The Genealogy of Genius

1. Why Is the Author Dead, again?
2. The Role of the Author
3. Conclusion: The Lingering Past

Introduction

In 1967, French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) published his highly influential essay, “The Death of the Author”. In it, Barthes attempts to free literary analysis from the pernicious belief that the author gets to decide what their work means. Interpretation — Barthes says — is sovereign.

Through this Copernican shift from author-centrism to reader-centrism, Barthes seeks to overthrow the old aesthetic model: genius, traditions, objective standards of beauty, etc. His goal was to emancipate the reader.

But, why was the author killed? What historical impetus led to his regicide? Just as the death of God forced us to reimagine the moral web of mankind, the death of the author too forces us to reimagine the aesthetic web of mankind. Free from the tyranny of author-centrism, how will we proceed?

Why Is the Author Dead, again?

What does it even mean when someone says that the author is dead? At a basic level, it means that the author is not the final authority on what a work of art is saying. Though authors very often create their works with great care and intentionality, the fact is that art is not ontologically bound to the author. As bodies of symbols, ideas, figures, references, narrative, etc., works of art exist as collections of referents that the reader understands through their own cultural lexicon and lived experiences.

The work’s meaning is generated and recreated by the understanding.

[…] a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

It is easy to misunderstand what an author is trying to say by using our own ideas to make sense of their work. As a matter of fact, this seems to be the default way of understanding. We have no choice but to use what we know to make sense of what we don’t know.

Every man hears only what he understands.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

Every signified has to be conjugated through signifiers in order to be distributed. Ideas themselves cannot be shared without first being instantiated in a form like language, music, etc. Necessarily, the result
is that the marketplace of ideas is a marketplace of signifiers.

This is a simplified model, but with it we can proceed to look at the real thing. Let us look at an example.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

You do not need to know what Nietzsche means here to read this sentence and understand something. Likewise, one can read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit without having the baggage necessary to even just have access to what the guy means. Though the resulting understanding would technically be misaligned with the author’s intended meaning, one can nevertheless come out of that experience having acquired meaningful knowledge.

A strong case can be made that we could never have the necessary baggage to understand. An even stronger case could be made that none of us will ever come close to understanding Hegel. But if we do not understand signifiers by matching them with an authorial signified, does that not make everything interpreted? How can two people successfully communicate?

This question exceeds the scope of this article, but let us tackle it as much as we can while staying on topic. Each idea in this marketplace can be situated somewhere along the continuum of factuality and poetry.

Leaving possible semantic ambiguities aside, sentences such as “get out of my house” leave very little room for interpretation. They are firmly on the side of factuality; they want to be understood. But, could the same be said about a piece of music? Probably not. This is not to say that Shakespeare did not want to be understood, but rather that — like most art — it is not produced to convey a fact and nothing else.

After hearing a particularly wild interpretation, we have all heard someone respond with, “why did they not just say that instead?” Would a musician be better off trying to express how they feel using words? Instead of writing a long and elaborate romantic poem, why not just say “I love you”? Does it not serve the same purpose? Maybe sentences such as these are not enough to convey all that human experience has to offer.

The more we use “sentences”, the more we stand on the side of factuality;
the less we do, the more we stand on the side of poetry. The farther away we are from factuality, the greater the gap between what was meant and what was understood. This is a necessary outcome.

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

Meaning is constructed by the reader. To suggest that the author’s intention trumps a reader’s understanding fails to understand how art exists. Works of art are partitions of cultural referents whose signified is often unknown to the artist themselves. By the ontological nature of the work, the signified must be reconstructed by the observers through their own baggage.

Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature.
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

The author’s signified is but one reconstruction; the author’s interpretation is but one interpretation. Your interpretation may not be a particularly useful, insightful, or popular one in broader culture, but it is ontologically equal to every other one.

In 2018, Donald Glover released the video for his song This is America. Upon its release, it had the entire world was talking about it, trying to analyze what it all meant. But, Glover refused to elaborate. Though it was disappointing to many, it was essential. It may very well be — as is often the case with art — that Glover himself does not know the full extent of what his creation means. He certainly has an opinion on it, but he is well aware that if he factualized his poetical work, his interpretation would come to trump everyone else’s. His factual rendition would not be more “correct” or less “vague” than the video. It is precisely thanks to the poetical form that Glover could tap into the pathos of American culture so effectively. Suggesting that the author’s intent trumps the cultural pathos that is being reached in each individual “reader” fails to understand what art is.

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

Fact must make the signified clear through the signifier, and poetry must untether the signifier from the signified so it may reach the clouds. It is precisely in its newfound cloudiness that it allows us to see more than what clear words allow. Nothing deep can be clear. Wherever there is more than mere factuality, interpretation is the default mode of understanding.

We do not have to agree with his argument, nor do we need to have a rational justification to hold onto that disagreement. One can care about authorial intent because of an intuitive valuation. There is something to be said about how such a theory robs artists of their voice and self-expression, leaving their works to the fickle whims of a mob that cares for nothing other than reinforcing their pre-established beliefs. We lose a great deal when we hold our opinions above those of geniuses. Although, Barthes does have something to say about that.

The author is a modern figure… a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist’ ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

Though this reasoning is flawed if taken literally (the authorial worship of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil far precede the historical conditions that Barthes perceives as responsible for our authorial worship), it is assuredly true to enough to warrant study. We would not be wrong to deduce from this passage that Barthes sees in the worship of genius another tyrant to overthrow. By murdering the author, Barthes wishes to emancipate the individual reader. I was not aware that admiring talent was such an obstacle to freedom of thought, but let us give this theory its due.

In the work Gender and Genius, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1990), Christine Battersby analyzes the origins of “genius”. Her thesis is that genius, from its inception has always been conspicuously masculine. Throughout the ever-changing definitions of femininity and genius, culture always found a way to make womanhood antithetical to genius in some way. It’s a fascinating read, but for our purposes, we will be focusing on her study of the genealogy of genius, which is the genealogy of authorial authority. For Battersby, the earliest philological common ancestor of contemporary genius dates back to the early days of Rome.

[…] the Roman genius involved the divine aspects of male procreativity which ensured the continuance of property belonging to the gens or male clan.

