ABSTRACT
Art can treat human beings and human life in terms of the animal in them, without allowing any scope for graciousness, magnanimity, friendship, dedication to something other than one's own animal desires, sobriety, or the other virtues. Proust redeemed himself through art not by remembering the past, but by imposing order on it and by seeing an interweaving in life between pleasure, joy and fascination, and their obverse. In artistic endeavour the world of objects is presented as informed by human subjectivity, and the feelings and attitudes that constitute this subjectivity are seen as structured as responses to the objects presented. The introduction into art of random and mechanical processes and, even worse, the replacement of art by such processes, such as one see in photography, computer produced 'poems' and aleatoric music, amounts to a repudiation of human beings as intentional agents, capable of creatively intervening in nature and guiding their actions in the light of their consciously monitored goals.
