The Truth of Accountants

I recently submitted an essay to The 2026 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. One way or another, it won't see the light of day until the competition has been judged.

What I can share is the pattern that kept cropping up as I engaged with the source material. It's a common problem in the genres of anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. I feel like I've been stung, and while completely swearing off these genres feels a bit drastic, there's plenty of content within them that we would be better off not engaging with. Some ideas don't need refining, they're not "part of the history of inquiry", they're simply unfalsifiable conjecture that bears no fruit for humanity or thinking.

The pattern is simple, and I apologise, once I describe it, you'll see it everywhere. I sure did. Within two days of submitting my essay to the Berggruen competition I found it leaping out of the paragraphs of an Aeon article titled "How Art Invented Humanity".

It goes like this:

1. Find a mental capability that you have.
2. Decide that at some point this capability did not exist.
3. Practice armchair anthropology and "identify" the moment in time where people first developed this capability.
4. Declare its development as pivotal to the history of humanity.
5. Heavily imply that the capability is still rare, or at least, missing in those you disagree with.
6. Avoid providing any advice on how to obtain this capability, or perhaps insist that it "cannot be taught".

The offending Aeon article starts with an anecdote about Werner Herzog.

The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth... The truth of accountants (and) ecstatic truth.

I'm all for artists crafting stories around their convictions, but please label it fiction when you don't have any real evidence. That's not a slur. Aspirational fiction has the ability to open people's eyes to new possibilities, and make a real change to the world. Of course the temptation exists to cross the world of stories, where things are convincing because they "make sense" with the world of facts, where things are convincing because they can be proven true. This alchemy can be achieved by confounding could be with should be and is.

Anyway, I'm not responding to a Herzog essay, I'm responding to a J F Martel essay, and that essay is ultimately about art and artifice, with an anthropological meander that the title indicates. Still, it's a weird jumping off point, and I think to myself, what good could come of this?

Van Gogh

Martel gestures at a Vincent van Gogh painting, suggesting that it has an excess of meaning. It expresses more about the world than simply that a murder of crows flew over a wheat field one day. If I were to respond dryly with "it is also an example of how van Gogh paints" Martel would call me a spoilsport. Even if I went as far as to say that the way in which he paints tells us something about his emotional state, I get the sense that it wouldn't be enough. Martel loses me in his response to this.

van Gogh's painting is showing us what it means to be alive on this planet, in this universe. No doubt it does this by means of the subjective ideas that critics and historians have found in the painting, such as mortality and despair (the picture was made shortly before the painter took his own life). But what the painting reveals through these themes is not subjective at all. It is, in fact, the one thing we can know objectively: the radical mystery that every event, by its mere occurrence, affirms. The mystery isn't what the crows and the field mean, but that they mean, and that they mean because they have all come to be, just as they are.

So is it a mystery that the crows have meaning, or is it solved? "They mean because they have all come to be, just as they are".

On top of this, it seems like Martel is rejecting the obvious answer: they mean something, subjectively, to van Gogh, and they now mean something, subjectively, to me. Perhaps they now mean the same thing to both of us. We can understand each other, beyond the obvious, and perhaps we both see things the same way. That's marvellous! I feel a closeness, with van Gogh, and with anyone else who may interpret the painting, or crows, which have been symbolic for millennia, in the same way. Martel simply asserts objectivity, that the painting says something about the universe beyond anything that can be pinned down by an accountant. In fact his only definition for that which he holds in the highest regard: meaning; ecstatic truth; art; is that it can't be defined.

Art and Artifice

Martel moves next to show that there are two types of beauty: perfect and hideous. He wouldn't be the first to insist that ugly can be beautiful too, but he brings it up now, I think, to benefit from the cognitive dissonance. As an example he presents The Scream of Nature. I don't like that painting, which I suppose makes me a spoilsport. Martel insists that it relates to ecstatic truth. The opposite is running through my head: because I don't simply "get it", I have to work rationally to find its beauty, constructing a laundry list of accountancy truths: the context in which it was painted, its fame, the emotions it is supposed to evoke. Even then I don't necessarily arrive at beauty. Artistic expression, yes, honest, probably, but beautiful? It's not something I can feel, and that personal dissonance is real and unresolvable. Martel may want to tell me that I don't know myself, that I am acknowledging it unconsciously, such as he argued for the crows in the previous section.

The truth of artists, in this deeper sense, precedes and contains the truth of accountants. It is what must be acknowledged – if only unconsciously, sometimes perhaps resentfully – before anything can be said to be worth counting or accounting for.

I'm feeling resentful alright. Perhaps the capability to perceive what Martel perceives simply eludes me. We're landing right on the button of step 5, and I can't really object, because I cannot prove him wrong. Martel continues on, triumphantly.

Two kinds of truth, two kinds of beauty. It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live.

So now we understand why Martel picked up his pen. He wants more real art in the world, and he wants to set the standard for what constitutes real art. This, I have no issue with whatsoever. Aspirational fiction can be truly transformative. He even has the same sensibility as me! In another of my essays, I defined a "real adventure" as something unique, with the purpose of discovery, Martel would like to define "real art" as a unique occurrence that reveals something about the universe that was previously hidden. In our own subjective view of what is meaningful in life, we are aligned. It makes me feel closer to him and anyone that engages with his ideas.

But for me the important thing about a shared fiction is that we can choose to embrace it, or reject it. That volition is very much part of the fun of it. Martel doesn't want to leave it to chance, so he plays the game of redefining terms, and calls it philosophy. And next, he'll reach for anthropology.

Cave Artifice

Artifice corresponds to the first kinds of beauty and truth: the beauty of geometers; the truth of accountants. It may elevate or degrade, uplift or depress, edify or delude, but it transforms nothing. It leaves everything as it found it, because it proceeds from the assumption that the way we normally think of the world is enough for us to know how it really is. Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art; the countless works that merely reflect the ambient opinion of their time.

Martel hastily dismisses the idea that cave art may simply be artifice. "The things on the cave walls are not quite those that a scientific mind, intent on measurement and quantification, would recognise", he says, while elsewhere admiring the "anatomical precision and individuality that Palaeolithic artists gave animals". He goes on to apply the facts to his chosen thesis: that proper art takes one outside oneself. That's why there are so few human figures. Freud was wrong! Art is not at its base a narcissistic endeavour. (I am partial to a Freud takedown, I must say). It's always been about marvelling at the that-ness of the world.

Let's look at the facts. People in the Palaeolithic era painted animals in caves, and rarely humans. They sometimes added marks beside those animals, which some researchers speculate are marks counting the number of moons from the spring snowmelt to the calving season. It seems that these paintings are not art at all, they're educational material. Paintings of food, what to look for, when to hunt. The truth of accountants. Useful information for a human trying to survive. It does meet the definition to be called artifice. But then, if we are to believe Martel's interpretation of events, it cannot be, since it is also transformative: it invents humanity.

The Fruits it Bears

Ultimately, I could go along with this origin story if I believed it would bear fruit for humanity, and it wasn't being insisted upon as fact. That great art brings awareness to things that were previously invisible, that's a useful thought to consider. But it doesn't require that we consider ourselves infinitesimally small in the grand scheme, and that we ourselves are nothing to marvel at. Every time in this essay when I felt a true appreciation of art, when I felt I was being made aware of something new, I felt that as a connection to other people. It's between people that I find meaning is made. A sunset is beautiful, but twice as much when I watch it holding hands with someone I love. Remembering that serves my humanity more than any acknowledgment of mystery ever could. ◆