[…] the term genius both represented ‘the virile powers of man which make for the continuance of the family’ and in a broader sense, ‘the spirit that dwells in the man […], as a spirit dwelt in the hearth or in the store cupboard’.

In Stoic Cosmology we find a universe created by the logos spermatikos. Just as the male body was supposed to distil semen out of heated vapour, so it was argued that nature itself is permeated by a fiery breath that constitutes the Genius or spirit of the universe. […] It was spermatic: an active, forming principle analogous to the male seed. […] The logos spermatikos was Genius on a cosmic scale.
— Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

[…] the father enclosed a genius as the spirit of his power to beget.
— Will Durant, The Story of Civilization Vol. 3: Caesar and Christ

The concept of genius, Battersby contends, survived and evolved philologically until the Romantics recycled and adapted the term to the aesthetic concerns of its era: individuality, freedom, nature, etc.

One example of that is how the Roman sanctification of male procreation and the logos spermatikos of the Stoics that characterized the concept of genius in its early days survived the historical journey and brought about the Romantic idea of genius as someone (male) who generates order from chaos, frames the sublime, and articulates a culture’s spirit.

The Romantics inherited from the pre-Romantics a taste for ‘nature’ in its most savage and unimproved mode […] For the Romantics, by contrast, the art-work was no longer simply a mirror held up to nature. […] [The Romantic genius] is, instead, a kind of junior God-the-father who shapes matter into form according to rules. He imposes order on chaos […] The new (artistic) reality is as highly structured as the cobweb spun out of the bowels of the spider […]
— Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

It was during the Romantic ambiance of the late 18th and early 19th century that the ideas we inherited about genius were formalized. Not only was this a time period rife with artistic and philosophical giants, but aesthetics was treated as a very serious and important subject matter for intellectuals to discuss. This time period saw intellectual and artistic giants like Goethe, Kant, Mozart, Hugo, Baudelaire, Austen, Shelley, Melville, Emerson, and many more come together to formalize this genius-centric conception of art that still influences our thinking to this day.

Though Battersby spends a great deal of time explaining how the concept of genius never overcame its patriarchal origins, it slowly evolved — at least in form — into a divine, creative, and aesthetic faculty. As the Romantic era was rebelling against the convention of rationalism (which had afflicted the world of philosophy since the Scholastics), Romanticism saw in aesthetics an opportunity to transcend what the Enlightenment had accomplished and what they were leaving undefeated.

Rather than discontinuing the Enlightenment’s call to submit every belief and every action to the authority of rational criticism, the romantics are responsible for continuing “the age of criticism” — which is usually taken to characterize the eighteenth century — well into the nineteenth century. In that sense, they are the “children” of the Enlightenment.

[…] the romantics turned to aesthetics to a large extent in order to pursue, rather than to reject, some of the core ethical and political values of the Enlightenment, such as autonomy or self-determination […] Art and aesthetics also provided a model for the romantic political ideal: a democratic, egalitarian community grounded in the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 19th Century Romantic Aesthetics

The Romantics were not irrationalists, they wanted to bring reason to a higher stage of dialectical fruition. They saw in imagination, sensuality, beauty, and sublimity an unliberated terrain of human experience. In the aesthetic — as it was conceptually inaugurated by Kant — the Romantics discovered another mode of cognition, one that did not ignore morality and the self like the old dilapidated model of reason that Kant had so conclusively critiqued. Many of the faculties previously deemed irrational contained opportunities to further the goals of reason; they could expand both the understanding and freedom of man; feeling completed reason.

Not that Rousseau rejected reason; on the contrary, he called it a divine gift, and accepted it as final judge; but (he felt) its cold light needed the warmth of the heart to inspire action, greatness, and virtue.
— Will & Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 10

For the Romantics, a kind of epistemological gerrymandering had flagged certain districts of the mind as irrational when they were in actuality crucial to the proper development of reason as laid out by the thinkers of the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, etc.). The goal was one of intellectual, political, social, and religious emancipation, and reason was a glimmer of freedom in the soul of man.

This all started with René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Discourse on the Method (1637), Descartes explicitly attempts to intellectually emancipate mankind from the hold that ecclesiastical authorities had on knowledge during his lifetime. Fully entrenched in the Protestant ethos of his time, Descartes sought to relocate the source of truth from the halls of power to the soul of man, thereby ontologically redefining man as the epicenter of knowledge. No longer would salvation and knowledge be determined by external authority; all men possessed within themselves the equal means to know, learn, fathom, and make moral decisions. Reason was the great equalizer that undermined the old hierarchies of knowledge.

René Descartes promised to found knowledge not on authority or tradition but on self-evidence.
— Peter Simons, The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

Luther was to salvation what Descartes was to philosophy, and subsequent thinkers from Locke to Kant continued this emancipatory project. Once the Cartesian project is understood as a furthering of the Protestant project, then Romanticism can be grasped as a continuation of that same project. Thinkers followed one another along the same dialectical trajectory.

Those dialectical changes can be seen in the evolution of genius. Battersby explains how — during the Middle Ages up until the Romantic era — genius was thought of as the capacity to effortlessly and naively put a mirror up to nature and transcribe it for all to behold. We can still see traces of this view in both Schiller and Shelley. Here, genius is not located in the generative capacity of the individual; rather, the artist is beholden to something alien and external to him. The standards of art are not personal, but impersonal.

But once we we around to Romanticism, we can see a process of dialectical evolution taking place. The concept of genius preserved the old notion of submission to an external standard while actively promoting the overthrow of artistic traditions to focus on the generative personality of the genius himself. Using the new Kantian model of the human mind, genius became the ability to consolidate this mental apparatus to grasp the unfathomable totality of reality.

Kant does not value the dark, instinctual forces from the unconscious that became so important in the next century. It is still reason, understanding and memory — as well as the imagination — that makes Kant’s genius sublime. It is through the exercise of these faculties that humans can begin to envisage what God’s own infinite and divine powers must be like.
— Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

This combination of being independent of given rules and attuned to something other than yourself is required not only for the genius, but also for approximating the Absolute.
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 19th Century Romantic Aesthetics

In their earliest works these poets began everything anew, in scorn of all the rules which had then been fabricated […]
— G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics

Poetry […] holds the first rank among all the arts. It expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering […] a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate[…] It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty […] of regarding and judging nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature of itself does not afford us in experience […]
— Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment

The genius was no longer a mechanical copyist, but an individual; he was no longer a dependent scribe of either religion or ancient traditions, but a free individual; he was a restless soul who combined both rationality and imagination to bring order and clarity to the unfathomable. He articulates the secret truth, values, and realities of life like a prophet would; he is the spirit of the age, speaking in eternal truths while giving voice to history. With Kant and Rousseau, the individual and art were united into priority.

