Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception 9781474255752, 9781474255783, 9781474255776

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Beauty and the End of Art

Also available from Bloomsbury Portraits of Wittgenstein, edited by F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground The Art of Gerhard Richter, Christian Lotz The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, Monique Roelofs Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations, Jakub Mácha

Beauty and the End of Art Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception Sonia Sedivy

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Sonia Sedivy, 2016 Sonia Sedivy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5575-2 PB: 978-1-3500-7663-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5577-6 ePub: 978-1-4742-5576-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sedivy, Sonia, author. Title: Beauty and the end of art : Wittgenstein, plurality, and perception / Sonia Sedivy. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012273 (print) | LCCN 2016013173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474255752 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474255776 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474255769 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics. | Art–Philosophy. | Perception (Philosophy) | Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Classification: LCC BH39 .S4135 2016 (print) | LCC BH39 (ebook) | DDC 111/.85–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012273 Cover image © Gerhard Richter Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Andre and Nicholas, and in memory of Veronica, Anton, Steven, my parents and brother

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgement Introduction

viii

ix 1

Part I Loss and Reaffirmation 1 2 3

Pluralism as the End of Art? Rupture and the Relevance of Beauty Beauty and Pliant Consciousness, Individuality, Visible Permission

17 43 63

Part II Art Practices and the Value of Perceptible Presence 4 5 6

Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Constitutive Norms in Context Art Practices and Perceptual Engagement: We Can’t Get Enough Beauty as the Value of Perceptible Presence

97 149 189

Conclusion: Beauty and the End of Art

233

Bibliography Index

242 251

List of Illustrations Figure 3.1 Olympia, by Edouard Manet, 1863

76

Figure 3.2 The Incredulity of St. Thomas, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1603

82

Figure 5.1 Dead 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 667–1)

163

Figure 5.2 Hanged, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 668)

164

Figure 5.3 Man Shot Down 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 669–1)

164

Figure 5.4 Man Shot Down 2, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 669–2)

165

Figure 5.5 Confrontation 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–1)

165

Figure 5.6 Confrontation 2, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–2)

166

Figure 5.7 Confrontation 3, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–3)

166

Figure 5.8 Funeral, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 673)

167

List of illustrations online at www.bloomsbury.com/sedivy-beauty-end-art Interior at Nice (Room at Beau Rivage), 1918, © Estate of H. Matisse / SODRAC (2015), Photo: Archives Henri Matisse (D.R.). Abstraktes Bild, Gerhard Richter. (CR 726). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter 2015. Betty, Gerhard Richter. (CR 663–5). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter 2015. Cage 6, Gerhard Richter. (CR 897–6). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter 2015. Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Joseph Mallord Turner. Reprinted by permission from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2015.

Acknowledgement It seems to me that Donald Davidson found how to say what sometimes needs to be said when he dedicated a collection of his essays to Quine: “without whom not.” This expresses my thanks to John McDowell and Arthur C. Danto, whose inspiration runs through my work here. Though I argue that we are at a point in time where we need to change one key facet in Danto’s work (that affects some of the rest), I hope it is clear that this does not question his abiding achievement, which shows how we might think and write about art philosophically. I wish the book were finished earlier so that he might have read it; I might not have persisted with the project without his supportive and open-minded response to the first draft. This book has benefitted from many conversations across the years, with students and colleagues, in classes and conferences, for which I am truly grateful. I will only single out a few people who have been very generous in reading and commenting on earlier drafts: special thanks to Alexander Nehamas and Diarmuid Costello for super close readings; and to Ronald de Sousa and William Seager for their criticism and support at key junctures in the evolution of the manuscript. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers from Bloomsbury Press for their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to extend a deep thanks for the conversation of two Ph.D. students who worked on their own terrific dissertations on beauty during this time: Susan Sinclair and Belinda Piercy. I am also very grateful to Dave Hickey, Alexander Nehamas and Elaine Scarry for participating in the conference The Future of Beauty at the University of Toronto in 2007 that I organized, and to the Chancellor Jackman Program for the Arts for funding the event. My appreciation of their work was greatly shaped by the discussions at that meeting. I write about a number of people’s work here, but not in the usual sense of ‘foils’ against which to develop my view. Rather, the book aims to draw a range of works together that contribute richly to the evolving conversation about beauty, art and perception.

x

Acknowledgement

Part of the challenge has been to write to two very different readerships – in philosophy of art and philosophy of perception. Trying to provide enough responsible detail for each without too much for the other has presented pitfalls to which reviewers and friends have alerted me. I hope to have found a balance, though a few infelicities doubtless remain. Finally, I would like to thank my husband and son, Andre and Nicholas, whose love brings the happiness that allows me to see the beauty all around.

Introduction

How might beauty speak to a sense of ending in Western art? This is the question posed and addressed in this book. A sense of rupture seems to inform twentiethcentury Western art, felt and discussed by artists, viewers and theorists alike. This feeling of ending is hard to articulate, with no suggestion that the making of art stops. Rather, by the closing decades of the twentieth century, art seems to be marked by a complete openness that is also an absence of overarching projects or values that had once given it narrative structure. The century is also marked by a devaluation of beauty, to the point that the beauty of art stops being a subject of discussion or study in its later half. But then the turn of the twentyfirst century seems to bring beauty back as a topic for discussion and perhaps even as a value in art. This book offers a route through these themes of loss and reaffirmation. I examine recent ways of articulating and addressing both, so that the focus is on the way the issues take shape in ‘our time’, roughly the second half of the twentieth to the early decades of the twenty-first century. This is motivated in part by a Wittgensteinian approach that asks us to examine the ‘rough ground’ of diverse lived detail when we think through our difficulties or theoretical problems.1 It also acknowledges that our horizon of concerns is the present, however large or long-standing the issues we wish to understand may be. It is, very simply, the specific question the book poses: Does the return to beauty with which the twentieth century closes address the repeated, hard-toarticulate sense that the art of that century poses a break or even an ending of the Western artistic tradition? The discussion falls into two parts. The three chapters of Part One set up the issues by reconstructing leading arguments about the end of art and the value of beauty. Part Two develops a new framework for art, perception and beauty that addresses the issues identified in the first part. The aim is to do justice to the experiential, historical, norm-infused nature of art, and to the experiential and historical nature of aesthetic properties and beauty. The means are Wittgensteinian. When we turn to beauty, some of Immanuel Kant’s2 insights are collected into the Wittgensteinian frame. I suggest that

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work offers a thoroughly holistic perspective to the integral, mutually constitutive relationships between our capacities, forms of life activities and their broader natural and historically evolving circumstances. This is a subtle form of realism in which the world is not a dominant but associated or co-implicated partner in webs of reciprocal relationships between our possibilities for activity and the possibilities in our broader circumstances. Wittgenstein’s later thought recognizes that specific structures of permissions and constraints inhere in broader circumstances, and helps us understand that our activities are informed by norms that both depend on and play a constitutive role in our circumstances. In short, Wittgenstein’s later works help explain both the historically contingent nature of our practices and the objectivity of the facts and values such practices make available. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that perception is engagement that involves our conceptual understanding. This, I will try to show, allows us to understand the historical diversity and experiential nature of art, aesthetic properties and beauty. Chapter 1 focuses the question of art’s ending by examining two proposals that art ends in the pluralism getting underway from the 1960s onwards. Both suggestions date from the mid 1980s, from the art historian Hans Belting and the philosopher Arthur C. Danto.3 Both are concerned with the relationship between art history and art, and the relationship between the conceptual resources or ‘narrative templates’ that determine what art is and ‘how we view anything if we view it as art’.4 Both pursue these issues across more than three decades of work. Belting analyses the inadequacy of art-historical concepts for identifying contemporary works, but increasingly brings out continuities among the diversity of early and late twentieth-century works rather than a mid-century discontinuity. Danto argues that the correct narrative template becomes available with the art of the 1960s. That template is a relational definition that ‘co-implicates’ historicism and essentialism: artworks embody meanings – essentially regardless of time and place – though both embodiment and meaning involve and depend on historical context, or more precisely on the understanding extant in historical context. I will argue that Danto’s work is important – not only as a matter of its historical impact – but because it offers the strong thesis that art ends in a condition of ‘post-historical’ pluralism once we recognize that its nature or essence as embodiment of meaning places no constraints on artworks that are internal to art. But Danto’s work is also important in a way that has not been recognized: the full arc of this thought distinguishes two senses in which art may be thought to end – a substantive one that turns on Hegelian historical narrative or more broadly on art’s role

Introduction

3

in human society, and a structural one that depends on understanding art’s essence. The latter is Danto’s original contribution. It is important to recognize the two senses of ending since they rely on different factors. Just as Belting and Danto set aside a substantive sense of art’s ending, so will I, to focus on the relationship of art history and understanding to art. Tracing Danto’s reasoning about the end of art is illuminating in that it shows that both of these leading themes about the art of our time – the sense of ending and the loss of beauty – involve essentialism as a key premise. First, essentialism about art entails that artistic directions dissolve into pluralism upon the discovery that art has a nature that is completely open to variety of embodiment. But second, insofar as we believe that art has a nature, the absence of beauty as an aim or a value in some twentieth-century art shows that beauty is inessential to art. While essentialism is not a reason for demoting beauty, it offers theoretical support for it. So it is important to recognize that one and the same key premise underlies both the view that art has ended and the demotion of beauty, this premise is the view that art has a nature, however relational and historically realized. Insofar as contemporary theorists make a compelling case that beauty stands in more integral relations in some art, it calls for a type of explanation that can accommodate this fact. There is a body of thought that looms large in substantive discussions of the end of art that this book does not cover: the work of Hegel.5 In part, my focus is dictated by space; it would be too long and unwieldy to attempt to present Hegel’s views in any responsible detail in addition to the other theorists with whom I want to deal (and the same goes for thinkers ‘downstream’ from his thought such as Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno). So I will examine Hegel’s views only as they figure in Danto’s work and the distinction it holds between substantive (including Hegelian) views of art’s ending and his ‘structural’ alternative. But my focus is also thematic. Instead of directly addressing Hegelian historicism about art and beauty, I provide a Wittgensteinian alternative that eschews ‘high-altitude’ master narratives to be considered on its own merits. Wittgenstein’s work offers a modest historicism that does not bring antecedent theoretical requirements but reorients us to the specific contingent detail whereby particular norms, facts or values become available and compelling. This bears on art-historical debates in steering us away from master narratives.6 Then why focus on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work, which may also be identified in the lineage of Hegelian thought? In ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’,7 Gadamer provides the intellectual precedent for this project by

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arguing that beauty is relevant in a specific way: thinking about beauty is helpful for understanding the continuity of art. Though Gadamer’s thoughts about beauty tend to be overlooked in favour of his work on art, Chapter 2 examines what we may learn from his work today, with the re-examination of beauty well underway. Gadamer’s point is not so much that the beautiful itself somehow answers or reassures us in a condition of ending, but that thinking about beauty anew from the horizon of our present concerns, which includes the sense of a rupture in art, helps us rethink art. This perspective is very different from the separation of aesthetics and art, and from the aesthetic and interpretive dimensions of artworks, which characterize much later twentieth-century thought – but which are being re-considered together with the return to beauty. Gadamer’s perspective is also deeply attuned to the Wittgensteinian orientation elaborated here. Though his work is prescient in a number of important respects that connect with developing trends, I will highlight the following strand. His view is that to recover beauty, we need to understand that beauty is a matter of perceptual experience – experience that engages us with truths – rather than a matter of subjective sensory pleasure; and we need to do so in a way that doesn’t set up an opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Contemporary reaffirmations of beauty by Elaine Scarry, Alexander Nehamas and Dave Hickey provide our entry to some of the key dimensions of the problems beauty poses.8 This is the aim of Chapter 3. My reconstructions show how three themes are at work in these distinctive, prominent proposals. All three theorists propose that we need to be able to understand that beauty is a value with no transcendent backing. Each tries to show that the beauty of an artwork is a matter of just the sort of meaningful complexity that contemporary viewers expect from art. They disagree on how to account for the complexity of meanings that artworks make visibly manifest – emphasizing either visibility or interpretation, or both. In this respect, each account turns, I will argue, on the question of beauty’s perceptibility just as Gadamer’s work alerts us. And each offers vivid reaffirmation of the ongoing role of beautiful art in human life that rebuts any substantive sense of art’s exhaustion and that marginalizes the import of a structural sense of arts ending. Unlike much of the recent discussion of aesthetics and beauty, this book does not focus on their relationship to the ethical and political dimensions of human life and the issues these pose. Rather, I am concerned with the experiential or perceptual dimension of human life. This directs us to the role that theory of perception plays in our understanding of beauty, art and aesthetic properties. My focus does not downplay the importance of beauty’s

Introduction

5

connections to ethics or politics, which are in the foreground in recent volumes such as The Life and Death of Images, Beauty and Art History versus Aesthetics.9 But art and beauty require a theory of perception adequate to the task – one, as I argue, that shows how perception is a mode of immediate engagement with the individuals and properties of our world that is informed and secured by our understanding. So this book suggests a new intersection of four dimensions that are important in their own right and from the perspective of the others: the relationships between art, aesthetic properties and beauty; Wittgensteinian realism; theory of perception; and Kant’s views of beauty. This calls for an important qualification. I focus on visual art and I argue that beauty is perceptible but not in order to rule out or cast as second best the beauty of literature or music, for example, or even of mathematical theorems. My focus is on the beauty of particulars, and I argue that our response is perceptual. This does not imply that beauty is only perceptible. The enquiry here follows Frank Sibley’s suggestion that ‘slightly different but partially parallel things must be said about literature and music’.10 Such further tasks are beyond my scope here. Sibley was writing about aesthetic properties, but I would like to extend a similar qualification to beauty as well. In addition to the issues posed by literature and music, many people believe that there is something like completely ‘abstract’ beauty where what we find beautiful is an individual theorem, for example, but not because of its determinate characteristics, in contrast to the way this particular cloudy sky with just these determinate shapes and shadings of clouds in these determinate hues arrests us. The beauty of a mathematical theorem lies not in individual inscriptions of that theorem but in what is common to them; unlike a particular Richter painting, Cage 6, for example, whose beauty is the fully determinate layering and smearing of colour that can only be pointed out demonstratively but not described. The argument in this book is uncommitted about the beauty of abstracta and their relationship to the beauty of particulars. It may be important to begin by trying to explain the beauty of particulars (as Plato, for example, suggested).11 But the book does not argue this. The challenges posed by abstract beauty remain to be addressed, that is not my task here. My specific focus on visual beauty also does not foreclose or cast as secondary the need to understand beauty in our other perceptual modalities. But it was in visual art that twentieth-century developments were discussed extensively as art’s ending, and so the connection with the return to beauty is clearest in the visual domain. If we focus on visual art, it becomes apparent that discussions of beauty and the end of art involve at least two oppositions – between historicism and

6

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essentialism, and between the aesthetic or perceptible and the cognitive or conceptual. Arguments about the end of art highlight the former, while debates about beauty implicate the latter. I argue that Wittgenstein’s work helps dissolve the first dichotomy; conceptual realism about perception obviates the second. In brief, Wittgensteinian realism suggests that art is a variety of normgoverned practices; the force of these norms is specific to the practices; and the broader historical context is relevant for their understanding. This is the topic of Chapter 4. My interpretation builds on John McDowell’s12 reading. Wittgenstein suggests not only that norms have force in larger contexts but also that to understand their having force we need to understand their broader historical situation. One problem with a general claim such as ‘norms are socially emergent’ is that it does not suffice for understanding and there is no general ‘systematic’ account of such emergence just as there is no systematic account, Wittgenstein urges, of practices or the broader contexts of our normgoverned activity. What is needed is open to view – the way that structures of specific permissions and constraints become available and compelling in their broader natural and historical circumstances. Wittgenstein indicates such enquiry rather than illustrating it in the Philosophical Investigations with somewhat more specific examples in On Certainty. But he is quite clear in his Lectures on Aesthetics.13 25. The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture…. which fully means really to describe the culture of a period. 26. What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc…. [That children are taught by adults who go to concerts, etc., that the schools are like they are, etc.]

I will pursue this lead together with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the rule or norm-informed nature of human activity. This suggests that art is a variety of locally overlapping practices, each with their own constitutive norms, aims and values. This is an alternative to theories of art that claim that art has a nature that can be specified ahistorically, however relational and open-ended that nature may be. Wittgenstein’s work emphasizes that we need to keep contingent contextual factors in view; whereas this is precisely what definitional approaches deny, as we will explore. The notion of constitutive norms or values satisfies the intuition that there is something that makes a range of artefacts art, while

Introduction

7

also allowing for plurality in what makes something art in different cultural eras whose practices have different constitutive norms, aims and values. This explains that beauty has been the constitutive value of some but not all art practices – which is exactly what is needed to recognize that in some but not all cultural eras beauty has already and may yet again play an integral role. Yet Wittgenstein’s work doesn’t just emphasize the historical diversity and specificity of art practices and their norms; as chapter four argues, it also offers resources for recognizing a commonality that art practices share. Chapter 5 uses Wittgensteinian insights to sketch a conceptual realist account of perception, in order to argue that though it is local norms of specific practices that ‘make’ something art, perceptual engagement is the form of life activity that art practices diversify and share in an almost Quixotic sense.14 In other words, diverse art practices with their own constitutive aims and norms intertwine both by virtue of ‘local relationships’ between their aims and norms and by virtue of allowing us to extend and explore perceptual experience. If perception is engagement with individuals in their determinate qualities – with this care-worn face whose eyes nevertheless still smile, or with this tracing of rooftops against this dusky sky, or this monochrome grey painting – then we can better understand that we can never get enough: a perceptual experience cannot be retained beyond the moment of engagement, that is, the moment it occurs. In philosophy of perception, I have argued that one key fact to which any theoretical explanation must answer is that as soon as one’s gaze turns away, experience of individuals and their properties can no longer be retained with the fully determinate character of engaged experience.15 This is the way that perception itself shows its relational nature, and the singular object- and property-involving nature of its content. Here I explore what this fact might indicate about art. First, consider that living experience teaches us continuously that the qualitative or determinate character of perception cannot be retained when it is not being actively experienced; it depends on or involves the object or property. And so, very simply, we want to see more. Diverse art practices answer to this fact of experience. Artworks provide occasions and artefacts that allow us to extend, explore and manipulate perceptual engagement – in ways that are shaped by their broader historical context and the structures of permissions and constraints specific to art practices. Insofar as some conceptual artworks, for example, de-emphasize their determinate perceptible properties or do away with them altogether, thereby minimizing the role of perceptual experience, a Wittgensteinian approach accommodates rather than denies this fact by

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explaining this strand of art in terms of the local relationships between its norms and those of other art practices. I will examine the challenges conceptual art poses in both Chapters 4 and 5. Second, insofar as our perception is genuinely relational and involves individuals and their properties, it does not demarcate contributions from cognition or from the senses; it does not segment off a purely visual dimension that is the proper domain of beauty or aesthetics more broadly. I will argue that this helps explain why it is not appropriate to draw lines between the ‘meaningful’ and ‘aesthetic’ dimensions of artworks. Any perceptible property might stand out for us as noteworthy, significant or of value. And insofar as a perceptible property stands out, we will be engaged as embodied, experiencing agents whose understanding is internal to perceptual experience. To show that taking a perceptual approach acknowledges rather than constrains the diversity of works, properties and practices in their historical detail, I will focus on Gerhard Richter’s challenging works, especially his October 18, 1977 cycle of the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. And I will examine contemporary views such as Kendall L. Walton’s influential proposal that some aesthetic properties are determined by the historical categories to which the works belong; and James Shelley’s and Noel Carroll’s suggestions that some visual art is nonperceptual in order to accommodate conceptual art.16 Chapter 6 offers a new approach to beauty’s value by building on conceptual realism about perception and on the way Wittgenstein’s work helps us rethink the nature of objectivity – just as contemporary reaffirmations of beauty show that we need to do if we are to reclaim its role as a value with no transcendent metaphysical backing. But I will appeal to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement to extricate some ideas from their original transcendental context for development within a broadly Wittgensteinian framework. I focus on two related parts of Kant’s approach. He argues that experience of beauty is a free harmonious play where imagination and understanding stimulate one another’s activity, but do not yield a judgement that subsumes the experience under a concept of beauty that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions. He also suggests that the beauties of artworks (and natural objects) express aesthetic ideas through their aesthetic attributes, and thereby evoke the free play of our faculties. I will argue that this part of Kant’s view is important in that it can accommodate the fact that historical understanding needs to enter into our experience of artworks and their contents. To take one example, the intensity of experiencing these layers of melding colours in Richter’s Cage 6 is an outpost of pleasure where the specific beauty of those colours eludes understanding even

Introduction

9

while it is evidently something one can and does think about (see Cage 6 by Gerhard Richter, www.bloomsbury.com/sedivy-beauty-end-art). Kant emphasizes that the aesthetic attributes of such a painting allow us to ‘think much that cannot be said’, expanding our concepts beyond the limitations of finite experience through a harmonious but free interplay of our faculties of imagination and understanding. Kant’s overarching point is that beauty takes experience to an intensely pleasurable limit where we become aware that the perceptible character of the world meets the conditions for thought – it is something we can experience – even though its beauty eludes our understanding. I would say more simply that in experiencing beauty we experience the wonder of perception itself. And this, we might understand Kant as proposing, is beauty’s extraordinary role in human life – its capacity to intimate that the perceptible character of the world is such that we can be aware of it even while there is a sense in which it eludes us. One might find in Kant’s insight a finely honed sense that beauty makes us at home in the world. I will draw this out in different terms that suggest beauty is a higher-order value that has the structure or role of permission, and it allows for plurality of many historically specific beauties, the beauty of the melding colours of a late twentieth-century Richter abstraction or of a nineteenth-century Turner, such as Nordham Castle, Sunrise. In short, here are three of the interconnected ideas that the book tries to develop. The first was sketched briefly above – that in order to understand the beauty of particulars we need to recognize that our response is perceptual: this means that it is neither sensory nor interpretive, but an engagement with individuals and instances of properties that is made possible in part by conceptual understanding. Yet thinking about beauty also helps us understand perception better. This leads to the second theme. Focusing on beauty can help us understand that perceptual experience is inherently evaluative and that the perceptible presence of the world is of value. A specific perceptual experience and its object might not be noteworthy. But when one becomes alert to the pleasure of this light at this moment, or of these haunting, dripping, continuously melting life-size wax figures by Urs Fischer at the 2011 Venice Biennale – when one’s perceptual engagement is noteworthy, one is alert to the value of what is perceptually present. The fundamental point is that some perceptual experiences can be aesthetically noteworthy in their value only if all are in that range or domain of evaluation, that is, the domain of aesthetic value rather than visual presence. Perceptual experience is distinguished in part by the fact that it is aesthetic. From another perspective, the point is that the perceptual presence of the world lies in a range of evaluation.

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What we learn is reciprocal: from one perspective it concerns perception – that perceptual experience has an inherently evaluative dimension – and from another it is an insight about beauty – that the perceptible presence of the world is of value to us. This leads into the third theme: beauty is a value; and specifically, beauty is the value of the perceptible presence of the world. This connects Kant’s insight that beauty intimates that the world’s perceptible character is thinkable with Hickey’s suggestion that beauty is a value best described as a secular counterpart of grace: visible, forgiving permission. The notion of grace is all but lost to us. Yet in a secular context it continues to suggest a generosity of spirit or outlook that is evident in demeanour. Closer to its religious roots, it is a notion of visible generosity or permission that is unconditional. Beauty’s role in contemporary secular life and art is continuous with that once offered by grace, Hickey argues, because beauty elicits trust that enables or permits us to open ourselves to difficult subject matters so that we can discuss and discover what we value. Many artworks try to make us engage with difficult subject matters, but what helps us to do so? Hickey urges that beauty has the most powerful rhetorical potential because it enfranchises us. Trust is permissive. My aim is not to argue that all art should be beautiful. That would belie the diversity of art that this book strives to help us understand. Rather, the point is to explain the space that is being reclaimed for those artworks that are beautiful. That is the space of trust and permission rather than carefree pleasure, subjective preference or consolation. Since my concern is with beauty’s role in human life as well as its more specific role in art, I am also interested in the nature of the world’s perceptible presence. I suggest that at a higher level of abstraction the beauty of both is continuous. The perceptible presence of the world is a condition of visible permission or grace in which we find ourselves. The narrative line just sketched integrates issues and theoretical resources in new ways – we set out from thinking about the end of art and reaffirmations of beauty in order to motivate rethinking art and beauty, as well as perception and realism in a unified approach, which also allows, at the very end, for the connections between reconsidering beauty and the end of art to become clear. This framework counters the sense of ending in art though that is one spoiler that I will avoid here, leaving that final piece of the puzzle to the conclusion. But it will be apparent that the task is almost done if we replace essentialism like Danto’s, even if it implicates historicism, with Wittgensteinian attention to

Introduction

11

the normative in the historical detail of life. If we recognize that art is a diversity of practices with specific constitutive norms, we can recognize that in some practices, historically specific beauty may be a constitutive value or norm, while in others self-reflexive understanding may be a constitutive norm. Much turns on finding ways to embrace and to explain perception’s unique nature and role in human life: that it engages us with a world of individuals with determinate properties. And so what follows might be read as an extended discussion of the human love of perception. Perhaps it is that. But then its concern is threefold: with art, beauty and perception. And its aim is to see interconnections, to arrive at an integrated appreciation of the way three vital concerns fit together. This is what the book as a whole tries to show. It is the appreciation at which I believe we can arrive by tugging hard on what might seem to be two independent strands: the sense that Western art has ended its historical progression and the sense that we have lost beauty.

Notes 1

2 3

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: Chicago University Press: 1987); Arthur Danto, ‘The End of Art’, in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven Publishers, 1984). Both Belting and Danto continue to pursue and to refine the idea of ending in art across the ensuing decades in the following works. Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) in which the work The End of the History of Art? is reprinted; ‘At the Doom of Modernism: Art and Art Theory in Competition’, in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, eds. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); ‘Narratives of the End of Art’, in Encounters and Reflections, Art in the Historical Present (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991); After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, History and Theory, 37 (1998); Unnatural Wonders (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); ‘Responses’, in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, eds. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

12 4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11 12

13

Beauty and the End of Art Danto, Unnatural Wonders, 347. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Robert Pippin’s After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers an instructive contrast. He notes that ‘very few art historians or philosophers’ are inclined towards historical master or ‘governing’ narratives, but also suggests that we need what Hegels’ vantage point makes available. My project is just to stick to the rough ground, which I believe in Wittgenstein’s hands yields the normative and objective nature of our endeavours and values. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Alexander Nehamas,‘ The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’, Representations, 7 (2001): 37–54; Only a Promise of Happiness, The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press, 1993); The Invisible Dragon, Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Air Guitar (Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press, 1997); ‘Buying the World’, Daedalus (Fall 2002): 69–87. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, ed., The Life and Death of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Dave Beech, ed., Beauty (London: Whitechappell Gallery ; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). James Elkins, ed., Art History versus Aesthetics (New York: London: Routledge, 2006). Frank Sibley, ‘Particularity, Art, and Evaluation’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 96. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas, Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1989). More precisely, McDowell has written very carefully that Wittgenstein’s ‘conception of linguistic community’ is ‘non anti-realist’. The context of this remark is a response to Crispin Wright’s anti-realist readings of Wittgenstein’s, ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 253. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

Introduction

13

14 The conceptual realist account of perception explains the nature of perceptual experience, it does not address the nature of the visual processes at the ‘subpersonal level’ that stand in a causally enabling relation to such experience. 15 Sonia Sedivy, ‘Nonconceptual Epicycles’, European Review of Philosophy, 6 (2006) and ‘Starting Afresh Disjunctively’, in Disjunctivism: Perception, Action and Knowledge, eds. Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Contemporary philosophy of perception is a highly contested field with intricate competing accounts. That complexity lies outside the scope of this work (or this introduction). My aim is to show how one of the competitor views – conceptual realism – resolves problems about beauty and art. Doing so also increases its standing among theories of perception. Any adequate theory of perception should be able to explain the experience of beauty. This is a condition of adequacy that I hope this book will help impress upon theories of perception. 16 Kendall L. Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, Philosophical Review, 79 (1970): 334–367. James Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003): 363–378. Noel Carroll, ‘Nonperceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (2004): 413–423.

Part One

Loss and Reaffirmation the question is not which are the artworks, but how we view anything if we view it as art. Danto, Unnatural Wonders, 347

1

Pluralism as the End of Art?

