A Metaphysical Interlude: The Uselessness of Consciousness

Abstract

Despite overwhelming evidence, the claim that art is useless may be resisted. That art is concerned primarily with the generation of beauty and that beauty has nothing to do with morality, usefulness or even edification, is an ancient position — reaching back as far as Plato and the quarrel between the poets and the philosophers; but in recent centuries it has usually been associated with a frivolous desire to shock or at least has been served up in a nimbus of silliness. ‘All art is quite useless’ invokes, of course, Dorian Gray and the martyrdom of Wilde, the camp smirk, the desire épater le bourgeois, or, to use Barthes’ phrase, ‘to show one’s behind to the Political Father’. The uselessness of art therefore needs rescuing from its status as a dated cliché, from the after-sniggers of the Decadents, as much as it needs defending against the anger of those, such as Tolstoy, for whom, as we noted in ‘The Freezing Coachman’, all but the simplest, most nakedly didactic art was condemned by its inutility. The uselessness of consciousness is (except as a larger condemnation of the uselessness of existence) less of a cliché. The point of this chapter is to reanimate the familiar idea of the uselessness of art by relating it to the less familiar idea of the uselessness of consciousness.