[Sturm und Drang] redefined religion as a divine afflatus in a soul whose genius is part of the creative urge and mystery of the world. They identified nature with God, and concluded that to be natural was to be divine. They took the medieval legend of Faust as a symbol for the intellectual hunger and burning ambition that breaks through all barriers of tradition, convention, morals, or laws.
— Will & Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 10

English literature degenerated into Romanticism and Victorianism: by now the heresies of poetic genius, personality and inner light were firmly entrenched […]
—Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

Genius is — literally — creative power, the divine spark in the individual life […]
— Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics

We can still see traces of the genius being beholden to the external world, and we can still see the old logos spermatikos in how the genius generates order from chaos; however, this time, the genius no longer recreates an alien world that all humans must submit to and accept as is. The genius shows the world not as it eternally is, but as history needs it to be. It is in this cultural atmosphere that figures such as Goethe, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and many others challenged the notion that understood things as unchanging and eternal.

[…] he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present.
— Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

If we wish to gain the general idea and conception of what the Greeks were, we find it in Sophocles and Aristophanes, in Thucydides and Plato. In these individuals the Greek spirit conceived and thought itself.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

The new conception of nature was complete in its main features; all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course.
— Friedrich Engels, The Dialectics of Nature

The author acquired a special role as the spokesperson of a cultural spirit. The evolution of authorial importance reflects the historical development of the individual from Protestantism onwards.

Thus, we can see that the author’s importance is not set in stone but is rather a product of our historical genealogy. The past was not that long
ago; my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was alive when Karl Marx was alive. Are we under the impression that our cultural orientations have not been conditioned by events this recent? Since then, our culture has not so much changed as it has grown up. Traumas, insights, secrets, and values linger in the spirit of culture; they evolve but they never disappear.

With this, I believe I have adequately represented what is meant by the statement “the author is dead”. The author is dead because — in many ways — he was never alive to begin with. By the very ontological nature of a poetical text as a body of unanchored signifiers, it can only be interpreted. Beyond that — and as we have just explained — , the author was only ever thought to be alive because of our cultural heritage. We valued authorial authority because we arbitrarily inherited a customary worship of genius.

Though it is true that something originating in culture does not make it invalid, traditions can oppressively linger about if they are not examined, challenged, and adjusted to fit the ethical priorities of the day.

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

This is what Barthes is pointing to when he seeks to overthrow the author like how Nietzsche tried to overthrow God. Barthes is trying to do for aesthetics what Nietzsche tried to do for morality, what Luther did for faith, what Descartes did for knowledge, what Rousseau did for society, and what Marx did for economics: free it from the outdated impositions of tyranny.

But how exactly is the author a tyrant? One way to think of it might be that the genius is a kind of priestly authority who imposes unquestionable facts on people who have no say on the matter. In the same way that Descartes rebelled against a system of knowledge in which people had to submit to an ostensibly all-knowing elite class, we can think of genius as standing in the way of that same mental emancipation but for aesthetics.

In his masterpiece, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Paulo Freire (1921–1997) claims that real pedagogy must involve a dialogue between teacher and student. Top-down teaching where a teacher propagates facts can do nothing but congeal the education system’s beliefs and values in the student’s minds. This is a very effective way of keeping a class subordinate to a system of power they cannot change. Not only does a dialogue liberate the student from the fate of becoming a vessel, it also gives the students an equal standing with the teacher, empowering them with a political voice of their own. Under this new, dialectical model of pedagogy, students rather than perpetuating established knowledge become our educational system’s priority. No longer should students be filled with knowledge completely alien to their particular background and condition. Everywhere, the individual must be emancipated from top-down authority to flourish.

The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched.

Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality.

Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled […]
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The myth of genius may perpetuate a normalization of bourgeois values in a similar kind of way. If we understand authorial authority as a bourgeois mystification that does nothing other than reflect the needs and priorities of the ruling class, it is easy to see how the author and his genius stand in the way of genuine political and social emancipation. By appropriating art as a public subject rather than the top-down domain of elites bestowing ready-made truths onto an unknowing public, the individual is freed and interpretation becomes an expression of freedom and an emancipatory activity in which the individual expresses and realizes themselves.

Though genius once served that emancipatory function, it no longer does. A pattern is beginning to form. We have discussed three points in history: Descartes, Romanticism, and Barthes. All three must be understood as successive steps in the same emancipatory project.

When did this project originate? Why exactly do we care so much about freeing ourselves from these impositions? If our worship of genius is culturally conditioned, what is the genealogy of our rebellion against him?

Here we must observe the confluence of a number of historical moments. For one, the Protestant revolution initialized the Western movement towards individualism. Rebellion against ecclesiastical domination planted the germ that would eventually cause the French Revolution. Alongside the Protestant Reformation, Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon formalized a theory of man that posited a materialistic world where man attains freedom by obeying his rational soul. From this, we do not have to wait too long before the arrival of capitalism: an economic system that can only work in a culture of individualists who believe in the march of progress through the material exploitation of resources.

In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the Newtonian Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Kantian critique of metaphysical rationalism, it is no wonder that an intellectual culture emerged that took on all of these shapes and found in aesthetics both a progression of reason and a vindication of the self against the shackles of cold, scientific reason. Let us take one more look at how the trajectory of this radical ethos affected our valuation of genius.

Galvanized by the Protestant revolt against ecclesiastical power, Descartes wished to do for knowledge what Luther did for salvation. His goal was not reform but a radical ending of our reliance on the powerful for knowledge. Descartes’ epistemological revolution radically challenged the authorities of his day by individualizing man in his very ontological being. “I think therefore I am” is a cry of liberation; it is saying, “this feeling of conviction is truth. Truth is not hidden away in a book that only those with the pointy hats can interpret; it’s here in my own head. No occult pontification can take this certainty away from me.” His project was emancipatory in nature.

