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“Art and Insecurity”
Today, I’m going to be discussing some of the ideas that we’ve been examining in the “Why Does Art
Matter?” course, but I’m also hoping to advance my own research a bit, insofar as my recent work relates
to the themes and issues that we’ve been exploring in the course. Basically (and perhaps simplistically),
there seem to be two basic questions that one can ask about art: First, some version of the question “What
is art?” and, second, some version of the question “What can (or sometimes should) it do?” Most art
critics, historians, and philosophers of art either combine these questions or focus more on one than the
other. Typically, they find more sophisticated ways to examine these questions, but these seem to be the
basic questions at stake when it comes to art. The question “why does art matter?” nicely combines these
two basic questions (in order to figure out why it matters, we have to determine what it is), so we begin
the course by spending a few weeks on the ontological question before turning to the question of the
historical and social effects of art, enlisting a variety of artists and theorists to aid us in this endeavor.
Okay, so enough about the course, for now at least: I’ll return to the concerns of the course toward the end
of my talk. Next, I want to talk a little about my current research in order to show how this research
coincides with at least some of what we’ve set out to do in the course. My reflections today will have
more to do with the second question, i.e. it will be more about art’s possible effects than the ontological
question concerning the nature and definition of art. About a year ago, I began thinking about the
question of security, and the philosophical implications of the political discourse of security, and when
you start to look for a concept like security and its related terms, you begin to find them all over the place.
For example, Michel de Montaigne’s wonderful “Apology for Raymond Sebond” contains multiple
references to security, which makes sense given the precarious times in which Montaigne lived and
worked. Montaigne’s multiple references to security also make sense when you consider his day job, in
which he had served as the mayor of Bordeaux before retiring to his country estate in order to write his
essays. The first section of my paper provides a brief sketch of the discourse of security in early modern
philosophy, in which security is typically understood as something desirable. In the middle section, I
focus on James Baldwin’s critique of security and his conception of the artist as a figure who cultivates
insecurity. Finally, in the third section I conclude by briefly comparing Baldwin’s conception of the
creative artist with Albert Camus’ discussion of the artist from his 1957 lecture “Create Dangerously,”
which is one of the texts I’ve discussed in my section of the course.

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1. Security as a Moral, Political, and Epistemic Concern in Early Modern Philosophy
The first passage on security in The Apology for Raymond Sebond concerns whales, and it’s an extract
from the section in which Montaigne is trying to show that “man is no better than the beasts.” Here
considers what we might call the moral lives of animals:
As to the particular duties we perform for one another in the service of life, we see many similar
examples among animals. They hold that the whale never moves unless it has in front of it a little
fish like a sea gudgeon, which is therefore called the guide-fish; the whale follows it, letting itself
be led and turned as easily as the tiller turns the ship; and, in recompense, again, while everything
else, whether beast or vessel, that enters into the horrible chaos of the mouth of that monster is
incontinently lost and swallowed up, this little fish retires there with complete security and sleeps
there.1
Because the guide fish performs a duty for the whale, the whale keeps it safe. Montaigne next points out
the symbiotic relationship between the “little bird called the wren” and the crocodile, as well as further
examples of particular duties that comprise the moral lives of animals. Morally speaking, humans are no
superior to whales and guide fish (incidentally, this is a point with which Herman Melville would likely
agree; indeed, he includes this passage among the extracts at the beginning of Moby-Dick). Later in the
essay, Montaigne will have something to say about human security (or at least insecurity) as well. At this
point, he is advancing his skeptical claim that human knowledge claims invariably lack certainty:
Besides this infinite diversity and division [among kinds of judgments] it is easy to see from the
trouble our judgment gives us and from the uncertainty everyone feels in himself that the seat of
judgment is very insecure. How diversely do we judge things? How many times do we change
our ideas?2
Whereas Montaigne seeks repose, like theologians before him, in the security of faith that quiets the
restless desire to know, Descartes will later seek to secure knowledge upon secure foundations. Aside
from the rather obvious relevance for political discourse, we can see that security and insecurity have
been important for modern philosophy as well. But what could security and insecurity possibly have to
do with art?
1
Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 41.
2
Ibid., 125.

