Art to What End? Bob Dylan and Jacques Maritain on Artistic Integrity

What does this have to do with art? Maritain thinks that in philosophy, education, and politics, we need to direct our attention toward the discovery and cultivation of activities that are intrinsically choiceworthy, desirable for their own sake. We need to recover dispositions of receptivity and wonder. Like Aristotle, Maritain sees a similarity between the philosopher, who is defined as a lover of wisdom, and the poet, whose focus is on wonder:

There is a curious analogy between the fine arts and wisdom. Like wisdom, they are ordered to an object which transcends man and which is of value in itself, and whose amplitude is limitless, for beauty, like being, is infinite. They are disinterested, desired for themselves, truly noble because their work taken in itself is not made in order that one may use it as a means.

Art, like philosophy, thus has much to teach us about what it means to be human. 

By contrast, “technocratic pragmatics leaves in human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best those of pleasure.” What is left is “the assumption that merely material or biological standards rule human life and morality”; what is lost is the sense of the “spiritual dignity of man.” Jacques and his wife, Raissa, had encountered such a reductionist vision of human life in the philosophical views prominent in the Sorbonne, the French university where they both studied in the early years of the twentieth century. Accompanying these philosophical views were “relativism, intellectual skepticism, and—if one was logical—moral nihilism.” There is a totalitarian political impulse here as well. Raissa calls this impulse the “new barbarism” that was to “deck itself out in the prestige of a culture already worn thin, already hypocritical, already prepared for the worship of force.”

While he does not ignore the role that art plays in the cultural or political order, Maritain is skeptical of censorship. He notes that governments or cultural authorities might be tempted to “brandish the moral law against the artist, and summon him to change his work, whatever his inner state of mind and his artistic conscience may be.” But Maritain thinks this is actually imprudent. As he goes on to say, “The Wise man, I think, will not” intervene.

Writing at the time of the great totalitarian regimes, Maritain worried about the notion that art should conform to ideological, social ends—a vision of art prominent in Nazism and communism. Art for the “social group makes the social value, social significance, or social impact of the work into an aesthetic or artistic value, even the supreme aesthetic or artistic value.”

From Maritain’s reticence about external control of art, it might seem that his goal is to quarantine the internal act of artistic creativity from the taint of outside influences, leaving us with a view of art as nothing but self-expression. But that interpretation is unwarranted.

In fact, he remained quite critical of precisely the strain of modern art that amounted to mere self-expression. Such art is solipsistic. Like idealism in philosophy, it is “walled in.” But Maritain, alongside his affirmation of the creative freedom of the artist, insists that the modern awakening of art to its own sphere of freedom involves simultaneously an openness to the shared external world. He describes the double awakening of the self, to itself and to nature, as an “invaluable advance” and a great “adventure.”

So the artist can be formed by all sorts of external sources of inspiration, but at the moment of creation, the artist must be moved by whatever internal vision the artist possesses. Art is about the expression of that vision. Art is thus not primarily—even when it takes up ethical, political, or religious themes—about directly moving to action; rather, art aims to capture and express some particular vision in the particular medium of the artist.

The notion that the experience of art or beauty is an end in itself does not mean the encounter with an artwork should be void of passion or feeling. Not feeling certain emotions in the presence of certain works of art might well indicate that one has not actually encountered them. The ideal viewer or listener is not a neutral, detached observer. Moreover, the assumption that everyone is already in a position to appreciate what a work of art seeks to communicate is problematic; certain antecedent emotions or passions, as well as intellectual preconceptions, might stand in the way of one’s ability to grasp what is presented in the work of art. Flannery O’Connor, who understood and embraced Maritain’s position on art as an end unto itself, puts the problem this way in Mystery and Manners, a book of her essays:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

Maritain’s account of artistic creativity fits nicely with Dylan’s self-understanding. There is reason to be cautious about Dylan’s self-understanding, since he has been deeply allergic to artistic theories, as well as to political movements. That skepticism has helped him maintain the integrity and autonomy of his art. Commenting on Dylan’s diffidence toward movement activism, Mike Marqusee, in his book Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art, writes: “He absorbed his politics, like much else, by osmosis. His contribution to the movement was limited to a small number of personal appearances, a few donations—and the songs. These… were an inestimable gift.”