‘Epilogues have been fashionable for so long that one would dearly like to write an epilogue on the age of epilogue’, notes the art historian Hans Belting, a couple of decades after asking whether there is a sense in which Western art has come to an end.1 In a historical coincidence that suggests something might be afoot, Arthur C. Danto posed the same question almost simultaneously in the mid 1980s from a philosophical perspective.2 Across more than two decades of work, each tries to elucidate the relationship between art history and art in order to explain the sense of ending expressed by many artists, theorists and viewers. Their shared focus directs us, in Danto’s words, to ‘the historical structures, the narrative templates so to speak, within which artworks are organized over time, and which enter into the motivations and attitudes of artists and audience who have internalized those templates’.3 Probing the very idea of narrative structure and the role of art-historical concepts allows us to step back from principal narratives of ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’ while continuing to address the contingent facts of the contemporary situation. This is important in part because both terms are more akin to rubrics for a complicated array of competing explanations rather than agreed-upon concepts,4 and to complicate matters further, both subsume a variety of specific ‘movements’ which are often themselves contested explanatory terms – here one might think of the relationship between the idea of the avant-garde and that of modernism, or of how to understand conceptual art and minimalism and their relation to ‘post-modernism’. It is in the midst of this complexity that Danto and Belting emphasize – now in Belting’s words – that ‘[t]he important thing is the continued need for epilogues that characterizes an age. Where nothing new is discovered and the old is no longer the familiar, then epilogue is what suggests itself…. today, theory whatever it acquits itself of, is geared towards epilogue in all its themes and speech rules’.5

18

Beauty and the End of Art

Though both pose the question of the relationship between art history and art, Belting’s art-historical approach examines the explanatory adequacy of art-historical concepts, whereas Danto’s philosophical discussion probes the nature of historical narrative and of art. I will focus on Danto’s stronger position but approach it through Belting’s. My reconstruction of the full arc of Danto’s thought will identify the following three hitherto unrecognized points that hold broader consequences for the sense of ending in art and its connection with beauty. (i) Danto’s work distinguishes two ways that art might be thought to end, a substantive and a structural one. (ii) Essentialism – the view that art has a nature that can be specified ahistorically – is the contentious premise in Danto’s pairing of essentialism and historicism about art, which holds that the nature of art is realized or ‘indexed’ historically. (iii) Essentialism also supports the ongoing demotion of beauty – that is, essentialism is not a reason for demoting beauty, but offers theoretical support for it.

Belting and the inadequacy of art-historical concepts The diverging trajectory of Belting’s view offers an instructive contrast for approaching Danto’s stronger position. Belting details a kaleidoscopic array of intertwined, oftentimes reciprocal dissolutions to suggest that art-historical concepts are no longer adequate for explaining or narrating contemporary art, but finally holds out hope that new concepts might be developed. The negative thesis is demonstrated in fine-grained historical detail that shows the demise of notions of style and development; of the very idea of ‘works’ whose material aspect vouchsafes their identity as art; of belief in art’s autonomy together with a correspondingly distinctive history that traces art’s development as a distinctive endeavour. To take one example, consider Belting’s account of the concept of style, which he defines as the ‘quality of art for which a logical evolution was to be traced’, that also plays a mixed descriptive-normative role in the development of art history.6 Belting details how the idea of style appears in art criticism from the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries just as artworks seemed to require increasing, even exclusive attention to their formal aspects,

Pluralism as the End of Art?

19

yet in a ‘paradox’ of modernism, formal considerations were also applied retroactively to the art of the ‘old masters’. Because the concept of style lends itself to a developmental, progressive logic, even to evolutionary or organic models of genesis, growth and decline that had been used to narrate art since Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, it forms a ‘conceptual pair’ with the possibility of a history internal to art. Such a sui generis history stands apart from a history of artists, or from a social history in which art is one among a variety of integrated factors. Emphasis on form, summarized in the concept of style, allows for a history of art that traces developments that are internal to art, yielding a history where pre-modern and modern art are unified in developmental terms along a temporal dimension. But Belting argues that the notion of style is also normative: ‘Narrating the genesis or decadence of style in literature and in the visual arts was always a rewarding strategy to put forward a norm or ideal for art. In this discourse, the single work constituted a mere station in the development toward the unfolding of a norm of art.’ The result is that ‘[e]ven if complete in itself, a given work remained open-ended in relation to the evolution of that norm’, rendering each work ‘incomplete’ and ‘dependant on an overall historical process’.7 To the extent that the notion of style functions as a norm, Belting argues that it can be rejected as such, and that this in effect happens by the middle of the twentieth century. But because the notion of style is integral to a progressive history of art, undermining that norm also undermines an ongoing history of art that traces art’s ‘internal’ stylistic development. This is one way to understand the situation reached by the 1970s as artists revisit or sample from art’s ‘history’ as from a completed sequence by whose norms they are no longer governed. Belting also offers the analogy of picture and frame for a more general explanation of the reciprocal relationships between art and specific art-historical concepts that style exemplifies. Just as a frame collects what it contains into a picture, so ‘[i]t was art history that gathered the art of previous centuries into the picture, where we learned to see it’.8 Though what has been collected in the frame provided by art history was produced for centuries without awareness of the later concepts, this changes once artists are aware of the art-historical concepts that identify art of the past as a distinct human enterprise. The correlative development of art museums ensures that later artists cannot but be aware of art history as the frame that defines their own efforts. But this also means that artists can challenge, contest and even burst out of that frame with works that the concepts of art history can no longer collect together.

20

Beauty and the End of Art

Belting’s unequivocal point is to explain the contemporary situation as a paradoxical one where certain human undertakings came to form the kind art largely through the application of certain concepts, yet we persist in recognizing activities and objects as forming that kind even though the concepts are no longer adequate to the works being produced today. But does this entail that art has ended? There is no question that Belting now wants to distance his proposal from this strong thesis. I did not intend to write an obituary for art or for art history. Instead, I asked myself whether art and the narration of art to which we had grown accustomed were still compatible…. the rhetorical figure of speech dealing with the end of art history does not mean that art or art history is over but that, both in art and in the discourse of art history, we can foresee on the horizon the end of a tradition whose familiar shape had become, in the era of modernism, canonical.9

Yet the notion of a canonical shape allows the possibility of non-canonical alternatives and so underplays the strength of the relationship Belting conveys between art and art-historical concepts developed in the modern era. If art is what is revealed in the reciprocal relationship between frame and picture, between art history and what it brings together, then – for us, those who live with the influence of art-historical concepts developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the canonical shape of the tradition characterizes the concept of art, so that a different emerging shape would configure a different category of object. This stronger reading is confirmed by Belting’s detailed historical analyses. In the context of a study of Christian icons, for example, he distinguishes the era of the image from the era of art on the ground that the notion of art was not a driving force in the production of icons.10 This suggests the possibility that discontinuity between contemporary art and its predecessors might mark the boundary between the era of art and a subsequent, distinct, yet-to-be-understood era of a different kind of work. The discontinuity in art practice existing between the traditional and the present type favors the view that art, as we understand it today, was a phenomenon not present at all times and at all places and does not give the guarantee to exist forever. Instead of accepting its existence as a matter of fact, we may meanwhile ask ourselves how art entered certain periods and societies and in which sense it was possible to become accepted.11

To soften his own and Danto’s arguments for significant discontinuity, Belting increasingly emphasizes dimensions of continuity from modern art

Pluralism as the End of Art?

21

to art that follows. Starting in Art History after Modernism, he details how works across both periods deal with similar issues. I can’t do justice to his detailed reconstructions, but one example is the constraints imposed on artists by the presupposition that artworks have an antecedent identity as physical objects for exhibition, especially paintings and sculptures. In chafing against such constraints, diverse artists going back to the early twentieth century with distinct ‘ideals’ and projects such as Marcel Duchamp, Vassalij Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich recognize the ‘hybrid’ character of an artwork ‘as a made object that represents an idea, the idea of art’ and identify the fundamental question of ‘the crucial link between art as an idea and the artwork as an object’. For example, Malevich develops his monochromatic square works as ‘icon[s] of an idea’, for which there is no right way to be exhibited – ‘upside down or mirror-reversed’ will do. As Malevich puts it, ‘A square is not a picture, much as the switch or the plug are not the current. Whoever saw a picture in my icon, committed an error, since he mistook the plug for an image of the current’, or as Belting clarifies, ‘in other words, mistook the artwork for art’. Belting’s point is that an artwork might have a hybrid identity already in the twentieth century in the sense that ‘It exists as an object yet represents an idea, the idea of art’12 which later works emphasize and which drives the theoretical turn that Danto emphasizes. But if this is ‘the subtext of modern art’, then ‘modernism’s total contrast with the 1960’s does not stand up to closer inspection. On the contrary, the new art scene entertained problems with a long incubation period’.13 Seen in this light the split between modernism and its aftermath is in need of revision. The general art public of the 1960’s … would mistake the common target of such activities as the deconstruction of the artwork, whatever the single movements otherwise had in mind … . the new art scene looked like deliberate iconoclasm, like a bunch of movements ‘against’ rather than movements in their own right. It seemed to announce the end of art, whereas modernism, by contrast, looked like the last stronghold of lofty ideals. This forced opposition, with its dualistic note, needs to be thoroughly revised, however, as it tends to purify modernism, in retrospect and to dismiss its inherent conflicts.14

All in all, though Belting argues that art is a historical phenomenon, his evolving view does not cast the condition of pluralism as the end of art. He strives to bring out the distinctive detail that characterizes the works of different artists, rather than sweeping these together in a strong dualist opposition between ‘modern’ art and art from the 1960s and beyond. His considered view

22

Beauty and the End of Art

is that there is no ‘internal logic’ to art-historical narrative that suggests that different concepts might not develop that reshape art.

Danto’s mix of essentialism and historicism about art It is precisely in this sense that Danto holds that contemporary art has ended. Danto contends that there is an internal logic to the trajectory of art events in the twentieth century that entails that there can be no further history, no art that carries on directions that are internal to art, but rather a free pluralism of post-historical art. The class of artworks is simply unlimited, as media can be adjoined to media, and art unconstrained by anything save the laws of nature in one direction, and moral laws on the other. When I say this condition is the end of art, I mean essentially that it is the end of the possibility of any particular internal direction for art to take.15

Danto offers three strong, distinctive views that together imply that the end of art history is the end of art. The first is that some artworks in the 1960s posed the philosophical problem of indiscernibles. The second contends that Hegelian history of art offers the appropriate historical model for explaining pre-modern, modern and contemporary art. The third argues that there are ‘objective historical structures’ in the sense of closed ranges of possibilities that stand in explanatory, narrative relationships to one another.16 Danto’s evolving position is distilled in his defence of these contentions and their mutual coherence. The problem of indiscernibles – the problem posed by artworks that are visually indiscernible from counterpart objects that are not artworks – drives Danto’s view both of the nature of art and of its ending. Danto highlights that one trend in the art of the late 1950s and the 1960s was to challenge ‘the gap between art and life’ where ‘the commonplace world of everyday experience had begun to undergo a kind of transfiguration in artistic consciousness’.17 This challenge is posed by a variety of artworks that also figure in different narratives concerning minimalism or pop art, for example. Robert Rauschenberg offers ‘combines’ such as a ladder attached to the surface of a painting, or a bed in a vertical frame, its covers scribbled and dripped with paint; Fluxus displays plastic dime store toys;18 pop art takes consumer goods as its subjects; and minimalists appropriate industrial materials as the materials of art. Danto argues

Pluralism as the End of Art?

23

that this challenge culminates in pop art works that are visually indiscernible from ordinary objects, especially Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box from 1964. Because Warhol’s Brillo Box closely resembles its ordinary supermarket counterparts, but is an artwork rather than a soap pad container nonetheless, it poses the problem that artworks might be visually indiscernible from ordinary objects. Danto’s point is that this problem forces us to think about art philosophically in the sense of requiring us to explain what makes something a member of a certain category even though an indistinguishable counterpart may not belong to that category. Raising the problem of indistinguishable counterparts – actions and bodily movements, dreams and waking experiences, for example – has been part of the philosophical method for a very long time, and Danto goes so far as to suggest that it is the hallmark of the method. To take a different example, an action is sensuously indistinguishable from a bodily movement even though the two belong to crucially different categories, and an ordinary action may also be indistinguishable from a dance movement. Just as one wouldn’t fully understand the nature of human action if one couldn’t explain its distinction from bodily movement – even if one could easily pick out actions – so Danto suggests we need to understand how artworks differ from indistinguishable counterparts, even if one can pick out artworks. ‘[T]he question is not which are the artworks, but how we view anything if we view it as art.’19 Brillo Box not only forces the question into its acute philosophical form but also points to the answer. What distinguishes artworks from ordinary counterparts is that the former but not the latter embody meaning. It is necessary though not sufficient that artworks embody meanings.20 This is Danto’s controversial pairing of essentialism and historicism: ‘Essentialism and historicism are widely regarded as antithetical, whereas I see them not only as compatible but as co-implicated with one another, at least in the case of art.’21 On the one hand, art has a timeless nature, ‘eternally the same’ so that ‘there are conditions necessary and sufficient for being an artwork, regardless of time and place’.22 But insofar as artworks necessarily embody meanings, the content of any work enters into its identity conditions; and because not all contents can be entertained at all times, it is also the case that often ‘what is an artwork at one time cannot be one at another’.23 Artworks are historical in their very nature because embodiment of meaning is. Consider a museum of monochrome art with red paintings by a variety of artists from Malevich’s Red Square, as well as canvases of a single colour carried out by a single artist across his or her career, such as Robert Ryman’s white canvases. To see each distinct monochrome painting would require

24

Beauty and the End of Art

appreciating not only its ‘sensuous properties’ but also the content that it is intended to convey, and this is only possible, Danto argues, through historical understanding of the context of the work with respect to other works by that artist and other artists of her own time and earlier. To take a more contemporary example, consider seeing Richter’s Grey from 1974 (catalogue Raisonne 365–3).24 In seeing this specific artwork (rather than a painted canvas that a paint store might use to demonstrate the latest ‘in’ shades, for example) one’s experience would draw on one’s acquaintance with the wide diversity of Richter’s paintings as well as their relationship to other works. One might be struck that the artist of a fifteen-painting cycle about the BaaderMeinhof group, October 18, 1977, would offer expanses of a single colour. And one would be arrested by the fact that the colour is grey. The tonal affinity would be striking with his quasi-photographic approach where paintings of photographs are blurred. Aside from this relationship, are there other reasons why Richter uses grey so much? He states that grey is the colour of ambivalence and conveys his avoidance of any belief system. One might also wonder whether any previous monochromatic works by other artists focused on grey? Examples such as Rauschenberg’s Eve, which is a super red, more readily come to mind. Monochrome works highlight that embodiment of meaning is historical, that artworks ‘stand in different kinds of relationships to works of art than to any other kind of thing’25 so that ‘[a]rtistic perception is through and through historical’, ‘to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry –… a knowledge of what other works the given work fits with, a knowledge of what other works makes a given work possible’.26 This is to appreciate that embodiment as well as meaning depend on broader arthistorical facts so that art is a historical phenomenon. It also illustrates, Danto contends, that embodiment of meaning is largely interpretive rather than visual, according to standard presuppositions about perception that factor out vision and understanding. The implications of Danto’s combination of essentialism with historicism reach well beyond the question of defining art to the putative ending of art. If the nature of art as embodiment of meaning does not impose constraints on how embodiment is realized, it also does not impose any direction on artists or their works; we only need to recognize this fact. Such recognition – thanks to the art of the 1960s – would bring a condition of complete freedom and pluralism. Master or meta-narratives are no longer possible for art because any such narrative must exclude and demote some varieties of art from the main narrative structure,

Pluralism as the End of Art?

25

whereas the recognition that art is embodiment of meaning no longer allows any variety of art to be excluded or demoted. According to Danto, this condition is the end of art history insofar as there is no longer any direction that is internal to art for such a history to narrate. ‘[W]e can exclude nothing today. This makes narration impossible.’27 Is this condition also an end of art? This question brings us, as Danto makes clear, to philosophical views of the nature of history and to his view that art requires – or realizes – Hegel’s particular historical narrative. This is the second of the key moves I suggest we need to examine. According to Danto, the hallmark of such a narrative is that it shows human endeavours as developing towards and culminating in self-reflexive understanding. Danto emphasizes that the Hegelian framework divides art into two distinctive stages, with a third post-historical phase. In the first, artworks embody meanings that help disclose our understanding of our place in the world, embodiments that are integrally linked with a religious conception of the world. With the passing of a religious worldview, art is no longer integral to the culturally dominant endeavours for attaining truths about the human condition and enters a second self-reflexive phase. Both phases are developmental, but the culmination of the second brings the historical trajectory to an end since understanding the nature of art leaves artists free from any further impetus that is internal to art – either as a means of representing and understanding our world, as in the first phase, or as a means of understanding that mode of representation, as in the second. To be sure, Hegel’s view is richer and more nuanced than Danto’s interpretation suggests, and I cannot do justice to the depth and subtlety of Hegel’s thoughts about the end of art, which go beyond the ideas identified by Danto. But Danto’s reading concurs with broad consensus in Hegel scholarship over the two points that he uses in his proposal. The first is the basic shape of Hegel’s historiography: that changing human practices need to be understood in terms of a trajectory of coming to understand our own nature better. The second concerns one way in which Hegel claims art ends: that due to its sensuous nature, art is ultimately inadequate to express truth and that we look to discursive means for understanding – even for understanding of art. These points of consensus suffice for my aim, which is to reconstruct how Danto takes up Hegel’s approach in his own position.28 The Hegelian frame is appropriate, Danto argues, because it captures the nature of modern art (understood as the art of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth) as not simply another stylistic stage in the history of art – or a number of stylistic phases – but as an ascent to a meta-level of selfreflexive enquiry. The key point in favour of Hegelian historiography is that it has

26

Beauty and the End of Art

the resources to capture both pre-modern and modern art in one developmental sequence while also distinguishing modern art within that trajectory.29 Yet Danto does not simply take over the Hegelian frame; he disavows one key aspect. One might wonder why, after all, art ends rather than continuing after it reaches self-understanding? The answer is that as art comes to understand its own nature – as embodiment of meanings – we also recognize that our needs are met more fully by explorations that are not tied to embodiment and perceptual experience. In Danto’s words, His thesis was that whatever art now might do for us, it can no longer compare with what it once did for those who came before us. ‘Neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to the mind the true interests of the spirit.’ Rather, Hegel writes, ‘Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art.’ And the reason that art remains, so to speak, earthbound is that it displays ‘even the highest [reality] sensuously.’ It is tethered to the experience of some object or other – the material object in which the artwork is embodied – whereas philosophical reflection delivers us to a reality of pure abstract thought, which cannot be reduced to sense experience at all.30

The clear upshot is that ‘Art is limited in a way that philosophy is not by virtue of the fact that it is constrained to use objects (or images) as the medium through which to express thoughts.’31 This is the Hegelian view that Danto comes to reject. Although his disagreement could not be stated more clearly in 2005, ‘my view of the end of art is radically different from his’,32 it was absent from the initial papers of the 1980s that sparked discussion of the end of art, even from his 1990s work continuing the debate. Throughout, Danto’s point has been that philosophy takes over the task of defining art once indiscernibles pose the question of art’s nature in a form that requires discursive explanation. Releasing art from this burden is part of the freedom that constitutes contemporary pluralism. But only now does Danto clearly state that his considered view is the anti-thesis of Hegel’s when it comes to any other sense in which philosophy might be said to supplant art. The truth is that philosophy has hardly evolved to the point that it alone can deal with all the political and moral ideas we have to deal with in modern life … . Indeed, we can see the history of art as having attained the level of pluralism that is needed to make vivid the thoughts about love, identity, fear, and hope that define modern life. We need from artists all the help we can get – of expressing, through performances and installations, the complex political ideas we need to master in order to navigate modern life.33

Pluralism as the End of Art?

27

Danto’s divergence raises the question whether the historiographic shape of Hegel’s framework can stand independently of the broader substantive commitments that inform the approach, especially substantive beliefs about perception and thought, and correlatively denigrating views of the nature of art and its place among human endeavours. To consider this question is a way to address the nagging doubt, raised above, that many readers feel and theorists express: why can’t art continue after reaching self-understanding?34 Why is the end of the self-reflexive phase not precisely that, the end of that particular phase rather than the end of the narrative structure as a whole? The answer lies in Danto’s increasingly ‘charitable view of substantive philosophies of history’.35 This is the third in my triad distilling Danto’s key moves. In a departure from his 1960s work in the philosophy of history, Danto has come to argue that there are objective historical structures. This means that there are closed ranges of possibilities; not everything is possible at any given time. We can tell that there are such closed fields of possibility by imagining something contentful – an object or mental state, such as belief – to find that it could not have occurred at the earlier time because its content was not available at that time. The contents of certain objects enter into their identity conditions and not all contents can be meaningfully entertained at all times. Imagine a later artwork in an earlier era, such as a monochrome like Richter’s Grey (365–3), but to pick an extreme example, consider whether one of Duchamp’s readymades such as Fountain might have been presented at a mid-nineteenth-century salon? The fact that it could not – its particular way of embodying its meaning would not have been available so that an item with the identity of Fountain could not have occurred – indicates an objective field of possibilities or an objective historical structure that is closed to a readymade in Duchamp’s sense. Yet the nineteenth-century field of possibilities also stands in explanatory relationships to the field or structure in which Fountain becomes possible. This is Danto’s view that there are ranges of possibilities that are objective – in the sense that they exclude much that couldn’t happen at a certain time so that they support counterfactual inferences – and they are narrative structures in that there are explanatory relationships between one range of possibilities and another. In a telling contrast, Belting seems to demur at just this point from a substantive view of historical narrative. It may seem like chasing ephemera if we try today to capture the image of art history … Why do we need a certain concept for it, if all artists, past and present, prove to be unarguably real – as real as history – and if their works exist

28

Beauty and the End of Art as palpably as solid objects? One can only reply that fictions have also made history and that they, too, have been reified. Art is a historical fiction, as Marcel Duchamp proved long age. And art history a fiction as well.36

Fictions or facts? Fictions that may play a causal role in ‘making’ history or factual structures of possibilities that constitute history? In a striking twist, Danto’s 1997 After the End of Art appeals to Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life to support the idea of real structures of historical possibilities. This turn is surprising because Danto’s arguments from the 1960s onwards for the definable nature of art had the 1950s neoWittgensteinian rejection of essentialism as their impetus and target. I will examine this issue in Chapter 4, but here from the outset it is important to recognize this unnoted aspect of Danto’s view. Having rejected neoWittgensteinian historicism about art in favour of essentialism as the core commitment of his theory of art, Danto comes to choose Wittgensteinian historicism to support the idea of real historical structures. Danto highlights Wittgenstein’s view that ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’, which aims to help us view language as an integral, inseparable dimension of human life activities that, unlike animal lives, have a variety of cultural and historical forms.37 The relationships between language and forms of life flow in both directions: they are internal to one another in the sense that one cannot occur without the other, and forms of life activities and uses of languages enable, depend on and entail one another. The field of meanings and possibilities articulated in a language depends on the form of life activities that is that field of meanings and possibilities, while a form of life could not be the field of possibilities and meanings that it is without the constitutive role played by language. The two cannot be separated. Danto emphasizes that ‘a form of life is something lived and not merely known about’ to explain that art, just like language, inheres in historical structures in the sense of forms of life. (I will pursue Wittgenstein’s idea in detail in Chapter 5.) He goes so far as to suggest that art requires an echo of Wittgenstein’s claim about language: ‘to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role’.38 And he argues that even if we know much of a past age, we cannot relive its art because ‘one cannot … live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life’. This might seem to be simply an obvious fact of human life, but Danto suggests that it holds a key asymmetry ‘in the way the future is impossible for us, and the way the past, which we can know about, is impossible for us’, an asymmetry that ‘is the structure of historical being’.39 It is, in other words, the asymmetry of

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objective historical structures, where not everything is possible at any time. In the absence of any knowledge of the future, we can only envision future life in terms derived from our own forms of life as even a little hindsight shows – which is to say that we cannot really envision future forms after all. The asymmetry with the past lies in the fact that even though we have knowledge of the past unlike the future, we cannot return to past forms of life because we can no longer live its range of meanings and possibilities. This asymmetry is vivid in art. Danto suggests that if we take Italy as our example and lay out the detail of fifteenth-century life with its system of meanings, alongside sixteenth-century life and then early seventeenthcentury life with their systems of meanings, what would become apparent is an ‘internal correspondence between message and means’, between meaning and embodiment as it changes across what we have come to identify as PreRenaissance, Renaissance and Baroque art. Considering the evolving forms of Italian life would make vivid ‘the way in which sixteenth-century artists could not so much as conceive of expressing certain things in art that really required the painterly vocabulary of the baroque style, and in thinking of how a baroque artist would be frustrated were he obliged to try to say whatever he had to say in the linear style of his immediate predecessors’.40 This is the sense in which detailed investigations of forms of life would show the fields of meanings and possibilities that are closed to those whose own range of possibilities are integral to later or earlier forms of life. Together, Belting and Danto’s reflections show that some form of historicism needs to enter into our understanding of art; the question is its strength, structure and import. Danto challenges us to countenance that historical structures are real. This is what he means when he writes that art has a narrative structure. If Wittgenstein’s work can help convince us that historical structures are as real as forms of life, then Danto can point to an objective condition of complete pluralism in contemporary art. And if Danto is correct that objective historical structures stand in explanatory relationships to one another, this raises the question: what is the explanatory relationship between the contemporary condition of complete pluralism and its predecessor, the self-reflexive phase of art integral to the forms of life identified across a variety of ‘master narratives’? If the self-reflexive phase yields the putative understanding that the nature of art holds no constraints on embodiment, this would explain the subsequent condition of pluralism. And one consequence of this explanatory relationship would be, as Danto repeatedly emphasizes, that there can be no further constraint (or direction) on embodiment from the nature of art. This is the sense in which

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the end of art history is the end of art – the end to any further changes that can be explained as developments driven by the nature of art or what we take to be that nature in different historical eras. The train of reasoning just traced does not appeal to any substantive Hegelian views about history or about the relationships between perception and thought, art and philosophy. My point is that although Danto continues to invoke the Hegelian framework, he in fact provides a bypass. This is crucial since his appeal to Wittgensteinian forms of life supports his conclusion that art has ended without involving Hegelian historiography, and so without interpretive controversies about that framework or its putatively denigrating views about embodiment and perception.41

Substantive and structural conceptions of ending in art Danto’s divergence from Hegel’s framework shows that his approach blends two distinct conceptions of ending. Though Danto does not isolate two senses of ending, the distinction is available in his work; I suggest that it is one of its valuable contributions. I will call these structural and substantive. The structural sense of ending is that the ‘objective condition of complete pluralism’ just comes along with understanding that the nature of art holds no constraints on embodiment. What artists do can no longer be explained in terms of a historically specific and perhaps historically evolving understanding of the nature of art because the correct understanding that is now available permits any embodiment. If historical structures are real in the sense Danto has argued, then the condition of artistic pluralism is not simply the end of art history; it is the end of art. This understanding of ending is Danto’s original contribution. There is also a substantive sense in which art might be said to end. This bespeaks an estrangement that is open to a diversity of expressions. For example, there is a sense that the way artworks embody meaning is no longer immediately ‘in synch’ with or integral to contemporary forms of life; that many works require too great an interpretive effort to play a vital role, the complex understanding required to grasp the sensory embodiments artists offer simply gets in our way – we can better deal with the issues posed in contemporary society without expressing our ideas in obscure skeins of theory-driven embodiment. Such contemporary views might come close to expressing a Hegelian view without its commitments or they might draw on other theoretical precedents that are

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outside the scope of this discussion. There is also the more specifically Hegelian view that in a secular age oriented towards discursive explanations, the sensuous embodiments that art provides no longer meet our ‘highest needs’ for grasping ourselves as free, social, historical beings. Whatever the range of such view and whatever theoretical resources they draw on, to the extent that they are swept together under the thought that ‘art is a thing of the past’, they find no more support in Danto’s affirmation of the structural end of art than in Belting’s ultimate denial. One might object that the structural sense of ending Danto offers seems too ‘thin’, too much a matter of concepts and their logic and too little connected with the senses of loss present in contemporary culture.42 Danto has always argued that he is explaining part of the zeitgeist shared by artists and viewers alike, so his approach needs to be able to respond to this challenge. First, one might point to some of Danto’s later writings where he links the logical implication that is his primary concern with broader cultural life. For example, ‘The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy’43 connects the liberatory politics of the 1960s with the liberation of art from mistaken imperatives falsely thought to derive from the nature or historical development of art. Yet such efforts might seem too few and insubstantial. I think that a deeper rejoinder is contained in Danto’s core idea that artworks embody meanings. His view that art-historical understanding is key for artistic embodiment of meaning embraces the broader cultural context of understanding extant at a given time as crucial to the meaning and embodiment that an artwork might offer – emphasizing ‘theory’ makes the point that the broader context enters through the ‘lens’ as it were of art-historical understanding. Danto’s position implies that if art has ended because of the understanding that has been reached, that understanding would enter into the embodied meanings possible today, so it would cleave contemporary works from works that figured in a developmental art-historical context to which we respond as such. Even more importantly, recall that Danto’s aim is to explain the contemporary condition of complete pluralism as a post-historical condition. One could argue that the attainment of pluralism in art has been a leading edge in the emergence of pluralism as a value in at least some late twentieth-century societies, and that this theme is made available in Danto’s work. I will return to this issue in the Conclusion. From this perspective, one can see Danto’s work as examining how the emergence of pluralism as a value has been correlative with the recognition that the nature of art does not favour or require certain

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approaches rather than others for embodying meanings, which just is the structural sense of ending. This would imbue contemporary artworks not simply with a sense of loss or of liberation from tradition but also with the nascent recognition that pluralism is a value. Danto makes this connection ever so briefly in 2007, precisely in response to a ‘challenge to make my end-of-art thesis “something much more political and social”.’ ‘If everything is possible as art, then everything is underwritten by the First Amendment: artists have a right to make anything any way they like, barring the commandments that trump the First Amendment, like prohibiting murder, so the art world is the very model of the pluralistic society in which I believe’44 (my emphasis). The structural sense of ending and pluralism are for Danto two faces of a single coin, two ways of experiencing and explaining one and the same historical condition, so that the structural sense of ending is not a thin conceptual point disconnected from its historical context, but a way of trying to explain certain dimensions of that context.