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2. James Baldwin: Art, Insecurity, and Society
Another of my recent interests is the work of twentieth century African-American writer James Baldwin
(1924-1987); I’m currently coordinating a community reading and discussion group on Baldwin’s
writings and thinking about the relationship between Baldwin’s work and my own teaching and writing. I
want to begin with Baldwin’s answer to this question and then proceed to some more familiar
philosophical answers to this question concerning the relationship between art and security, or, more
accurately, the artist and insecurity.
James Baldwin is rightly considered among the greatest of American essayists, he is certainly among the
finest of the twentieth century. His writings gave voice to his generation’s struggle for civil rights, a
struggle that continues to this day. But his writings also evince a concern for what it means to be a
literary artist in the twentieth century, and it is clear from his writings during the 1960s that he was
concerned about how to balance the public demands that came with serving as spokesman for the Civil
Rights Movement with what he saw as the private demands of literary authorship. So, how does
Baldwin’s work address the question of why art matters, and how does it deal with the relationship
between art and insecurity?
Baldwin claims that one of the privileges that distinguish white Americans from African-Americans is
their sense of safety and security. It’s a mark of what we would today call ‘white privilege’ that middle
class white Americans can live securely, without worrying about whether they will be able to afford rent
or worry about harassment by law enforcement; indeed, this sense of security is one of the defining
features of the American middle class. Baldwin wonders about the costs of this sense of security. He
claims that this sense of security is built upon a series of lies and self-deceptions that contribute to white
Americans’ sense of superiority and immunity from the burdens of history and a sense that one is unable
to avoid bequeathing these burdens to the next generation. One of the key things that distinguishes poor
blacks from well-off whites in the United States is this apparent immunity from history in a collective
sense and an ignorance of one’s own finitude in an individual sense. Baldwin recurs to this delusion of
safety throughout his work. In his most famous work The Fire Next Time, he addresses this question of
the unbearable nature of this risk:
Behind what we think of as the Russian menace lies what we do not wish to face, and what white
Americans do not face when they regard a Negro: reality—the fact that life is tragic simply
because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun
will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is
that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos,

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crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact
of death. It seems that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn
one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the
small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and which we shall return.3
There is a strong Existentialist flavor to this passage. Like Martin Heidegger, Baldwin claims that we flee
an awareness of our own finitude, what Heidegger terms our “ownmost possibility.” Like Jean-Paul
Sartre, he claims that most of us seek to the comfort and security of a life lived in bad faith. The bad faith
of security is a recurring theme in his writings. Much later, in his last published work, Baldwin will
return to the self-deception that is required to a live a secure life. The Evidence of Things Not Seen grew
out of an assignment that Baldwin was given to write on the Atlanta child murders of 1981 and the trial of
Wayne Bertram Williams, the twenty-three year old African-American suspect who was eventually
convicted of perpetrating the murders. In the course of this essay, he poses the question of what real
community might look like:
[Real community] means doing one’s utmost not to hide from the question perpetually in the eyes
of one’s lovers or one’s children. It means accepting that those who love you (and those who do
not love you) see you far better than you will ever see yourself. It means accepting the terms of
the contract you sign at birth, the mast copy of which is in the vaults of Death. These ruthless
terms, it seems to me, make love and life and freedom real: whoever fears to die also fears to
live. Whoever fears to die also imagines—must imagine—that another can die in one’s place.
The dream of safety can reach culmination or climax only in the nightmare orgasm of genocide.4
What Baldwin here terms the ‘dream of safety’ entails the same flight from death that he had analyzed
more than twenty years earlier, but in The Fire Next Time the flight from an awareness of one’s own
finitude was couched only in terms of self-deception. In The Evidence of Things Not Seen, the stakes are
much higher. In his 1985 book, Baldwin’s worry is that life lived without real community leads to a
tragic coarsening of life, a desire for security that makes it possible to disregard the lives of others and
even actively seek the death of those who are perceived to block the realization of the dream of safety.