Consider Dylan’s early song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” with its interrogative refrains “How many times?” and “How many years?” Dylan asks how much time is required for a people to be free but also “How many times can a man turn his head / And pretend that he just doesn’t see?” The lines are accusatory; they intend to move the listener to a kind of recognition. The listener’s mind is thus ordered to a new or restored vision.

Perhaps Dylan’s most passionate and explicit expression of the protest movements of the 1960s is the song “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964). The title line is repeated in a defiant tone at the end of each stanza. It’s an exuberant and confident song of revolution, proclaiming that the present order is “rapidly fadin’.” In one of the many echoes of scripture that permeate Dylan’s lyrics, the song prophesies a time when “the first one now / will later be last.”

Dylan became such an influential voice in the protest movement that he was invited to perform at the 1963 March on Washington. He sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song he wrote about the murder of Black civil rights activist Medgar Evers. But the song links Medgar Evers and poor white men as all pawns in a game controlled by powerful officials. Dylan’s lyrics move beyond Evers’s murder to trace the root causes of prejudice and violence to unnoticed sources of manipulation. Again, here the goal seems to be the cultivation of the kind of insight that pierces conventional narratives.

The film A Complete Unknown traces Dylan’s rapid rise in the folk/protest community as a politically conscious songwriter. Dylan would come to find the external demands of that identity confining. By 1965, he had moved on. The film reaches its climax with his appearance that year at the Newport Folk Festival; tensions between Dylan and festival organizers were thick in the hours leading up to his performance. Repudiating the expectations of movement leaders and audience alike, Dylan dropped the acoustic style of folk music in favor of an electric guitar while playing “Like a Rolling Stone,” among his most famous songs. He also signaled his independence from the folk movement, marking it as but a passing season in his career, by singing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The film conflates this moment with an even more famous moment later in that tour, when a fan, as Dylan walked on stage with his electric guitar, screamed “Judas” from the back of the arena. That moment crystallized the sense of betrayal felt by many of Dylan’s most loyal fans at the time because Dylan “went electric.”

Dylan’s probing of the ways in which artistic integrity can be co-opted often involves not only looking outward toward external pressures but also inward at his own past. In one of his lyrically most complex songs, “My Back Pages” (1964), Dylan reassesses his own adherence to movement ideology, even as he reflects skeptically on overly confident political certitude:

Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.

As Marqusee sees it, in this song, Dylan offers “a critique of politics itself as a field of human endeavor.” Yet Dylan did not permanently swear off protest songs or even something like advocacy. In 1975, Dylan had one of his biggest hits of the decade with the song “Hurricane,” about the murder conviction of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Dylan retells the story in a way that makes it clear how and why Carter, who as the song’s refrain proclaims “coulda been the champion of the world,” was framed. Racism is the target of Dylan’s storytelling here: “If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street / ’Less you want to draw the heat.”

Dylan has repeatedly asserted his independence from the expectations of any particular movement, any set of music critics, and even of his most devoted fans. He is among the artists most devoted to Maritain’s thesis that “the work is everything for Art; there is for Art but one law—the exigencies and the good of the work.” In shocking his fans, a close second to the shift from acoustic to electric rock has to be Dylan’s late-1970s adoption of Christian music, which drew inspiration from a number of sources, including Black gospel music.