Essentialism, Wittgenstein and beauty Tracing the arc of Danto’s work doesn’t just distinguish the structural sense of ending from its substantive cousin; it underscores that the structural sense is dependent on essentialism about art, which plays an important role in the substantive sense of ending as well. Ending as pluralism follows from the commitment that art has a nature – albeit one that can only be realized historically – together with the specific view that the facts of art history show that nature to be relational, about which perhaps not much more can be specified than that fundamentally art embodies meaning. ‘[E]ssentialism in art entails pluralism, whether pluralism in fact is historically realized or not.’45 I have offered a sympathetic reconstruction of Danto’s reasoning, pointing out that it need not rely on any specifically Hegelian commitments about history, a reconstruction that counters some of the repeated objections to Danto’s thesis such as ‘How could historicism fit with essentialism about art?’ or ‘Why can’t art continue by doing something unexpectedly new?’ Addressing these objections has turned on defending Danto’s historicism and the coherence of that historicism with essentialism. But this also isolates the question, Should we undertake an essentialist attitude to art – which holds that art has a nature that can be specified ahistorically – in the first place?

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Wittgenstein’s work is key for addressing this issue. And the trajectory of Danto’s thought is instructive again. I have shown that he comes to embrace the historicism in Wittgenstein’s later work while continuing to reject what was thought, in the 1950s and 1960s, to be Wittgenstein’s historicist rejection of essentialism about cultural kinds such as languages or games, and art by extension as well. As philosophical texts tell the story, neoWittgensteinians of the 1950s argued that art did not permit definition as it was a family resemblance concept.46 In a theoretical context dominated by the neo-Wittgensteinian challenge that art is not definable, Danto saw an alternative. ‘What struck me with the force of revelation in 1964 was that this view was entirely wrong.’47 His insight in reaction to Brillo Box was that a relational definition that emphasizes the context of understanding necessary for artworks accommodates the open-ended plurality of art. This was a milestone in theories of art because it showed, as considered above, that art might have a timeless nature that we might understand and explain, even if that nature requires historical realization and so open-ended historical variation in the ways that artworks look. This reopened the theoretical space for definitional approaches, allowing ongoing dispute over the relational conditions necessary and sufficient for art, whether what needs to be emphasized is the institutional context, the historical context or the more amorphous context of understanding that Danto stresses. Such narratives are textbook fare by now.48 But note that to trace the development in philosophy of art does not question the terms of the debate. It does not re-examine the neo-Wittgensteinian view. It does not ask, What if Danto were reacting to a mistaken view? What if the neo-Wittgensteinians extended Wittgenstein’s work somewhat inappropriately – which sparked a stark dispute between essentialism and its denial, rather than opening discussion of how to explain rule-governed endeavours? Danto’s view is explicitly based on an opposition between essentialism and a denial attributed to Wittgenstein – but to which Wittgenstein’s work offers an alternative, which is discussed in Chapter 4. I do not suggest that we ask how Danto’s view might have taken shape differently in the 1960s? And the point is not so much to criticize Danto for denying the neo-Wittgenstein view as to identify a motivation for his essentialism that no longer holds. The question is, What alternative shape may the discussion take now, given the issues to which Danto and Belting heighten our sensitivity together with developments in understanding Wittgenstein’s work that have not fully made their way to theory of art? One repercussion is that if historicism is not brought into

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an essentialist framework like Danto’s, this opens up the question how best to explain the historical nature of art? Isolating essentialism as the key vulnerable premise in tracing Western art to its ending helps turn our attention to its role in the demotion of beauty as well. Again, the arc of Danto’s thought across the last few decades is instructive as it makes explicit how essentialism supports the ongoing demotion of beauty. From the initial, often-recounted reaction to Brillo Box, across more than thirty-five years of writing, there is no description or discussion of how Brillo Box looked, with a minimal discussion of the aesthetics of commercial art in 1997 that I will trace shortly. The theoretical impact was tremendous, the perceptual impact unmentioned. This absence is one with the theoretical point that Danto took Brillo Box to establish. Aesthetic characteristics are inessential to the identity of artworks and to their being recognized as such. This is part of the putative discovery that art’s nature is embodiment of meaning as Danto emphasizes across the decades: aesthetic qualities are not part of the nature of art; rather we were misled into believing they are during much of the era of art when the aim to make art happened to coincide with the aim to make beauty. Now consider the contrast in Danto’s view between his 1997 After the End of Art and his 2004 The Abuse of Beauty. In 1997 Danto points out that the commercial art appropriated by pop artists was ‘colourful’ and made by commercial artists who had ‘good eyes’. ‘[S]uch commercial efforts are selected by someone with a good eye who said confronting, say, a Campbell’s Soup label or a Brillo box design, “That’s it!” In making their facsimiles, pop artists appropriated designs that had already passed an aesthetic test of some sort.’49 The Abuse of Beauty begins by re-endorsing the reasons why aesthetic considerations have not entered into Danto’s view of the nature of art. ‘Aesthetics seemed to bear on this issue not at all, since the two sets of boxes, which seemed to have distinct philosophical identities, so resembled one another that it seemed scarcely credible that one of them should have aesthetic qualities the other lacked. So aesthetics simply dropped out of the equation, and never particularly figured in the extensive philosophical literature my 1964 essay, titled “The Art World,” engendered.’50 But then Danto reconsiders, ‘I have, however, recently come to think that aesthetics did have a certain role to play in the fact that it was with specific reference to the Brillo Boxes that I framed my question…. Why was Brillo Box somehow the fulcrum I used for lifting the issue that was to form the foundation of my philosophy of art? I think it had to have been because it was somehow visually outstanding.’51 Danto finds that the show might not have had

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its success without Brillo Box, had it just consisted of ‘Brillo Box’s relatively drab peers – the Kellogg’s Corn Flake box, for example, of the buff brown containers for tomato ketchup’.52 But the contrast with his earlier discussion shows that these peers are successful items of commercial design already preselected by a ‘good eye’. So it is aesthetic differences beyond ‘successful design’ that turn out to be significant after all. ‘The Brillo Boxes were … the stars of the show and have gone on since to become stars of art history. And it is aesthetics that explains their glamour, even if Warhol himself had nothing to do with that.’53 I do not suggest that prior to The Abuse of Beauty Danto was insensitive to the disappearance of beauty. Not at all – he clearly recognized the rupture posed by the demotion of aesthetics more generally. ‘Now there is one feature of contemporary art that distinguishes it from perhaps all art since 1400, which is that its primary ambitions are not aesthetic. Its primary mode of relationship is not to viewers as viewers, but to other aspects of the persons to whom the art is addressed.’54

And he addressed the demotion of beauty as early as 1987 with ‘Beauty and Morality’,55 to suggest a partial rehabilitation. Danto does not contest the politically motivated rejection of beauty’s capacity to make us feel consoled. Rather, he counters that since beauty’s role is ‘to cause the viewer to feel an appropriate emotion’,56 beauty may play a role in artworks where consolation is internally connected to the meanings of the works. For example, a consoling effect is appropriate to a work that is elegiac in tone or subject. I will return to this view in detail in Chapter 6 on beauty; here the point is Danto’s increasing sensitivity to the issue but only partial defence. It is understandable that in the 1960s he did not reflect on the role of beauty in the works he took to sunder art history because he was part of the age of which he was writing. It is more significant that his 2004 re-examination emphasizes beauty’s pre-eminent role in human life as a value that ‘defines what a fully human life means’ but does not reconsider his core commitment that art has a nature. He reaffirms that ‘it has been clear from the onset of modernism that something can be art without being beautiful. So beauty is not and cannot be part of the essence of art’. Yet he carves out a role for beauty as one of the ways artworks elicit our emotions and make us care about a subject matter, which leads him to ask but not to answer whether we must ‘widen the definition of art’. Without an argument as to how beauty might after all be a necessary condition for art, the essentialist framework leaves us with the view that ‘beauty … is an option for art and not a necessary condition’.57

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Even so, Danto’s willingness to return to Brillo Box in the context of rethinking beauty illustrates that with beauty back in our sights, the most searching re-examination is called for. One question is whether re-examining beauty might offer responses to the sense of ending in art? Danto’s position makes clear that the rejoinder would need to address one or both of two senses of ending – structural or substantive. A return to beauty might challenge a substantive sense that art has run its course because it is exhausted or second best. Although both Danto and Belting take pains to reject a substantive sense of ending by the early years of the twenty-first century, to the extent that the substantive sense of loss is culturally in the air, reaffirmations of beauty might address it nonetheless. The connection between rehabilitating beauty and the structural understanding of the ending of art history in pluralism is less direct. Tracing Danto’s reasoning about the end of art is illuminating in that it shows that both of these leading themes about the art of our time – the sense of ending and the loss of beauty – involve essentialism as a key premise. First, essentialism about art entails that artistic directions dissolve into pluralism upon the discovery that art has a nature that is completely open to variety of embodiment. Second, insofar as we believe that art has a nature, the absence of beauty as an aim or a value in some twentieth-century art shows that beauty is inessential to art. If we maintain an essentialist approach to art, it is hard to see how beauty’s role – however important – could be other than an optional add-on to art’s necessary and sufficient conditions, perhaps belonging to the pragmatics or rhetoric of art. The final chapter will consider this issue further. The general point is that though essentialism is not a reason for demoting beauty, it offers theoretical support for it. Yet recent reaffirmations of beauty argue that beauty’s roles in life and art are significant and integral. My point is that this implies rethinking art as well. That is why it is important to recognize that one and the same key premise underlies both the view that art has ended and the demotion of beauty, and that premise is the view that art has a nature, however relational and historically realized. A final consideration is that one of Danto’s arguments in favour of a definition of art – as embodiment of meaning – is that it offers explanation that is empirically adequate, since a definition must encompass all the phenomena without prioritizing or adjudicating between works.58 But I think that this now tells against an essentialist view, which cannot account for beauty as other than an option that is not part of the nature of art. Insofar as

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contemporary theorists make a compelling case that beauty can stand in more integral relations in some art, as we will now consider, this calls for a type of explanation that can accommodate this fact.

Conclusion Recognizing that both themes of ending or loss share essentialism about art as a key premise should lead us to wonder about that premise. Might there be an alternative for both art and beauty, and might its implications extend all the way to the sense of their loss? Questioning Danto’s essentialism also opens up the issue how best to explain the historical nature of art. These questions are explored in Part II. First, with the resources and distinctions from Danto’s and Belting’s arguments, we can consider key reaffirmations of beauty not only in their own right but also to see whether they address, however implicitly, the two senses of ending in Western art as well.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Belting, Art History after Modernism, 3. Danto, ‘The End of Art’. Danto, ‘Art Criticism after the End of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders, 3. James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). Belting, Art History after Modernism, 3. Ibid., 26. To be sure, Belting’s is not the only account of art-historical style on offer. One interesting account in this context is Jonathan Gilmore’s The Life of a Style, Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) because it explicitly focuses on the nature of art history and the contrast between ‘realist’ and ‘constructivist’ theories of narrative histories. Belting, Art History after Modernism, 130. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 165. Belting, ‘At the Doom of Modernism’, 114. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 123, 117–118.

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15 Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, 139. 16 Arthur Danto, ‘Master Narratives and Critical Principles’, in After the End of Art, 43. 17 Arthur Danto, ‘The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy’, in Unnatural Wonders, 335. 18 Danto, ‘The World as Warehouse’, 336–338. 19 Ibid., 347. 20 In his extended development of this position in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto offers more conditions to distinguish artworks from representations in general, which include consideration of their metaphorical or rhetorical nature, their style and the role of art-historical understanding. Noell Carroll offers an especially systematic discussion of Danto’s detailed attempt at definition in ‘Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art’ with which Danto concurs. For both, see Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 79–106 and 205–208 respectively. However, in his later work Danto does not press his earlier more detailed characterization and leaves it open what it would take to have a clear set of necessary and sufficient conditions. See, for example, ‘Modalities of History: Possibility and Comedy’, in After the End of Art, 195. ‘To be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning … . my book [The Transfiguration of the Commonplace] ekes out two conditions, and I was (and am) insufficiently convinced that they were jointly sufficient to have believed the job done … . I captured part of the essence of art, and hence vindicated my philosophical belief that art is an essentialist concept.’ My discussion follows his later usage, sticking to the core idea that artworks embody meanings. 21 Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, 128. For one exemplary argument against Danto’s mix of essentialism and historicism see Michael Kelly’s ‘Essentialism and Historicism in Danto’s Philosophy of Art’, History and Theory, 37 (1998): 30–43. 22 Danto, ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism’, in After the End of Art, 95. 23 Danto, ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism’, 95. 24 For Richter’s complete works see https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/ 25 Danto, ‘The Historical Museum of Monochrome Art’, in After the End of Art, 164. 26 Danto, ‘The Historical Museum of Monochrome Art’, 165. 27 Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, 140. Danto makes clear here that there is no injunction against the possibility of telling many diverse stories; the issue is meta-narratives. 28 Stephen Houlgate’s view is especially helpful as he reconstructs three ways in which Hegel argues that art ends. See his ‘Hegel, Danto and the “end of art” ’, in The Impact of Idealism, Aesthetics and Literature, eds. Christoph Jamme and Ian D. Cooper (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ‘Art and Human

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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Wholeness’, in An Introduction to Hegel, Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); ‘Introduction’, in Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). One significant feature of Houlgate’s interpretation is that he brings out the importance of beauty not only in Hegel’s framework but also in his view of the end of art. ‘In Hegel’s judgement, the function of art is to enable us to encounter our own complex freedom, humanity, and vitality in the form of beauty … . He thinks that we still have a profound and abiding need for beautiful art because we are sensuous, imaginative beings who require a sensuous, imaginative vision, not just a conceptual or felt understanding, of what it is to be truly free and human.’ Danto supports this claim by distinguishing the Hegelian framework from a number of alternative accounts of modernism, especially Clement Greenberg’s Kantian approach, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Philosophy of Art, Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1995), 111–117. Danto argues that though both share the key insight – that modernism is an ascent to a self-reflexive phase rather than simply one style in a sequence of styles – only the Hegelian frame can enfold pre-modern art as well as art after modernism. Because Greenberg articulates the idea of ascent to a metalevel with a Kantian framework that proposes that the hallmark of modernism is self-scrutiny of the limiting and hence necessary conditions of our forms of representation, his approach cannot adequately capture the nature of pre-modern art or art after modernism. To the extent that all art is understood to aim towards displaying and entrenching its own limiting conditions, the representationality of pre-modern art is rendered secondary to its formal properties. More importantly, in the other temporal direction, Greenberg’s framework cannot explain the fact that abstract expressionist art does not continue beyond a brief period, but gives way to a variety of movements such as Pop and Minimalism, finally issuing in a condition of complete plurality. Danto urges that Greenberg’s analysis cannot explain the recent pluralistic decades as other than a stalled detour in art’s development. Danto, ‘Introduction: Art Criticism after the End of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders, 6. Danto, ‘Painting and Politics’, in Unnatural Wonders, 352. Danto, ‘Introduction: Art Criticism after the End of Art’, 7. Danto, ‘Painting and Politics’, 353. For example, see Noel Carroll, ‘The End of Art?’, History and Theory, 37 (1998): 17–29. Danto, ‘Master Narratives and Critical Principles’, 43. Belting, Art History after Modernism, 111. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19. Danto, ‘Modalities of History’, 202. Ibid. Ibid., 201.

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41 It seems fair to say that most contemporary commentators agree with the overall shape of Danto’s interpretation while drawing different consequences, for examples, see J. M. Bernstein’s ‘Freedom from Nature? Post-Hegelian Reflections on the End(s) of Art’ and Robert Pippin’s ‘Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Theory of Art’. As mentioned above, Stephen Houlgate’s interpretation of Hegel’s view of the end of art seems to be a noteworthy exception. See his ‘Hegel, Danto and the “end of art” ’, 264–292. 42 I am grateful to Robert Pippin for raising this objection in conversation. Also see his discussion in After the Beautiful, 70–72, where he charges that Danto’s interpretation of Hegel is ‘internal to a highly formalized conception of art history’ whereas ‘there is a great deal more at stake in Hegel when the question is the historical fate of art’ and in ‘left-Hegelian’ art theorists such as T. J. Clark and Michael Fried. ‘The question that animates all three accounts and others like them is the simple, sweeping question of what it means that human beings make art, how it is that this activity is so significant to them, how it could be that this sense of its significance could change, often radically, and still be identified as the making of significant art. It is hard to detect the presence of these concerns in Danto, and so hard to understand what he could mean when he calls himself a “born again Hegelian” .’ (Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 9 ). Pippin acknowledges in a footnote accompanying this passage that ‘In this passage, Danto makes clear how cautious and self-consciously limited is his “Hegelianism” but he is concerned mostly not to subscribe to any of what he regards as dubious “metaphysical” and “systematic” claims.’ After the Beautiful, 71–72. 43 Danto, Unnatural Wonders. 44 Danto’s response is to Lydia Goehr and is stated at the end of her ‘For the Birds/ Against the Birds’, in Action, Art, History, 78. 45 ‘Modalities of History’, 197. 46 William E. Kennick, ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?’, Mind, 67 (1958): 317–334. Morris Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1956): 27–35. 47 Danto, ‘Introduction: Art Criticism after the End of Art’, 8. 48 For example, see Noel Carroll’s ‘Introduction’, in Theories of Art Today (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 3–24. 49 Danto, ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism’, 92. This passage occurs in a discussion whose point is to argue that aesthetics might enter into critical discourse even though pop art helped us recognize that aesthetics is not relevant to the question of what makes something art. 50 Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. The Paul Carus Lectures 21 (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2003), 3–4.

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51 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 3, 4. 52 Ibid., 4. 53 Ibid., 5. Danto goes even further to highlight Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s recollection of seeing pop art in colour for the first time ‘What they were unprepared for, Alex Malmud remembers, was how beautiful Pop Art was!’ (6) 54 Arthur Danto, ‘Museums and the Thirsting Millions’, in After the End of Art, 183. 55 Arthur Danto, ‘Beauty and Morality’, in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994). 56 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 122. 57 For Danto’s discussion, see the subsection ‘Optional Beauty’ in The Abuse of Beauty, 118–124. 58 For example, ‘A philosophical definition has to capture everything and so can exclude nothing.’ ‘Three Decades after the End of Art’, in After the End of Art, 36.

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Rupture and the Relevance of Beauty

To rehabilitate beauty, to connect reaffirming beauty with rethinking the nature of objectivity and its place in contemporary life, and to wonder whether such reaffirmation might redress the rupture felt within art, is to pursue avenues explicitly opened by Hans Georg Gadamer in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet his prescient focus on beautiful art seems to be largely overlooked even to this day. In this chapter, I propose taking Gadamer at his word that beauty is relevant in a very specific way: thinking about beauty is helpful for understanding the continuity of art. The package of views Gadamer offers also contains another important strand. His view is that to recover beauty, we need to understand that beauty is a matter of perceptual experience – experience that engages us with truths – rather than a matter of subjective sensory pleasure; and we need to do so in a way that doesn’t set up an opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. This chapter examines Gadamer’s views as the key precedent for thinking about beauty and the end of art. Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach emphasizes that our grasp of the meaning or content of a text or artwork is dialogic and shaped by a horizon of understanding that is temporal and dynamic – informed by what is historically extant even as that is continually reshaped in terms of our ongoing attempts to understand and re-understand. His aim is to show how understanding may be both objective and historically situated in such a dynamic temporal way. It is from within this broader focus on tradition and the possibility of continuity that Gadamer addresses the sense of a problematic rupture posed by contemporary art and argues for continuity. But his attempt to bring out the temporal dimension of historical situatedness is faulted on at least two counts: that his concern with historical tradition is conservative, and that it fails to capture the objective and normative character of our judgements, including aesthetic ones. I will consider these issues at the end of the chapter.

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A few words to contextualize my focus on Gadamer’s views of beauty might be in order, especially as these views still tend to be overlooked.1,2 To some extent, this might be due to the fact that in the hermeneutic tradition the relationship between art and truth is central, so Gadamer’s work is seen principally in relation to work on that problem. The structure of Truth and Method also allows for this selective focus. Jeff Malpas, for example, notes that Truth and Method closes by examining beauty.3 But it also opens with an examination of beauty: the first eighty-seven pages offer a detailed hermeneutic reconsideration of the central concepts implicated in our understanding not simply of art but more specifically of beautiful art during the era that identified the two. The subjectivization of ‘aesthetic consciousness’ that is Gadamer’s target is historically specific, and it concerned our experience of beautiful art. The subjectivization of the key implicated concepts – of Bildung, common sense, judgement and taste – leads to the later, broader subjectivization of art and of the truths that beautiful art had been thought to hold and that art more generally might offer. This is how the opening sets up the argument that in order to recover belief that the humanities deal with truths, we need to regain understanding that artworks offer truths. The body of the work then reclaims a more encompassing notion of truth as ‘disclosure’ or something like pre-propositional presence of factual structures and emphasizes the role of language in mediating tradition and hence understanding. The closing discussion unequivocally concludes that it is reaffirmation of beauty that holds the key since beauty is the immediate radiance of the intelligible – beauty presents itself immediately to our grasp; it shows the intelligible to be present to us; ‘the metaphysical distinction of the beautiful was that it closed the gap between the idea and the appearance’.4 ‘Beauty has the mode of being of light.’5 This outline of Truth and Method indicates that the predominant perspective on Gadamer’s work extracts the core of his extended argument concerning the subjectivization of art (or of ‘aesthetic consciousness’) and its relation to our views about truth. I don’t want to contest this focus, which is understandable in the broader context of hermeneutic thought. But it is also important to recognize the fuller shape of Gadamer’s concerns that the symmetrical structure of Truth and Method conveys: we are prepared for the extraordinary invocation of beauty in the closing discussion by the opening that has already put the problematic history of our relationship to beautiful art in view. With the re-examination of beauty well underway, let’s consider what we might learn from Gadamer’s work today, from the horizon of concerns that we are presently reshaping. Gadamer’s ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful,’ written seventeen years after the publication of Truth and Method and intended for non-technical readership,

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connects a sense of rupture posed by twentieth-century art with the ongoing significance of beautiful art.6 By streamlining – and perhaps avoiding – the complexities of his own response to philosophical tradition, especially the work of Kant, Hegel, the German Romantics and Heidegger that is detailed in Truth and Method and other essays, Gadamer allows us to do the same and to focus on just a few key insights and moves. The essay argues that we can find conceptual resources for explaining art’s continuity by (i) going back to Plato’s and Kant’s ideas about beauty and beautiful art to find that they describe an extreme case that provides insights that hold for art; and then (ii) showing how these philosophical ideas help to explain art in terms of the intersection of notions of play, symbol and festival whose meaning has rich resonances in Gadamer’s philosophical tradition while also connecting with contemporary anthropology.7 The dynamical role of tradition is illustrated in Gadamer’s use of Plato’s and Kant’s views to re-understand our contemporary situation. As Robert Bernasconi writes in his introduction to The Relevance of the Beautiful, ‘It is only by way of the past that we have access to the present, and yet it is the present and by way of what is most new and unforeseeable in it that we discover the resources of the past.’8 This is especially striking in light of the way the late twentieth century return to beauty revolves around those ideas with competing proposals. We will see, for example, how Scarry’s and Nehamas’ conflicting defences of beauty turn on their opposing views of what is of value and what is to be discarded from our Platonic and Kantian heritage. This chapter will (i) briefly present Gadamer’s recovery of Platonic and Kantian ideas; (ii) detail his proposal that explaining beauty in terms of play, symbol and festival addresses the problem of art’s continuity; (iii) examine objections to his emphasis on tradition; and (iv) bring out his responses to both substantive and structural sense of art’s ending.

Plato and Kant Gadamer finds Plato’s and Kant’s ideas continuous, one and the same idea stands at the core of the Platonic understanding of the beautiful and in the view developed in the birth of aesthetics in the European enlightenment: ‘in art and the beautiful we encounter a significance that transcends all conceptual thought’.9 Plato’s Phaedrus tells us that beauty is distinguished by its immediate visibility and by the fact that we react to it with love, ‘now beauty alone has this privilege, to be the most clearly visible and the most loved’ (250E). Gadamer elaborates that it is in ‘the experience of love and the beautiful, the love of the beautiful’ that

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Beauty and the End of Art we learn that however unexpected our encounter with beauty may be, it gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions. The ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real.10

Gadamer suggests that the same function is served by Kant’s account of the way perceptual experience of beauty eludes conceptual understanding. His reading seems strikingly prescient of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury interpretations of Kant in its careful attention to Kant’s emphasis on the free play of our faculties and on aesthetic ideas in place of Kant’s putative formalism. Defending Kant from prevailing trends – running from German idealism through to Clement Greenberg’s influential theory of modernism as Kantian self-reflexive criticism and beyond – that cast the approach as formalist, Gadamer argues that Kant’s leading ideas lose their insightfulness when they are taken to have a broader or different application from those Kant specified. He highlights Kant’s view that the experience and judgement of beauty are grounded in a free play of our capacities for imagination and understanding, suggesting that it is Kant’s great ‘achievement’ to recognize that judgement grounded in such free play is normatively binding. (I will detail this part of Kant’s view in Chapter 6, returning to the themes introduced here.) More specifically, the conundrum Kant tries to untangle is that a judgement of beauty is shareable or communicative, and normatively ‘binding’, even though it does not convey an instance of a generality or universal law. Kant’s view turns on the idea that by feeling the reciprocal harmonious and free play of our capacities, we feel the nature of those capacities, which is common to us. Imagination and understanding stimulate each other’s activity both in the creation of a beautiful work that sets rather than follows rules and in an experience that grounds a judgement that does not subsume a particular beauty as an instance of a universal concept of the beautiful or as a beautiful instance of a kind, such as a beautiful flower. But this is tricky because Gadamer agrees with Kant that ‘[i]t is invariably true that when we see something, we must think something in order to see anything’.11 Kant’s subtle point about beautiful art is that it is in the free play of imagination and understanding that a beautiful work leads us to ‘to go on to think much that cannot be said’.12 Naturally, [Kant] did not mean that the creation of … beauty free from significant content represents the ideal of art. In the case of art, it is true that we always find ourselves held between the pure aspect of visibility presented to the viewer by the insight (Anbild) [that ‘we both elicit the image from things and imaginatively

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project the image into things in one and the same process’ 17] … and the meaning that our understanding dimly senses in the work of art.13

In a late essay ‘Intuition and Vividness’ collected together with ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, Gadamer prefigures increasing attention to Kant’s suggestion that beautiful artworks convey aesthetic ideas – whose content goes beyond the deliverances of experience – through their aesthetic attributes.14 Gadamer suggests that this is what sets our interpretive task: ‘[H]ere – rather than in a return to the judgement of taste – lies the real task of carrying Kant’s philosophical achievement further and liberating his insight from the fetters of the opposition of intuition and concept.’15 Kant’s idea that the imagination and understanding play freely in response to aesthetic ideas recognizes that we need to move beyond an opposition of the sensible or intuitional and the conceptual in the case of beautiful art. Nevertheless, Gadamer suggests these Kantian insights are not adequate, as they are formulated, for explaining the continuity of modern and traditional art. This brings us to the second stage of the argument. He proposes that the identity and experience of a work of art can be explained in terms of its ‘anthropological basis’ in play, symbol and festival. Human beings in all societies play, use symbols and celebrate festivals. The connection with the first stage of the argument is that we can understand what is important for aesthetics in each of these broad phenomena by drawing on key texts in the history of aesthetics, and especially the insights extracted from Plato and Kant.16 So the discussion of the three anthropological notions again illustrates the kind of temporal interplay Gadamer wants us to recognize. His contemporary context makes the anthropological concepts available, while it is not simply older philosophical aesthetics that elucidates the potential significance of these concepts but the way in which his contemporary situation allows him to rethink the earlier aesthetic work to bring it to bear on the contemporary ideas. Recognizing this helps us appreciate that Gadamer does not define art in terms of aesthetic satisfaction. Rather he uses an extreme case (as he puts it) within aesthetics – beautiful art and experience of it – to articulate dimensions that explain art and its experience in ways that bring out continuity.

