ON STYLE
551
way that
it
is so connected is that art may yield moral
pleasure;
but
the moral pleasure peculiar to art is not the pleasure of approving of
acts or disapproving of them. The moral pleasure in art, as well as the
moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratifica–
tion of consciousness.
Morality is a
form
of acting and not a repertoire of choices.
If
morality is so understood-as one of the achievements of human
will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world
-it becomes clear that no generic antagonism exists between the
form of consciousness, aimed at action, which is morality and the
nourishment of consciousness which is esthetic experience. Only when
works of art are reduced to statements which propose a specific con–
tent, and when morality is identified with a particular morality (and
any particular morality has its dross, those elements which are no
more than a defense of limited social interests and class values)–
only then can the experience of a work of art be thought to under–
mine morality. Indeed, only then can the full distinction between the
esthetic and the ethical be made.
But if we understand morality in the singular, as a generic deci–
sion on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to
art is "moral" in so far as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibil–
ity and consciousness. For sensibility is exactly that which nourishes
our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act,
assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling .an act
moral, and are not just blindly and unreflectively obeying. Art per–
forms
this
"moral" task because the qualities which are intrinsic to
the esthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentive–
ness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the esthetic object (grace,
intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental
constituents of a moral response to life.
In art "content" is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure
which engages consciousness in these
formal
processes of transforma–
tion.
Take the case of Genet-though here there is additional evidence
for the point I am trying to make, because the artist's intentions are