Descartes situated knowledge in the individual soul rather than in the unchallengeable authority of the Aristotelian establishment or the Platonic realm of everlasting truths. The philosopher looked around himself and found in the castle of knowledge so worshipped throughout the Middle ages nothing but a vault of arcane and extravagant nonsense. “Tear it all down,” he said, “and let’s start over.”

[…] it occurred to me that I should find much more truth in the reasonings of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and followed by no consequences to himself farther, perhaps, than that they foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common sense.
— René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

The Romantics continued this revolt against authority. Its zenith was the French Revolution: another historical development of the individual.
The Romantic mythologization of genius was — in many ways — a way to further situate truth in the hands of the individual. Uplifting aesthetic irrationalism further vindicated what the rational authorities demonized and sought to subjugate. The genius articulated the spirit of the people not through power or oppressive reason, but through excellence of will and mind. The genius spoke to the innermost soul of every human; he was a cultural, spiritual, and humanistic leader who used his soul, nature, and beauty as his guides and subject matter — the communal goods of mankind.

Thus, we can see that the tradition that eventually brought about the death of the author may have originated in the Protestant Revolution. What is interesting is that both the worship of genius and the death of the author are both moments along that emancipatory trajectory.

In quite the dialectical fashion, genius no longer serves the emancipatory function it once served. The world has changed, and in this new world, the concept of genius is now at odds with our new goals. For the same reason he was born, the author must die: to liberate us in light of our current political contradictions. The death of the author is simply the latest aesthetic or philosophical paradigm of our era; it is just as historically arbitrary as the myth of genius we have inherited. The genius was an individualized form of the top-down authority we sought to overcome; he was a transitory step toward complete emancipation.

Aristotelian science was falsified on the basis of its achievements; if capitalism were falsified by communism, it would be by virtue of its own achievements. Continuity is preserved through rupture: quantitative development becomes qualitative change if it attains the very structure of an established system; the established rationality becomes irrational when, in the course of its internal development, the potentialities of the system have outgrown its institutions.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or […] with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
— Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1850)

The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust […] is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping.
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Many of the things we consider oppressive today were liberational in their day: absolutism, capitalism, nationalism, marriage, etc. They each were transitory links in a dialectical project. The material world lags behind the form it seeks to realize: freedom is developing dialectically, and genius is one of its developmental stages between the scribe and reader, much like how capitalism is between feudalism and communism according to Marx.

It’s dialectical materialism all the way down. Our Protestant grandfathers rebelled against ecclesiastical authorities; our Romantic fathers rebelled against political authorities; and we rebelled against cultural authorities. Rebelling against traditions, conventions, and external imposition is part of our heritage, and each generation brings this objective closer to fruition. One day we will wake up in a world free from every aspect one should expect to find in any culture, and we will call this culturally sterilized world “free”. Our culture has been obsessed with slowly stripping our world of its traditions and calling this radical attack on the most ubiquitous feature of all cultures: “emancipation”. This is not sustainable.

The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom […]
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

In Terry Eagleton’s (b. 1943) work “Literary Theory: An Introduction” (1983), we find him discussing T.S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) with language that should be familiar by now.

[…] men and women must sacrifice their petty ‘personalities’ and opinions to an impersonal order. In the sphere of literature, this impersonal order is the Tradition. […] This arbitrary construct [is] imbued with the force of an absolute authority […] Tradition, like the Almighty or some whimsical absolute monarch, sometimes withholds its favour from ‘major’ literary reputations […]
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

Here we can behold the strain of Protestant panic we have been discussing up until now. Traditions are not opposed because of any internal failure, rather, they are torn down, piece by piece, with language reminiscent of Luther, Cromwell, Robespierre, or Marx. They are denounced as tyrannical; something worth liberating ourselves from. There, in that liberated state, we believe we will enjoy art authentically, without anything in our way, alienating our aesthetic experience.

We can thus see that our approach to art is informed — and very much chained — by our historical lineage. Why should we believe that cultural alienation is hostile to the aesthetic experience? Does the artist limit our aesthetic experience, or is he a channel through which the aesthetic may be increased? It is as though we believe something exists behind the pasteboard masks of alienation, and that we may reveal this content by taking off the mask. But we will never experience the “pure” thing. Our historical lineage misleads us into destroying every externality, every possibility of cultural experience. First the church, then the king, then traditions, and finally, the author. Every externality is a tyranny. Each is overthrown and replaced with a stage that, at a later point, will itself be perceived as a tyranny, and so on, until we have liberated ourselves from the yoke of all externalities.

We cannot simply bring the author back to life. Customs cannot be chosen from the catalog of history. Since customs are emanations from a society’s given historical and material conditions, no custom is correct or true, rather, they are only ever well/ill-adjusted to the conditions of the present. If the conditions change, well-adjusted becomes ill-adjusted. We cannot lift a custom from the historical condition that brought about its necessity and proceed to inject it into our world.

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. […] We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology

We cannot bring the past back to life if the conditions that sustained it are no longer with us. The past was not a choice, it was a result. “Genius” is not real so much as it was the customary emanation of a particular historical need. The mythology of genius served a function that it can no longer serve, and as such it must be adjusted to the present or abandoned.

While genius and authorship were adopted because they served a crucial function in the emancipation of the individual. However, that very same concept ballooned into a dialectically antithetical role and was soon regarded as oppressive and in need of getting dismantled.

[…] what Doctor Faustus itself implies […] is that there is more than a simple affinity between the Romantic cult of the genius-personality and the fascists’ response to Hitler’s frenzies. Thomas Mann gently satirises the narrator’s attempts to separate out the (evil) cult of genius with the (good) culture of modern Germany. […] We would rather not register the author’s message, that links the rise of European fascism to the cult of genius that is integral to the tradition of European culture.
— Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

This is why we killed the author: our latest conditions demanded it. But what is this latest custom? The worship of genius still exists, but it is receding. In certain contexts, we can observe this receding trend in an active generational conflict.