Play, symbol, festival First, in a clear expansion of Kant’s view that beauty is communicable while eluding our concepts, Gadamer suggests that play is a form of non-purposive activity that is distinctively human and communicative when our reason is

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involved, for example, in setting rules. ‘For the specifically human quality in our play is the self-discipline and order that we impose on our movements when playing, as if particular purposes were involved – just like a child, for example, who counts how often he can bounce the ball off the ground before losing control of it.’17 Gadamer’s focus on play follows in a long tradition of philosophical thought extending at least from Kant through German idealism to twentieth-century hermeneutics. But it is also striking from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s later work, which emphasizes that our life activities are broadly game-like structures to which language is integral. More specifically, a Wittgensteinian perspective that highlights the role of rules in human forms of life activities draws out two implications from Gadamer’s focus on play and the fact that rules do not simply occur, as we set and agree to follow them.18 First, an activity is communicative insofar as it is constituted by intentionally set rules. Second, the identity of any case of play is constituted by its rules. Consider Gadamer’s example. If I see a child playing with a ball by bouncing it within the cracks of the paving stones – that is, if I see what I have just described rather than random or unintentional motions by child and ball – then the rules that the child has set itself or the rules that constitute the play are conveyed or communicated to me. This is the sense in which rule-governed activity is communicative to any onlooker who can see what is intended in following those rules. Such experience is participatory since to see the play one needs to be able to count the bounces that avoid the cracks in the paving stones. These points allow Gadamer to suggest that in play ‘something is intended as something even if it is not something conceptual, useful, purposive, but only the pure autonomous regulation of movement’ and that ‘there is a primary experience of rationality in the observance of self-prescribed rules, for example, in the very identity of whatever we try to repeat’.19 Gadamer proposes that the identity of an artwork is determined analogously through the setting up of play in which the one who experiences the work must participate actively or ‘play along’. ‘The identity of the work is not guaranteed by any classical or formalist criteria, but is secured by the way in which we take the construction of the work upon ourselves as a task.’20 This addresses the experimental and often seemingly distancing effect of much modern and contemporary art. Though one often-felt difference between traditional and contemporary art is that the former does not make our activity as evident to us, the effort that might seem to distance one from a modern artwork is quite the opposite – an attempt to ‘transform the distance of the onlooker into the involvement of the participant’.21

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Gadamer also uses the participatory nature of play to argue that beauty places specific requirements on theory of perception (a point also made more explicitly in Truth and Method). First, theories of beauty or beautiful art are led astray to the extent that they rely on theoretical approaches to perception that factor out a purely sensory dimension: ‘we generally employ an inadequate and dogmatic concept of sensory perception as an aesthetic criterion’.22 Rather, ‘perception must not be understood as if the “sensible skin of things” were all that counted aesthetically’.23 ‘To perceive something is not to collect together utterly separate sensory impressions, but is rather, as the marvelous German word wahrnehmen itself says, “to take something as true”.’24 But second, Gadamer suggests that because it is ‘invariably true that when we see something, we must think something in order to see anything’, Kant’s recognition that the experience of beauty involves a ‘free play’ of the faculties of imagination and understanding ‘forces us to face the question about what is actually built up in this process’. On the one hand, Gadamer’s point is clear: accounts of both beauty and art need to draw on a theory of perception adequate for explaining the complexity of experiencing them. On the other hand, we can also appreciate the tension in what Gadamer is trying to do. The view that experience of beauty eludes conceptualization puts pressure on suggesting that the experience of beauty is perceptual in the sense of a taking true. That is why he has to find a way to explain that what is at issue for Kant is the particularity of experience that involves rather than bypasses our capacity to form and follow rules.25 Since the notion of play explains the broadly ‘representational’ identity of beautiful artworks and the correspondingly contentful nature of experience but does not distinguish that some kinds of contents are distinctively particular, Gadamer adds a second intersecting dimension to capture this fact. He argues that beautiful artworks are symbolic in a distinctive way that involves the presence of meaning. Gadamer emphasizes the original Greek sense of symbol as a token of remembrance, a fragment of a whole used as a ‘pass’: ‘something in and through which we recognize someone already known to us’.26 The point is to recapture the sense of the symbolic as a fragment that uniquely contains the meaning of a larger whole within itself (like a representative) for anyone who can actively reconstruct that whole. Much as a key, by uniquely fitting a lock, opens a larger whole for anyone who undertakes to turn the key.27 This notion of symbol contrasts with allegory and a kind of symbolic reference that requires that one must have an (at least partially) independent grasp of the referent. For example, an understanding of flowers that is at least partially independent is

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required for the linguistic symbol ‘flowers’ to fulfil its referential function, or for an allegorical symbol to stand for flowers. When I encounter a symbol of these kinds, I confront something that is completely distinct from flowers but points to them nonetheless. It follows that another symbol might refer to flowers or might allow me to recover the full meaning involved in the symbol ‘flowers’. Ultimately, Gadamer goes all the way to the Catholic understanding of the sacrament to convey the alternative notion of a symbol. Jesus’ words ‘This is my body and this is my blood’ do not mean that the bread and wine signify his body and blood … . the bread and wine of the sacrament are the flesh and blood of Christ.28

This is a claim about the distinctive ontology of artworks. Like a sacrament, a beautiful artwork involves the physical realization or embodiment of a meaning. But artworks differ so that each is a fragment that makes present a meaning distinct to that particular realization. Danto agrees with this point, and also appeals to the Catholic understanding of the sacrament and the idea of transfiguration to capture how the ontology of artworks or embodied meanings is distinct from indiscernible counterpart objects that are mere real things.29 Gadamer uses the point to argue that if an artwork is a fragment of our sense of our place in the larger whole, then this allows for a plurality of fragments in which we might find the presence of the larger whole. ‘If we think along these lines … we see that the significant thing is precisely the variety of this experience, which we know as a historical reality as much as a contemporary one. Amidst the variety of art, this same message of the whole addresses us over and over again.’30 Gadamer is emphatic that his account of the symbolic nature of art – which develops Plato and Kant’s shared insight that the meaning sensuously present in beautiful artworks eludes conceptualization – opposes the Hegelian view that philosophy might supersede art. Insofar as the role of art is integral to the human condition – the attempt to make perceptually present to us our sense of our fragmentary place in a larger whole – it could not be superseded in the sense of rendered obsolete or unnecessary. And insofar as that role could only be carried out by symbolic representations – like sacraments – in Gadamer’s sense, it could not be taken over by discursive means that are self-standing such as conceptual descriptions. To expect that we can recuperate within the concept the meaningful content that addresses us in art is already to have overtaken art in a very dangerous manner. Yet this was exactly Hegel’s guiding conviction, which led him to the problem of art as a thing of the past … everything that addresses us obscurely

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and non-conceptually in the particular sensuous language of art was to be recuperated by philosophy in the form of the concept. However, that is an idealistic temptation which is rejected by all artistic experience … [and] fails to do justice to the fact that the work speaks to us as a work and not as the bearer of a message … . The significance of the symbol and the symbolic lay in this paradoxical kind of reference that embodies and even vouchsafes meaning. Art is only encountered in a form that resists pure conceptualization … . Thus the essence of the symbolic lies precisely in the fact that it is not related to an ultimate meaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbol preserves its meaning within itself.31

Quoted at length, this is Gadamer’s no-holds-barred response to a Hegelian view of ending in art. (To be sure, there are other respects in which he appreciates and shares Hegel’s views, but his point in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ is just focused on this Hegelian view that art has ended.) The affinities and differences between Gadamer and Danto’s views need to be distinguished carefully. They agree that artworks are embodied meanings. But Gadamer also emphasizes that there are common dimensions in the experience and identity of beauty and art that hold direct implications for a Hegelian view of art’s ending. Taking this different route, Gadamer’s discussion confirms Danto’s ultimate disavowal of Hegel’s substantive framework for the end of art. But Gadamer is clear from the outset that taking the idea of embodiment seriously blocks a substantive view of ending. If the sense that art has ended were dependent on Hegelian ideas, as Danto’s writings initially seemed to suggest, then Gadamer’s work would have offered a pre-emptive strike.32 Gadamer emphasizes that beautiful art has a shared, social dimension by adding the third notion of festival to intersect with play and symbol. He argues that a festival is an intentional activity wherein we experience community by actively taking part in a recurring whole that precedes any particular celebration of it and gives any particular celebration its distinctive identity and temporality. When we consider the celebration of various recurring festivals, we appreciate that ‘such moments represent the primacy of something that happens in its own time and at the proper time, something that is not subject to the abstract calculation of temporal duration’. That is why to take part in a festival is more precisely to ‘enact’ because ‘to enact is not to set out in order subsequently to arrive somewhere, for when we enact a festival, then the festival is always there from the beginning’.33 Gadamer suggests that our experience of beautiful works shares in this distinctive kind of ‘autonomous temporality’, one that we must pause to enact. Since festivals and festival time are to be enacted by all members of a community, understanding beautiful art as akin to festivals seeks to erase

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distinctions between high and low art, to relocate beautiful art as an expression of the life of a community rather than an escape or departure from it. With the three intersecting dimensions in place, it is clear that though both Gadamer and Danto insist that background historical understanding plays a key role in our experience of art, Gadamer argues that the requisite understanding cannot be fully rendered in descriptive concepts. Rather, it involves playing along with unarticulated rules, with the ‘increase in being’ present in a sacrament or symbol within an autonomous time like that characteristic of festivals.34 These capacities arise out of membership in community and such communities take shape in a reciprocal relationship with the languages we speak. They are forms of life activities in the Wittgensteinian sense introduced in Chapter 1 (and that will be elaborated in Chapter 5). Gadamer’s three notions emphasize the ever-renewing reciprocal relationships between individual response and grounding in community. One implicit suggestion is that many of us experience modern or contemporary art much like a foreign festival, intriguing and exciting perhaps, but not something we can genuinely enact. Yet even though membership in one’s community entails disengagement from the festivals of another community, it is also our only resource for overcoming such disengagement. One can play along with beautiful artefacts from remote or long-lost cultures, for example, to the extent that grounding in one’s own culture enables at least partial entrance to others.35 Similarly, one might be open to the art of one’s time to the extent that one’s own grounding in contemporary culture, however different from the artist’s, makes it possible to try to come to terms with the world shared with the artist and the possibilities the contemporary situation opens. The clear implication is that such new possibilities in perceptual experience involve expanding one’s sense of community.

Objections Gadamer has been criticized precisely on the ground that his appeal to tradition cannot do justice to the normatively governed and objective nature of the aesthetic judgements we might make. Among recent commentators, both Kristin Gjesdal and Robert Pippin make this criticism. Kristin Gjesdal’s Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism stands out because she addresses the relative neglect of Gadamer’s work on art and beauty and offers a nuanced reconstruction of his interpretations and misinterpretations of Kant’s work on beauty en route

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to arguing that his historicism fails. She argues that Gadamer’s work fails to offer ways ‘to overcome the obstacles of historical and cultural distance through working out a sustainable notion of normativity in interpretation’.36 This is because Gadamer’s hermeneutics addresses one particular prejudice, the modern tendency to abstract from the fundamental historicity of human existence, at the cost of overlooking a larger specter of hermeneutic problems and issues, including those of critique, reflection, and normativity in understanding.37

Since the detail and depth of her reconstruction is outside the scope of this chapter, let’s focus on Robert Pippin’s more succinct criticism in ‘Gadamer’s Hegel’.38 Pippin prefaces his challenge with the strong claim that ‘I want to endorse enthusiastically the basic principle of his approach to all hermeneutics’ that ‘we can only look back at [texts and bodies of thought] from where we are now, from within our own “horizon” ’.39 But he objects that Gadamer’s position offers no source for genuine normative standards or criteria for the everrenewable nature of texts and artworks: ‘Gadamer would be fine with the self-correcting, negotiating, aiming-atagreement parts of ’ ... ‘rule-following’ [by] ‘reflectively rule-assessing communities ... [that] must somehow be understood (at its most basic level) as a kind of continual negotiation about normative authority’ … ‘but without Hegel’s argument for the relevance of criteria of genuine success in such attempts (ultimately, the so-called Absolute viewpoint), we will end up with simply a narrative of what had been taken, as a matter of historical fact, to be failure, success, reformulation, and so forth (insofar as we, by our lights, could understand them now).’40

Yes, Gadamer’s approach does not involve a perspective for reconstructing and assessing the nature of normative authority in addition to the specific ways in which communities assess, self-correct and negotiate normative authority. Pippin acknowledges Gadamer’s focus on the rule-following dimension of human activity – like Wittgenstein’s – and charges that this is insufficient to secure criteria of genuine correctness. I suggest that we can use Wittgensteinian realism to inform our understanding of Gadamer’s approach because they overlap precisely in their attention to rules and forms of life activities, while differing in what they bring out for explicit attention. I will argue in Chapter 4 that Wittgenstein successfully offers a realism that looks only to the detail of human rule-following in the absence of any overarching meta-perspectives. So the appreciation or elaboration of Gadamer’s position that I believe to be appropriate is deferred or beholden to the later discussion of Wittgenstein.

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At this point, I suggest we take Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement as an illustrative example for considering Pippin’s charge. Gadamer brings out resources present in the complexity of Kant’s text – which raise questions about the relationships between different passages, their relative significance for Kant’s aims and so on. Some of Gadamer’s focus seems to be borne out by ensuing Kant scholarship at the end of the twentieth century with its increasing recognition that Kant offers a discussion of beautiful art and argues that the aesthetic attributes of beautiful works convey aesthetic ideas that engender the free play of imagination with understanding. But Pippin’s challenge applies to these interpretations as well: is this just what increasingly seems to be interpretive success at a certain time? From the perspective of Gadamer’s approach, how are we to understand that earlier readings de-emphasize or subordinate parts of Kant’s text, such as his suggestion that artworks convey aesthetic ideas? And how are we to understand Gadamer’s reading? As what he happens to think at a certain point in time? Or as what he finds to emphasize when he tries to respond to the problem – set by his broader cultural as well as specifically art-historical context – of a sense of rupture in the art of his time? Pippin’s concluding objection is that the problem that is pressing for us – how to explain that human experience is distinctive in its normatively governed nature – is different from the early twentieth-century context of problems to which Gadamer was responding, which included positivism and psychologism as prime targets. From ‘where we stand now,’ the distinctiveness of the ‘human sciences,’ following [a] Hegelian lead, stems from the distinctiveness of human experience in being ‘fraught with ought,’ in Sellars’ phrase, from the distinctive capacity we might call our responsiveness to reasons, ‘oughts.’ Viewed this way, we can understand why ‘this is traditional,’ ‘this is the way we go on,’ and so on could never ultimately count as such reasons, however much time it takes us to learn that.41

It is undeniable that the problems that seem pressing to us shift to some extent. But this doesn’t seem relevant to our issue. Gadamer’s response to the sense of ending in art is not to point to ‘this is traditional’ and ‘this is the way we go on’ as reasons, but to examine past works that offered extraordinary insights about art, and to see from a contemporary viewpoint whether they might help us forge better understanding using more current concepts, such as those from the hermeneutic tradition together with anthropology. This is not an essentially conservative response.

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A second, more specific objection to the proposal in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ is that although the notions of play, symbol and festival seem ideally suited because of their anthropological scope to subsume the varieties of art, their breadth is also problematic in that it fails to explain any one variety, such as the self-conscious turn that is often thought to be a key hallmark of modern art or the pluralism of contemporary art that concerns Danto and Belting. The charge is that Gadamer’s account needs to contain the resources for explaining not only what is continuous but also what is distinctive about traditional and modern art. For example, in canvassing conceptual resources for modern and contemporary art, Belting rejects hermeneutic approaches on the ground that they place too great an emphasis on individual hermeneutic response and on the correspondingly hermeneutic nature of artworks. Though he focuses on other thinkers without addressing Gadamer’s proposal in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, Belting’s point is that ‘The end of the philosophical concept of “art” as such marks the beginning of the hermeneutic concept of the “work” ’. The charge is that ‘the consciousness here becomes more important than its object, and the interpretation, which is bound to its own perception of things, in the end confirms only itself ’.42 From the point of view of arthistorical explanation, this is the same basic objection voiced by Pippin and Gjesdal, discussed above.43 It is not clear whether Belting’s criticism is just: does Gadamer’s hermeneutics de-emphasize the properties of objects and our shared knowledge of those properties too greatly? Or does this general charge not give enough weight to Gadamer’s specific invocation that artworks and festivals are pre-existing structures that need to be enacted by virtue of the shared, publicly available understanding extant in community?

Senses of ending If we set disagreements over the adequacy of Gadamer’s historicism and the breadth of his proposal aside, we can collect together its multilayered response to senses of ending in art. Each turns on his account of the way our understanding of the beautiful helps our understanding of art. First, we saw that Gadamer makes clear how theory of perception is not only presupposed in a substantive Hegelian view that art has ended but also the lines along which theory of perception can offer a rebuttal: perception is a factive ‘taking true’ in structures of particulars. Insofar as the distinctive identity of artworks involves the intersecting dimensions of play, symbol and festival, it requires a theory of

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perception that can explain experience that is rule informed, particular and involves a broader communal context of cultural possibilities. Art that requires perceptual experience is not open, Gadamer argues, to being overtaken by purely discursive resources. Second, Gadamer’s approach allows that philosophy might supersede art in the task of defining art, but the overall thrust of his work minimizes the significance of an ending of this kind. Recall Danto’s suggestion that the pluralistic freedom of contemporary artworks informs the works themselves so that we experience them in part as embodying the absence of historically mandated direction. That is why we experience the end of art not only in the plurality of contemporary art but also in individual works. Gadamer can agree with Danto that art-historical understanding informs our ability to cooperatively play along with a work, to enact the meaning that is present in its perceptible particularity. But Gadamer’s emphasis on beautiful artworks suggests that we are shaken by the sense of the human condition each makes present. His approach proposes that we only succeed in understanding art’s nature to the extent that the explanation does not demote the role of beautiful art – and indeed, begins with a careful consideration of this ‘extreme case’. Third, Gadamer’s work offers several direct responses to Belting and Danto. Insofar as Belting presses on the inadequacy of conceptual means to understand the full plurality of contemporary art, Gadamer offers a candidate: the intersection of play, symbol and festival. Danto’s challenge that art can no longer be produced or experienced as part of a progressive art history is pushed to the side or minimized by Gadamer’s approach: our present understanding is always informed by renewing past works, whether these figure in a specifically progressive history or not. What is important is that ‘the art of earlier ages only comes down to us filtered through time and transmitted through a tradition that both preserves it and transforms it in a living way’. ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ also holds a response to Danto’s view that art can no longer be made or experienced in the possibility of internal development because we have grasped the plurality inherent in embodiment of meaning. The notion of symbolic meaning Gadamer delineates is inherently a plurality of individual ‘fragments’ of meaning. That is its role in the triad of intersecting notions Gadamer invokes. Beautiful artworks are a plurality that has always confronted us as such, a plurality that has been compatible with some internal development, a plurality for whose recognition we did not need the art of indiscernibles, a plurality that we have the capacity to engage with as such.

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Conclusion Gadamer’s work offers important precedents. His ‘leading idea’ is that beauty is relevant in a very specific way: rethinking beauty is helpful for understanding the continuity of art. He also argues that understanding beauty places requirements on theory of perception. Insofar as the distinctive identity of beautiful artworks lies at the intersection captured by the notions of play, symbol and festival, beautiful art requires a theory of perception that can explain experience that is rule governed, particular and involves a broader communal context of cultural possibilities. Such a theory of perception would counter the loss of beauty and a substantive sense of art’s ending. Although Gadamer’s approach allows that philosophy might supersede art in the task of defining art, as Danto argues, the overall thrust of his work minimizes the significance of an ending of this kind. His approach implies that we only succeed in understanding art’s nature to the extent that the explanation does not demote the role of beautiful art.

Notes 1

Consider the Stanford online Philosophy Encyclopedia, which currently serves as a gateway to philosophy for many students and professionals. The entry on Gadamer’s Aesthetics does not include beauty as one of its subsections, concentrating entirely on Gadamer’s account of art (Nicholas Davey, ‘Gadamer’s Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/). The general entry on Gadamer’s work presents his attempt to recover truth in terms of a recovery of art, and though it recognizes the role of beauty in his approach, it only allots one sentence to this point. ‘In contrast to much contemporary aesthetics, Gadamer takes the experience of beauty to be central to an understanding of the nature of art and in the final pages of Truth and Method, he discusses the beautiful as that which is self-evidently present to us (as “radiant”) exploring also the close relationship between the beautiful and the true. Of particular importance in his writing about art and literature are the three ideas that appear in the subtitle to “The Relevance of the Beautiful”: art as play, symbol and festival.’ Jeff Malpas, ‘Hans-Georg Gadamer’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/ gadamer/. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer offers another example. Though Robert J. Dostal’s introductory essay makes a similar point to the one quoted above

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3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Beauty and the End of Art that ‘Beauty … is a central consideration for Gadamer,’ none of the subsequent essays focus on Gadamer’s views of beauty. ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9. But Kristin Gjesdal’s recent Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) is an outstanding exception. She offers a detailed examination of Gadamer’s critical understanding of Kant’s work on beauty in both Truth and Method and the essays collected in The Relevance of the Beautiful. While arguing convincingly that ‘Gadamer’s reading of Kant is more complex than it is often assumed to be’, she also tries to show that Gadamer misses certain things in Kant’s view to the detriment of his own position. Her focus is different from mine, as she examines the connection of beauty and morality in Kant’s work and Gadamer’s understanding of it, and charges that Gadamer misunderstands the role of natural beauty in Kant’s account thereby missing how ‘Kant’s notion of natural beauty is intrinsically related to his notion of knowledge and empirical research within the natural sciences’. I will return to this theme in Kant’s work from a different perspective in Chapter 6. See Note 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Revised 2nd Edition (London: Continuum, 2004), 481. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 477. For an interesting discussion of The Relevance of the Beautiful, see Gary, Shapiro ‘Gadamer, Habermas, and the Death of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 26 (1986): 39–47. Gadamer uses the historical concept of beautiful art or die schone Kunst to motivate the first step. He examines the historical identification of art with the beautiful, an identification that Danto’s essentialist approach sets aside as incorrect, a historical misunderstanding of the nature of art that misleads theorizing whereas only the plurality of contemporary art makes it possible to think correctly about art. In contrast, Gadamer suggests that we might learn from it. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Introduction’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, xviii. Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 16. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 29. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, quoted in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 21. I will return to the problematic nuance of Kant’s view in detail in Chapter 6. Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 20. In a later essay ‘Intuition and Vividness’ collected together with ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, Gadamer argues that we miss the experience of art if we approach it from an opposition between the sensible and the intellectual. In a highly critical recovery of some of Kant’s work, Gadamer argues that we need to be ‘saved from the temptation of introducing … the concept of sensible intuition and thus the abstract

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14

15 16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23 24

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epistemological opposition of intuition and understanding’ and ‘to look instead at the productivity of imagination and its interplay with understanding’ (164). ‘Now surely the real intention of Kant’s grounding of aesthetics is to dissolve the subordination of art to conceptual knowledge without at the same time eliminating the significant relation of art to conceptual understanding.’ By the early years of the twenty-first century, Gadamer’s suggestion is borne out as theorists increasingly turn to Kant’s work on aesthetic ideas. For example, in a number of papers, Diarmuid Costello argues explicitly that the way to reclaim Kant’s work from the distorting lens of Clement Greenberg’s work is to pay attention to his proposal concerning aesthetic ideas. ‘Retrieving Kant’s Aesthetics for Art Theory after Greenberg: Some Remarks on Arthur C. Danto and Thierry de Duve’, in Re-Discovering Aesthetics, eds. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 117–132, and ‘Greenberg’s Kant, and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (Spring 2007): 217–228. Gadamer, ‘Intuition and Vividness’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, 165. All three notions figure in idealist aesthetics and hermeneutic thought, including Gadamer’s discussion in Truth and Method, but in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ he highlights Kant’s work for the most part, with some attention to work in the idealist and hermeneutic traditions. ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 23. Gadamer has an ontological understanding of play as pervasive, objective natural structure, of which human play is a distinctive type. I am streamlining the argument to focus just on the human case, without trying to support the broader ontological view. See pp. in ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 22–23, ‘The Play of Art’, 123–130 in the same volume, and see also Truth and Method. Gadamer’s reaction to Wittgenstein’s later work was sympathetic, especially to the idea of language games, as has been noted in the secondary literature. See Gadamer, ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’ note 13 Truth and Method, and ‘ The Phenomenological Movement’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976). Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 25. Ibid., 28. The notion of play also allows Gadamer to reconsider the idea in Kant’s ‘formalism’ with its apparent denigration of colour: ‘The interesting thing is what Kant is clearly aiming at. What is it that is distinctive about form? The answer is that we must trace it out as we see it because we must construct it actively – something required by every composition, etc. There is constant co-operative activity here.’ Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 29. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29.

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25 This also allows him to turn the usual understanding of disinterestedness of beauty around: precisely insofar as experience of beauty is a perceptual ‘taking true’ rather than merely sensory, the fact that experience of beauty draws our attention to the ‘autonomous significance of perceptual content’ does not degenerate into an aestheticism of ‘beauty for beauty’s sake’ or by extension of ‘art for art’s sake’. 26 Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 31. 27 ‘… the particular represents itself as a fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it. Or, indeed, the symbol is that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life.’ ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 32. 28 ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 35. In the next chapter, we will see Dave Hickey offer a specific art-historical explanation of the way the Catholic understanding of sacrament enters into explaining artworks. 29 The idea of transfiguration runs throughout Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Here is one indicative quotations: ‘learning it is a work of art means that it has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks, and that our aesthetic responses will be different. And this is not institutional, it is ontological. We are dealing with an altogether different order of things.’ (99) Here is a connection with sacraments from ‘The Artworld’: ‘Is this man [Warhol] a kind of Midas, turning whatever he touches into the gold of pure art? And the whole world consisting of latent artworks waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured, through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament?’ (580–581). (Thanks to Jonathan Gilmore for reminding me of this second quotation.) 30 For example, ‘[t]his is why I consider the debate about objective versus nonobjective painting to be nothing but a spurious and short-sighted dispute within the politics of art’. ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 36. 31 Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 32, 33, 37. 32 There is much consensus on this point, that Hegel’s view – that the sensuous embodiment of ideas ultimately makes art less adequate than discursive means such as philosophy – is mistaken or inadequately supported. For example, both of the commentators I highlight in this chapter because of their criticism of Gadamer’s historicism (see discussion below) endorse Hegel’s approach and criticize Hegel’s thesis about the sensuous inadequacy of art as insufficiently argued or mistaken. See Robert Pippin’s discussion in After the Beautiful, and Kristin Gjesdal’s discussion in Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. I have already noted that Stephen Houlgate offers a dissenting view, see Chapter 1 note # 29. 33 Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, 41. 34 See Gerard Bruns’ ‘The Hermeneutical Anarchist: Phroenesis, Rhetoric, and the Experience of Art’ for an especially illuminating account, in Gadamer’s Century,

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35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

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eds. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 45–76. See Bruns, ‘The Hermeneutical Anarchist: Phroenesis, Rhetoric, and the Experience of Art’ for discussion of these issues. Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism, 4. Ibid., 3–4. Robert Pippin, ‘Gadamer’s Hegel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The broader aim of Pippin’s paper is to convey the complexity of Gadamer’s relationship to Hegel’s work and to argue it shouldn’t really be Hegel that Gadamer has ‘in his sights’ as he ‘[gives] to hermeneutics the task of over-coming the primacy of selfconsciousness’, 80. Pippin, ‘Gadamer’s Hegel’, 91. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 97. Belting, ‘The End of the History of Art’, 20. Belting’s criticism targets the use – or perhaps degeneration – of hermeneutics as a method of scholarly enquiry rather than as an account of dynamically evolving historical understanding, as it seems to be in Gadamer’s texts: ‘[i]n its less felicitous art-historical applications it permits the interpreter, left to his own devices, to “reproduce” the work in the conjuring act of a guaranteed method’. ‘The End of the History of Art’, 20.