Due to this precariousness, life can be extinguished at any time. This state of security is a willful
ignorance that deceives and damages. Such willful ignorance of ones’ own finitude leads to a sense of
superiority over those who don’t have the luxury of this self-deception. In other words, unlike early
modern philosophers such as Montaigne and Descartes, who, despite their many disagreements over the
value of philosophy for life, basically agree that security is something desirable, Baldwin believes that the
3
James Baldwin, Collected Essay. Ed. Toni Morrison (NY: Library of America, 1998), 339.
4
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (NY: Holt, Rinhehart, and Winston, 1985), 101-102.

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feeling of security is a form of self-deception that demands a cure, and, at least in some of his writings,
Baldwin proposes art as a potential cure for the tranquilizing sense of security that characterizes the lives
of many white Americans. The kind of art that Baldwin advocates is the sort of which expresses
insecurity to counteract the blithe security of most white Americans.
Baldwin develops this idea in a short piece entitled “The Creative Process” published in 1962, the year
that the two essays which would comprise The Fire Next Time were also published. In “The Creative
Process,” he articulates what it means to be an artist as well as the role of art in society. What he terms
“perhaps the primary distinction” between the artist and everyone else is that the artist “must actively
cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone” (Essays, 669). One
senses in this distinction both a profoundly autobiographical element and an echo of his claim in The Fire
Next Time that freedom consists in the awareness of one’s own death. Baldwin’s biographer David
Leeming reports that, like many successful artists, Baldwin cultivated a group of followers and hangers-
on, especially as a young writer in France. Baldwin was a gregarious person, so he was constantly trying
to fight this tendency in order to find time to write, time to cultivate loneliness. All artists need to
cultivate this art of solitude if they are to be successful, but this puts them at odds with the practical
concerns of most people in society who are gregarious and sociable. Additionally, society is a function of
the collective projects that corporations and governments undertake to conquer nature and to live together
in society. “There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children
to be fed: and none of these things can be done alone” (Essays, 669). Living together and conquering
nature require their own sorts of creativity, distinct from the artist’s solitary sort. Baldwin is quick to
point out that the artist’s solitude isn’t that of the “rustic musing by the lake,” but rather “is much more
like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearful aloneness which one sees in the eyes of someone
who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, that force and mystery which
so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has understood or really been able to
control” (Essays, 669). This is the kind of solitude characteristic of “extreme states” that many people try
to avoid if they can.
The artist’s task is to show that this solitary condition which is characteristic of birth, death, and love is
ultimately everyone’s fate. The difference between the artist and everyone else, according to Baldwin, is
that the artist cultivates this solitude while everyone else avoids risking it for as long as possible.
Therefore, the artist’s task is to dispel our delusions of safety, which makes the artist “an incorrigible
disturber of the peace” (669). The artist is at odds with society because “the entire purpose of society is
to create a bulwark against the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human
race alive” (669-670). Society’s promise of security is predicated upon the illusion that society is

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impervious to change, which is why neither the revolutionary nor the artist is welcome in society: they
both threaten this illusion of security that governments and corporations work so diligently to cultivate.
Baldwin’s examples are drawn from the tumultuous post-World War Two years in which successful
international struggles were waged against colonial oppression in places like Algeria and domestic
struggles against racist oppression in places like Alabama. Perhaps it’s a mark of how little things have
really changed domestically that we could probably cite similar examples of places in the United States
where the struggle against racist oppression continues, places like Ferguson or Baltimore. Internationally,
things appear different, for the figure of the terrorist has largely replaced the figure of the postcolonial
revolutionary in our public imagination. Still, Baldwin’s basic point stands: there’s a real sense in which
both the artist and the revolutionary (and, we would want to add, in a fundamentally different way, the
terrorist) represent a challenge to the status quo.
The artist differs from the other actors in society by the fact that he works on himself to reveal the
invisible reality of flux and change hidden behind apparently stable appearances: through acts of self-
cultivation (Baldwin claims that the artist differentiates himself by “the fact that he is his own test tube,
his own laboratory”) he discovers truths about the “human condition,” specifically that lacks stability
despite the tranquil illusions of stability so carefully cultivated by other members of society, such as
“politicians, legislators, educators, scientists, et cetera” (Esssays, 670). The artist’s peculiar responsibility
lies in the fact that he is always at war with his society and its fixation on keeping up the appearance of a
stable, unchanging social space.
