Does anyone want to debate?

Does anyone want to debate?

I think the moral functions of texts are just as important as the aesthetic ones.

I.e. literature as social justice.

Agreed. Art for the sake of aesthetics is pointless and empty, and hardly worth being called art in the first place. It needs to make a point, or lead you to some higher or altered understanding.

All art is quite useless. We've known about this for centuries. If art serves a purpose outside of its own existence it is nothing more than a tool.

I don't believe in the existence of morals so I see nothing to debate, sorry

Every essay through some "lens" perverts an already existing narrative for a wholly separate purpose other than purely personal fulfillment. It becomes a tool to manipulate the reality of mass culture. Political criticism and political art for this reason will always rest on a rung lower.

Why does there need to be distinction? Isn't producing a purely aesthetic piece of art a social commentary in itself? A justification of an existence that isn't a limb of the state? Genuinely asking

I think writing is about allowing people to imagine things you've imagined, so it can be instructive or not. I think it's better when it is but the way that can look is very abstract and possibly very aesthetically refined.

On a separate note the term social justice is loaded for me and honestly I've never seen any good instructive or empathy-facilitating art come out of that movement.

texts define their own functions which are quite impossible to normatively evaluate against anything other than the text itself. the text is a kind of circuitry which shorts at the moment of its reading. to attempt a value judgement from either an ethical or aesthetic stance is to ignore the incandescence of the text destroying itself in an unfulfillable attempt at rebuilding it.

Yeah maybe, also just not all the time though, like that doens't really happen in a lot of books

i don't know what 'moral functions' or 'aesthetic functions' are or what that has to do with social justice

I would say the aesthetic is, by definition, an agent of altered understanding. But by this nature it resists being a moral agent. Morals are just a system of aesthetics. Good art aims to create it's own system or build upon an existing one. In doing so, though, it necessarily has the tendency to shift the goal posts of aesthetic ambition (including moral ambition). To say otherwise is to be against aesthetic ambition and art itself.

I agree that the morality of a story is important, more so than the morality of the life lived by the author

>I.e. literature as social justice.
apparently so

books are never as cohesive as they pretend to be. both their negative (those functions they directly oppose) and their repressed (those functions they are unable for whatever reason to come to terms with but which they nevertheless inadvertently formulate) always seep through the veneer of totality books, and fiction especially, try to create an impression of. there are always incongruities, heterogeneities, failures, sputterings and false starts, and they are the most interesting thing about reading.

So the difference is between "Personal fullfillment" which I'm assuming you mean is more than masturbatory, and anything that attempts to change groups as a whole (What im considering political) is somehow not included in this fulfillment? What kind of fulfillment can you have that doesn't include other people?

Well obviously they can be consciously contary to the state too.

And if you have an example of a book devoid of any political engagement at all, or at least attempting too, I'd love to hear about it.

Was reading some Ginsberg earlier today ...
>“Well there was the aspect of homosexuality which, after 1947 or so, I was quite open about and familiar with and at ease in. He [Jack Kerouac] did not want to admit that image to his literary universe in relation to himself, and had no special reason to because he was primarily heterosexual. He had quite a bit of experience with men in bed, a lot of people blew him, even me, but he didn’t particularly count it as his main métier. In fact he was sometimes a little bit patronizing of other people’s homosexual sense, at other times he had a very nice mellow old-fashioned bohemian charming appreciation of it.”

You fail to see art as an end itself. You do not value it as such. How can I make you change your mind? How can I force you to experience epiphanies of the sublime and transcendental via art and understand why I love it for its aesthetic, intellectual and philosophical value? Why must a work of art inform my morals? That degrades it, in my opinion. The art becomes less and the moral message becomes the sole focus of the art.

But why can't there ideally be both sublime internal feels and outward community feels?

in any political art, the politics take precedence over the art, and man cannot serve two masters and literature is inherently ambiguous or at least full of multiple meanings (not necessarily contradictory ones), whereas political ideas are usually only about one meaning. you can't combine the two without diminishing one of them because they're fundamentally different

I don't see an argument as to why this is impossible. Any amazing sublime book that comes to mind has a political element, if only becasue its about people.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth. -W. H. Auden
All the poetry in the world didn’t prevent world war 2. if it doesn't initially work on the level of art it may as well be useless.