3

Beauty and Pliant Consciousness, Individuality, Visible Permission

Is it nostalgic to reconsider the role of beauty in human life and in art? beauty too often serves to placate an anxious public, operating in the service of the status quo. This is not to suggest that beauty cannot be invested with other purposes, or even that it is insufficient as a productive aesthetic term in its own right, but rather that its ubiquity at present can be explained, at least in part, by its unparalleled ability to mollify and appease, in short, to reconcile.1

More simply, the charge is that a rediscovery of aesthetics by art historians would be a nostalgic attempt to return to elements of a modernist or even premodernist aesthetic. A certain support for this reading could be found in the recent spate of work on beauty by Dave Hickey, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, and Alexander Nehamas2

Or again, at greater length, the revival of beauty typically wants to place the individual in an unmediated, untroubled and de-cluttered relationship to the beautiful object. Thus, the controversy over beauty reasserts the modern dilemma that pits the individual against society by assuming (or insisting on) the individual’s autonomy. It therefore fails to see how the forces of modern alienation have transformed beauty immanently. To imagine that we can make judgements without unintended consequences, or take pleasure without risking structural and ideological complicity and culpability, is to conjure up a hermeneutics without suspicion.3

For and against, we are in the midst of renewed interest in beauty and aesthetics more broadly. To the extent that accounts of beauty want to show that we have misunderstood earlier approaches in ways that contribute to beauty’s demotion, they are open to charges of looking to the past. But the objections just considered are more than structural. Each accusation voices a deeply felt

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reaction that in one way or another a revival of beauty expresses longings we would do better without – for a less politically fraught relationship to our surroundings, a less messy formalism, a more straightforward visual focus on pleasing sights. It is the specific detail in the various reaffirmations of beauty that shows whether charges of such hankerings are apt. All three of the theorists I have chosen to discuss have been thus indicted. Nehamas responds as follows: The return to the beautiful, as I understand it, is not a step back, but an acknowledgement that beauty and the aesthetic vocabulary more generally have always played, and continue to play, a central role both in life and in that part of it that is the history of art. It is not so much a call to adopt new (or old) values and vocabularies, but an effort to reveal the values and vocabularies we have been using and continue to use.4

I would like to add that the need to rethink beauty is posed by the world we live in today where stunningly beautiful works, such as Gerhardt Richter’s abstractions and figurative paintings or Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of environmental degradation, arrest us as facts of contemporary life. For some, the art battles of the 1960s and 1970s are living facts; for many they are increasingly part of history to learn about through competing narratives that are themselves part of ongoing dispute. One thing that shapes contemporary conscious experience is that beauty is not something we ever talked about in school. It is something that we experience in our daily lives if we are very fortunate. It is also, for example, the clear aim of advertising, whose omnipresent manipulations are far from a simple good in contemporary life. And just as one might begin to be self-conscious of a gap in what our culture presents as bona fide subjects for understanding, beauty is here again both in the most ‘serious’ art of our time and in theoretical discussions across disciplines. To find this urgent to think about is not a form of nostalgia. This chapter examines three contemporary proposals about beauty to bring out some of the principal dimensions of the ongoing discussion. The aim is twofold. First, I reconstruct each account to show how three themes are at work in these distinctive prominent proposals. All three theorists propose that we need to be able to understand that beauty is a value with no transcendent backing. Each tries to show that the beauty of an artwork is a matter of just the sort of meaningful complexity that contemporary viewers expect from art. In this respect, each account turns, I will argue, on the question of beauty’s perceptibility just as Gadamer’s work alerts us. Each account also addresses or counters the charge that beauty mollifies us into accepting the status quo. My second aim is to follow up on the question of art’s ending to see

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whether contemporary reaffirmations of beauty offer responses, even implicitly. I will argue that each reaffirms the ongoing role of beautiful art in human life, thereby rebutting any substantive sense of art’s exhaustion and marginalizing the import of a structural sense of art’s ending. While Scarry and Nehamas’ work holds implications for a sense of ending in art, Hickey offers an explicit detailed alternative to Danto’s structural account of ending in art. The next three chapters will take up the issues and pressure points identified here to re-think art and beauty. I leave the charge of nostalgia with the reader. But with all the theoretical resources in place, the final chapter on beauty will examine one strong version of that charge: the criticism that beauty evokes soothing or consoling feelings that shield us from the troubles of our world.

Elaine Scarry and the beauty of a pliant mind Elaine Scarry proposes that beauty has the potential to engender capacious consciousness through intelligible perceptual structures. The muted optimism of this suggestion meets with some strong opposition and some harsh, even hostile criticism. Yet several of her suggestions give voice to shared trends in the contemporary reaffirmation of beauty, while others provide opportunity for reflecting on the hostility with which they are met. Her account also implicitly connects beauty with issues about modernist self-reflexivity and the end of art that has not been noticed. Scarry’s central suggestion that beauty engenders capacious consciousness connects beauty with both truth and justice. This theme harks back to Plato’s and especially to Kant’s earlier views, which will become clearer in Chapter 6. The link that Scarry proposes is highly tenuous: expansive consciousness may move us to appreciate truths and to dislodge us from a self-centred stance in our relationships with others and in our appreciation of social structure. Her claim is about ‘invitation’ and ‘assistance’, opportunity and capacity: particular beauties provide opportunities where one may but need not develop capacities that are conducive to increased appreciation of truths and social justice. But Scarry is pummelled on both of these counts with the factual observation that many people demonstrate complete disregard for truth and justice in their actions while also seeming to show interest and perhaps even appreciation of beautiful art. Art-hoarding Nazis are but one exemplar, with all of history to the present moment brimming with such counter examples. Given that beauty is all around us, why are so few of us so little inclined to the careful pursuit of truth

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and justice? Moreover, she is charged with proposing that beauty necessarily leads to goodness and with overlooking the darkness of the human contexts in which beauty occurs.5 But Scarry tries to capture the factual situation with the suggestion that beauty is a call, which avoids any imputation that beauty necessarily has certain effects. Since a call may be important without being either necessary or sufficient to bring about its effect, the suggestion seems to have the right force. If I am struggling in the current and you call to me from the riverbank, you may play a key role in saving me, even though I might be saved in other ways – so your call is not necessary – and additional help may be required to bring me ashore – so your call is not sufficient. But such facts would not mitigate the importance of your call, especially if a handsome villain is beckoning me from the opposite shore. This is the nuance that Scarry wants us to recognize. Beauty may lead us towards education and greater regard for others even though it is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring this about. Is it not important to heed its call nonetheless?6 Beyond this overarching suggestion, Scarry offers a number of specific considerations about links between the experiences of beauty, education and social justice, whose detail lies beyond the scope of this chapter.7 I would like to highlight that her account exemplifies two main trends in the contemporary ethos about beauty. The antipathy her account elicits is also instructive, indicating the strength of the opposing commitments. First, her initial account of beauty’s attributes – the features that beautiful particulars share – is pitched at a very high level of abstraction so that they subsume the plurality of beauties across cultural eras and individuals. A particular experience of beauty feels unprecedented and lifesaving or rejuvenating; it brings a sense of the sacred, incites us to copy or to share it, and to search for comparisons with other beauties that had seemed unprecedented in their turn. This list does not restrict beauty’s variety to any looks, musical sounds, literary cadences, sculptural forms and so on. This is important because these features enfold the variety of beauty across diverse cultural eras and individuals. On the other hand, it is also not clear how helpful such attributes are precisely because of their high level of abstraction. Second, she offers an especially clear statement of the cultural ethos that beauty must be explainable without appeal to any transcendent metaphysics. Beauty’s metaphysical standing is one strand in the rejection of beauty and confronts any contemporary attempt to reaffirm its value: It sometimes seems that a special problem arises for beauty once the realm of the sacred is no longer believed in or aspired to. If a beautiful young girl

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(like Nausicaa), or a small bird, or a glass vase, or a poem, or tree has the metaphysical in behind it, that realm verifies the weight and attention we confer on the girl, bird, vase, poem, tree. But if the metaphysical realm has vanished, one may feel bereft not only because of the giant deficit left by that vacant realm but because the girl, the bird, the vase, the book now seem unable in their solitude to justify or account for the weight of their own beauty. If each call out for attention that has no destination beyond itself, each seems self-centered, too fragile to support the gravity of our immense regard.8

Scarry argues that this makes no difference because the effects of beauty may nevertheless be the same. ‘What happens when there is no immortal realm behind the beautiful person or thing is just what happens when there is an immortal realm behind beautiful person or thing.’9 For example, beauty’s role would be the same if she is correct that ‘the perceiver is led to a more capacious regard for the world’.10 The antipathy her proposal evokes is noteworthy, especially as it seems to come with uncharitable readings of her text in order to press objections. I have already considered the claim that Scarry proposes a necessary connection between beauty and good effects. She is also charged with overlooking the darker dimensions at play in her own examples and, more generally, of overlooking the darkness of contexts where beauty stands out. In contrast, I suggest that – in part – her account is interesting precisely in its use of highly ambivalent examples to highlight beauty’s subtle potential in complex sociopolitical circumstances: Odysseus’ first sighting of Nausicaa after nearly drowning, and the symmetrical structures evident in the drum beats of Athenian warships and in American parades. The charge that she is naïve about her own examples are telling but not credible given that they overlook (i) her explicit thesis that beautiful structures such as symmetries are most important in social contexts in which justice is missing; and (ii) her detailed example of Odysseus and Nausicaa. For example, J. M. Bernstein objects that Scarry ‘slides past the obvious’ and ‘deflects’ the issue of death – that ‘we are drowning all along’ is the context for understanding beauty.11 Here is the opening of Scarry’s extended discussion of Odysseus and Nausicaa, near the beginning of the book. Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered in brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonished him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any things so lovely.12

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Instead of sliding past the point that Odysseus’ response to Nausicaa has much to do with his emergence from a deadly sea, Scarry makes it – though she does not belabour it. I want to highlight one part of her explanation of what it is about beauty that engenders capacious consciousness. Scarry suggests that beautiful particulars have perceptible structures that ‘lift facts into intelligibility’. In addition to its highly abstract features – such as feeling life-affirming – beauty is distinguished by the embodied perceptible structures in beautiful objects. This general claim does not prioritize either natural or artistic beauty, but applies to the genus of the beautiful. The argument is implicitly developed rather than explicitly stated in the book, though she discusses it explicitly in lectures. For example, the structure of a chair makes visible ‘the adversity of our upright posture and the counterfactual wish that it be relieved’.13 This illustrates her distinctive claim that intelligible facts can be made visible through perceptible structures. This is true of ordinary objects, like ordinary chairs, but the ‘electric brightness’ of beautiful objects, such as Phillippe Starck’s transparent Louis Ghost chairs, can make the intelligible facts much clearer to us. We have seen that this thesis goes back to Plato, as Gadamer emphasizes. Yet the intelligible facts that a chair’s structure makes visible might seem a far cry from the value of equality, which exemplifies the complex sociopolitical issues at stake in the charge that beauty is a nostalgic return to less difficult issues and times. ‘How do we convey, through images, that all men are equal?’ Danto asks in a recent essay titled ‘Painting and Politics’, which connects the issues in the title – perhaps not surprisingly – with the end of art and beauty. As we considered, he suggests that the difficulty of giving ‘visual embodiment’ to such abstract ideas was one of the reasons why Hegel believed that art ends in the modern era, the era that has become concerned with ‘exalted political ideals’ such as the ‘inalienable rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness’.14 Danto reroutes Hegel’s reasoning towards the opposite conclusion: The truth is that philosophy has hardly evolved to the point that it alone can deal with all the political and moral ideas we have to deal with in modern art. Humankind is far behind the point that Hegel believed he had attained in his philosophy. … Indeed, we can see the history of art as having attained the level of pluralism that is needed to make vivid the thoughts about love, identity, fear, and hope that define modern life. We need from artists all the help we can get – of expressing, though performances and installations, the complex political ideas we need to master in order to navigate modern life.15

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But Danto’s discussion of artworks that ‘make vivid thoughts about love, identity, fear’ answers only indirectly, at best, the question about ‘conveying’ human equality ‘through images’ from which he sets out. The difficulty of meeting his challenge should at least give one pause in rejecting Scarry’s insistence that we need to come to terms with perceptible symmetry, her most criticized example of a visible structure that can lift facts into intelligibility. After all, what perceptible structure can lift the value of equality into intelligibility more clearly than a symmetrical one? There might be others, but to recognize them we need to countenance beauty’s visibility and the importance of symmetry as an example of perceptible structures that can lift complex facts and values into intelligibility. The issue is that while it is necessary to provide higher-order characterizations of beauty in order to countenance beauty’s plurality across time, across cultures and across individuals, we also need to recognize beauty’s perceptibility. The challenge needs to be met rather than denied. Scarry makes the challenge vivid by characterizing beauties at a high level of abstraction as unprecedented, sacred, life-saving, while also insisting that symmetry ‘… despite … variations in emphasis, never ceases to be, even in eras that strive to depart from it, the single most enduringly recognized attribute’.16 In lectures, Scarry responds to criticism by arguing that the resistance to her proposal testifies to the hegemony or ‘look ma no hands trick’17 at work in contemporary societies that depend on our acceptance of the status quo of gross inequality. Her response makes more explicit the point of her examples of American parades and Athenian triremes, which exemplify symmetrical structures in conflicted societies where military might and inequality coexist with struggling or fledgling democratic governance that strives for symmetrical structure among citizenry. Scarry also offers an extended discussion of a perceptible structure that answers Danto’s pointed question about visual means for addressing complex issues. Her answer does not turn to the pluralistic art of our era, but to one of the defining masters of modernism. She details the way in which Matisse’s paintings of life in Nice simultaneously make visible both complex intelligible structures and the correspondingly capacious consciousness that such experiences can engender. This is perhaps her most charged example. After all, the utterly ‘untroubled’ Nice paintings span the same decades as the two world wars, yet depict everyday life where peaceful interiors resplendent in colour open onto views of genteel promenades along the sea. It is possible to discount Matisse’s Nice paintings as failing to appreciate the issues

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that motivated his contemporaries’ rejection of beauty. From its startling opening sentence, Scarry’s discussion takes precise aim at the charge that art is lacking if it does not have a clear sociopolitical aim: ‘Matisse never hoped to save lives.’18 Her aim is to evoke in words the intelligible structures that Matisse makes perceptible. But her prose also allows Matisse to answer our questions about connections between the end of art and beauty. In extended passages that have been charged as no more than a puzzling detour, she considers the way in which the motif of a palm tree is ‘the precedent behind [the beauty of] each Nice painting’.19 Her analysis is twofold. First, she argues that Matisse’s use of the palm motif is a symbolic association for painting. She shows that palms might go unnoticed in the earlier Nice paintings, where they are small or only implicit in the striations that play throughout, but become a dominant motif across the decades, growing almost startling in size and colour. Beginning in the years immediately following the First World War, a few works take painting as their subject, picturing Matisse painting a model; but among these earlier works, only paintings that depict painting also show palm trees weaving light. Otherwise only their effects are present in a plenitude of striations across numerous works.20 (See Interior at Nice (Room at the Beau-Rivage), by Henri Matisse, 1917–1918, www.bloomsbury.com/sedivy-beauty-end-art) In later works, palms figure prominently, sometimes standing as the only or prime subject that takes up most of a canvas. Here is one description. Light trips rapidly across the surface of the room: in out in, out in out in, out off on off, on out off in, on off on off. It feathers across the eye, excites it, incites in it saccadic leaps and midair twirls … It is as though the painting were painted with the frond of a palm, or as though the frond were just laid down on the canvas, as though it swished across the canvas, leaving prints of itself here there here there here there.21

Such descriptions strive to render in words how the leaf-light of Matisse’s paintings engenders pliant and elastic perceptual consciousness. This is the second dimension in play. ‘Matisse believed he was painting the inner life of the mind; and it is this elasticity that we everywhere see in the leaf-light of his pictures, the pliancy and palmy reach of the capacious mind.’22 Pliancy and elasticity are perceptible – they can be lifted into visibility in perceptible structures – so that one’s perceptual experience is correspondingly pliant and elastic, and in this sense capacious. So beauty’s hallmarks are not only the abstract

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features listed earlier but also the features displayed by the perceptible structures in Matisse’s paintings: pliancy and elasticity. This supports Scarry’s suggestion that to the extent that beautiful visible structures ‘call’ to us, their answer would be a capacious regard for what we can see in perceptible structures. Both the call and its answer turn on the pliancy and elasticity, the complexity of perception, of what we may see. Her discussion also expresses Matisse’s response to the self-reflexive turn that demotes beauty as no part of the essence of art. Matisse is concerned with the nature of painting. And he simultaneously shows that this concern does not require forsaking beauty. Does Matisse make visible that modernist self-scrutiny may be of the beautiful? May itself be beautiful? Or does he demonstrate a stronger relationship – perhaps even identification – between painting’s self-scrutiny and beauty? Insofar as the Nice paintings identify painting with the pliancy and elasticity of beauty and of capacious consciousness, they show – at the very least – that there is nothing in the nature of painting, or in modernist self-reflexive examination of the nature of art, that requires displacing beauty. That is what the perceptible structures in these paintings lift into intelligibility. Accused of disregarding the issues informing much modernist art, the Nice paintings show the opposite. Insofar as these paintings work, they stand as a testament to an ongoing role and value of beautiful painting: helping us to develop a more capacious consciousness.

Alexander Nehamas and the beauty of individuality Alexander Nehamas argues for a dramatic rethinking of beautiful persons and art: we need to return to Plato’s originary suggestion that beauty is the object of love. The return aims to correct what Nehamas charges is the mistaken detour taken by Western aesthetics. Casting beauty as a matter of taste, of distinctively aesthetic judgements that seem to be neither objective nor mere statements of subjective preference, is ‘a detour leading into blind alleys’. Rather, Nehamas uses Plato’s insight to capture beauty in terms of what contemporary post-moderns celebrate: personal individuality. He proposes that our loves of beautiful people and artworks play a key part in developing our genuinely distinctive personalities. Simply, ‘what we find beautiful is essential to our being as individual as we can be’.23

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Though the book is rich with related themes about art and beauty, the proposal may be summarized in terms of three connected claims: (i) The features of a beautiful object are distinctive in a way that draws passionate or ‘erotic’, extensively interpretive, response from us. (ii) Because the extensive nature of our responses takes us beyond what we already know to learn and to enter into new relationships, it develops our distinctive personalities in ways that cannot be foreseen. (iii) Because the outcome of a quest to understand a particular beauty may develop one’s personality in unforeseeable ways – for worse as well as for better – beauty does not necessarily lead to goodness, though it may. In response to objections, Nehamas clarifies that while others ‘are concerned with what it is to be beautiful, I am interested in what it is to find something beautiful, in the phenomenology and not the ontology of beauty’. The relationship we need to attend to is that we love something because we find it beautiful and we find it beautiful because we love it.24 But the objects are not left out of the account. Nehamas strives to explain that ‘It is an object’s actual features that prompt us to find it beautiful; but they do so only because we love it’ and he zeroes in on the distinctiveness of the object’s features. Beauty … is a matter of distinction, of standing out among things of one’s kind, whether people or objects. It is always manifested in appearance – in look or action or what actions produce – and it requires discernible structure, a unity that gives its possessor its own character among the many things it is like, that invites love and demands interpretation in order to be seen exactly for what it is. Such an unmistakable arrangement is part of anything that is importantly new. It demonstrates that more is possible than had been imagined so far. It constitutes an individual.25

Like the style of a highly individual person, the style of an artwork puts things together in a new way that is coherent and cohesive. In drawing art and human personality together through the notion of style, Nehamas shows his deep bond with Danto’s work, which makes this connection in the concluding pages of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. ‘The structure of a style is like the structure of a personality.’26 But Nehamas takes a further step in aligning personal style with the beauty of an artwork. In doing so, Nehamas’ framework proposes a middle ground between ‘a dogmatism that detects a difference of quality in every divergence of taste’ and a ‘relativism that refuses to make any judgement at all’.27 The middle ground lies not between the subjective in the sense of that which eludes concepts and the

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objective as that which is conceptually communicable, but between the subjective as the isolated and the objective as the fully social. Judgements of beauty express, and are grounded by individual personality, which is neither isolated nor universal in the sense of fully social. Rather, individual personality is constitutively social in the sense that we become what we are by loving beauties that take us out of ourselves into myriad partial overlapping communities. This is the sense in which Nehamas denies that our judgements of beauty are ‘merely subjective’ as the contemporary mantra repeats, while allowing us to celebrate their individuality. If Nehamas’ approach works, the payoff would be genuinely significant. Nevertheless, Nehamas’ core commitment – that finding something beautiful or loving it draws us to want to understand it – has received strong criticism. Malcolm Budd, for example, denies Nehamas’ central thesis.28 Consider two statements from Nehamas that Budd highlights. [The] collective name, ‘Beauty’, names those attractions that exceed our ability to articulate them in terms that we already understand, and promise to reveal to us something never seen before. [E]verything we love is always a step beyond our understanding … when you have found everything a beautiful thing has to give you will have lost what made it beautiful, the promise of more, and with it the love that desired what was promised. … The art we love is art we don’t yet fully understand.29

Budd suggests that both claims are false. It is not the case that to love something is to try to understand its beauty and so understanding is ‘not integral’ to the specific desire for the beautiful; nor is it the case that to love and find something beautiful ceases with understanding. On the first point, here is Budd: ‘neither for persons nor works of art is there an essential link between the emotion and the desire: it is not integral to finding something beautiful that we want (or need) to understand what makes it beautiful’. To the second, Budd counters: ‘The truth is that a thing of beauty can be a joy for ever, even if its beauty is well understood.’30 The disagreement between Budd and Nehamas is instructive in part because Budd targets exactly the parts of Nehamas’ view that affirm strands in the contemporary ethos about beauty. One of the strengths of Nehamas’ approach is that it has the pulse of contemporary attitudes about beauty: (i) that beauty engages our understanding rather than simply being a matter of pleasure; (ii) yet that our response is pleasurable or passionate in some sense that needs to be worked out; (iii) and that there is something inexhaustible about beauty’s draw. But in doing so, his work shows that the ingredients it integrates lead to the strong and perhaps counterintuitive view that a feeling

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of understanding is incompatible with finding something beautiful. I suggest that this follows from casting the response to beauty as one of desire, a desire that is distinctively interpretive. Satisfaction brings a desire to an end. This is not news. Once I eat the ice cream, my desire for that particular cone is over, though I may begin to desire another one to be sure. If love of the beautiful is a type of desire – not for possession but for understanding (though one might also point out that understanding something might be considered a cognitive way of taking possession) – then once understanding is achieved, the desire is sated as it were. So if ‘what it is to find something beautiful’ is to desire it in a way that essentially implicates wanting to understand it, then it follows that finding something beautiful ceases with the satisfaction of that desire. Nehamas’ account accepts and insists on this set of entailments. I suggest that this problem indicates that while it is important to recognize that the experience of beauty is an intense pleasure, explaining that pleasure as one of desire has unacceptable consequences. To defend Nehamas’ view, we might turn to the more specific way he puts his point: that the phenomenology of beauty is a unique blend of erotics and hermeneutics. His insight is that one dimension of the experience without the other would not be love of beauty: erotics without hermeneutics is just erotic desire, and hermeneutics without erotics is just the pursuit of understanding. If either dimension of the response predominates, what is characteristic of the response to beauty goes missing. Though this way of putting it doesn’t alleviate Budd’s objections, it helps to bring out the complex interplay Nehamas strives to explain as distinctive of beauty. Nehamas is trying to work out the shared insight that there is something inexhaustible about the beautiful, about its draw on us and the love it evokes. We have seen that Gadamer highlights a similar insight in the Kantian view that beauty engenders a free play between the imagination and the understanding, whereby we ‘think much that cannot be said’ without being able to arrive at a concept that subsumes the beauty we are experiencing. But Nehamas wants to reject the Kantian tradition and turns to Plato, whose image of ascending a ladder characterizes the distinctive blend of erotics and hermeneutics in the love of beauty. The lover of a beautiful young boy is drawn into ever-deeper (and more general) appreciation of what it is that makes a human individual beautiful – such as knowledge and the role of law – until he appreciates ‘the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, he gives birth to make gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom’. According to Nehamas, Plato’s view connects his ‘idea that love is a desire for wisdom ... with what for him is a

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fundamental assumption, … that if we love or desire something for some reason, X, then that reason, X, is the primary object of our love or desire. So, at each step of the ascent, the lover “rises” to a love of whatever it is that explains the beauty of, and hence his love for, the object on the step below’.31 Nehamas argues that the complex interplay characteristic of the phenomenology of beauty also distinguishes the objects: a reaction that is simultaneously ‘erotic’ and ‘hermeneutic’ ‘disallows’ any easy division between the form and content of the work. Following through on Plato’s view that love of beauty draws us into pursuit of understanding, Nehamas details how the features of a beautiful work are manifest, requiring direct experience and interpretation, but not perceptual. Though he does not state this explicitly, the reason that they are not perceptual is that they require understanding of facts that may be extrinsic to the work. This is a subtle point implicit in his discussion, but his view turns on it. Consider his extended example of his love of Manet’s Olympia (spanning 15 pages),32 which draws him to try to understand the odd configuration of depicted people and objects, especially Olympia’s pose and gaze always looking just over the viewer’s shoulder (see Figure 3.1). In each case, a perceptible feature – the arrangement of the room and the figures, the ambiguous smile on the maid’s face, Olympia’s pose and gaze – stands out for Nehamas while eluding his understanding. But in each case he cannot venture towards understanding these features or the way they contribute to the whole without learning many extrinsic facts, each of which leads him into relationship with people, artworks or texts. He needs to learn about other nudes, indeed the history of nudes in Western painting and practices of rendering nudes in both painting and photography in Manet’s time. This allows for a comparative understanding of the painting’s compositional structures. Sociological facts about prostitution, as well as specific facts about Manet’s models, help him to understand the ambivalent relationship between Olympia and her maid. In each case, Nehamas is able to make his own discoveries about the painting. Until finally, he is in a position to realize that the strange arrangement of figures, and Olympia’s elusive gaze just past one’s own eyes, is due to the fact that Manet is taking over and representing the structure of photographic ‘calling cards’ wherein the models would have looked past the lens of a veiled nineteenth-century camera at the photographer standing behind. Nehamas’ original insight is that taking the Olympia not merely to look like a photograph but actually to represent one, … does not go far enough, for Manet has painted not just Olympia’s photograph, but Olympia herself being photographed – he painted Olympia as

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Beauty and the End of Art she might have looked to – and at – a photographer taking her picture. That explains immediately why the Olympia … failed, and continues to fail, to make narrative sense – that is to say, it fails to make narrative sense as a painting. … no [narrative] questions can even be raised as soon as we imagine that the scene we are witnessing is of two women posing for a photograph …33

Figure 3.1 Olympia, by Edouard Manet, 1863. Reprinted by permission from Art Resource, NY.

If I don’t already know the relevant facts about nineteenth-century Parisian prostitution, then I cannot see where Olympia is gazing and why. In contrast, even if I don’t have any extrinsic knowledge about Matisse or palms, I may see – either immediately or with elongated or repeated exposure – how the striations that pervade his paintings relate to the broad stripes that characterize palm trees and their effect on light, so that I see the same intelligible fact in these perceptible structures as Scarry: that there is a pliancy and elasticity in the palmfiltered play of light that fills these paintings. Both accounts press on the fact that beauty evokes a response that lies in both domains – of the perceptible and the intelligible – involving direct acquaintance with the object’s distinctive perceptible features for which understanding is necessary. The counterpoint is that Nehamas’ interpretive response reaches out to extrinsic facts, whereas the perceptible structures that Scarry details can lift facts into intelligibility without appeal to extrinsic facts.

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Together, Nehamas’ and Scarry’s discussions confront readers with two competing alternatives: the perceptual nature of Matisse’s Nice paintings and the interpretive nature of Manet’s Olympia. This opposition is trenchant because of the role of both painters in the way art history has come to be told. Manet is cast in many accounts as the first modernist painter precisely because his paintings challenge our perception, failing to resolve in ways that we expect and requiring us to think about why he would paint in ways that fail our perceptual expectations. Matisse challenges us precisely because so many of his explicitly modernist paintings are unabashedly beautiful, rejoicing in the perceptible colours and shapes the world offers. This shows, I suggest, that the role of understanding needs to be handled with care. Nehamas’ discussion of Olympia makes the following important point. The distinction between merely describing what a work of art is and interpreting what it means … can’t be systematically maintained. Its role is practical. And, in practice, a description of a work is made up of interpretations that are not, at the moment, in question … An interpretation is what accounts for a feature being as it is (as it is agreed to be on particular occasion) and, once accepted, becomes more surface for which a further account is needed.34

Nevertheless, I suggest that Nehamas’ emphasis on interpretation that needs to reach out to extrinsic facts is distorting. It includes too much by rendering our response too cognitive. Even though Nehamas details how interpretation always begins from perceptible features and does not leave those features behind so long as beauty continues to elude us, the response is weighted more towards understanding and cognition – as the emphasis on extrinsic facts shows. Again and again, one returns to the question whether beauty’s draw requires interpretation that takes one beyond one’s resources (at any given time), as Nehamas sketches in his pursuit of Olympia. Other examples bring the problem out even more. Consider Goya’s etching ‘He Broke the Pot’ from his Los Caprichos series. Nehamas writes that it shows a ‘feral pleasure’ in the beating of a child, a pleasure that comes from the poverty and ignorance that can make us bestial in a disturbing sense unique to us. He finds the work beautiful. I cannot. Is this a fact about our individual personalities or about the problematic breadth of the interpretive emphasis of Nehamas’ approach that necessarily pulls beyond what one is able to see at any point in time? A different line of criticism would point out that even though Nehamas shows how the individualizing pull of our loves of particular beauties is also a draw into a world of relationships with other people and works, his

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approach celebrates individuality too much. Recall one of the accusations from which this chapter set out: the controversy over beauty reasserts the modern dilemma that puts the individual against society by assuming (or insisting on) the individual’s autonomy. It therefore fails to see how the forces of modern alienation have transformed beauty immanently. To imagine that we can make judgements without unintended consequences, or take pleasure without risking structural and ideological complicity and culpability, is to conjure up a hermeneutics without suspicion.35

Nehamas argues pointedly against politically motivated approaches to beauty: an explanation fails to capture beauty’s distinctive value insofar as it renders beauty subservient to or instrumental for moral or political concerns. If he is right – and I think he is – his point does not protect his account from the objection that it fails to address the problem of individual complicity in larger societal forces. But the extensive hermeneutic engagement that Nehamas details is intended to encompass the sort of understanding that a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ strives for, without making that its intended goal and warrant. His aim is to characterize genuine personality – which we may surmise would include some reflective grasp of the larger structures in which one might be complicit. For better or worse, Nehamas’ emphasis on individuality and interpretation offers an implicit outlook on the end of art in both substantive and structural senses. Insofar as beautiful art draws us into the world in the effort to understand the distinctiveness of what we find beautiful, this would not cease to be an important part of human life. And even if Danto is correct that art’s trajectory has ended in pluralistic freedom, Nehamas’ approach suggests that experiencing art as part of a progressive art history is not very important. Nehamas explicitly agrees with Danto that beauty or aesthetics is not part of the definition of art – neither of what art is nor of what makes art good.36 But insofar as beauty and the love it inspires continue to drive our intense and formative relationships with artworks, such relationships are an ongoing dimension of human life, untouched by the trajectory of art history. Beautiful artworks of any kind, from any historical era, provide the many particulars from which each of us might make highly personal aesthetic choices that potentially combine the pre-modern, modern and the apparently post-historical. My path might include and keep returning to Raphael, Turner, Matisse and Richter. Your path might spiral around Caravaggio, Goya, Picasso and Warhol. If this is the way art figures in individual human lives, it is one way that art hangs together. But then how significant can a rupture

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be between pre-modern, modern and apparently post-historical art? If our formative engagements with art are a multiplicity of individual relationships to what each loves and so finds ‘non-fungible’, the key driver in those relationships is beauty, not the trajectory or vicissitudes of art’s history.

