The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [12]
So, in a way, it’s not that Mick and Keith are staying together for practical reasons, working out the business decisions through lawyers and producers, even though that side of it certainly exists. Rather, even after they decimated and belittled one another on the world stage, to the point of no return, it’s like they still agreed to have more children, so to speak, by surrogacy if necessary, and they did so for a long, long time (perhaps now they’re post-menopausal, but I don’t know; I wouldn’t bet on it). Whatever the “genius” is here, it lives outside of the subjective existence of these boys, each taken alone. It’s about how sparks fly when two powerful subjectivities clash, and mesh.
This is a classic case of what philosophers like to call “dialectic.” It is a simultaneously destructive and creative encounter of standpoints, and if the “dialectical philosophers” are right, pretty much everything in cultural history gets made by means of such strife. You never get anything worth having without a fight. The master of this kind of philosophy was Georg Hegel (1770–1831), and he didn’t think very highly of Kant’s idea of “genius.” There is a spirit of the times (a “Zeitgeist”) that moves the world from one stage of history to the next, with or without the co-operation of the individuals involved. The Stones are a pretty fair example of a group of people on the edge of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, and somehow they were able to surf that wave all the way into the second decade of the twenty-first century—and that’s a long ride.
Fifteen Minutes of Fame?
It may be good to remember that Mick and Keith have been famous for almost half a century, and it’s unlikely that either can remember what it’s like to have anonymity. They never were easily embarrassed and they learned early on that their dirty laundry would be on public display (not that it was altogether bad for business), and even though Mick is generally thought of as being image-conscious and sensitive to criticism, I think it’s pretty obvious that both of these guys were temperamentally well-suited to the limelight. If they minded at first that their quarrels ended up in the tabloids, that’s all over now. These guys have leathery hides and they’re tougher than we are. Ordinary folks like us can’t really imagine what their lives are like—but then, they also can’t imagine our lives, and surely they envy us at least a little that we can pop over to the corner for an ice cream cone whenever we take a notion.
In hindsight, we see that Mick and Keith are (and always were) serious artists, or if that goes too far, serious about their art. They weren’t just seeking money or fame. They definitely had a sense of the history they were living. They saw their music as being grounded in a thorough understanding of the side of American culture that gave rise to the blues as an art form. Unlike the blues purists, the twins were quite willing to repackage and sell what they had gleaned; the times required it. But their sincere devotion to blues as an art form is beyond questioning. It’s not just that these guys loved the blues, as fans. They also approached it with real intellectual curiosity, made themselves true students, and in time, also initiates. They recognized the enduring aesthetic and cultural value of the blues back when Americans themselves did not. The twins didn’t just pore over the music because it was cool; they knew it was good art, in the sense of aesthetically and spiritually significant. They were surprised