For some time I have been trying—without too great a measure of success—to get a grant from one of the great foundations to do what a philosopher is supposed to be able to do, and that is to contemplate. But in filling out all the innumerable applications, I realized that I always have to be able to show that my contemplations will in some measure be useful. “What is the importance?” the questionnaire so often asks. “What is the importance of your project to the advancement of knowledge?” And in considering what standards are being used for the judgment of the project’s value, I realized that they all eventually boil down to the only value that anybody seems to agree about nowadays—that is to say: what is valuable—in philosophy, in art, in religion, in culture as a whole—is what promotes the survival of mankind.

Now, in most translations of the Book of Genesis, it is said that Adam and Eve fell from the state of grace because they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Actually, this is a mistranslation, for what it says in the original Hebrew is that it was not the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge of the useful and the useless. The Hebrew words are connected with skills: with the knowledge of what is advantageous and disadvantageous from the point of view of human survival. And in this connection I want to read a remarkable statement by Eugène Ionesco, the playwright, which appeared in Theater Arts under the title The Marvellous Come to Life.

Mr. Ionesco says:

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind, an imaginary construct, the creation of a whole world introduced into our world. One does not wonder about the meaning or the use of a painting, a column, a symphony. Their only use is to be this particular painting, this column, this symphony.

And why? Well, if an answer is absolutely required, one could say that it is because the painting of a picture, the erection of a column, the composition of a symphony, are exigencies of the mind. In the same way, a play must also be the expression of an unpremeditated creative act. One does not ask why a flower is a flower, nor why existence exists. It exists to exist.

I once met a man who wanted to kill all pigeons because those creatures seemed to him utterly useless. Thus, one can reach the point of wanting to exterminate the entire universe, because the universe is useless as well. Or rather, it is beyond usefulness and uselessness. What can the function of the theater be in our times?

The answer is simple. The function of the theater is to be the theater. Its aim is inherent in itself. If the theater were anything other than the theater—a demonstration, the illustration of an ideology, an attempt at demagoguery, education or reeducation, or something else—it would be a small thing indeed.

And if it were absolutely necessary that art or the theater be put to some use, I would say that it ought to serve the purpose of teaching people once more that there are activities that are of no use and that, in fact, it is indispensable that gratuitous acts exist. Such a theater is as natural as the air we breathe.

Today, people have a terrible fear of freedom and of humor. They do not seem to know that there is no life possible without freedom and without humor; that the slightest gesture, the simplest initiative, require the unfolding of the forces of the imagination that they stupidly attempt to shackle and imprison within the blind walls of the most narrow realism. This realism that they call life and light is actually death and shadow. I claim, therefore, that the world lacks boldness, and that this is the reason for our suffering. And I affirm that dreams and imagination (rather than a routine existence) require courage, and reveal the fundamental essential truths.

And, as a matter of fact—this is a concession made to those who believe only in what is useful and practical—if nowadays planes cross the sky, it is because we conceived the dream of flight long before we succeeded in flying. It has been possible to fly because we dreamt of flying. And yet, flying is a useless thing. Only later, once the discovery was made, the necessity for it was demonstrated or invented—as though we wish to apologize for its profound essential uselessness, a uselessness that, however, was a need; a difficult one to admit, I know.

Looking at people running for their business down the street, they look neither to the right nor to the left. Their eyes to the ground, they run a straight course like dogs. They do not have to look ahead, for they follow mechanically a well-known path. That is what happens in every large city in the world. Modern man, universal man, is a hurried creature. He has no time. He is the prisoner of necessity. He does not understand that a thing does not have to be useful, nor does he comprehend that what is useful might actually be considered a useless crushing weight.

If one does not grasp the usefulness of the useless, the uselessness of the useful, one does not have a grasp of art. And a country that does not understand the nature of art is a land of slaves or robots, a place of unhappy people who neither laugh nor smile; a spiritless, humorless country.

Human intelligence has been corrupted to the point where it has become impossible to make people understand that a writer may not want to indulge in propaganda or moralizing; that he refuses, in fact, to enlist in the ranks of the prevailing ideology, for doing so would mean his submission to the order of the day.