Dave Hickey and beauty as visible permission Hickey challenges us to think about the visual pleasure of beautiful art in terms of trust and permission. This offers another sea change for understanding beauty. Hickey’s contribution as an art critic is increasingly considered in relation to his criticisms of the large-scale institutionalization of art, but the attack is an integral part of his re-affirmation of beauty in art. Both stand out in their completely specific historical focus – restricted to the beaux-arts tradition and its undoing – to offer a unified alternative to both substantive and structural sense of the ending of art, and to rebut the charge that beauty reconciles us to the status quo.37 Focusing on ‘what beauty does not … what it is’, Hickey argues that it gives jolts of visual delight that – due to a specific historical development – evoke trust that permits us to consider the difficult and the distressing so that we can discuss and discover what we value. Beauty’s ‘rhetorical power is second to none’ precisely in that it does not ‘mollify and appease’ as some contemporary charges insist, but enables us to confront what we find distressing or horrifying or just plain out of bounds. I will examine Hickey’s detailed art-historical explanation that this ‘civilized sedition’ is a by-product that can be traced to the fact that artworks retain their origins as embodied ‘visible grace’ in Renaissance art, origins that may have been deeply religious, yet whose substance continues in secular experience no less than in its religious counterparts. His point is twofold: perspectival illusionist art enables an ‘unmediated’ relationship with a work and the beauty of oil glazing offers an object that is in a visible state of grace or forgiving permission, so that we are enfranchised by such objects into freely evaluative, personal perceptual experience. In this tradition, beautiful artworks become embodiments wherein we externalize, recognize and negotiate not simply what we desire but what we ‘desire and esteem’, as he puts it, which is to say what we desire and value. Hickey’s account clearly refocuses the conversation to beauty as a value rather than a property, and more precisely, a meta-value with no transcendent backing, a value that permits us to see what we value more specifically. This, I will argue, is its most important contribution.

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Recall that Belting and Danto’s shared concern is with art-historical concepts or narrative templates that determine ‘how we view anything if we view it as art’. Hickey’s specific historical explanation is that because the origin of this way of looking centred on the luminous beauty of Renaissance paintings it persists in what has come to be the way we view art, as well as more broadly in the personally evaluative nature of perceptual experience and our perceptual expectations. In other words, art practices evolve ways of looking at beautiful art, so that perception, art and beautiful particulars are all historically evolved in ways that we need to recognize. The two main steps in Hickey’s proposal concern two contingent historical developments: competitive rendering of pre-specified religious contents and oil glazing. The first historical happenstance is that the Catholic Church ‘outsourced’ its decoration while continuing to control the range of permissible contents. The resulting competition yields stylistic proliferation, ‘the Renaissance orgy of formal diversification, visual refinement, and technical invention’.38 Hickey’s point is twofold: the development of perspective makes content readily available to any beholder; while sameness of content leads to evaluation on grounds of how the content is made visible. As he writes, it isn’t just that ‘Connoisseur churchmen’ who were not ‘going to artists to “get the word” [but] to get the Word made flesh’ chose between artworks of the same limited range of contents – different renderings of the Annunciation, for example – on the basis of how they looked and how well they made the Word flesh. Assessing the relative value of ‘like to like’ involves perception that is evaluative and comparative. It was the beauty of Renaissance paintings, together with the fact that they were competitive renderings of same contents, that brings out the evaluative potential of perception. This is the second factor. Because some paintings were so ‘viscerally persuasive, visually dazzling’, Hickey argues, they evoked ‘limit experiences’ of ‘private desire and personal enthusiasm’ that permitted personal evaluation of the way artworks visibly embodied their contents. This dimension of ‘permission’ is due to the fact that Renaissance paintings innovated the technique of oil glazing for making sanctity visible: ‘applying transparent layers of pigment suspended in oil one over the other created the ravishing surfaces whose luminosity became the trademark of this painting’. since the glazed surfaces of this new painting allowed ambient illumination to pass through levels of transparent color and bounce back so the paint appeared to hold the light and glow, this seductive simultaneity of light and gross material was taken as a metaphor for Christ’s simultaneous mortality and sanctity as the eternal work of God made living flesh. In everyday practices,

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however, oil glazing was never actually restricted to painting the body of Christ. The physical, theological metaphor of luminosity was immediately extended and transformed into a metaphor for the presence of grace – for the visible investment of a body with some aspect of sanctity. This justified the use of oil glazing to portray kings, patrons, princes, saints, and bystanders. In very short order, entire paintings were bathed in atmospheric sourceless radiance – directionless and therefore timeless.39

The matter is more complicated because luminosity can neither be a metaphor for timeless grace – since ‘the presence of grace in Renaissance theology is presumed to be visible in fact’ – nor can it render incarnate Christ’s eternal spiritual presence – since this would be ‘playing fast and loose with the Second Commandment’. What, then, is a mimetic image of Christ, that, thanks to oil glazing, seems an uncanny incarnation of Christ? … If it is only a representation of the historical Jesus, it stands in for Christ and signifies his absence. Yet Christ, conceived in grace, is never absent, and any presumption that a man-made picture might embody Christ plays fast and loose with the Second Commandment. So the Roman church proclaimed such works to be images of the once and future Christ, whose life on earth was historical and will be again, whose spiritual presence is eternal and signified by incarnate luminosity.40

Understanding the exact significance of oil glazing is important because it offers historically specific analysis of the technical achievement from which derives the much discussed presence or embodiment of meaning in the artworks of the beauxarts tradition, as Danto and Gadamer among many theorists strive to explain. But it is even more important that grace is not only visible sanctity. In this religious tradition the concept of grace is specifically that of forgiving, unconditional permission that is visible. So it is visible forgiving permission – that is at once historical and eternal – that the technique of oil glazing allows paintings to ‘embody’, starting with ‘[t]he Renaissance invitation to step out of the real, through the picture plane into the possibility of ideal mercy’.41 Compare Danto on the grace evident in the beautiful light of old beaux-arts works: ... the old masters ... have a light in addition to whatever light they show. ... My personal criterion of great painting has in part to do with this mystery of light, but I wonder how many of the great paintings of the world would be seen that way, in possession of this curious grace, if they were perceived solely as we might perceive their material counterparts; would their material counterparts have light, granted that they might not show any?42

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Both ingredients – perspectival illusionist entry to complex contents and beautiful permissive embodiment – are needed for Hickey’s claim that the evolving beaux-arts tradition enfranchises ‘a categorical way of looking at art’ and by extension other beautiful particulars that is personally evaluative. The ‘evolving core’ of the beaux-arts tradition involves a legacy of complex perceptual expectations – we expect beautiful art objects specifically and beautiful particulars more generally to offer sites where we can discover and discuss what we value. Hickey analyses a range of works in these terms – for example, Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1603), which shows Christ guiding the doubtful Thomas’ finger into his pierced side; and Mapplethorpe’s Helmut and Brooks, N.Y.C., 1978 from the X Portfolio, which captures a particular moment of a sexual act of fisting (see Figure 3.2). Each work argues a pressing problem of its own time – over religious tenets and transgressive sexuality – that raises issues of doubt and trust, submission and control that Hickey argues also lie in the permission of beautiful art. It is the beauty of each work that evokes a ‘vertiginous bond of trust and submission’ so that each – in its own time – takes us to limits of what we can encounter.

Figure 3.2 The Incredulity of St. Thomas, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1603. Reprinted by permission from Art Resource, NY.

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For just as Christ trusts Saint Thomas and suffers himself to be intimately touched, we trust the image and suffer ourselves to be intimately touched – taking beauty as the signature of the image’s grace and beneficence. And just as Christ, by his submission, ennobles his disciple and controls him, so we ennoble the image and control it in our submission. In doing so, we demonstrate that, even though we may be, in all respects, nothing like the Son, we may still, like him, give ourselves up, trust ourselves to be humbled – by God, by art, by others – and, full of guilt, contract the conditions of our own submission. In that submission, we, like him, may redeem our guilt and dominate, triumph before the arrested image of our desire, in an exquisite, suspended moment of pleasure and control.43

Just as ‘masochism focuses on the deferred sublimity and the vertiginous rhetoric of trust,’ [t]he analogy … here is blatant. The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of beholders who, like Masoch’s victim, contract their own submission – having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image. The signature of this contract, of course, is beauty. On the one hand, its rhetoric enfranchises the beholder; on the other hand, it seductively proposes a content that is, hopefully, outrageous and possible. In any case, this vertiginous bond of trust between the image and the beholder is private, voluntary, and a little scary. And, since the experience is not presumed to be an end in itself, it might, ultimately, have some consequence beyond the encounter.44

Hickey’s examples contest the comfortable conceit that our current sociopolitical issues are of a newly increased order of complexity that defies beautiful embodiment and requires new media. Rather, it is precisely because the response is ‘unmediated’ that beautiful illusionist paintings or photographs have ‘a rhetorical power second to none’. We find old beautiful paintings undemanding and pleasing – ‘easy’ to view – because their contents have been worked through or are at least familiar, and their issues are no longer ours, but not because the ideas were any less difficult at their own time. And it is by submitting to problematic content that we can ‘dominate’ it, evaluating it for ourselves. One might question Hickey’s central claim that the complex content carried by oil glazing persists in the ‘categorical way of looking at art’. Hickey clarifies in terms of the semiotic distinction between designative and embodied meaning. Like Nehamas, he aims to replace a distinction between form and content. The semiotic distinction is important because both dimensions are referential. Insofar as a picture refers to something that is unlike itself – such as

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a table – it has a designative meaning (just as the referents of words, which are unlike words, are their designative meanings). But ‘since all signs that we call signs are also things in the world’, ‘they reference things that are like themselves – as a word, or color, or a musical note is known with reference to other words, colors, or musical notes’.45 This contends that so-called formal elements, such as colours, textures or luminosity, are no less referential than is the so-called content of a work. What distinguishes these two dimensions in a work is their domains of reference rather than an absence of reference. Insofar as referential relationships obtain between uses of properties that works share – such as colours or surface luminosity – they provide complex historical networks of perceptible relationships. Such referential relationships affect us and enter into the complex multidimensional content of a work. To illustrate the distinction, Hickey suggests that we can notionally pull apart the way that designative and embodied meanings combine in experience by posing these two sorts of questions about any artwork we see: ‘Do we learn about the king compared to other kings through the agency of his portrait, or do we learn about the painting compared to other paintings through the agency of the king’s likeness? Do we learn about the table compared to other tables through Picasso’s portrayal of it, or do we learn about Picasso’s painting compared to other paintings through the agency of the table he portrays?’46 Because perceiving the colours or surface luminosity of a work involves historically evolving networks of referential relationships, the content of a work is a complex function or ‘weighting’ of both domains of reference and their interaction. That is why the surface textures and luminosity of paintings and photographs stand in ongoing relationships to the use of oil glazing in Renaissance art.47 Hickey also uses the semiotic distinction to argue that because ‘embodied relationships … are perceptible without designative reference’ ‘like-to-like embodied meanings always have cognitive priority’.48 If he is right, embodied relationships can engender pleasure that has been historically invested with a freedom of evaluative response. This allows us to attend to the work’s designative meaning and to make of it what we will. In Hickey’s terms, this is ‘the revolutionary efficacy of the pleasant surprise’.49 We might say it is beauty’s meta-value. Hickey’s account explicitly reverses the charge that beauty consoles us into accepting the status quo: beauty engenders trust that allows personal, individual, free assessment and appropriation of a work. Beautiful artworks permit us ‘to willfully misappropriate the elegant lies of ambitious power’. For five hundred years this privilege of misinterpretation had been society’s hedge against rhetoric, its mode of subverting the blandishments of governmental,

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corporate, academic, and clerical authority. … it may seem a small thing but the privilege of standing with one’s companions before some juggernaut of illintentioned bombast selling the pleasures of war, penury, or tribal seclusion – of being able to stand there smiling happily in its presence and say, ‘Well, isn’t that pretty!’ is no small thing. It is the essence of liberty and sophistication, the emblem of civilized sedition.50

Just as the two factors Hickey highlights offer to explain what is distinctive about the beaux-arts tradition, they identify what would be its undoing. What would dismantle this particular tradition of rhetorical images is a twofold suppression of each of the facets that this tradition brought together, readily accessible designative (illusionist) meaning and evaluative looking for beautiful embodied meaning, or more specifically: (i) illusionist designative meanings that are especially efficacious because they do not require intermediaries for their grasp, and (ii) embodied meanings that jolt us with visual pleasure into domains of referential relationships that extend all the way back to Renaissance depictions of visible grace. Indeed, Hickey’s work offers two such accounts. First, modernist art suppresses the tradition of complex yet immediately perceptible designative meaning. Hickey highlights Cezanne’s paintings to underscore the same features as other theorists, such as Clement Greenberg, T. J. Clark, Michael Fried and Arthur Danto: ‘the declaration of the paint, the plastic language of the mark, the taut picture plane, the objecthood of the image, the inference of primary structures made manifest by the substitution of haptic information for pictorial date, the vertiginous tension between the depth implied by the image and the lateral dance of flat chromatics across the surface of the paint, and all the rest of it’.51 But rather than defining art, or purifying and entrenching its limiting conditions, or some other significant task, modern artists teach us, ‘a justifiably ignorant public’, about the ‘specialized business of making pictures with paint … so … that the pleasures of art depend upon our appreciation of its most paralyzingly obvious attributes and limitations’. Hickey’s lampoons challenge theorists such as Greenberg and Danto that a tradition of readily accessible illusionist content was forsaken for good or important reasons. ‘It’s rectangle! Wow! But it doesn’t have to be a rectangle! Yikes!’52 Second, during the 1970s, a variety of criteria of evaluation – in the broader context of increasing large-scale institutionalization of art, including the increase in higher art education and government funding – are introduced in place of choosing artworks on the grounds of their beauty or the pleasure of their embodied referential relationships. One illustrative case is the institutional rise of identity art, which Hickey traces in part – as a former judge

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for the National Endowment for the Arts – to an anomaly in the criteria for funding that supplied no information about artists but required support for art of minorities and women. What could judges do to award grants but to look to contents for clues of the artist’s identity? The criteria in effect neutralized evaluation and support based on comparative looking ‘like-to-like’ in favour of how an artwork conveys one’s identity and perhaps the ‘trauma of one’s alterity’. Moreover, large-scale institutionalization comes with increasing emphasis on interpretation that privileges – and tells us – what artworks have to say, striving to ‘anesthetize’ our responsiveness to embodied meanings with their webs of historically intertwined, enfranchising referential relationships. There is no mistaking this as a picture of an ending. It is Hickey’s alternative to both a substantive sense of ending and Danto’s account of a structural end of art. First, Hickey’s specific historicist focus details the dismantling of one tradition rather than the subject of a master narrative such as Western art. Second, the historical focus identifies contingent factors – having to do with art practices in their broader historical contexts – that yield no whiff of an internal logic that would lock us into unalterable structure. Third, his specific historical analysis suggests that the role of beautiful illusionist art in the beaux-arts tradition is not mimesis or ‘imitation’ but civilized sedition. This role evolves from developments in fifteenth-century religious life – the role of oil glazing in making sanctity visible – and continues to be critical for contemporary secular life. Fourth, pluralism figures differently in the account. Hickey’s narrative takes us to the end of the twentieth century rather than finding its conclusion in the 1960s with the end of modernism. For Danto, the pluralism getting underway in the 1970s is the aftermath of the end of art – pluralism is the result of art’s narrative trajectory having ended with the problem of indiscernibles. As we examined, his argument is that the effect of posing this problem is irreversible because once it is shown that what makes art is ‘nothing the eye can decry’, artists can only continue in a pluralistic freedom that is the absence of any mandate from within that art should be or look one way rather than another at a certain point in time. But Hickey’s narrative separates art’s modernist ‘educative’ mission from the subsequent condition of pluralism as the result of a change in institutional practices of evaluation – these are distinct dimensions in the dismantling of the two parts of the beaux-arts tradition. Each is reversible because, first, the modernist educative mission does not teach us anything genuinely important that might foreclose an ongoing practice of artworks with readily accessible designative meaning. (The argument is not that all art should offer perspectival illusionist images but only that some continue to do so.) Second, pluralism as institutional

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abandonment of ‘standards of exclusion’ on the ground of how artworks ‘look’ is not the consequence of the educative mission, and holds open the possibility of further institutional change. These two phases integrate both senses of loss – of art and of beauty, of a balancing of designative and embodied domains of reference – as two principal dimensions in forsaking a single tradition. This counters a substantive view of art’s ending because the role of beautiful art in enfranchising us to see and discuss what we value continues to be important for contemporary life. Hickey’s approach also counters the structural sense of ending by giving an alternative account of late twentieth-century pluralism that emphasizes institutional factors under our control. But Hickey’s historical interpretation might be challenged. The principal line of objection would contest that he has not taken sufficiently dark account of the broader socioeconomic structures that have undercut the ‘civilized sedition’ that beautiful art may provide. Hickey is aware of the problem and argues that mercantile or commercial democracy – democracy that allows small markets to proliferate – can allow for the independent evaluation that beauty enfranchises. He argues that buying and selling is one key way in which we evaluate by taking a stake and making a difference, as the owners of small stores and their customers exemplify. Hickey points to jazz in the 1950s and 1960s as the right scale at which art can be a marketplace of ideas and beauty a meta-value in that market. This argues for practices of visual art that turn on the small markets provided by gallery owners rather than ever-increasing art schools that produce ever larger numbers of artists implicitly expecting to participate in a profession supported by institutional structures. This is Hickey’s counter to charges that he simply overlooks the systemic harm perpetrated by capitalism. But emphasis on the practices of mercantile democracy opens him to the problem that the contingent societal changes that disrupt the beaux-arts tradition may no longer be reversed to the requisite scale for which he argues. In other words, though we are not locked into the internal logic that Danto’s essentialism claims to demonstrate, Hickey’s historicism charts contingent developments that it may as a matter of fact not be possible to alter. Yet the difference is important since insofar as we are not locked into a structural ending as Danto explains, we can try to change our course – or further factors not specifically under ‘anyone’s’ control may in fact change our course.53 Just as the civilized sedition Hickey celebrates is an unintended and unforeseen by-product of Renaissance art practices, further changes may have unforeseen consequences that might favour beauty and ‘comparative looking like to like’. In fact, in the 2009 revision of ‘Buying the World’ Hickey makes the surprising suggestion that at least part of the dismantling of the beaux-arts tradition is

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over – we have started talking about beauty again. ‘Then around 1993, the anesthesiologist’s discourse just goes poof. It evanesces … Everybody is going to the art fair! And we are right back where we started, in Florence talking prices on the balcony in the sunshine.’54 Hickey’s account might also be charged with not developing the view of value that it implicates. Recall Scarry’s recognition that reaffirmations of beauty need to address the contemporary sense that there is no transcendent backing for beauty. My reconstruction brings out Hickey’s added insight that what is at issue is value – the possibility of value in the absence of transcendent backing. I have suggested that his account explains beauty as a higher-order value that enfranchises us to recognize our specific values. Understandably, Hickey does not provide a philosophical defence or development of the objectivity of value. Rather, his account points in two directions: beauty’s perceptibility and the socially mediated emergence of value. First, as we have considered, he challenges us by appealing to the structure of grace to suggest that beauty’s meta-value depends on perceptual experience: the very idea of grace is of ‘sanctity-visibly-confirmed’. Grace is, very simply, visible. His account of the Renaissance practice of oil glazing offers historical support. Second, his account illustrates how the normative force of beauty in the beaux-arts tradition emerges in historically contingent social practices – beauty’s value, like that of grace, is confirmed by our seeing it, which happens through historically contingent social practices. To avoid using the notion of objectivity, Hickey suggests that in the present moment a historical item such as an artwork can embody ahistorical authority. Authority or normative force is ahistorical in this sense in that it is not determined or constituted by historical agreement. Hickey argues by pointing out that the partial extent of the constituencies that form around any beauty is not a defect but lies in the nature of value, since value emerges through pockets of mutual recognition and negotiation among us. To illustrate, he highlights the first seven words opening the American Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident.’ These words offer no apology, but affirm that there is no other source for the declared rights and values aside from the recognition and agreement of the thirteen colonies. This is not to say that there is no more to value than mutual agreement, but that there is no other source for value coming into view than our mutual recognition and this begins with partial constituencies. There is no source of authority for beauty’s value other than our ability to recognize value. Beyond this example, Hickey does not offer a detailed analysis of the nature of value or its emergence in human activities. If readers feel the need for more philosophical defence of beauty as perceptible

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value, his discussion of the opening words of the American Constitution points to the kind of understanding that is needed: one that would explain the way in which values become available and compelling in social practices without downgrading our sense that it is genuine values whose authority is objective or ‘ahistorical’ in Hickey’s sense that come – and can only come – into view through contingent and partial practices and ‘negotiations’. In these respects, Hickey’s work points us in the right directions, I believe, while leaving us with further work to do.

Conclusion Scarry and Nehamas elaborate themes that trace back to Plato and Kant in contemporary terms. Their accounts divide over what to keep and what to jettison from this inheritance. Scarry’s reaffirmation of beauty is almost startling in its aim to reconnect beauty even tenuously with both truth and goodness, choosing to close the twentieth century by reviving Plato’s opening gambit for theorizing about beauty in the West. She also follows through on Plato’s insight that what distinguishes beauty from the other principal values, truth and goodness is its immediate visibility. Her central proposal that beauty engenders capacious consciousness insists on the absence of transcendental metaphysical backing. Nehamas emphasizes Plato’s core idea that manifest beauty is the object of love, which leads quite swiftly to an emphasis on interpretation rather than perception, to what the mind and not simply the eye can find. Nehamas’ leading idea is to take the modern view that beauty is a matter of individuality in an impoverished sense – a matter of subjective taste or preference that no amount of Kantian argumentation can finesse – and transform it into a matter of human individuality in the sense that contemporary post-moderns in the West celebrate: the development of genuine personal individuality. Despite their differences, both accounts offer vivid reaffirmation of the ongoing role of beautiful art in human life that rebuts any substantive sense of art’s exhaustion – if that art is beautiful – and that marginalizes the importance of a structural sense of ending. In this respect, both proposals engage at least implicitly in the conversation Gadamer opened. Hickey proceeds from a tight art-historical focus. Like Nehamas, he strives to change the terms of debate. As a result of contingent art-historical developments stemming from the Italian Renaissance, beauty is a form of visible permission that enfranchises a ‘responsive, personal, evaluative way of looking’.55 This

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explains beauty’s role in human life and art as a meta-value with no transcendent backing: beauty makes it possible for us to consider subject matters – including those at the limit of what we can face – so that we can discuss and ‘negotiate’ what we value. Hickey also presents an art-historical explanation of the contingent factors that undermine the ‘civilized sedition’ that the beaux-arts tradition affords. This provides a point-by-point alternative to Danto’s meta-narrative of the structural end of Western art. These are just some of the themes and variations that inform the ongoing conversation about beauty. They show how the discussion is giving voice to a nascent ethos about beauty that involves rethinking value and objectivity. What seems to be emerging is a sense that beauty might be a value that we have mistakenly set aside, a value that we might reaffirm for art. This involves rethinking art as well.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

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Suzanne Perling Hudson, ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’, October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), 115–130; also reprinted in Beauty, ed. Dave Beech, 51. James Elkins, ‘The Art Seminar’ round-table discussion, in Art History versus Aesthetics, 83–84. Dave Beech, ‘Introduction’, in Beauty, ed. Dave Beech, 17. Alexander Nehamas, ‘Beauty Links Art History and Aesthetics’, in ‘Assessments’, in Art History versus Aesthetics, 154. The objection that Scarry proposes a necessary connection between beauty and goodness is pressed by Alexander Nehamas in his review article of both Scarry’s and Hickey’s works on beauty, ‘The Return of the Beautiful: Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (2000): 394–403. J. M. Bernstein makes the second objection – that Scarry overlooks the darkness of the contexts in which beauty stands out, which I will consider further, in ‘In Praise of Pure Violence (Matisse’s War)’, in The Life and Death of Images, eds. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 38–39. My elaboration of Scarry’s view that beauty is a ‘call’ counters Nehamas’ charge that she suggests a necessary link between beauty and goodness, and Dennis Dutton’s charge that she is unclear. See Dennis Dutton, ‘Mad about Flowers: Elaine Scarry on Beauty’, Philosophy and Literature, 24 (2000): 249–260. For example, I think that her argument from error is ingenious and does not fall prey to Dutton’s charges. She asks readers to consider their own experiences of

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beauty to see whether they ever have the conviction that they were wrong. Insofar as readers agree, they show that they are committed to the possibility that one may be correct in judgements of beauty as well – since ‘error’ is a contrast term that comes with its opposite, correctness. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 47. Ibid., 47–48. Ibid., 48. ‘In Praise of Pure Violence (Matisse’s War)’, in The Life and Death of Images, eds. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, 38–39. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 21. Scarry’s presentation at The Future of Beauty, University of Toronto, May 3–4, 2007. Danto, ‘Painting and Politics’, 352. Ibid., 353. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 96. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 33. Ibid., 33. ‘The palm in the window is still only a small fraction of the surface, one thirty-fi fth, but unlike many other Nice paintings, it is here stark, self-announcing. The palm now has emphatic fronds. It is brown, like the painter’s brush, which has only a shaft and no brush, and so seems supplied by the tree, as though the palm were a continuation of the tool he holds … the palm seems not just the model, the things that inspires him or the things he aspires to copy, but much more material in its presence. It is what he reaches out for, closes his hand around, and presses down on the surface of the canvas he is lashing with light. It is the graphic literalization of “brush,” “to brush,” a brush with beauty. Because the palmy stripings incite the silver cross-jumps of light over our face and eyes, it is as though the painting in turn paints us, painting braids of light across the surface of our skin.’ Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 1. Ibid., 35–36. Ibid., 46–47. This is Nehamas’ clarification of his view in response to critical essays by Carolyn Korsmeyer and Berys Gaut, ‘Reply to Korsmeyer and Gaut’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (2010): 205–207. Nehamas, ‘Reply to Korsmeyer and Gaut’, 205. See their critical essays in the same issue: Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘What Beauty Promises: Reflections on Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art’, 193–198; Berys Gaut, ‘Nehamas on Beauty and Love’, 199–204. Gaut argues that there is no understanding of love – as either personal, hedonic or for particulars – that can satisfy the full job description Nehamas places on it: that such a passionate feeling

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Beauty and the End of Art could be directed to artworks as well as to nature and persons. I think that the charges are not as serious as Gaut suggests, and he finds much else in Nehamas’ book of value. This is not the part of Nehamas’ view that I want to pursue since I think it is valuable to try to consider beauty in terms of the nature of love rather than judgement. My line of concern is closer to that expressed by Budd, which I discuss shortly. Nehamas, Only a Promise, 133. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 207. Nehamas, Only a Promise, 84. Malcolm Budd, ‘The Love of Art: More than a Promise of Happiness’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (2011): 81–88. Nehamas, Only a Promise, 86 and 76. Budd, ‘The Love of Art: More than a Promise of Happiness’, 84. Alexander Nehamas, ‘Introduction’ to Symposium by Plato, transl. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989), xxi. Nehamas, Only a Promise, 105–120. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 122–123. Beech, ‘Introduction’, in Beauty, ed. Dave Beech, 17. Nehamas, Only a Promise, 95–96. The account given in Hickey’s ‘Buying the World’ is of the way contemporary Americans talk about beauty. I mention this to show how exactingly specific Hickey’s focus can be. But putting the account in ‘Buying the World’ together with his other essays in Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar expands the focus to beauty’s role in contemporary mercantile democracies whose practices stand in the European Beaux-Arts Tradition. Hickey, ‘Buying the World’, 78. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 76. The full discussion in the later edition is as follows: ‘This visible investment, however, is not properly a metaphor for timeless grace, since the presence of grace in Renaissance theology is presumed to be visible in fact. … So, if grace can be seen in fact, then what is the status of objects whose physical luminosity replicates the state of grace? … A mimetic picture, however, is a representation that stands in for the absence of its physical subject. What, then, is a mimetic image of Christ, that, thanks to oil glazing, seems an uncanny incarnation of Christ? … If it is only a representation of the historical Jesus, it stands in for Christ and signifies his absence. Yet Christ, conceived in grace, is never absent, and any presumption that a man-made picture might embody Christ plays fast and loose with the Second Commandment. So the Roman church proclaimed such works to be images of the once and future Christ, whose life on earth was historical and will be again, whose spiritual presence is eternal and signified by incarnate luminosity.’ Invisible Dragon, Four Essays on Beauty, 10th edition, 89–90.

