, instead of the Aristotelian view that humans are naturally
“social animals”[iii].
Morality no longer has its basis on the Natural Law, which has led to today’s
rampant moral insanity by way of relativism. Religion, too, has had a cultural
downgrading (this, by the way, started with the Protestant reformation, better
called “the Protestant Revolution”) through the standardization of scientism[iv].
There’s more to this, but what’s important is for us to grasp the
basics. With all of these in the background, it’s now time to jump into our
topic: Art. Specifically, on the decline of music and its effect on culture.
Duchamp and the Cult of
the Ugly
As the demons of modernism spread throughout the Church and society,
with people like Pope Pius X, with all the similarities of an Old Testament
prophet, warning us of it[v],
it seems that the culture dropped its guard with regards to art. Just when
everybody was enjoying all the works of artists like Michaelangelo, along came
the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968).
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| Marcel Duchamp |
If before, art was supposed to communicate divine truths and proper
moral standards so that through it we may learn reverence and virtue and proper
judgment, Duchamp’s art (or at least some of it) had the aim of mocking all of
it.
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| Duchamp, Fountain (1917) |
His work entitled Fountain (1917)
is just a urinal with a signature “R. Mutt 1917” in it. Nothing more. His aim
was to mock the world of art and to insult artistry. One document explaining Fountain says, “[i]f you want to break all the
rules of the artistic tradition, Duchamp reasoned, why not begin discarding its
most fundamental values: beauty and artisanship. The readymades were Duchamp’s
answer to the question, [h]ow can one make works of art that are not ‘of art’?”[vi]
The document also explains what the term “readymade” means: it is “a
work of art without an artist to make it.”[vii]
With Duchamp, the beauty that once pervaded all works of art, and the effort
that artists once exerted to attain it (which implies the importance of virtues
like prudence and patience in making it, thus allowing art to be a tool for
moral training), was now thrown into the bin. The revolution sparked by Duchamp
was an attack against not only beauty, but aesthetic virtue and virtue in
general. There was no more standard for art, no more importance for society. To
hell with it all! Here is the start of the cult of the ugly.
Declining Art, Declining
People
The Christianity of the old West, centered on the belief on the
incarnation, of God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ, was reversed
through the perversion of modernism. Now, it is man wanting to be God. What
matters now is his rules, his standards! Hence the birth of relativism, not
only in morality but in art as well.
Following the footsteps of Duchamp comes the artist Tracy Emin (born in
1963) (the fact that this woman can even be called an ‘artist’ gives me a
headache). Once Emin produced a work of art called My Bed,
created in 1998. It’s just a bed, with unorganized sheets and trash like
bottles and old newspapers beside it. Sir Roger Scruton once commented about
it: “This is modern life, presented in all its randomness and disorder.”[viii]
Once asked by an interviewer on what makes My Bed an
artwork rather than mere disordered bed, Emin responds, “because I say that it
is”.[ix]
“Because I say that it is”: the mantra of modern relativism. Why are
you doing that even though people will think of it as a moral abomination? Because I do what I want
to do. Why do you
think such-and-such an artwork is beautiful despite the fact that it looks like
a freaking mess? Because it fits my taste. Why do you listen to Oasis’ “My Big Mouth” despite the fact that its
rhythm is forced? Because this is what I want to listen to. Splendor, harmony, and integrity are
no longer the requirements for doing art. All you have to do is call something
“art” and it automatically becomes one, even if its dull, messy, and broken.
With relativism, we come to the heart of modernism. The ego is the
center of all: me, myself, and I. Duchamp’s art not only mocked traditional standards of beauty, but it
also opened up to another conclusion: that anything can be a work of art. How
can this happen? Well, it all depends on you.
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| Emin, My Bed (1998) |
As art goes, so is culture. As art shaped our imagination, it has
thereby shaped our humanity and the society we belong to. As artists like Sarah
Lucas produced works like Got a Salmon on (Prawn) and Chicken Knickers, so did our standards on sexual morality became lower and lower. By
the time Martin Creed produced his Sick Films
(which basically has people being filmed while clawing their throats so that
they would vomit), our manners have become too animalistic.
Even with architecture, our ideals of it have become so ugly. The once
grand and mystical public buildings (especially the churches) have been
replaced with cubes. One of the pioneers of modern architecture, Le Corbusier
(1887 – 1965), had proposed a solution for Paris to replace their traditional
buildings and overshadow them with tall boxes. The issue was that he was
proposing this solution even though there was no problem[x].
The American architect Louis Sullivan (1856 – 1924), properly called “the
father of skyscrapers”, coined the phrase “form follows function”. Architecture
has now been reduced to mere utility, to mere usefulness. No longer can we look
at our buildings and marvel at the human mind who designed it, and hence of the
Divine Creator that endowed man with creative power. All that’s important is
what the building does. Modern architecture is the right imagery for a busy
culture, a culture that does not know how to reflect, a culture that does not
know how to pray. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit
quietly on a room alone”, says French Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal. He
wrote it in the 1600s, but it seems to describe the modern era more than it
does the time when it was written, for we live in a restless era, not knowing
that it can rest in God.
Since we have shunned beauty, we have no choice but to settle on the
ugly. To grab an idea we talked about above, we had no choice but to dispose our
human faculties in absorbing the unattractive, and hence in settling with
falsehood and immorality. And, as we will see in the next part of this essay,
this is also the case when it comes to music.
[i]
William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, Volumes 1 and 2: Quadlibets 1-7,
Translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley (1991), Cited in Feser
(2014), Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction
[ii]
The error in Hume’s reasoning is that he puts events as fundamental to
causation, when in fact it’s substances that are fundamental to it. He also
disregards the Aristotelian view that immediate causes are simultaneous to
their effects. The throwing of the stone and the breaking of the glass may be
two separate events, but the penetration of the stone into the glass and the
glass being penetrated by the stone are actually just a single event.
[iii]
I expand on this and its negative implications in my article “The Philippines:
A Crypto-Catholic Nation”, See https://matthewantero.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-philippines-crypto-catholic-nation.html
[iv]
Scientism is the belief that only science can give us genuine knowledge of
reality.
[v]
See Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907)
[vi]
See Marcel Duchamp Fountain: http://ochsmrsg.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/9/4/14949746/marcel_duchamp_-_fountain_1.pdf
[vii]
Ibid.
[viii]
Sir Roger Scruton (2009), BBC Documentary Why Beauty Matters: youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc
[ix]
BBC (1998), Breakfast with Frost, Tracy Emin interview, excerpt from
Scruton, BBC Documentary Why Beauty Matters
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