Considered one of his most didactic songs, “When You Gonna Wake Up?” (1979) does contain a precise and explicit confession of faith: “There’s a man up on a cross and he’s been crucified for you.” But the lyrics are mostly about the irrationality and injustice of the world and its deceptive philosophies. One stanza warns about “counterfeit philosophies” of the left (Karl Marx) and the right (Henry Kissinger). Many fans were appalled at Dylan’s explicitly Christian lyrics, his apparent embrace of a doctrinal take on the most important questions, and his apparent abandonment of his previous skepticism of all authority. But even this song is largely about the sharpening of vision, about seeing what the Christian proposition is and what difference it might make. It seeks a kind of clarity about God that applies to believers and nonbelievers alike: “Do you ever wonder just what God requires? / You think He’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.” The critique in this line aims more at the way most believers approach God than at any specific conception of God among nonbelievers.

A more poetic take on the religious point of view can be found in “Every Grain of Sand,” a song that Dylan, who has been notorious for decades for not singing his biggest hits at his concerts, still performs regularly. The sources here are both literary and scriptural. There is an allusion to William Blake’s poetry (“To see the world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower”) and another to Matthew 10:30 (“the very hairs of your head are all numbered”) in these lines: “Then onward in my journey I come to understand / That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.”

As this and a host of other songs indicate, Dylan draws from a wide variety of sources. The film captures well the way in which Dylan was eager to learn from, even mimic, great exemplars. It clearly depicts his engagement with folk music before he arrived in New York City; meeting Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and immersing himself in the New York folk scene only intensified this engagement. He also absorbed the vision and language of the civil rights movement. Here, the crucial influences were the musician Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York, who was far ahead of Dylan in her understanding of the civil rights movement. Dylan’s writing is also suffused with language garnered from literary texts and varied musical styles, from Johnny Cash to Irish folk.

But Dylan never merely mimics. As he put it in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2004,

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.

Here Dylan echoes another thesis of Maritain’s, namely, that the awakening to the subjective freedom of the artist is “inseparable from—is one with another requirement—the grasping of the objective reality of the inner and outer world.” Few contemporary artists have as distinctive or as easily identifiable a voice or style. Although some of the dialogue in the film has Dylan making strong statements about self-creation, his personal artistic mode of expression is not merely idiosyncratic or a matter of novelty for its own sake. His deeply personal art arises from dialogue with other artists and with enduring human concerns. Indeed, few artists have combined so readily an identifiable personal style with the capacity to speak to large numbers of people about matters of both contemporary and perennial significance.

Perhaps the latter capacity has something to do with the depth of Dylan’s sources. When he recommends being “exposed to everything” that has informed the art of those whom one admires, he is hinting at the connection, mentioned earlier, between art and liberal education.

Dylan is always trying to see anew and to articulate enduring insights with fresh imagery. There is a playful quality to his lyricism, a playfulness that generates paradoxical insights and provokes wonder on the part of the listener, who is invited to see the ordinary as extraordinary. The connection that Maritain sees between contemplation and the experience of beauty is present in Dylan as well.

Dylan’s lyrics are highly cognitive, often literary, but they are also suffused with emotion, often with a panoply of emotions. This seems also to fit Maritain’s account of creative intuition. Maritain rejects a notion of artistic creativity that is purely intellectual or primarily abstract, as if the artist begins with universal concepts and then seeks to express them in concrete imagery. Instead, the artist is pierced by a kind of emotion that accompanies an image or a sound; from the initial receptivity, the artist develops a theme of some sort. As Dylan once put it in a 1995 interview, “Creativity isn’t like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect…. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.” Or again, as he said in 1991, “The environment to write the song is extremely important. The environment has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing.”

Both Maritain and Dylan cite as exemplars epic texts from Homer to Dante and great artists from the Renaissance to the Romantics. Yet neither supposes that a contemporary artist could achieve the sort of unifying, comprehensive vision found in some of the most memorable works from previous epochs. Neither the culture, which lacks the deep unity of previous eras, nor the artistic community, which lacks the soil to cultivate ambitious artistic goals, is propitious. Yet that does not mean that all is lost, that we are doomed to mediocrity or to the mere repetition of great art from the past.

As Flannery O’Connor eloquently puts it in Mystery and Manners, “Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, ‘Who speaks for America today?’ will have to be: the advertising agencies…. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance.” We should, she urges, take what the artist offers “as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”