Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gender Ideology and the “Artistic” Fabrication of Human Sex: Nature as Norm or the Remaking of the Human?Michele M. SchumacherUntil quite recently,” the famous English novelist C. S. Lewis remarked in 1959, “it was taken for granted that the business of the artist was to delight and instruct his public”: that is to say, to address simultaneously their passions and their intellects. “There were, of course, different publics.... And an artist might lead his public on to appreciate finer things than they had wanted at first; but he could do this only by being; from the first, if not merely entertaining, yet entertaining, and if not completely intelligible, yet very largely intelligible.” This constraint—let us call it intelligent (or purposeful) design, in keeping with a basic analogy that we will draw upon in these pages—had however been lost, Lewis observed. Hence, even “in the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist’s duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing; we owe him ‘recognition,’ even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits.”1 In short, the artist of modernity need not pay the slightest attention to an intention, not even his own. Modern art need not be an expression of intelligence or [End Page 363] understanding; it is expression as such (tout court): personal and autonomous.2Lewis’s remarks do not point merely to the increasingly relativist tendencies of art in the Western world, to the lack of objective criteria or norms governing the artistic disciplines. They also point to the growing disregard among artists for the sociocultural expectations of their publicum. Mediating between the two is, without a doubt, the basis upon which both artistic and social norms were traditionally founded: nature, which served as a classic analogy for both art (understood in the broad sense, so as to include not only the fine arts, but also technology and practical sciences) and ethics in virtue of nature’s intrinsic inclination towards its defining end and perfection.With regard to the first of these analogies (that of art and nature), Mark Schiefsky explains that although art does bring about “results that nature itself cannot,” it does so in the classic understanding “by acting in a natural way—the way nature would act if it could generate the products of art.”3 As for the difference between the two, nature is moved to its specifying end by way of intrinsic inclinations that are implicit to it, whereas a work of art is moved to its end extrinsically, and thus with more or less violence.4 A sculptor, for example, who introduces a form into a piece of marble, does so by chiseling [End Page 364] and hammering away at the fine stone.5 “Art is,” Aristotle explains, “the principle and form of the thing that comes to be [let us say, a sculpture]; but it is located elsewhere [in, for example, the artist’s mind or in a sketch that he has made] than in that thing, whereas the movement of nature is located in the thing itself that comes to be [a tree, for example, or a baby], and is derived from another natural organism [a tree or human parents] which possessed the form in actuality.”6This classic distinction between art and nature parallels the distinction between art and ethics. Ethics “does not affect human action in the same way as do art and technique,” Servais Pinckaers explains. Unlike art and technique, which are concerned with “the external work produced by human action”—this painting or that machine, for example—ethics is concerned with an immanent principle, qualifying the actor as such: the stable dispositions (or habitus: virtues or vices) at the origin of “the active willing that is the principle source of the action.”7 This immanent principle at the source of ethical action is—to complete our analogy—creative in only a limited sense. The human person is indeed free to choose, but he or she is not free to decide “what is good or evil” as such, nor what is “good or bad for...