For example, older generations are more likely to have a negative opinion of music that has been autotuned or made “by/on a computer”. They are more likely to admire the kind of music from artists who can simply pick up an instrument and play without the need for any technological assistance. How frequently do we hear musicians being praised for their talent when they sound the same live as they do on their records? These generations tend to admire virtuosity, authenticity, personality, excellence, and genius more than younger generations.

Younger generations, on the other hand, are of the opinion that autotune and other music production technologies have democratized art. It is their belief that such a focus on virtuosity is oppressive, artificial, alienating, and limiting. Art, they say, is about self-expression, not about “sweat”, “excellence”, or “impressing” people. These expectations limit the amount of music that can be created — the range of human expression — just to satisfy some old-world rules about “genius”. Genius is oppressive.

[…] music isn’t made for the purpose of shallowly impressing elitist old men anymore.

The only way forward is to recognize music as auditory art and not a god damn sport — human inspiration and not human error.
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt7UhLeU4E4

The mythologization of genius is regarded as oppressive because it clashes with our historical condition. We live in an interconnected and atomized world where having a voice is more important than it has ever been in human history. In such a civilizational context, genius only limits what is accepted as legitimate self-expression, and thus is seen as stifling.

While it is unarguable that there is a generational pattern involved here, these two perspectives co-exist in a single culture. Korean boy bands are admired for their excellence and worship of musical artists from the 20th century is as prevalent as ever. One must only look at the public’s reaction to Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021) to realize that the mythology of genius is still alive and well to this day. Our individualism and our heritage can still sensically worship the articulation of our spirit’s ethos and pathos when it comes from an excellent individual.

Today, we still admire genius thanks to the circumstantial continuity of our heritage, but it now shares the stage with our latest aesthetic priorities. Genius satisfies an aesthetic pleasure, but it is no longer the sole, dominant mode of aesthetic pleasure. No more are the days when art was only valid insofar as it imitated or participated in greatness. Such values are now stifling to a population that values self-expression before everything else. The geniuses are over there and art belongs to everyone.

Only under rare occasions do we still regard the genius as being in inspired communion with God; he has become the vocal representative of a social faction’s pathos/ethos. Genius has been redesigned to suit the cultural terms of the times while retaining some aspects of its Romantic origins. Genius played a role in creating the conditions that later demanded its revision. The author is dead in the new ethos and alive in the old one.

With this, I believe we have made as good a case for the death of the author as anyone should hope for. Not only are the reader and one’s interpretation necessary sovereigns in the act of poetical understanding by the very ontological constitution of a symbolic gestalt where the signified has vanished, but we also have seen how culture forced us into intellectualizing what is first and foremost and desire for individual emancipation.

However, this begs the question: would you be wrong to interpret what is meant by “the death of the author” however you wanted? Barthes’ essay is a work of philosophy, but what even is philosophy? Is it factual or poetical? If we can answer this question, we will know the status of the signified. The answer is that philosophy is somewhere between the fact and poetry; it is not science, but it is also not art — though art and philosophy often overlap. Philosophers try to articulate the intellectual values of a culture much like how art tries to articulate the pathos of a culture.

Since philosophy cannot justify its esoteric ideas in our new scientific age, it has lost all ambitions as a source of knowledge. As of today, philosophy is nothing more than a museum. What is philosophy today aside from memorizing or connecting existing ideas or thinkers? not much at all.

Philosophy has yet to kill the author. Unlike art, philosophy leaves little room for interpretation, misreading, and taking things in your own direction. You are not welcome to misunderstand what the text means in philosophy circles like you are in literary circles. As a reader of philosophy, you are expected to understand and not interpret the works of the elders.

The author is alive in philosophy because — there — the reader has died.

Though the concept “the author is dead” has transcended Barthes himself, there is a clear and intended meaning you are expected to understand. You can disagree with it, but you have to engage with the intellectual discourse. Since philosophy belongs to the old world, it has not changed our public discourse since we do not think of doing philosophy as an act of self-expression as we do with art.

Here, we can hopefully see everything coming together. It is important for us to understand that the initial argument about signifier/signified is neat and all, but it selectively applies to subjects that have undergone a radical cultural evolution. While the distinction between “factual” and “poetical” may be useful, it remains an intellectualization of what is first and foremost cultural. Both art and philosophy articulate the spirit of culture.

The worship of genius and the death of the author are two points — two moments — in the same historical trajectory. The author was alive for the same reason he is now dead: to further emancipate man. Maybe one day we will see him come back to life; it all depends on what cultural conditions await us. Could they be here already? If the myth of genius is nothing but the efflux of bygone cultural conditions, then we must wonder if the death of the author is still an appropriate efflux of our own cultural conditions. Have we changed since Barthes published his essay?

I am not so sure, but I am also not sure that Barthes’ argument is complete. My goal with this essay is to study and examine the question of authorial importance. It seems quite obvious to me that the author and the reader both co-exist to different degrees depending on the context. In the context of an academic exercise, it might be instructive for a student to either accustom themselves to the author’s point of view or to use the work as an opportunity to explore and articulate their own life experience.

Exploring these different contexts could make for a truly interesting article. Here, however, I want to focus on the role of the author in the aesthetic experience. Instead of trying to persuade you that the author is back and stronger than ever, my goal is to try and sincerely look at how the author influences, defines, and directs our aesthetic experiences.

The Role of the Author

Does art require an author to be art at all? If art is understood as formalized human expression, then it seems ontologically necessary for the work of art to contain authorial expression. Let us examine this assertion.

What if a work of art — unbeknownst to a museum-goer — was produced by an elephant or by artificial intelligence; would the absence of an author be sensed by the aesthetic judgment? In other words, is authorial intent visibly embedded in the work itself? If it is impossible for us to see and experience the author’s intent directly, then how can the author influence our aesthetic experience?

Let us imagine that this hypothetical museum-goer proceeds to weep at this technically “authorless” painting, feeling that it gives a voice to their innermost feelings. This is not an impossible scenario, yet it depicts someone experiencing the aesthetic through a work that lacks authorial intent. Authorial intent is thus not necessary to experience art. We must therefore conclude that — in the experiential context of art — the author has no control over the aesthetic experience of those who consume his craft. The content of the work is made sensical through the subjective, not through the objective. Unlike objective schemes of knowledge, art is made coherent by the cipher of our own individual/social/cultural composition.

