Joan, do you disagree with Chuzz's statement that "if there is a truth [in Art] it is entirely subjective?
It seems to me to be so clearly true that it's almost tautological.
I would write Chuzz's statement this way, adding quotes around the word 'truth,' to indicate that the word is being used in a particular way:
"If there is a 'truth' [in Art] it is entirely subjective."
My impression is that I was accurate in my statement that
...this discussion of 'truth' applied to art
is proceeding without the required common agreement, or
stipulation, on what 'truth' is supposed to mean, when
applied to a work of art,
And it seems to me you don't see that the word 'truth' means a different thing when by it we mean a statement of fact about repeatable experimental results (or other empirical tests) than it does when by it we mean a sense (sense = subjective) of 'rightness,' of 'reality,' of depth of insight, of new ways of seeing which-- we recognize in the moment of 'truth'-apperception-- help us to organize, to unify, to make sense of our experience as human beings fixed in our culture and time-- to give our experiences meaningfulness to us. (I suppose I should say 'meaning,' but i am trying to say more.)
You are validating my main contention, which is that the two parties to this argument are operating with different, even incompatible, definitions of 'truth.' You keep returning from different angles to offer evocations of what art does for one. And if you look at these evocations, they all fit snugly under the heading of things that make one feel a certain way or that tell one 'facts' or 'truths' about the nature of the world that are not the same species of 'fact' or 'truth' that Chuzz is referring to when he uses the word 'truth.' HE is talking about, as he says, scientific, 'laboratory,' or empirically tested truth. YOU are talking about receiving insights you feel to be 'true,' though they have not been 'proved' to be so in the laboratory or statistical sense. (And these two species of truth, empirical and its subcategory, laboratory, themselves differ, though they share a distinctness from artistic truth.)
You want him to say that Art and Science are equally 'true,' ie that they are on an "equal footing." But since he uses the word to mean laboratory truth, or something like it, he cannot possibly say that.
Chuzz is entirely accurate when he says, of art, "If there is a 'truth' it is entirely subjective," because the art-truth has not been subjected to the laboratory or other empirical tests (eg statistical) that make it the 'objective' scientific truth that he has stipulated as his definition of 'truth' for the purposes of this discussion, as is his right to do.
Let's say that a poem or work of fiction has revealed to us an apparent truth. Such as, for example, that children are cornucopias of pure truthfulness or that masturbation is so unnatural it makes hair grow on your palms or that slavery is not kind and fair or that love conquers all. Human beings have read and been moved by works that bring each of these so-called truths home to them.
But time passes, the zeitgeist changes, and empirical observation, even if not, usually, statistical studies or lab tests, reveal that some of the 'truths' of this kind... weren't truths at all! Tests have been conducted that show children do lie, or are easily manipulated into telling untruths. No study has been able to confirm the dark truths of Victorian literature about masturbation. The previously not appreciated truths in H.B. Stowe's novel about the cruelty and injustice of slavery have been shown, in the fullness of time, to have been accurate. And many who have been swayed into ill-considered matings under the sway of a literary 'truth,' -- "love conquers all" -- have lived to rue the day they did not, first, conduct some less artistic test, a more scientific one, a statistical study, perhaps, or at least a poll, or at least an informal poll among their friends, in an attempt to verify the 'artistic truth' that had so moved them against a more empirical, more 'scientific' one.
Of course there is 'truth' in art, if we agree on what we mean by it. Chuzz and you have not agreed, so the discussion is frustrating. He wants to reserve the word, use it charily and strictly in a specific sense. You want to use it in a vastly different sense, and additionally as a compliment to art, and insist on taking Chuzz's refusal to so apply it as evidence that he is less a lover and admirer and appreciator, even worshipper, of art than are you.
At least that's what I get out of the exchange.
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