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Hickey, Invisible Dragon, Four Essays on Beauty, 10th edition, 47. Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 106. Hickey, Invisible Dragon, Four Essays on Beauty, 10th edition, 22–23. Ibid., 65. Hickey, ‘Buying the World’, 84. Ibid., 45. Embodied meanings as one facet of any sign are different from what Danto means when he says that artworks are ‘embodied meanings’ since Danto’s notion stands for the complex of designation and embodiment rather than the semiotic point that embodiment itself stands in its own referential dimension. Though Danto agrees, as he puts it, artworks stand in different sorts of relationships to artworks than to any other sort of thing. Hickey, ‘Buying the World’, 85. Ibid., ‘In the moment of encounter, intricately constructed patterns of embodied reference always have the potential to completely reinvent the past to reinvent even their own pasts and yield up the future in new, surprising, and totally unauthorized meanings’, 86. We might see this as Hickey’s specific art-historical explanation of the ever-renewing nature of artworks that Gadamer emphasizes. Hickey, ‘Buying the World’, 80. Dave Hickey, ‘This Mortal Magic’, in Air Guitar (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 182. Ibid., 184. Danto repeatedly emphasizes that because his account of art’s ending turns on the pluralism of art that comes with essentialism, it cannot be ‘reversed’ as a byproduct of unforeseen and unintended contingent developments. 1993 is the date of his Invisible Dragon, which is typically cited as the date of the return to beauty when we start talking about beauty again. Hickey, ‘Buying the World’, 81.

Part Two

Art Practices and the Value of Perceptible Presence the world as an aesthetic presence is inseparable from what we are. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 156

4

Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Constitutive Norms in Context

Wittgenstein’s later work offers ways to understand that contingency and objectivity are not adversaries but bedfellows, in the sense that it is in historically contingent practices that objective facts, norms and values become available and compelling. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s multiply interrelated explorations of this theme yield a subtle realist framework that helps resolve the issues about art and beauty traced in the preceding three chapters. A Wittgensteinian framework helps us understand the norm-governed historical plurality of art and its historically evolving experiential dimension, as well as the historical and experiential nature of aesthetic properties and beauty. Insofar as Wittgenstein’s approach shows how values as well as facts become available in contingent historical practices, it provides a framework for explaining the objectivity of beauty without a transcendent metaphysics, just as contemporary reaffirmations of beauty suggest. This chapter argues that a Wittgensteinian orientation to art as a variety of norm-governed practices emphasizes that the force of these norms is specific to practices, so that broader historical context is relevant to understanding them. This facet of Wittgenstein’s outlook holds an alternative to essentialism about art by challenging the commitment to abstract away from contingent detail that is shared by definitional approaches, even those that emphasize the relational and historical nature of art such as Arthur Danto’s and Jerrold Levinson’s, as we will see. My interpretation builds on John McDowell’s realist (or ‘non anti-realist’) reading.1 His figures in a larger grouping of interpretations that includes Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Hilary Putnam,2 which blend a realist orientation with some divergence over Wittgenstein’s method. I go beyond these approaches in the distinctive emphasis just mentioned: Wittgenstein suggests not only that norms have force in larger contexts but that to understand their having force

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we need to understand their broader historical situation. One problem with a general claim such as ‘norms are socially emergent’ is that there is no systematic account, Wittgenstein urges, of practices or the broader contexts of our norm-governed activity, and so no general ‘systematic’ account of such social emergence. But this does not foreclose understanding. What is needed is open to view – the way that structures of specific permissions and constraints become available and compelling in their broader natural and historical circumstances. This calls for case-by-case explorations that show how specific norms figure in their broader contexts. Wittgenstein indicates such enquiry rather than illustrating it in the Philosophical Investigations. But, as we saw in the Introduction, he is quite clear in his Lectures on Aesthetics. 25. The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture…. which fully means really to describe the culture of a period. 26. What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc. … [That children are taught by adults who go to concerts, etc., that the schools are like they are, etc.]

This passage is noteworthy as Wittgenstein’s example of the way we need to attend to contingent detail and the sorts of facts that are relevant for grasping the role and force of normative judgements, in this case aesthetic ones. That is why it serves as the touchstone of my enquiry. The discussion in this chapter will divide into five parts that (i) briefly consider Wittgenstein’s method, (ii) develop Wittgensteinian realism at some length since it provides the framework for what follows, (iii) analyse the family resemblance passages anew since their initial uptake in philosophy of art in the 1950s and 1960s blocks more searching use, (iv) apply Wittgensteinian realism to art and (v) discuss the contrast with contemporary relational and especially historical definitions of art.

Wittgenstein’s kaleidoscopic writing One caveat needs to be registered immediately. I draw on Wittgenstein’s work in a fairly straightforward substantive voice though his writings warn that philosophy makes problems subside in place of offering novel solutions that

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might figure in theory. This is Wittgenstein’s ‘quietism’ whose elusive nuance poses challenges for anyone attempting to understand let alone apply his work. 109. … And we may not advance any kind of theory. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take place. And this description gets its light – that is to say, its purpose – from the philosophical problems.3

Just how Wittgenstein’s ‘method’ informs or constrains what his work might teach is the subject of competing views that range from more quietist to more constructive readings. Much depends, for example, on what one understands by theory in the sense in which Wittgenstein warns us away from it. Along with a number of interpreters, I suggest that Wittgenstein eschews theory in the sense of an account that is answerable to antecedent requirements that are presupposed in enquiry – for logical analysis, for basics or fundamentals, or for the necessity of a set of concepts distinct in kind from those being explained.4 What we are to understand by the invocation to describe is just as important, if not more so. As the quotation above indicates, a description ‘gets it light’ or ‘purpose’ from the philosophical problems to which it is responding. In many cases if not all, Wittgenstein has something specific in mind. ‘Following according to a rule is fundamental to our language-game. It characterizes what we call description.’5 I will turn to Wittgenstein’s exploration of rules and his idea of language games shortly, at this point we can note that to describe is to characterize the rule or norm-governed dimensions of the human activity or ability at issue. So on balance, the reading here is on the more ‘constructive’ side. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s ‘negative’ considerations – his diagnostic unravelling of world pictures and the kinds of theorizing these involve – suggest alternative insights and outlook. Nevertheless, any attempt to articulate these is immediately haunted by a sense of being too stark or one-sided and thereby too ‘constructive’ or even dogmatic. Aside from specific interpretive issues, this hazard comes with recasting Wittgenstein’s kaleidoscopic writing in ‘linear’ argumentative style. Wittgenstein’s writing is kaleidoscopic in that it offers short numbered sections that address a variety of overlapping, interrelated issues in nontechnical terms from a variety of perspectives – often in ‘dialogues’ between two or three voices or by a single protagonist who is tempted by different outlooks in thinking about an issue. This brings us to Wittgenstein’s well-noted holism. I suggest that there is a unity in the holism of Wittgenstein’s method and subject that is key for his realism. This suggestion can be made without adjudicating between many of

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the nuanced and thoughtful attempts to articulate Wittgenstein’s method and how it offers understanding. Interpreters differ in emphasizing that his dialogic method elicits or requires active participation from readers, that it offers competing voices to move beyond the examined positions into a Pyrrhonic suspension of the options, that it proceeds through a series of paradoxes that are shown to ensue from a range of antecedent theoretical requirements and so on. For the most part, my suggestion doesn’t compete with the others insofar as those make more fine-grained proposals about the internal structure and relationships among sections.6 What I focus on is that the fragmentary, multi-stranded and multi-voiced nature of the text brings into view the multi-dimensional nature of its subject matter. This is a unity in the holism of Wittgenstein’s method and perspective. Mathematics offers the image of a highly multi-dimensional space of vectors that represents and explains a complex state. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s method puts in place such a multidimensional space for a complex state that is the case – the state in which we find ourselves in the world’s natural and historical complexity and which we need to consider when questions come up about rules, meanings, intentions or actions and so on. Wittgenstein’s work comes closest – of any I know – to rendering in words such a multidimensional space. The mathematical image of vectors that combine to yield any one complex state also reinforces and explains the sense that just as the multiply-fragmentary text brings its subject into view, an attempt to discuss its themes and parts will seem to do it violence, to voice priorities or emphases or explicit teachings that are not there. And if we really do see what is open to view as a highly multidimensional space in which different vectors or dimensions might contribute differently, with a different ‘weight’ in the various complex states that are the total circumstances in which we figure, then we also begin to appreciate how generalizations and master narratives may not be especially helpful but detailed case studies are.7 I will argue that this holism expresses a realism that does not cast the world as the ‘dominant partner’8 but shows how no dimension has more weight – is more basic or fundamental – in that we act and see, think and speak in the natural and historical circumstances that support, constrain and take shape with our own evolving potentialities.9 As Wittgenstein put it, ‘Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing’ where empiricism is the prevailing framework that strives, one way or another, to isolate or place emphasis on basic experience or activity.10 A number of commentators – such as Stanley Cavell or Richard Eldridge – highlight that Wittgenstein is motivated by the wonder of our conceptual attunement and activity. I would put this as

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the sheer wonder that the many dimensions of our life activities, of hoping, seeing, building or grieving involve conceptual capacities, so that our activities and attunement are experiential, historically situated and potentially objective, allowing for some reflective ‘distance’. This is the wonder of there being minds and world at all. A final consideration on method is that a fairly straightforward or substantive voice is not distorting for our purposes here, since the emphasis is on what we might learn from Wittgenstein’s writings so as to help develop the emerging cultural ethos about beauty and art. One strand in Wittgenstein’s ‘quietism’ is that it offers reminders rather than solutions because it is helping us regain understanding that we have mistakenly or unnecessarily lost due to cultural changes. ‘§127. The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’.11 This fits both with the emerging sense that beauty was demoted due to unfortunate or mistaken pressures that sidelined our understanding and with worries that new developments such as conceptual or participatory art are hard to explain even by relational definitions. The theorists of beauty just considered try to diagnose mistaken twists and turns and attempt to redress them, which is congenial with taking Wittgenstein’s work to offer reminders that might help us through the thicket of pressures that deflects understanding beauty as one of the principal values of human life ‘as we would wish to live it’, as well as a value that may play an integral role in some art practices.12

Wittgensteinian realism: Practices and constitutive rules, contingency and objectivity It is by reorienting us to ‘the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which is woven’ (PI §17) that Wittgenstein offers a realism according to which our activities bring facts and values ‘into view’ but not ‘into being’.13 This understanding depends on being able to characterize detailed patterns that implicate us and our circumstances in terms that involve norms rather than reduce or abstract away from them. The Philosophical Investigations opens by asking us to consider two life situations that will turn out to be especially important: the first is of the sort whereby a child learns to speak and in the second people act cooperatively. I will return to the role that Wittgenstein’s concern with a child’s entry into language plays in his realism, but let’s begin with the second passage, which introduces his notion of language games.

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2. Let us imagine a language … The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam.’ A calls them out; – B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. – Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

Such examples of primitive language games illustrate what has come to be known as Wittgenstein’s view that ‘meaning is use’. But this slogan is less than clear and might mistakenly suggest, as a number of recent interpreters note, that Wittgenstein is proposing a theory of meaning to replace others. Rather, one of the functions of this passage is that the simple building situation illustrates how ‘nothing is hidden’, and linguistic meaning and the facts that make it possible are open to view in the internal relationships among what we can say, what we can do and the circumstances in which these take place. The relationships are internal or integral in that each of these – human life activities, uses of language and circumstances – enables, depends on and entails one another.14 One person can fetch a variety of things another needs in building something insofar as the two speak an articulate language so that one can tell another specifically what she needs – a beam, for example, rather than a pillar, or two blocks rather than one slab.15 This is the reciprocity in human forms of life activities and language: activity like cooperative building comes together with and is inseparable from the articulate speech integral to that range of activity and both can only take shape in external circumstances that allow for building with beams and pillars. More generally, human life activities are constrained by and take shape in the possibilities that the world makes available – possibilities that can come into view given our possibilities for activity and articulate language. This is the sense in which the example conveys the idea of a language game: that a use of language inheres in ‘the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven’ (PI §17). Such views are often called ‘holistic’, but to use the term with respect to Wittgenstein, I suggest we need to be clear how his holistic reorientation is distinctive in its thoroughness. To appreciate this, we need to consider with Wittgenstein how activities such as cooperative building by two or more people are much like games in that one needs to know how to go on in the right way – to bring a slab when it is requested, for example – which points out that our activities are shot through with rules. This directs us to consider explicitly how we are able to go on correctly, for example, to ask for one beam rather than two

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pillars as the need arises or to fetch a beam when asked, as Wittgenstein does in the rule-following passages, which thereby highlights the many dimensions implicated in the fact that we follow rules: such as the role of criteria of correctness, context and training into unreflective, immediate rule-governed responsiveness or activity.16 Wittgenstein’s investigations of rule-following provide a concise entry point for discussing the question of realism in a short space since they examine whether or how we follow rules that have determinate applications beyond any we actually make. Is there a fact of the matter whether we follow rules, such as n+1, for example, that is not only a matter of our contingent or historical agreement about applications that we do make? This is a highly focused way to address this more general question: how can we claim that facts and values are objective – in the intuitive sense that they are ‘thus and so, anyway, whether or not we choose to investigate the matter in question, and whatever the outcome of any such investigation’17 – even though the means are contingent or historical whereby we live those facts and values; discover, debate, challenge or abide by them? In what has been cast as an argument against the possibility of private rulefollowing or private language, Wittgenstein highlights how following rules requires a larger context that functions – in myriad ways that he explores and details – as the repository of criteria of correctness that are independent of any individual rule-follower but to which each is responsive and responsible. Some of the interweaving explorations show that if criteria of correctness were not independent of each individual, and if following rules were a matter of interpretation, then one might claim any behaviour to follow a certain rule. In such a case, if it seems to me that adding by 1 up to 1000 and by 2 after 1000 follows the rule ‘+1’, for example, then – it does! But if this is what rule-following amounts to, then the idea that we follow determinate rules is empty. Instead of affirming that this idea is empty, Wittgenstein directs our attention to the facts that need to be countenanced:18 202. And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.

This is Wittgenstein’s controversial suggestion: ‘To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).’19 Though this is the most contentious, it is only one of the interwoven considerations pointing in the same direction.

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In part, these passages strive to convey that meaning is only at the ‘participant perspective’.20 Only for someone who participates in ways of doing things is there a signpost, for example, rather than an occupant of space that is interpretable in some way or other. Wittgenstein’s investigations of following rules, such as the rule of counting considered above, bring out how presupposing that language functions as a code – a set of items to which interpretations are added – destroys the very idea of determinate rule-following. This is a key difference between realist and anti-realist understanding of Wittgenstein. It is what Wittgenstein strives to avoid by directing us to describe what we do, which incorporates rule-following in the very characterization of the activity. As Putnam puts it, the contrasting view that a sentence or a thought is like ‘an object to which an interpretation is added’ in some way – through verification or some assertability conditions – is disastrous for realism: it is ‘the most disastrous feature of the anti-realist view, the very feature that brings about the loss of the world’.21 The alternative is that a signpost or a sentence has a specific meaning insofar as criteria of correctness that are independent of any individual are extant in our practices, in the way we do things at the level of communities, and such criteria are internalized by individuals through training into integrated activities and ‘techniques of language usage’. Wittgenstein emphasizes that this does not suggest that all there is to criteria of correctness is communal agreement in practice, or that communal agreement determines what is correct and what is incorrect. This is the difficult idea that a realist approach needs to convey; how it is that human practices bring criteria of correctness ‘into view’ though not ‘into being’, to echo John McDowell’s phrasing. The distinction is important with respect to the objectivity of empirical or mathematical or value concepts. But its significance is also more general in securing the distinction between doing something according to a rule or norm (as a matter of fact, so to speak) and doing something in a way that a community agree upon. Let’s briefly take criteria, context and training in turn. First, Wittgenstein’s understanding of criteria is not that they are specifications of what we understand on which our judgements are based. As Cavell argues, Appealing to criteria is not a way of explaining or proving the fact of our attunement in words (hence in forms of life). It is only another description of the same fact; or rather, it is an appeal we make when the attunement is threatened or lost … [We can pick-out criteria insofar as] there is a background of pervasive and systematic agreements among us, which we had not realized, or had not known we realize.22

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Stephen Affeldt clarifies that a separation of criteria and judgements ‘risks preserving the ideas that (1) criteria are separate from judgement and represent an independent middle term or third order mediating between phenomena and judgement, and (2) that in learning language we are amassing, somewhere and somehow, a catalogue of criteria’.23 Instead, what impresses Wittgenstein is precisely the fact that there is no catalogue of criteria and yet that we are in agreement ‘in language with the specificity, systematicity, and normativity which eliciting criteria reveals’. My suggestion of a multidimensional total state allows us to envision that criteria can be elicited explicitly as a way of articulating one or more of the dimensions. ‘What sense our criteria have is only determined in judgement, through our agreement in judgement, and through our ability to appreciate the ways in which the sense of a concept is elaborated through its use in further judgements offered in response to specific questions, future circumstances, and the like.’24 The fact of our agreement and its role as a repository of criteria of correctness comes out in Wittgenstein’s exploration of the fact that a child is trained into life activities in which language use inheres. Having drawn attention to the learning of a first language in the opening section of the Investigations, Wittgenstein’s examinations of rule-following reorient us to such learning as training or inculcation into activities and techniques. This is important because training into a technique does not require any antecedent understanding of what is being acquired; all that needs to be in place is a capacity that the training brings to fruition. John McDowell draws attention to this dimension of Wittgenstein’s view and shows how it abuts Aristotle’s similar emphasis in his discussion of human excellence or virtue. Aristotle examines human life activities wherein the potential for rationality is fulfilled.25 The connection lies in shared emphasis that training instils ways of acting and reacting across multitudinous situations that comprise our forms of life activities. Aristotle highlights that we become moral persons by being trained – when we are uncomprehending children – into doing the right thing across various circumstances to the point where we just react to our circumstances by doing the right thing. Only at this point – where we react to the moral possibilities in our circumstances with the right action – can we reflect on our actions; understand why a certain way of acting – being truthful, for example – is morally excellent or correct, and freely choose it. Only at the juncture where an immediate reaction is also a free choice is it a moral action. Aristotle’s point is that one can’t understand why one should be moral unless one already acts morally; nor can one choose moral actions unless

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one already acts morally. Moral action requires free affirmation, but such affirmation is made possible by automatic reactions to circumstances. This is precisely the idea of unreflective, immediate rule-following – of cultural norm-governed ways of being. ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly’ (PI § 219). Aristotle’s account offers a picture of ourselves as animals with a second nature: our first nature becomes transfigured into a norm-governed second nature through training into ways of acting and reacting. Wittgenstein’s examinations of rule-following suggest the same sort of account. We have seen that these investigations yield, in part, the recognition that when I understand another’s speech or say something myself I am participating in ‘customs (uses, institutions)’ (PI §199). Rather than focusing on the fact that we are moral agents, Wittgenstein examines the fact that we are sensitive, thoughtful, inventive, active, conversant persons by showing that building, hoping, expecting – applying concepts in multitudinous activities and uses of language in which judgement is inherent – involve immediate rule-following that is made possible through training no less than what we think of as moral action. That Aristotle’s account presupposes a cultural communal context doesn’t seem startling when moral training is at issue. But the point seems to become controversial when its generality is pointed out: rule-following involves training, which requires a larger context where we are held responsible to rules or norms of correct activity. By showing that our various ‘cognitive’ capabilities involve following rules – so that they involve ‘second nature’ reactions and judgements – Wittgenstein’s investigations show that practices supply the required context for diverse aspects of our second-nature selves. In Blind Obedience, Meredith Williams argues that Wittgenstein’s attention to training helps clarify the role that practices or context play. She brings this out by drawing a surprising analogy between a child and Wittgenstein’s example of a standard meter stick, which functions as a standard of measurement. Williams’ distinctive point is that a child is ‘calibrated’ to the world through training into activities and judgements integral to the activities. Consider that to function as a standard of measurement ‘the bar need not be inherently representational or normative’ but it needs to have empirical properties such as rigidity and stability over time, so that it can be ‘engraved and scored’. These empirical properties ‘enable the bar to be scored, but such scoring is not a natural property of the bar’. Her point is this: ‘On analogy with the standard metre stick, … judgements of the obvious [such as “this is red” or “5 follows 4”] are calibrations that the young child undergoes no matter what. The child is “scored” for color, for number continuation, for objects over time.’26

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Williams uses this analogy to illustrate the following three important points. First, shared ways of acting provide stable broad patterns required for the possibility of training. When Wittgenstein emphasizes the ‘common behaviour of mankind’ (PI 206), he is pointing out ‘the material without which … judgements of the obvious cannot be made … This common behaviour of mankind is exploited in the calibration of the child’.27 This is important because it pre-empts the ‘communitarian’ view, which suggests that the community acts to check our behaviour for correctness and that it is in this that the normativity of our actions consists. Williams’ response is that no one checks the scoring in using a metre stick, once the scoring is there it is just put to use.28 Second, her analogy also tries to bring out that the causal regularities that enter into the possibility of training – into the scoring or calibration of a metre stick or child – are ‘within language games’. In other words, the causal regularities that are important for a standard of measurement figure from the perspective of a description that countenances norms rather than abstracts away from the role of rule-following in human life. Both points add more detail to our understanding of second nature.29 Consider how Cavell makes these points in intuitive terms back in The Claim of Reason. He suggests that when we point to a pumpkin, for example, we tell a child neither what a pumpkin is called nor what a pumpkin is, though both might seem common sense. Rather, children make ‘leaps’ in what they say in various circumstances and we keep smiling. He recounts the roller coaster of elation and disappointment he experienced at the variation in his toddler’s responses. This helps him realize that without stability, her responses are not to be captured in our syntax and vocabulary. my second reaction was happier: she means by ‘kitty’ what I mean by ‘fur.’ Or was it what I mean by ‘soft,’ or perhaps ‘nice to stroke’? Or perhaps she didn’t mean at all what in my syntax would be recorded as ‘that is an X.’ After all, when she sees real kittens she not only utters her allophonic version of ‘kitty,’ she usually squeals the word over and over, squats near it, stretches out her arms towards it and opens and closes her fingers … purses her lips, and squints with pleasure. All she did with the fur piece was, smiling, to say ‘kitty’ once and stroke it. Perhaps the syntax of that performance should be transcribed as ‘This is like a kitty,’ or ‘Look at the funny kitty,’ or ‘Aren’t soft things nice?’ or ‘See, I remember how pleased you are when I say “kitty” ’ or ‘I like to be petted.’ Can we decide this? Is it a choice between definite alternatives? In each case her word was produced about a soft, warm, furry object of a certain, size, shape, and weight. What did she learn in order to do this? What did she learn from having done it? If she had never made such leaps she would never have walked into speech. Having

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made it, meadows of communication can grow for us. Where you can leap to depends on where you stand.30

Williams would add more explicitly that it is stable blind applications of a rule that ‘create the space for abstracting the rule’ and for sighted applications. Her third key point is that training does not involve alternative interpretations. That the child is blind to what she is being trained to do shows that there are no alternatives for her that she would need to choose between. This is a key feature that many readings of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules tend not to recognize. A child does many things, but these are not alternative interpretations to what we say and do. What there is for a child being initiated into our ways of living is what we do and say and what is acceptable in various circumstances. Only certain ways of eating are acceptable, for example, just as certain uses of words in those situations are. There would be alternatives only if we suppose the child has the same capacities as those who have fully formed linguistic and logical abilities – but this obtains in the learning of a second language rather than training into a first, Wittgenstein argues – a view that casts children, in Cavell’s words, ‘as “small grown-ups, midgets” ’ or as ‘masters’ rather than novices in Williams’ terms.31 That there are alternative interpretations – even for a child acquiring its first language – is the presupposition that comes with the world picture that is ‘disastrous’ for realism. Reorienting to the learning situation as one of training helps us recognize that the view that rules always involve alternatives is not a theoryneutral assumption. In different terms, both Cavell and Williams elaborate how our first nature becomes transfigured into a norm-governed second nature through training into ways of acting and reacting. This probes the affinity McDowell highlights between Aristotle’s approach to ourselves as animals with a second nature and Wittgenstein’s examinations of rule-following. If we use the image of blindness, then our activity is blind in at least two ways. Our first nature activities and responses are formed into applications of rules to which we are blind, which makes it possible for those applications to become ‘sighted’ or freely affirmed as Aristotle suggests. But our second-nature activities and responses, and the judgements internal to them, continue to involve immediate or blind applications of rules. That they aren’t only blind is not the result of having made an interpretive choice among alternatives at each application but of our having recognized that the way we are in fact acting is sensible or a good.32

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It is important to be careful about what distinguishing first and second nature involves in another respect as well. Since the issue is our potentialities, first nature includes both what is distinctive to us and what we have in common with other mammals. It involves distinctive capacities for communicating through an articulate language on the one hand, and shared capacities such as eating on the other hand. The point of distinguishing second nature is that our capacities make it possible that we can be trained into language use, but they are not sufficient, training into public norms and language use is needed to open up the dimensions of activity that are our second nature. This means on the one hand that speaking is as natural – as much a part of our natural history, Wittgenstein writes – as walking or eating. On the other hand, it also means that eating and walking are as much a part of our second nature, themselves norm-governed forms of life activities that come with speaking. I suggest that Wittgenstein’s emphasis on training – which is an emphasis on our normative activities as immediate second nature – has at least a twofold significance. It shows that our activity is natural and norm governed by clarifying that norm-governed behaviour is enabled by natural capacities – so that a reductive explanation is not called for. But it also shows how the ‘transfiguration’ into second nature brings facts and values into view. This is its significance for realism. To bring this out, consider Crispin Wright’s anti-realist challenge that Wittgenstein’s reorientation to language in terms of language games is not helped by thinking about second nature. Wright suggests that Wittgensteinian language games offer an inversion: a perspective from which the good-standing of a discourse is somehow provided for first, without attempting any prior direct engagements – or questionably motivated assumptions – with the metaphysics and epistemology of its proper objects and concepts. Thus we do not ask directly what sort of things numbers, say, could be and how one might know about them. Instead, we ask how arithmetic, and the ordinary statements whereby it is applied, get their meaning and how that meaning might be grasped. Once those questions have been given the right kind of answer, the mere integrity of the language-game carries the ontological and epistemological issues in its wake and there is no space for a residual concern about the place of the subject matter of arithmetic in the natural world or the knowability of its objects by human being.33

The question is how to motivate the ‘language-games first; ontology second’ inversion and how to show the good-standing of a discourse. Wright suggests that ‘disclosing such good-standing must involve showing that the statements

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of the discourse … may quite legitimately be regarded as true or false – and that the distinctive objects and properties with which they deal may consequently be viewed as genuine, without further reductive obligation – in the light of nothing beyond the standard which we actually normally apply with the discourse’.34 He admits that ‘it is not of course irrelevant that a competence in normative discourses is one product of a normal human education’.35 But he finds the idea of second nature unhelpful or unsatisfying. Wright’s challenge returns us to the issue in question: how is all this realism? How do the ubiquity of rules in ‘the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven’ (PI §7) yield realism? And how does emphasis on second nature help? If criteria of correctness are extant in practices, which are norm-governed ways of doing things at the level of communities, then what vouchsafes the practices? In other words, why is this realism rather than its opposite, a form of idealism? Wittgenstein raises this worry, and indicates the avenue of response. 241. ‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. 242. If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so. – It is one thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results of measurement. But what we call ‘measuring’ is partly determined by a certain constancy in results of measurement.