But if this is true, then what happens to our definition? After all, if art is understood as the formalization of human expression, then does it not definitionally necessitate the presence of authorial intent? Certainly, the example we have just looked at suggests to us that it is not necessary, but we must not abandon our definition just yet.

Though we can experience the aesthetic without being certain about whether or not a given work was produced with authorial intent, and though we will experience the aesthetic in a variety of situations that are most definitely authorless, we must not conclude that the author is altogether dead. For who would not feel betrayed upon learning that the work they wept for was painted by an elephant? Who would not feel betrayed upon learning that the song they found so beautiful was generated by a random algorithm? Who would not be disappointed and call their own aesthetic judgment into question if they learned that the work of art that had them feeling understood just a few seconds ago was in actuality produced entirely by one monkey? This betrayal is by no means trivial.

We are caught in a contradiction. While we do not need authorial intent to experience the aesthetic, the explicit absence of an author constitutes a deep betrayal that directly invalidates the aesthetic experience. As such, the aesthetic is in some sense reliant on the presence of authorial intent.

This suggests that our brains expect the aesthetic to have authorial origins, which boils down to the following question: can aesthetic pleasure only be triggered by human expression? On the one hand, authorship leaves no visible evidence of its presence, which means the aesthetic must rely on something other than human expression to be experienced. The fact that we can experience the aesthetic by contemplating nature proves to us that we do not need authorial intent to experience art. On the other hand, it is clear that if a work seems — even if only tacitly — to have been the result of human intent, then we cannot use what we used to aesthetically appreciate nature, the work needs an author. Thus, it depends on the object.

This explanation is harmless, but it does not get us anywhere near the root of the issue. For one, how are those two different modes related? While the two can be split, they are united in being aesthetic experiences. What is the underlying aesthetic logic that allows aesthetic pleasure to be experienced both with and without authorial intent? It is an explanation that blames the loose ends it creates on reality rather than on its shallow theoretical reach.

For example, would our aesthetic experience be betrayed if we learned that a beautiful garden was in fact not the product of authorial design but a complete product of nature? In many cases, this might just augment our aesthetic appreciation significantly! What is going on here?

It is clear that trying to tackle this issue using nothing but practical observation is getting us nowhere. Let us try and develop a theoretical framework that can resolve all these contradictions.

What happens during the aesthetic experience? The aesthetic experience itself is inscrutable. Instead of theorizing it from the inside, we should look at it from the outside. From its effects and behaviors, we can see a pattern.

It is practically undeniable that the aesthetic sense is intimately tied to our social instincts. The aesthetic judgment operates as a means of cultural affiliation. Humans identify with and value objects and ideas. By sharing these valuations, a cultural spirit (pathos/ethos/logos) is born and mediates each member of the group to a scheme of values that transcend pleasure. The spirit may very well value hedonism, but this is a cultural valuation.

In turn, this spirit may be objectivized in the crafts of man. These crafts are aesthetically successful to the extent that they exemplify, express, dignify, and replicate the spirit of a given cultural association.

And even if artistic works are not abstract thought and notion, but are an evolution of the notion out of itself, an alienation from itself towards the sensuous, still the power of the thinking spirit (mind) lies herein, not merely to grasp itself only in its peculiar form of the self-conscious spirit (mind), but just as much to recognize itself in its alienation in the shape of feeling and the sensuous, in its other form, by transmuting the metamorphosed thought back into definite thoughts, and so restoring it to itself.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetic

The subjective spirit is articulated through particularization into a material object, and — there — other subjective spirits may recover the thought that has been articulated in the object. In order to retrieve this pathos/ethos, one must share an upbringing and a scheme of values: the objective spirit. In other words, we translate and conjugate our subjective spirits into the medium of the material world. This symbolically loaded object is then distributed to a broader community of subjective spirits. The intermediate cultural spirit that stands between this community is the objective spirit.

Intentional art tries to articulate an objective spirit, but objects, ideas, and values need not be intentionally crafted to express this objective spirit. Nature, violence, riots, individuals, etc. can all evoke and stimulate the aesthetic reflex by exemplifying the pathos/ethos of the objective spirit. This is how intentional and non-intentional art share an aesthetic logic.

Thus, we may understand the aesthetic as the pathic/ethic correspondence between the subjective spirit and the objective spirit. Beauty functions more so as an index of your taste than it is in itself some inscrutable verity, and it is through a correspondence of taste that genuine, value-oriented social formations can be founded. The aesthetic becomes the pathos/ethos of a given cultural spirit. Through intentional and unintentional art, a given community tries to understand itself and establish its identity.

Aesthetic judgment is more about taste than it is about beauty.

It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key — with many nations there is no other — to the understanding of their wisdom and of their religion.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetic

[…] great art works by selectively focusing an historical community’s tacit sense of what is and what matters and reflecting it back to that community, which thereby comes implicitly to understand itself in the light of this artwork.
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Heidegger’s Aesthetics

[…] the thrill that you feel is an endorsement of the things you observe.

Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community — of the agreement in judgements that makes social life possible and worthwhile.
— Roger Scruton, Beauty

Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good […] it assesses the value of other people too on the basis of [their having] a similar maxim in their power of judgment.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

Thus it appears, that sympathy […] has a great influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues. From thence we may presume, that it also gives rise to many of the other virtues; and that qualities acquire our approbation, because of their tendency to the good of mankind. This presumption must become a certainty, when we find that most of those qualities, which we naturally approve of, have actually that tendency, and render a man a proper member of society […]
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Each of these philosophers is preoccupied with beauty as being in the object, but it is clear that “taste” is at the root of their aesthetic theory. From this, we can bracket away beauty and focus on the social, cultural, and civilizational function of beauty as it exists in the human marketplace of taste. Beauty is that which your innermost character enjoys. Signaling that you find something beautiful, interesting, intelligent, impressive, important, funny, tasty, or otherwise significant, reveals a great deal about your character — perhaps more than our conscious minds can fully grasp. By divulging your taste, your suitability as a cultural mate can be gauged.