Baldwin makes two final points in this brief essay. The first concerns the difficulty of self-knowledge, the
antidote to the self-deception of security, among other forms of self-deception. Individuals work quite
diligently on various projects of self-deception throughout their lives. Although we are responsible for
our actions according to Baldwin, we rarely understand why we act in the ways that we do. Self-deception
accounts for why we maintain our social relationships. Unlike the 17th
and 18th
century social contract
theorists who argue that individuals make a clear-eyed decision to consent to be a part of society,
Baldwin argues that individuals become social creatures by default, because living among others is much
less frightening than the various alternatives. Baldwin would agree with Thomas Hobbes that fear
motivates us toward sociality, but he would disagree that this is an act of self-interested rationality
(basically for Hobbes, pre-social humans grow tired of being hunted down like dogs in the violent state of
nature and seek something more secure even at the cost of their freedom—freedom isn’t worth much
without security). For Baldwin, individuals basically become resigned to society and therefore become
social creatures by default: “We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in
order to become social, there are a great many other things which we must not become, and we are

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frightened, all of us, of those forces within us which perpetually menace our precarious security” (Essays,
671). On the Hobbesian account, we are faced with a stark choice: an anti-social existence in which our
lives, as he famously put it, would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” or a secure existence
within society; the smart money is of course on Option B, so on the Hobbesian account people rationally
choose the order of society over the chaos of nature. On Baldwin’s account, things are more complicated.
Individuals don’t face a stark choice between a secure society and certain death. Rather, they face a
dizzying array of possible choices, with sociality being the least risky. But this doesn’t mean that those
riskier possibilities simply fade away: they remain, and it is the artist’s risky task to remind us of this.
Baldwin’s second concluding point concerns the particular dangers faced by the American artist as a
result of American history. Subjugating the continent was a collective endeavor in which there was
initially no place for the artist unless her work served to further the aims of this project. Indeed, emergent
nations have no time for the difficult truths of the artist. Just as individuals lie to themselves about who
they are and who they wish to become, nationalist histories require lies that keep the darker aspects of
these national projects hidden. Art that supports these nationalist projects is permitted, while art that
reminds people of these darker aspects is either ignored or actively suppressed. It is only when a nation’s
aims become adequately secured that it can begin to indulge the artist. Unlike the Hobbesian picture of
the state, in which the state serves to keep the darker forces at bay, Baldwin knows that the state has the
power to unleash these forces. After all, it wasn’t in the state of nature that escaped slaves were hunted
down like dogs. Rather, it was as the United States emerged as a continental power that slave labor was
used as a primary means to extend its economic and political power. It is the artist’s task to bear witness
to these inconvenient facts of history, though not out of spite. Instead, the “war of an artist with his
society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself,
and with that revelation, to make freedom real” (Essays, 672).
Baldwin doesn’t mention any artists by name in “The Creative Process,” but a visual artist that he might
have had in mind is the painter Beauford Delaney. Born in Tennessee, Delaney moved to Harlem in 1929
to become one of the key painters of the Harlem Renaissance. By the time Baldwin met him in the 1940s,
he had moved to Greenwich Village. Baldwin himself was escaping a stifling home environment in
which his father’s overbearing personality made it impossible for Baldwin to develop his talents as a
writer. Delaney became something of a father figure to the young writer. In a tribute to the painter in
1965, Baldwin claims that it was the artist who first taught him to really see: “I learned about light from
Beauford Delaney, the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face” (Essays, 720). It is
the light in Delaney’s paintings that frees him Delaney from the darkness of his own past. Baldwin
continues,” [p]erhaps I am so struck by the light in Beauford’s paintings because he comes from

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darkness—as I do, as in fact, we all do.” (Essays, 720). Delaney teaches Baldwin not to succumb to the
darkness of one’s past or give in to the temptation to become trapped in our nation’s collective past, but
instead to find in the light of the present the possibility for change: “It was humbling to be forced to
realize that the light fell down from heaven, on everything, on everybody, and that the light was always
changing. Paradoxically, this meant for me that memory is a traitor and that life does not contain the past
tense: the sunset one saw yesterday, the leaf that burned, or the rain that fell, have not really been seen
unless one is prepared to see them every day. As Beauford is, to his eternal credit, and for our health and
hope” (Essays, 720).