No longer does the wisdom or the moral lesson of the fables of La Fontaine interest us. For this wisdom is the elementary and permanent wisdom of common sense. What fascinates us is the way in which it comes to life and becomes the living matter of a new language, the source of a wondrous mythology. Art is the marvelous come to life, and that is what theater ought to be above all else.

Because it is failing to live up to that standard, the theater is dying in Europe and in America as well. Commercialism and realism are killing it instead of helping it to survive. For a theater without boldness—I am thinking now of the slick manufactured product of the Broadway stage, or of the Boulevard, or of the realistic play with a message, a message that has been drummed into the ears of the spectators—is bound and shackled and it is basically an unrealistic theater.

On the one hand, the bourgeois theater devoid of reality. On the other, a socialistic theater equally empty of realism. Such are the dangers that threaten the theater. And beyond the theater, the powers of the imagination; the living, creative forces of the human spirit.

End of quote. Art, Ionesco is saying, is not art while it remains under the value system of the useful—that is to say: of what is conducive to human survival.

Now, of course, a very, very sharp disagreement will be taken from this point of view by those—both traditional in spirit and modern in spirit—who look upon the guiding aesthetic principle as a sort of functionalism. That is to say, when you study so-called primitive arts, you find to a very large extent that the artist is not conscious of himself as an artist at all, but thinks of himself as a workman. The designs that appear on plates, on houses, on tools and weapons of primitive civilizations are regarded by the workman who made these things as as much an essential part of the structure of the object itself—of the building, of the plate, of the weapon—as, say, the designs that we behold in the wiring of a radio or computer.

These designs—let’s say the designs on houses in an African village—are not there to make the house look pretty, they’re there to invoke supernatural forces, to ward off evil agencies, and act in precisely the same way, in other words, as lightning conductors or windows constructed to emit the beneficent light of the sun. And the artist who makes them has no consciousness of himself as an artist. That is to say: he seems to be entirely involved in the process of making the house a convenient means of human survival, and it’s only later that—as people begin to notice that one person draws the designs more effectively, more skillfully than another—that there comes slowly to birth the concept of style, of greater facility in skill, of beauty as something more than the simple efficient accomplishment of the job.

And then, you see, as people begin to notice styles, they begin to notice the quality of technique as something over and above the fulfillment of the survival job itself. We begin to develop a consciousness of the artist, the man who excels in technique. And then we move from this position to a worship of technique to evaluation of ornament for its own sake.

And then, naturally, in the course of time, there comes a revulsion against us; there comes what I would call an anti-art. Because when you get a valuation of technique for its own sake, a valuation of ornament for its own sake, the kind of art that is thus produced appears to have an astonishing irrelevance. It doesn’t seem to be related to life. It seems to be the product of pure luxury, of people who have money to spend, time to spend, on wasting money and wasting time. And it’s then felt especially in an economic context where these are a chosen few, and others go without and sorrow. It’s then felt that art is a sort of hothouse creation, absolutely irrelevant to the realities of the world.

And the reaction against this takes various forms. Forms of anti-art—that is to say: art as propaganda, art as depicting the actual realities of the time, the suffering, the deprivation of those who have neither time nor money. Or it may be the art of simple caprice: the reaction against technical mastery in turning our attention again to the spontaneity of unprimeditated acts. Or it may take the form of an actually conscious anti-art, as is coming in Paris today in what is called pantio aux merde, painting with excrement, or the sort of thing that I witnessed not so long ago, film used as anti-film, reels of photographs of street scenes in Paris as dull as could be, but the film itself had been scratched and painted, not in the form of making an animation, but on the actual cellar die. All sorts of blots and scratches and lines were drawn so that the performance, an hour or more long, is a simple mockery of the film itself.

Now, of course, in all its great ages, art as we have known it has excelled in the copying of nature—whether this be the form of man, or the form of trees and clouds and mountains, of landscape. And in this respect, the general public (with a certain kind of blind sanity) responds and appreciates the work of the artist as something more than one who makes a functional object well, something more than one who builds a perfect table or chair, or shapes an admirable spoon, or builds a wonderful house. The general public has learned to love the Chinese landscape, the work of van Gogh, or of Cezanne, because of a marvelous representation of the natural universe. And this, of course, is what the general public expects an artist to do.