By nothing do men show their character more than by the things they laugh at.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That is not to say that beauty is wholly subjective or culturally dependent — for the influence of culture can never move beyond the orbit of instinct. Though we are not born finding X beautiful, the cross-cultural pattern suggests that culture conjugates rather than invents our standards. Just like our disposition for language, we are not born with an instinctual language, but rather with a law and an extent of all possible languages in the categories of the mind. Just as formless feelings can be articulated into scenarios and dreams to make them mentally apprehensible, so too can formless dispositions be articulated by culture. Our formless dispositions are thus articulated and particularized by cultural upbringing. What we find beautiful is articulated by culture, but it is not invented there. There is a limit — a finite scope of potential — that each culture individually renders.

Beauty, then, is not limited to that which is elegant, harmonious, and cosmetic; it is that which is attuned to either subjective or objective taste. Subjective taste is the result of a confluence between your dispositions and the culture that articulates them; Objective taste is the result of a culture’s material and historical upbringing. It is clear that our instincts have a notion of what is beautiful, but it is mostly formless before cultural articulation. We may be more prone to finding certain proportions and narrative patterns beautiful, but since they are conjugated and not defined by culture, it is quite hard to see these rules in humans once they have been culturalized. It is easy to imagine a rebellious and progressive culture that finds beauty in objects that are — by all accounts — traditionally ugly.

We are thus forced to recognize three kinds of beauty:

1. Instinctual Beauty
2. Cultural Beauty
3. Traditional Beauty

Instinctual Beauty is the formless disposition we have; it refers to the rules, dispositions, and preconditions that make up our aesthetic instinct. This is the formless sludge that gets articulated by culture. Due to our being from the same species, variations in human personality are slight enough to allow comradery between all humans but flexible enough to allow us to adapt to our environment, hence the possibility for cultural distinctions. Maybe if we evolved in a less materially dynamic world our brains would not have never encountered the need to allow for as much variety. Culture, upbringing, and experiences then conjugate that formless, personal disposition into a particular taste. It most likely is possible to get you to find “A” and “not A” beautiful with a change in upbringing, but due to the importance of personality, it may very well be that your specific profile requires unique kinds of experiences to mold you from “A” to “not A”.

[…] the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle — Plan of Existence — Law — is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such — however true in itself — is not completely real. Aims, principles, [etc.], have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. […] a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

Cultural Beauty is that which a group finds beautiful; it is the objective spirit — that shared scheme of pathos and ethos. Whereas Instinctual Beauty is concerned with the human’s formless dispositional profile, Cultural Beauty is the result of an object expressing, representing, exemplifying, corroborating, or giving a voice to a shared spirit. When a group rallies around an object that accomplishes this, we are witnessing the cultural function of art: the material embodiment of an objective spirit. Finding such an object beautiful makes you a citizen of that objective spirit.

The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

Traditional Beauty on the other hand refers to what a given culture once considered beautiful; it often lingers in the present day and coexists with the Culturally Beautiful. We are often resistant to the idea of calling certain things art since the word art often evokes this kind of old-world nobility, virtuosity, and greatness, which seems completely estranged from what a piece of popular culture is trying to achieve. The question “is this art?” seems quaint and maladjusted in this context. The word itself reminds us of Mozart, Shakespeare, and the lineage of genius. Though many of these works are aesthetically impenetrable because they appeal to a pathos/ethos the citizens of which have long all been dead, they can still excite us intellectually and aesthetically by playing into our lingering worship of genius and our native disposition for ancestor worship. The longstanding aesthetic tradition of the West also exercises a strong hold on the term “art” itself, which in turn means that the word art means what it used to mean. It is too often the case that we will conflate the custom with the thing itself. We now know that Traditional Beauty is only Cultural Beauty for a previous stage of cultural development. However, in broader culture — where we do not make that distinction — , we often find people describing “true art” as “participation in the established aesthetic conventions of the past.” As an artist, it is essential to know that the excellence and genius of the past is not the goal of art; the ancients played to their culture’s pathos/ethos, and so should you. The measure of art is its correspondence to the spirit.

Custom is activity without opposition […] in which the fullness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life are out of the question […] Thus perish individuals, thus perish peoples by a natural death; and though the latter may continue in being, it is an existence without intellect or vitality; having no need of its institutions, because the need for them is satisfied, — a political nullity and tedium. […] the senile life of mere custom […]
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

In this system, genius can be understood as the “soul-leaders” of a culture’s objective spirit; they are the ones whose correspondence of spirit and creative excellence turns them into de facto spokespersons for a collective scheme of value. If we take as examples Bo Burnham and Donald Glover, we can see them poetically articulating the cultural spirit of a people. Finding Inside (2021) or This Is America (2018) beautiful suggests a deep and intimate association with an objective spirit. As the talented spokespersons of that spirit, they must be understood — definitionally — as geniuses; not because of any exceptional feat of intelligence, but because they gave a voice and an identity to a population’s values, priorities, and concerns.

[…] they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time — what was ripe for development. […] Their fellows […] feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied.
— G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History

With this, I believe our theoretical framework is complete. Our theoretical lexicon includes: intentional/non-intentional art, subjective/objective spirit, and Instinctual/Cultural/Traditional Beauty. Let us now see if we can solve the questions that plagued us earlier.

Can aesthetic pleasure only be experienced through human expression? The answer here is “no” since unintentional objects such as nature can be valued without bearing the mark of authorial design. That being said, the aesthetic is most fully tapped into by human design. The correspondence between subjective and objective spirit cannot be attuned without design. Only intentional art can fully optimize that correspondence.

Given that intentional art is most successful at capturing a culture’s spirit, it is no wonder that humans will value the author as often as our traditions do. Though, there are different Cultural treatments of the author’s importance throughout the history of cultures — our Traditional valuation of genius is one way, and our contemporary non-valuation of the author is another — , it is inscribed in our Instinct that the author is someone we have to reckon with due to his ubiquity in the production of intentional art.

Intentional art follows the equation “Subjective -> Objective -> Subjective”. In other words, a subjective spirit creates an object which is then digested by other subjective spirits. But this equation posits the individual as the sovereign in the aesthetic process. As stated in the introduction, this is the result of our Protestant/Cartesian historical upbringing. The problem is that such a perspective alienates us from the goal of our aesthetic Instinct.