3. Conclusion
To conclude, I’d like to briefly say a bit about how Baldwin’s conception of the artist, understood as an
individual who cultivates her own insecurity so that she can remind us of our own, relates back to some of
the concerns of the course. As I’ve taught the course this year, I’ve come to think of the course in terms
of a movement that begins by thinking about what art is (the ontological question I began with) and how
questions concerning the nature of art have been understood historically. We spend the first couple weeks
discussing Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art, in which he claims that art is a modern invention. From
there, we turn to Alexander Nehamas’ Only a Promise of Happiness and a discussion of various texts
prompted by his contemporary reflections on beauty. In the second half of the course, we turn from the
question of what art is and how it affects its audience to questions concerning the social role of art. It’s
here that we find resonances with Baldwin’s conception of the artist’s role in society. I’m going to use
Camus’ essay “Create Dangerously” as a basis for comparison to Baldwin’s conception of the artist and
as an illustration of this concern with the ethical and political concerns of art that concludes the course.
In 1957, Albert gave a lecture in Uppsala that was subsequently published as “Create Dangerously.”
Much like Baldwin and a host of other artists and intellectuals during this postwar period, Camus’ lecture
attempts to evaluate both what the artist’s role in contemporary society is and what it should be. Some
artists attempt to retreat into themselves and create an artworld distinct from the everyday world; we
might call this the Art for Art’s Sake tendency. Another artistic tendency is found among those artists
who accommodate themselves to society and create luxurious works that will serve as status symbols for
the wealthy who adorn their homes and boardrooms with these luxury items. Certainly neither tendency
qualifies as dangerous creation, though they account for much of the art that is created today.
Art ought to consist of instances of dangerous creation, which amounts to a kind of realism for Camus.
He is careful to point out that by ‘realism,’ he does not mean what is commonly meant by this term. He
argues that the only truly realist artist would be God, for in order to qualify as truly realist, a work would

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have to be both of space and of time. If we were going to complete a film of a man’s life (this is Camus’
example), we would need to film every moment of his existence. Not only would this likely be the most
boring film ever, no human being would choose to devote her life to watching it at the expense of living
her own life. Furthermore, even if there were such a film, it would still fail to accurately represent the
entirety of the man’s life, for it would miss the concrete relationships that constitute the person’s identity.
They would flit across the screen, but the viewer would miss their significance. Camus concludes that
only a god would be able to qualify as a realist artist (and, we might add, only a god would be able to
serve as the possible audience for such a work).5
This thought-experiment illustrates both the limitations of realism and the kind of realism that Camus
believes the artist ought to adopt. The realistic artist ought to present possibilities for how the world
might be, rather than how the world actually is. The artist, on Camus’ account, would be tasked with
shaping the future. “In order to reproduce properly what is, one must also depict what will be” (261).
Instead of either fleeing reality (the art for art’s sake strategy) or either attempting a faithful portrait (the
traditional realist strategy) or accommodating oneself to it (the artist as creator of luxury strategy), the
revised realist judges how much reality is necessary to show audiences a possible future that is better than
the present. “Then, every once in a while, a new world appears, different from the everyday world and
yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity—called forth for a few hours by the
power and longing of genius” (265). The task of the contemporary artist entails neither a flight from the
present world nor immersion in it. The new world that the artist intimates would be one of solidarity,
recognizably our own, though different enough to be worth trying to realize.
There are certainly some notable similarities between the conceptions of the artist advocated by Baldwin
and Camus. But there is at least one notable difference as well: Camus’ artist optimistically faces the
future by creating works that will remind individuals of their solidarity and nobility. Camus’ responsible
realist is one whose work ultimately overcomes solitude and its deceptions in order to create works of
innocent insecurity. Baldwin’s artist, on the other hand, reminds us of our incurable solitude and
therefore the insecurity provoked by his artist is never innocent.
5
Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously,” Reason, Rebellion, and Death: Essays (NY: Vintage, 1960), 259.