Aesthetics of Cute II

Cartoons are funny; death is not. So cartoons face into their limits when they picture death. Either they make death funny, in which case death never appears, or they push the limits of being cute cartoons, and they are no longer funny.

The Coyote and Road Runner series, and Warner Brothers generally, treat death as funny. Warner Brothers even applies this aesthetic directly to hunting in the character of Elmer Fudd and his intended prey, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Warner Brothers does not criticize hunting; hunting just provides a setting in which human and animals can have comic interactions. Death is funny only because no one ever dies.

There is little aesthetic difference between Warner Brothers cartoons and the early Walt Disney shorts. However, with Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942), Disney began to produce feature length films which introduced a different aesthetic. Cute remained: Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, Thumper, Flower, and Bambi in Bambi. But Disney introduces a new aesthetic alongside cute. The new aesthetic allowed for death, even tragedy, in the form of a cartoon.

In response to Fantasia, Warner Brothers laughed. They produced "What's Opera Doc" to lighten up the dark wizards at Disney. But to Bambi the response could only be Elmer Fudd.

to be continued

Aesthetics of Cute

Cute defines the aesthetic genre of Precious Moments figurines and the heroines of Walt Disney feature length cartoons. The eyes dominate the face; the balloon of a head sits precariously on a small body. Absolutely any example will validate the claim. Adults are simply larger children; and children are exaggerated infants. The aesthetic of the cute is aimed at children and those who want to hold on to the child’s vision of the world.

There are realities, realities many adults will affirm as good, which the aesthetic of cute cannot present. Imagine first a Precious Moments version of a crucifix. We immediately know something has gone terribly wrong. The crucifixion is not cute; those who think of it as cute have warped sensibilities. They are the avowed enemies of those who would worship the crucified one. But we may respond to a cute crucifix in two ways. First we may claim that “cute” presents a true vision of the world; we may modify Paul and insist “whatever is cute, whatever is sweet, think on these things.” That is, we might say, since a crucifix and what it represents cannot be cute, we should not have crucifixes and we should not think about crucifixions. Alternatively, we might conclude that if cute cannot present a crucifix, so much the worse for cute.

Imagine – unfortunately, in the internet age, one need not imagine – Disney characters engaged in the act of sex. Again, we know immediately that something has gone wrong. Sex is not cute; those who present it as such have warped desires. Confronted with Disney characters engaged in sex, we suspect that the real aim is, again, children. Pedophilias may prey on children by introducing them to sex in a child-friendly aesthetic. If we reject pedophilia, however, we still must choose between the adequacy of the cute and the goodness of good sex. If cuteness is adequate to reality, then we may reject sex because it is unpresentable and as boring in Disney films. On the other hand, if the cute cannot present sex as good, then the cute does not define the good.

Tomorrow: the cute critique of hunting.

Aesthetics of the Hunt

The challenge of "looking at death" leads me to the next topic. The topic of the pleasures and pains produced on the senses we call "aesthetics." Beauty has dominated, perhaps rightly, the topic. But there are other forms of aesthetics: the ugly, of course, but also, the sublime, the trivial, the silly, the disgusting, the delicious.

For the next several posts, I will argue that there are aesthetic modes that are inappropriate to death -- they make it impossible to see death and so we recoil.

Next post: Death and the Cute.

Ortega and Utilitarians

Initially, we may identify what might appear as common ground: the utilitarian, like Ortega’s hunter, aims at “happiness.” Clearly, however, the same word refers to different experiences.

For the utilitarian, happiness means pleasure. To claim that all sentient creatures strive for happiness is to say that they strive for pleasure. If one animal hunts another, it is for the “pleasure” of eating it. Further, the aim of all human action is pleasure or happiness.

For Ortega, this analysis does not go very far. Insofar as humans have broken with Nature and have entered History, their goal is freedom, not happiness. Even if they were to return to Nature as a hunter in search of happiness, it is not for the sake of “the pleasant.” Pleasure is not so much a goal as that which accompanies achievement in action. It is compatible with, perhaps even enhanced by, much pain and effort. Finally, it is a mistake to claim that animals, human or non-human, eat just for pleasure. They hunt and eat to survive (at least) and this brings with it pleasure. The way they hunt and the way they eat actually constitutes them as members of the species that they are.

Ortega y Gasset VI The Ethics of Hunting

Some writers criticize the practice of hunting on utilitarian grounds. The claims here are that pleasure is good and pain is bad, that right actions maximize the balance of pleasure over pain (that is the utilitarian part), and that hunting can be shown to not maximize pleasure over pain (and the anti-hunting part). This critique calls those who resist applying the utilitarian framework and only that framework to non-human species “speciesists.”

Part of the disagreement with the hunting concerns the definition of what is meant by hunting. Ortega y Gasset defines “hunting” as “what an animal does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own.” For the utilitarian, this definition misses the ethically relevant dimensions. That the hunter and the hunted belong to different species is beside the point. That the species have mutually adapted to each other such that, qua species, each depends on the other introduces extraneous data.

The utilitarian decrees that only pleasure and pain have an ethical weight, and not only humans but other animals too can feel pleasure and pain. For the utilitarian, hunting would be “what one sentient animal does to inflict death on another sentient animal, perhaps for the pleasure of eating it or displaying it.” From a utilitarian point of view, the only question is the extent to which the hunter can inflict death with minimal pain, as compared with the pain induced and the pleasure forfeited should the animal not die at the hunter’s hands.