Notions about a divinely inspired author permeate the history of cultures. It is woven into the design of our aesthetic Instinct that the subjective articulator of the objective is important (moral, genius, civilizational, etc.). We lose a great deal by Protestantly demystifying the veil of authorial authority from a given work. The author is not necessary for the aesthetic experience, but he contributes a great deal to the fruition of our aesthetic pleasure. Admiring Shakespeare or Dante as geniuses is not extrinsic to aesthetic pleasure; it is intrinsic to it. There are many different Cultural ways of admiring the author, but by killing him we are not replacing one valuation with another, we are only stripping our aesthetic senses from the means of full aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic experience is inferior to what it could have been in the absence of the author. Our Protestant attempts to liberate the Cartesian spirit from traditional alienation only lead us into alienating ourselves from our cultural dispositions.

If the author augments the work, then how can explain the example I gave earlier where a lush and beautiful garden was revealed to be natural? I do believe that if the garden was designed by someone who is worshipped for his excellence, then our aesthetic experience would be increased. Moreover, I also believe that if we think the garden was designed by a deity, our aesthetic experience would also be increased. However, that is not what this example was initially about. Learning that a garden was not designed by a human may help make it seem more “natural” and authentic, which would augment its aesthetic quality in one way. Both can be true.

Just as we established that an aesthetic experience can be betrayed by the absence of authorial intent, it can also be spoiled by the presence of authorial intent. If nature represents innocence, elegance, virginity, wisdom, strength, vitality, life, and authenticity, then it is easy to imagine how one’s aesthetic experience could be interrupted upon learning that the forest we are marveling at is in fact a set for a television show, entirely made of plastic. The scene may be Cosmetically Beautiful (visually elegant and evocative) while no longer being Aesthetically Beautiful (expressive of the spirit). Another angle may allow for Cultural Beauty, but in this betrayal, it lost the particular premises that made it aesthetic: natural authenticity.

Here, the natural scene was Culturally Beautiful — it was cherished for exemplifying the values of the cultural spirit — , and the scene’s revealed artificiality undermined that aesthetic premise — hence the betrayal.
Thus, the betrayal has nothing to do with authorship per se, but rather with the premise of our aesthetic appreciation being contradicted.

AI-generated art is criticized precisely because of that authorial betrayal. If we approach a work of AI-generated art not knowing that it was generated by AI, and if we are approaching this work under the aesthetic premise that we are interfacing with the spirit of humanity through the work of one subjective spirit, then we will be betrayed. Instead of asking whether AI art can be considered art, we should art if there exists an aesthetic premise in our culture that could recognize AI art as art.

As it stands, three things can happen when faced with AI-created art.

1. You could be duped into finding AI art beautiful not knowing that it was made by AI (expecting author, but being betrayed).
2. You could find AI art beautiful because of its meaningfulness as AI art, (aesthetically beautiful through a non-authorial aesthetic premise).
3. You could find AI art tacky while still appreciating some cosmetic feature (cosmetically beautiful, but aesthetically ugly).

What could those non-authorial aesthetic premises be? and do we have such aesthetic premises available in our culture?

We do have at our cultural disposal an aesthetic premise through which AI art can tap into our Romantic anxieties about being replaced by machines or about ever-expanding technological development, even if it means destroying the authenticities of human life. It is possible for us to interpret the work by injecting meaning into it as well, but this is not a very potent and stimulating aesthetic premise. For the most part, the premises we have at our disposal are more so about the concept of AI art than about any specific work produced by AI. Can we imagine such premises?

Just as a forest can be admired as an incidental representative of a group’s pathos/ethos, one can easily imagine a culture that worships machines and sees in their imitation of a formerly human craft a secret and mysterious design too profound for the flesh of our meager human brains to fathom and fully understand. Such a culture might feel betrayed upon learning that a work they love was made by a mere human!

But this is nothing but a repurposed version of authorial worship. Hidden in secular language, we can find in this aesthetic agitation what other cultures might describe as divine, sacred, and inspired. It seems as though our aesthetic Instinct has “the superhuman representative of a culture” as one of its central aesthetic premises. This can manifest as a worship of machines, the worship of genius, and the worship of a deity depending on the particulars of a given cultural upbringing. We do not need the author, but — embedded in our instincts — the author is there, ready to augment our aesthetic experience if we find a way to integrate him in the experience.

We may thus conclude that the author is not responsible for the aesthetic experience, but he is a critical contributor to it. There are many ways to experience the aesthetic, and valuing the author as a privileged and significant figure is quite a significant way to do just that. The author is important but not essential. Being one of the central aesthetic premises in our Instinct, it is no wonder we can observe authorial worship showing up in different forms throughout the ages.

Conclusion: The Lingering Past

In our day-to-day life, we think about history before WWII with a kind of mythical distance — as though we cannot fathom that it actually happened. Far from not having happened, living and breathing evidence of its life still permeates our customs, values, and concepts. These are not the products of recent historical events, but rather the products of an entire historical trajectory. Physical evidence of that past often does not carry the same intimate weight as beliefs and ideas do. It is one thing to see an artifact from the old world with our own eyes, but it seems so much stranger to realize that the ideas and values we hold in our head — those thoughts that feel so present, aware, and remote from a mythical and voiceless past — are in fact nothing but echoes from an abandoned world.

Whenever you are critical of someone being irrational or inconsistent, the past is speaking through you. This is not the natural commitment of a well-adjusted brain, but an intellectual custom you are taking part in. Whenever we find something beautiful, we are doing so through aesthetic customs, standards, and premises inherited from our past. In those moments, we are not experiencing a pure, individual, and emancipated sentiment, but the embodiment of tradition. The ridges of your aesthetic sensation have been traced by the pen of Coleridge and Shelley, which itself was shaped by their own respective cultural upbringings. You are made up of the past; everything is the product of a particular trajectory.

The past is not a moment but a shouted word in the canyon of time. Against the walls of material history and the distance it travels, its reverberant form grows distorted. What was once clear becomes faint, but it never vanishes. The past is a collection of shouts whose echoes harmonize with the culture of a later era. Voices come in and out of that cultural harmony. Though the motives of the initial shout are forgotten in the evolution of customs, the passionate words of the past are bequeathed to the next generations who — in turn — adjust their parent’s values to the new conditions of their time.