But herein the artist is paying nature a compliment. And he’s perhaps unconscious of the compliment that he’s paying, for he is copying nature in the uselessness of nature. We say, of course—when we see a representational painting of something that exists in nature—we say: “Well, I can recognize that as a picture. It represents a tree.” But we don’t ask the further question: “What does a tree represent?” This question—“What does a tree represent?”—raises the profoundest problem of all: what is a tree for? What is the universe for?—as Ionesco has asked. And of that question, it isn’t just that there is no answer, it’s rather that the answer is that that is not the question to ask. That is the question asked only by somebody who hasn’t really seen the tree. Because if he really saw the tree, he would never ask the question, “What is it for?” It would answer itself.

And so what Ionesco is looking towards is that there could be the possibility of there being works of art which one could behold and not ask the question, “What do they mean? What are they for?” But one would be as immediately convinced—as in looking at the tree, or as in looking at the clouds, or the waters, or at any other manifestation of nature. For when we look at these things in nature, I think we know that it is really fundamentally beside the point to say that a porcupine has spines on his back in order to defend himself against enemies, that creatures eat in order to survive. That’s beside the point, because if you really go into it, the survival of things is exactly the same as the existence of things. In other words, to say that an animal eats in order to go on living is a very, very sophisticated artificial reflection on animal life. An animal does not eat to survive, he eats to eat. He enjoys eating. He has no thought in his mind that this is good for him, that this is food has got such essential vitamins and builds him up so that he will have a longer future. This is quite remote from his mind.

Now, of course, I’m not trying to say that there is no value of any kind whatsoever in the science of dietetics, and that one ought not to consider the matter of the nutritive components of food, its vitamins, and so on and so forth. What I am going to say is that that additional knowledge about eating is really of no use to us at all if the only use it has is to give us a future. The point is: a future is of no use to people who are not able to appreciate the useless. A future has no value if it is only survival value. And this, then, comes to the fact that beyond the value of time, beyond the value of survival, is the supreme value of play, of the useless.

Now, when we see—in certain forms of art, things such as pantio aux merde—things which are nothing more than welded assortments from the junkyard… recently there was exhibited in New York a Buick convertible compressed by some sort of steam hammers into a solid block. This kind of thing is nothing more than a mockery, and indeed sometimes an intentional mockery, of the attempt that is now going on to justify art in the name of the useful. And, by way of illustrations for this, I want to read you an advertisement which appeared in The Wall Street Journal in October; an advertisement of the book by a very well known publisher which reads:

Did you know that people with modest sums to invest are often finding bigger profits in the art market than they do in the stock market? In fact, during the great bull market of the 1950s, the art market actually outperformed the stock market. The author of the remarkable new book Art as an Investment is a case in point. His art collection, begun only a few years ago, is now worth half a million dollars. His authoritative book shows you how to start from scratch with just a small sum, and build your own collection of paintings for pleasure, for profit, and as a hedge against inflation. It shows how you, too, can make a fortune by buying paintings, holding onto them, and then selling them at just the right time. Packed with illustrations and clear, easy to understand text, this guide tells you how to begin, what to look for, where and what to buy and sell, according to your means. It explains what you must consider, in forming opinion of a painting, how to judge the background and importance of the artist, how to determine whether a newcomer has a real future in art circles. In just a short time, you will know how to meet competitive bids intelligently, how to talk to dealers in their own language. You will be able to tell at a glance the price history of hundreds of individual paintings bought and sold since 1925, the schools of art and artists now in vogue, and—most important—how to judge the price of a painting for speculative purposes.

End of quote. And in this manner, modern art at last becomes useful. And is it any wonder that the artist in such a climate mocks the public by selling for speculative purposes? Pantio aux merde! No, the problem is, I think, that the people in an age of plenty—for we are all today, compared with former ages, fantastically rich—we’re still tied to our survival value as the only value, and therefore are unable to play.