Two features of Ortega’s account of hunting drop out of the utilitarian account. First, the difference of species disappears as irrelevant. As a basis for an ethic of hunting, this has troubling implications. Whether one hunts and eats or displays one’s own species is relevant only to the extent that it might increase the pleasure and pain involved. The utilitarian cannot oppose cannibalism on the grounds that it is cannibalism, only on the grounds that under certain circumstances it creates less than optimal balance of pleasure over pain. Further, though in principle it would not differentiate between species, in practice it values the species suffering pain over the species that inflicts the pain. The result is that animal rights advocates may feel pleasure at news of hunter accidents (and express such pleasure on internet forums) because at least there are fewer hunters to inflict pain on animals. Sometimes those who advocate animal rights must consciously remind themselves that "people are animals too" -- and this statement elevates humans to a moral status the activist can too easily lose sight of. (reference)

Second, the ecosystem drops out of the utilitarian calculus. Institutions, organizations, and systems, even ecological systems cannot feel pleasure or pain. Only individuals within those systems can; only individuals are real. Consequently, the only way to take account of an ecological system is through the pain felt by individuals; the collapse of an ecosystem and the extinction of species concerns the utilitarian only insofar as the individual sentient animals feel pain during the collapse. The utilitarian can have no objection to the extinction of a species, for an extinct species can no longer feel pleasure or pain. The utilitarian is pained only by the pain felt by the members of the species so long as they happen to exist. But “happening to exist” is itself neither good nor bad.

At this point I cannot but wonder if the utilitarian metaphysic is simply too truncated, if its inability to recognize certain realities does not doom those realities in its drive to efficiently maximize pleasure. Michael Pollan roots this metaphysic in a form of life. He notes “how parochial , and urban, an ideology animals rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development) , and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. ‘In our normal life,’ Singer writes, ‘there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.’ Such a statement assumes a decidedly citified version of ‘normal life,’ certainly one no farmer – indeed, no gardener – would recognize.” (pp. 325-6).

According to animal rights advocates those who reject the utilitarian account are “speciesists.” This term of criticism may be accepted if we define it. To be a speciesist is to claim, minimally, that species and ecological systems ought to count directly in our ethical considerations. It is to claim that the continued existence of a species is a good that we should value, that an ecosystem is worth preserving even if more pleasure and less pain would seem to be the result of developing it. It is to claim that while the pains and pleasures of individuals are important, there are also goods and evils other than the pain and pleasures of sentient individuals. There is more in the world than is dreamed of....

Ortega y Gasset V, Happiness and Freedom

Ortega has followed two trails. The success of his argument depends on his ability to make them coincide. We can define each trail by its endpoints. One trail leads from Nature to History; the other trail leads from the laborious chores and jobs to the pleasing. On Ortega’s telling Nature and the pleasing coincide with one another. [actually, I don't think this is quite right, but I've got to go back to re-read to get the right nuance.] Likewise, history and the laborious designate the same destination.

This is a surprising move. Philosophers working in the wake of Hegel see humans moving from forced labor toward freedom, and this is a steady move forward. In hunting Ortega sees humans moving from forced labor to happiness, and this move is a reversal back to Nature. He makes this move in the following paragraph:

“All this indicates that man, painfully submerged in his work or obligatory occupations, projects beyond them, imagines another kind of life consisting of very different occupations, in the execution of which he would not feel as if he were losing time, but, on the contrary, gaining it, filling it satisfactorily and as it should be filled. Opposite a life which annihilates itself and fails – a life of work – he erects the plan of a life successful in itself – a life of delight and happiness” (p. 37).

This last phrase, “a life of delight and happiness,” marks the precise place where we would have expected to read “a life of freedom and liberty.” But Ortega is convinced the hunter is looking back and not forward, that he is looking for happiness and not going deeper into history and toward freedom.

Ortega y Gasset IV, Internal goods, attention

In his analysis of hunting, Ortega picks up on this distinction between actions done for their own sake (“the pleasing”) and those which lead us to external goods (“the laborious”). The dichotomy defines human life: “So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing.” (p. 37). This distinction, and not the distinction between “difficult and easy,” leads the philosopher to the heart of the human action: “Happy occupations, it is clear, are not merely pleasures; they are efforts, and real sports are effort. It is not possible, then, to distinguish work from sport by a plus or minus in fatigue. The difference is that sport is an effort made completely freely, for the pure enjoyment of it, while work is an obligatory effort made with an eye to the profit” (p. 42).

Now we can hunt either as work or sport. We do not violate the act of hunting if we do it for one or the other of these purposes. However, after the Paleolithic era, once humans developed agriculture and no longer had to hunt, humans continued to hunt. Aristocrats hunt, and the working masses fight for the privilege of hunting. Dick Cheney hunts, and Tred Barta hunts. We hunt in pursuit of happiness. We hunt in order to hunt.

Like Pieper’s description of festivity, the activity of hunting itself can transform our usual habits of attention. Usually, “[o]ur attention, which is what aims our vision, seizes on that spot on the horizon because we are persuaded that what interests us will appear there. This attention to the preconceived is equivalent to being absorbed in one point of the visible area and not paying attention to the other points.” However, “[t]he hunter’s look and attention are completely opposite to this. … Thus, he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a ‘universal’ attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man” (p. 138).