What does measurement involve? There is measurement of length, for example, insofar as there are users of measurement with a perceived need for measurement who can agree in what it is to follow the constitutive rules of measurement. And the agreement must be unproblematic, seamless – something we take for granted once we have been taught how to measure (once we have been trained into imbricated ways of doing things in which measurement is an integral part). There must even be some constancy in the measurements that are obtained, Wittgenstein points out. But to make all this clear is also to make clear that the results of measurement are not thereby determined as well. Insofar as I have been trained into practices of measuring, I can use a measuring stick to figure out the length of this room – which in no way determines the length of the room. That the room is metres or yards long is a contingent fact determined by our practices of measurement. There is even a sense in which the fact that the room has a length is contingent on there being

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practices to which measurement of length is integral. But what length the room is measured to be in meters or yards is not contingent on our practices. While this point tends to be clear and unproblematic when it comes to measurement in metres or yards, it seems to become elusive and controversial when applied to language: to language games and to the words that fulfil various roles across our myriad practices as metres or yards do when we measure. But if we accept the point about measurement, we lack grounds for rejecting what is the same point concerning language. As Wittgenstein writes, A method of measurement – of length, for example – has exactly the same relation to the correctness of a statement of length as the sense of a statement has to its truth or falsehood.36 429. The agreement, the harmony, of thought and reality consists in this: if I say falsely that something is red, then, for all that, it isn’t red. And when I want to explain the word ‘red’ to someone in the sentence ‘That is not red’, I do it by pointing to something red.37

Explicitly identifying colours is integral to our forms of life activities – just as activities that involve measurement are ours, contingent and historical. Yet that does not mean that practices that involve colours or measures are merely or one-sidedly ours – as if we impose measurement on a world that stands constitutively apart from us as a bare presence. Forms of life activities that involve colours or measures do so because the world is such as to be colourful or measurable – given that there are forms of life activities in that world in which practices involving ranges of colours or measurement have a place. One route towards appreciating this mutuality is by recognizing that Wittgenstein’s stress is not simply on activity or skill but on the distinctive nature of activity that is internally connected with articulate language and norms. That emphasis, we have seen, is put in place from the outset of the Investigations with the idea of language games, and it also figures prominently in the way Wittgenstein highlights training. But one might be deflected from this point by Wittgenstein’s writing that ‘at bottom’ are activities – rule- or norm-governed ways of acting in the world that have been instilled through training. His image of striking ‘bedrock’ evokes the inescapable fact of the human condition that when we press the warrant of our ways for going on, our justifications run out in our ways of acting – this is how it is immediate for me to act, to see and say, and this is how I have been trained to react. That justifications ‘come to an end’ at the contingent ways that we do things – otherwise they would involve infinite regress – does not contrast thought or talk with skilful bodily action. It emphasizes that justifications come to an end in immediate norm-governed

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activity in the world, which is skilful activity that is internally related with uses of language. So it does not make the point that activity is basic or prior to thought or talk. Rather, training brings out our potential for immediate ruleinformed activity – activity that makes reflection possible so that it may become a live question, as Richard Eldridge emphasizes, for example, whether we are exercising our ‘expressive freedom’ in continuing in tradition as an ‘expression of our rational understanding’.38 And it is in the world that we act. That such activity is in the world and on the world – enabled and constrained by the world – is implicit in the very notion of activity.39 It gives substance to the contrast between bringing something – a certain fact, for example – into being and bringing it into view. That some mixtures or alloys of metals are hard is not brought into being by our activities. But it is brought into view by our activities and cannot be in view without them, or analogous practices of extracting metals from ore, producing alloys and so on. Just as the even greater hardness of plastic cannot come into view without rule-informed activities – we make plastic just as we make alloys, and we can make it hard, but just how hard it can be and how hard we might make it are matters of fact. The last ingredient we need to extract from Wittgenstein’s examples of primitive language games is that by highlighting the game-like dimension of our activities they direct attention not only to what it is to follow rules but also to the fact that some rules are constitutive. To start from a well-worn example, consider the queen in chess. The rules that specify what this piece in the game does are constitutive for the piece: to be the queen is to move in such and such ways, with such and such potential for the point of the game of capturing the opposing king. Such rules are constitutive; they determine the games we play by specifying the legal moves and thereby the entities that figure in a game – for there to be an entity that is the queen in chess is for there to be an entity whose moves are governed by certain constitutive rules, the rules that specify the queen’s movements. The notion is quite strong, insofar as it indicates that there would be no such entity as the queen in chess if it were not for the constitutive rules that define what it is legal for the queen to do.40 Moreover, facility with constitutive rules comes together with immediate perception of the governed entities, so that insofar as one can play chess, for example, one can see a queen without thinking of the rule explicitly or, indeed, without being able to articulate the rule explicitly. Yet the fact that those who play chess can perceive the queen also does not contest that they might typically be able to think about the way this piece functions in the game of chess as such or in any particular game. Rather,

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I have been suggesting that Wittgenstein’s distinctive point is to recognize the integrated variety in our capacities without prioritizing either perception or action or thought. Examples of well-defined games like chess or of primitive life activities with two builders help make perspicuous how myriad activities involve rules or norms that are constitutive, which, I will argue, is important for thinking about art. A more extensive discussion of rule-following and realism is beyond the scope of this chapter. The points my discussion highlights will play important roles in rethinking art, beauty and the role of perception. Just as following rules effects a transfiguration when it comes to ourselves, bringing us into second nature, rule-following makes objective facts and values available. Just as ways of acting come together with what those actions involve and concern, ways of judging come together with what those judgements involve and concern, slabs and beams of various sizes, for example. Training opens up a mutuality of activity with circumstances and objects of activity just as it makes immediately available a mutuality of judging with circumstances and objects of judging. To be trained into second nature is to react to one’s circumstances appropriately, for the most part – a consistency that distinguishes errors from mere fluctuations. One might say that insofar as I immediately and correctly react to objects or layouts as having lengths, length is there; but this is a less felicitous mould into which the point that reactions and circumstances of reaction entail one another might be cast. Stated so baldly, the idea might seem too quick or even facile; but such bald statements are not Wittgenstein’s. Rather, what takes their place are detailed investigations of the ‘filigree’ of activities in interdependent ‘imbricated’ practices that show that forms of life activities involve a mutuality of persons and world, languages and facts and values, actions and perceptions. Mention of one entails others. Wittgensteinian realism points to the relationships rather than prioritizing or giving more weight to any of the dimensions in the interlocking nexus of activity, articulate language, perception and worldly circumstances. Struggling with such realism re-examines our idea of objectivity, just as Gadamer urges we need to do. It is distorting to suppose that the notion of the objective is only of a mode of knowing or of description that does not involve an essential reference to our roles, or that requires explanations that specify in distinct non-normative terms what it is about us that grounds the concepts we use. Such views jeopardize understanding both facts and values: any aspect whose specification requires mention of our selves is not objective, not part of the ‘fabric of the world’, but a projection by us onto the bare presence that is really the world. Beauty like other values could not be integral to the world,

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but only a projection, and so would allow splintering into myriad projections by countless individuals each with his or her own subjective preferences and outlook. In striking affinity to Wittgenstein’s emphasis on rule-following, Gadamer highlights the concept of Bildung, of ‘rising up to humanity through culture’, as key to reclaiming a less restricted understanding of objectivity than that implied by scientific method. Recall that Truth and Method opens with a discussion of the historical evolution and provenance of the idea of Bildung as one of the implicated concepts that needs to be reconsidered – along with common sense, judgement and taste – in order to counter the spiralling subjectivization of beauty, art and finally the humanities. In the German tradition, the concept of Bildung develops the core elements found in the idea of second nature: that our capacities need to be actualized through learning, and that we become who we are through a historically, culturally grounded process so that when it comes to human beings ‘what is in question is not a procedure or behavior but what has come into being’.41 Wittgenstein’s work is not overtly historicist in the sense that when he explores the nature of following rules or of language he does not use the terms ‘history’ or ‘culture’, with only a few tantalizing uses of his notion of form of life. But one consequence of his focus on rule-following is that the practical and hence also historical nature of rule-governed endeavours is made clearer. Using different terms, both Gadamer and Wittgenstein focus on the actualization of distinctive capacities – which might be identified somewhat starkly as capacities to develop and to follow rules. The resulting endeavours and the truths they bring into view include those studied by the humanities.42 One might say that what is at issue are different kinds of complex patterns that hold together through distinctive relationships, just as the family resemblance passages attempt to help us countenance, as we will now consider. And just as rule-following involves training to the point of immediacy or second nature, so Gadamer suggests that this yields capacities that we would label as ‘senses’ because of their unreflective immediacy. What we immediately perceive is what training into second nature, or Bildung, allows.43

Revisiting Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance The neo-Wittgensteinian challenge of the 1950s to the possibility of defining art turned on a specific interpretation of the ‘family resemblance’ passages that continues to structure what it is thought Wittgenstein’s work may offer.44 Indeed, it is not too strong to claim that Wittgenstein’s later work has been largely set

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aside in philosophy of art as a result of the widespread rejection of the neoWittgensteinian challenge. So it is necessary to re-examine those passages in order to reconsider what a Wittgensteinian view suggests about art. Recall the historical progression that Chapter 1 touched on briefly. NeoWittgensteinians highlight analysis of the concept ‘art’ to show that it is a family resemblance concept. According to their interpretation, the point is to make us stop presupposing that wherever phenomena fall into a discernible kind there are essential features, and so to stop searching for definitions in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. As soon as the challenge was posed, it was severely criticized and then apparently disproved with definitions that show that if the conditions that make something art are relational or contextual, as Danto and Dickie argue, there is no tension between the open-endedness and definability of art.45 The discussion of family resemblances is only one within an array of considerations that investigate our belief that understanding requires definitions – which in turn are part of the larger tapestry just examined. But the way Wittgenstein’s work is transposed to philosophy of art suggests the opposite: as if Wittgenstein advanced one decisive counterargument rather than an arrangement of interrelated and embedded considerations. The decidedly un-Wittgensteinian excision of one putatively decisive argument in art theory debates is important if for no other reason than that a single apparently ‘devastating’ argument is open to refutation that is just as apparently devastating. So let’s not start with the discussion of family resemblance concepts, as Wittgenstein does not, but consider how the issues take shape in the text. As we have considered, the Philosophical Investigations plunges us into examining our views about language – how it is learned, how it functions in real-life contexts and so on – confronting us almost immediately with our tendency to assume that all uses of words have some commonalities that we can capture in defining the nature of language.46 13. When we say: ‘Every word in the language signifies something’ we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. (it might be, of course, that we wanted to distinguish the words of language (8) [a minimal expansion of the slab language whereby people can give orders regarding pillars and slabs] from words ‘without meaning’ such as occur in Lewis Carroll’s poems, or words like ‘Lilliburlero’ in songs.) 14. Imagine someone’s saying: ‘All tools serve to modify something. Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on.’ – And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the

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nails? – ‘Our knowledge of a thing’s length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box.’ Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions? –

To arrive at clearer understanding, Wittgenstein invites us to consider the actual variety and complexity of what we do with language, this time taking the notion of a sentence as his example. 23. But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences.’ And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new languagegames, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life. Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them – Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements – Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) – Reporting an event – Speculating about an event – Forming and testing a hypothesis – Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams Making up a story; and reading it – Play-acting – Singing catches – Guessing riddles Making a joke, telling it – Solving a problem in practical arithmetic – Translating from one language into another – Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying …

He begins to articulate an answer that involves criticism of certain kinds of general questions at § 24. 24. If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: ‘What is a question?’

But then the ensuing sections, that take us to the family resemblance discussion starting at §65, return to examining various parts and uses of

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language – names for example – and our assumptions about them and what we picture as their relation to reality.47 The clear import is that we need to consider much detail to address our presuppositions. 65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. – For someone might object against me: ‘ You take the easy way out! you talk about all sort of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language … ’. And this is true. – Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, – but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language’. I will try to explain this.

This terse summary does not stand on its own but, given its location in the text, invokes the detailed examination of ‘all that we call language’ across the first sixty-four sections. The promised discussion does not simply address the additional example that Wittgenstein presents in this section – the notorious example of games – but concerns the diversity of language revealed across the first sixty-four sections. The additional example of the tremendous diversity of games that we play – ranging over solitaire, rugby and a child’s tossing a ball against a wall – only highlights that when it comes to such phenomena 66 … . we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

Wittgenstein first suggests a way to ‘characterize’ or describe these similarities: 67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way.

Notice how Wittgenstein switches within the key passage from the first example of members of a family to kinds of numbers. Discussions in philosophy of art, indeed discussions of family resemblance concepts, do not note this. The analogy of resemblances among family members is presented to characterize the nature of the diversity among games. Then Wittgenstein immediately switches to the second example of the variety of numbers along with a second analogy as he goes on to address how such phenomena can hold together as one kind, as the next quotation shows. I am interrupting the flow to make clear

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that the transition from descriptive to more explanatory considerations is made by proceeding to a second example of numbers to illustrate a highly diverse kind, a transition that is accompanied by switching from the analogy of family resemblances to the analogy of a spun thread. Here is the continuation of the passage. 67. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

The examination does not stop here but goes on across subsequent passages to consider how we might be able to use concepts without clear boundaries, how we could learn such concepts, in what sense we can be said to understand them, what [s]eeing what is common might be and more. These discussions lead to investigating what it is to follow rules – since using words involves following rules and one worry that the detailed investigations raise is that using words such as ‘game’ without a definition would involve rules that don’t specify all applications. Keeping the context of the family resemblance passages and the entirety of that discussion in view shows how both the neo-Wittgensteinian proposal and especially its criticisms diverge from Wittgenstein’s text. (i) Wittgenstein’s primary focus is not on the concept of language but on ‘all that we call language’, not on the concept but on the practices or language games themselves, the forms of life activities in which articulate language is an integral part. (ii) Wittgenstein’s general claims in §65 depend on the demonstrations that precede them. The earlier sections try to show that we will be less inclined to look for general definitions if we approach our subject matter by attending to the actual varied details of a phenomenon – be it ‘all that we call’ language or art – rather than from the abstract vantage point of a theory that presupposes that explanation requires specification of an essence. This is clear from §24. Whether we strive to define or to detail patterns of differences and similarities results from the attitude and commitments we bring to the subject matter. In this respect, the crucial matter might be settled before we arrive at the detailed variety of language or art. Insofar as we are in the business of constructing definitions, we are committed to the viability of our project in advance of having delved into the lived detail. Since this is one dimension of what the totality of interweaving considerations is designed to show, the general claims about ‘family resemblance’ are part of this complex design. As such, they do not serve to make a self-standing point about the indefinable nature of ‘family resemblance’ concepts.

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(iii) Moreover, the textual claim about family resemblances is tightly circumscribed. The claim is one part of a two-part discussion of our ability to use a single concept for a tremendous variety of phenomena in the absence of a definition – where the missing definition would have presumably specified the commonalities among the variety of phenomena in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. It is not only that we discern the sort of criss-crossing resemblances as in families but also that these resemblances function together as the fibres of a thread or rope. The text clearly offers two analogies not just one – one analogy to help characterize or describe the patterning of similarities and differences among members and the second to explain how they may form together into one kind, how new and diverse members can be added and how our ability to use a concept can encompass such additions. This is crucial from the perspective of debates in theory of art where it is said that the neo-Wittgensteinian challenge suggests that the similarities among artworks hold together by means of a prototype or paradigm – perhaps as a paterfamilias sitting in the centre of a family portrait – and that it is manifest similarities to paradigms that determine membership in the kind ‘art’ and extensions of it.48 But there is no such suggestion in Wittgenstein’s text,49 which does not delve into the nature of family resemblances for explanation but immediately switches analogies to that of a thread or rope in which no fibres are more important than any others in constituting a whole through their intertwining relationships. The switch is important because the neoWittgensteinian proposal was criticized as overlooking that family membership is not in fact constituted by similarities to paradigms but commonalities in underlying genetic structure. The point of the criticism is that family membership is determined by common properties after all – genes! This seems to vindicate belief in essences and definitions by showing that the sort of criss-crossing resemblances manifest in families are in fact an example where a common essence – genetic structure – explains the manifest diversity. The criticism is telling against the neo-Wittgensteinian proposal to the extent that their discussion focused attention on the analogy to family resemblances. But Wittgenstein’s text holds no such spotlight. The progression in §67 shows that Wittgenstein suggests we think of family resemblances to illustrate the possible complexity of a pattern. His second point is that in certain cases, if a structure is large and complex enough, overlapping local relationships among members can determine the whole. Yes, family resemblances are explained by commonalities in genetic structure. But this does not suggest that all complex phenomena characterized by criss-crossing similarities and differences need

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to be explained by underlying commonalities since the simple example of a thread shows this to be unnecessary. (iv) A related point, also established by the thread analogy, is that fibres at the far ends do not have to actually touch each other in order to be related as parts of one whole. Local relationships among many intervening members allow for relationships among highly disparate members and even relate distant members that need have no direct relationships. This readily suggests application to art (as neo-Wittgensteinians proposed). On the one hand, the realistic frescoes of the Ancient Greeks need share no art-relevant features with Duchamp’s urinal but might be part of an extended pattern nonetheless by virtue of numerous diverse local relations or overlapping fibres. On the other hand, certain artworks that seem to deny that it matters that there is an object at all can nevertheless be explained as art by virtue of their local relationships to various other art practices. (v) Both of the preceding points bear on the fact that Wittgenstein nowhere suggests that manifest, readily describable similarities must obtain among members of a ‘family resemblance’ kind. Here is the charge against the neoWittgensteinian proposal: To be sure, Wittgenstein does not explicitly state that the resemblances which are correlated with our use of common names must be of a sort that are directly exhibited. Nonetheless, all of his illustrations in the relevant passages involve aspects of games which would be included in a description of how a particular game is to be played; that is, when he commands us to ‘look and see’ whether there is anything common to all games, the ‘anything’ is taken to represent precisely the sort of manifest feature that is described in rule-books, such as Hoyle.50

Here is a recent restatement of the objection: Echoing Wittgenstein, Weitz and Kennick maintained that in order to identify an item as an art-work, one just needed to look and see – look and see whether a candidate resembles the paradigms or descendant therefrom in terms of their manifest features.51

Danto, for example, agreed with the prevailing understanding that manifest features were at issue in the neo-Wittgensteinian challenge to counter that when it came to the variety of 1960s art, including the variety of artworks that are indiscernible from ordinary counterpart objects: ‘clearly, there were no manifest overarching similarities’.52 This is the famous moment of realization in front of a pile of Brillo boxes on a gallery floor in 1964: ‘What struck me with the force of revelation … was that this view was entirely wrong.’53

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But Wittgenstein’s injunction to ‘look and see’ was not at all the narrow thesis as the objection claims: 66. Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games” ’ – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that … is there always winning and losing, and competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis.

The significance of the injunction to ‘look and see’ is determined against the background of passages such as §23 that display the diversity of language games. These passages redirect us towards scrupulous attention to lived detail, suggesting that when it comes to understanding the fact of human language, we have been derailed from such attention towards general theory formation that considers variety as something to be abstracted away because it is inconsequential and messy – much like the noise that obstructs an informational pattern rather than the elements of the pattern itself. This is different from enjoining us to restrict the relevant similarities to ‘manifest’ ones in a narrow sense. This difference is also clear from Wittgenstein’s list of the criss-crossing similarities among games. When we ‘look and see’ the role of luck or skill in a game, we are discerning patterns of a different order of complexity from the ‘manifest features’ that a rule book such as Hoyle’s might describe. Indeed, passage §67 stresses that it is not manifest similarities in the simple sense intended in the criticism that are at issue. This is clear from the example of the varieties of number that Wittgenstein presents in mid-section to connect his discussion of family resemblances with his point about how fibres make up a thread. 67. Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre.

The relationships to which Wittgenstein points are mathematical, concerning what we can do with numbers in practices that involve numbers. If the injunction to ‘look and see’ continues to apply, as it does, then we are being enjoined to ‘look and see’ what we can actually do with numbers in

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coming to recognize their variety. There is no question that for Wittgenstein, the complex relationships between numbers are included in what he directs us to ‘look and see’. Moreover, if one takes into account the Philosophical Investigations as a whole, one of its principal strands concerns the complexity of what we immediately perceive. Wittgenstein does not put a cap on perception, but rather urges that we can see the nuance and complexity of human feelings when looking at someone’s face, for just one example. The next chapter will elaborate this view in application to the experience of art. But even if we don’t go beyond the family resemblance passages themselves, the complex relationships among varieties of numbers indicate that it is consistent rather than inconsistent with Wittgenstein’s approach to consider artworks in relations they stand to one another within practices or theories, as well as in relation with each other. Hence, relational theories of art, beginning with Danto’s and Dickie’s, that focus on the context of complex relationships – theoretical, historical, institutional or practical – in which artworks stand cannot be claiming to do something ‘anti-Wittgensteinian’, something that Wittgenstein was arguing against. In an irony of historical hindsight, Wittgenstein’s discussion of the way the concept of number is extended emphasizes relationships, which Danto urged as a new insight in the mid 1960s to rebut the neo-Wittgensteinian approach.54

Art as intertwining practices Wittgenstein’s work helps us address art’s pluralism without the essentialism that is a key premise both for Danto’s structural sense of ending and for the ongoing demotion of beauty as not part of the nature of art. A Wittgensteinian perspective on life activities and practices as rule- or norm-governed endeavours suggests that art is a variable and evolving norm-governed type of activity that involves some agreement in constitutive norms at the level of community. Extending the idea of constitutive rules to constitutive norms captures both the historically contingent and changing character of art and the sense that there is something at work very much like a ‘nature’ in the sense of something with a determining or constitutive force that we need to understand. But what is determining need not be a ‘nature’, always ‘eternally the same’ so that ‘there are conditions necessary and sufficient for being an artwork, regardless of time and place’.55 At any point in time, constitutive norms and values ‘make’ something

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art just as our intuitions suggest, but their role is specific to certain practices just as rules are specific to the endeavours they inform; and this is important in order to understand the historically contingent nature of art practices in a way that relational definitions or disjunctive explanations do not. Just as the constitutive rules in chess specify the legal moves of each of the pieces, which give the identity conditions for an item as being a knight or a rook, the more general idea is that constitutive rules or norms of various kinds specify what is correct or appropriate to do and thereby provide identity conditions for the resulting entities. In the case of art, constitutive rules or norms would pertain to the means, techniques, subject matters and other factors that go into the making of an artwork. (For much of this discussion I will use the generic notion of constitutive norms or values for brevity, with the understanding that this is shorthand for the variety of norm-governed means, techniques, subject matters, values and other factors for artworks.) Wittgenstein’s holistic realism suggests that we need to understand how various structures of permissions and constraints of art practices get their point and force in their broader contexts. Such holism speaks against a systematic theory of practice in general or of art practice more specifically, directing us to more ‘case by case’ understanding. Insofar as constitutive norms and values are specific to practices, a Wittgensteinian perspective emphasizes that they change along with shifts and alterations in others of our forms of life activities and practices. Because constitutive norms change as ways of living change, such alterations in constitutive norms are not arbitrary. As forms of life activities change, different ways of ‘going on’ become available as well as different factors that motivate or constrain us in ‘going on’ in certain ways rather than others. xii. Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian for instance.) Is it a mere question of pleasing and ugly? (PI Part II)

On this view, beauty – or various specific beauties to be precise – are one among a variety of constitutive norms for specific art practices. This allows us to understand that European art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, has a certain historically evolving beauty as its constitutive value while other art practices (that are integral to different cultural eras) have a very different beauty as a constitutive value, the beauty of the Japanese Edo period, for example; while other art practices, integral to still other forms of life, might not have beauty as a constitutive value at all, as it seems that art practices in Europe and North America in the later half of the twentieth century did not.

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The family resemblance passages offer analogies that give explanatory form to these ideas – though I have suggested that a more effective caption is that some concepts are multiply intertwining, or simply fibrous rather than family resemblance concepts. The diversity in ‘all that we call art’ involves criss-crossing similarities and local relationships that hold together like the fibres of a spun thread: locally overlapping practices with related constitutive norms, values and aims intertwine with the result that not only similarities but also differences overlap and criss-cross. To take a simplified example for illustration, consider art practices of Medieval Europe that were integral to religious forms of life activities and aimed to produce artefacts for religious worship. These art practices came to aim at beautiful perceptual verisimilitude as well – but that aim emerged as constitutive as the forms of life were also becoming increasingly secular so that the primary aim or raison d'être of the emerging, related art practices gradually ceased to be the production of religious artefacts. And both of these aims came to be replaced by different constitutive norms as practices intertwined throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such local relationships or overlappings – across many dimensions – secure both continuity and diversity. The thread of art might be so long and thick that numerous fibres might not overlap; the norms of many art practices may be quite distinct rather than similar. But this fact would not undermine the integrity of the whole insofar as there are local relationships or ‘overlappings’ that connect strands that don’t overlap. What about the concept ‘art’? Wittgenstein’s work reminds us to approach the concept by considering the diverse practices themselves. If art is a pattern of locally overlapping norm-governed practices with a variety of constitutive norms and values, then the term ‘art’ may not have a univocal meaning across cultural eras. As in the example above, the concept might change if the constitutive norms of the practices change – this would depend on the specifics. It may also be the case, as Chapter 1 considered through Belting and Danto’s work, that a Western concept of art that evolves in a certain range of cultural practices may be extended backwards historically and to works in other cultures – as well as being incorporated or adopted by other cultures. One might identify artworks that did not figure as such in their own cultural or historical context, for example, because their primary function was religious. Wittgenstein’s view that we may mistake the logical grammar of some of our concepts suggests that there may be times and places where we might not understand that the logical grammar of our uses of ‘art’ has a structure that allows for diverse criss-crossing, overlapping uses. For any particular speaker, one use

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of ‘art’ will be primary in the sense that it is part of her second nature: it is the use that is integral with the local art practice(s) so that speakers are trained into that particular use. Insofar as Madame de Pompadour, for example, used what is in fact a fibre concept while discussing the beautiful works making up the royal art collection, her use is related in criss-crossing, overlapping ways to many other uses – whether she knows this or not, and presumably she didn’t or at least didn’t appreciate its full extent. Madame de Pompadour’s eighteenth-century use would be more confined than Virginia Woolf ’s early twentieth-century use and much more confined than the late twentieth-century usage that concerns Belting and Danto. If a speaker attempts to expand her use from that which is immediate to her, she might make mistakes. Understandably, her mistakes might be more numerous or more significant as the art she considers has fewer or no local relations to the art that is an integral dimension of her second nature. This perspective releases one from a seeming obligation to supply a definition of the concept that specifies what is common to all art in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, or even a nonessentializing explanation in terms of a cluster of conditions. Arthur Danto’s relational definition and Berys Gaut’s cluster account offer instructive contrast. The contrast is instructive because, as we will see, a Wittgensteinian perspective highlights that both approaches share a key commitment: to keep the role of contingency out of the definition or account. First, recall that Danto’s response to the neo-Wittgensteinian denial that art is definable countered that we need to find a way to combine essentialism with historicism. ‘Essentialism and historicism are widely regarded as antithetical, whereas I see them not only as compatible but as coimplicated with one another, at least in the case of art.’56 But ‘coimplicated’ in what sense? Danto argues that the single essence that all artworks share – namely that all artworks embody meanings – is realized in or through historical circumstances.57 Second, Berys Gaut has argued that the family resemblance passages suggest a nonessentializing approach that explains the concept in terms of a cluster of disjunctively necessary conditions, some subsets of which are sufficient. This accounts for the historical diversity and open-endedness of art in the absence of a definition.58 There is much affinity between Gaut’s reading of Wittgenstein and the one offered here; for example, Gaut also denies that the idea of family resemblance involves similarity to paradigms and restricts us to manifest ‘visible or intrinsic’ properties. The divergence turns on the role of contingency. First, consider the logical form of a disjunctive explanation that Gaut emphasizes. Art might be explained, for example, as ‘being expressive of emotion’ or ‘being

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intellectually challenging’, or ‘…’ for any properties or characteristics of art that we can discern from the way the concept of art is actually used.59 This logical form accommodates the diversity that some art is expressive of emotion; while some art is both intellectually challenging and expressive of emotion, yet other art might turn on different key properties. Insofar as an explanation offers a range of properties, and specifies that from these conditions some disjunction is individually necessary, art is being explained by conditions whose necessity obtains ‘regardless of time and place’,60 as Danto has repeatedly emphasized – even though those conditions may in fact only obtain in certain cultural eras, which the disjunctive form allows. Here is Gaut: A cluster account is true of a concept just in case there are properties whose instantiation by an object counts as a matter of conceptual necessity toward its falling under the concept. These properties are normally called criteria, but it is important not to associate all the connotations which this term has acquired with its use here: a criterion is simply to be understood as a property possession of which counts as a matter of conceptual necessity toward an object’s falling under a concept.61

Consider the way that Danto zeroes in on the issue: ‘The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed – it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history.’62 Danto’s key commitment here is clear, namely to distinguish the essence or nature of something from what is contingent – from what enters into the way that essence becomes realized in different historical eras. ‘[T]he essence cannot contain anything that is historically or culturally contingent.’63 My point is that Gaut’s cluster concept of art does not dispute this commitment, since there is nothing in the disjunctive form of a cluster explanation that specifies that the various properties necessary for art are bound to contingent circumstances. In contrast, the notion of constitutive norms suggests that local art practices are informed or determined by something with the strength of being determining, such as necessary and sufficient conditions attempt to capture, but with a normative force bound to a specific practice. This means that later artists, such as those working in the early decades of the twentieth century, could recognize certain constitutive norms of the beaux-arts tradition, for example, without feeling bound by those norms. In short, this approach captures the sense that art practices diverge significantly in what they are – in their very nature, we might be tempted to say. And there would be nothing wrong with this phrase, so long as we are in a position to remind ourselves that depending on what is in question, its ‘nature’ – in the neutral sense of what makes something what it

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is – might be a matter of necessary and sufficient conditions, or of constitutive norms and values of rule-informed historical phenomena. What divides Danto and Gaut from Wittgenstein, I suggest, is how to understand the role of historical contingency. From Danto’s essentialist perspective, the conundrum is that ‘it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history’. From another perspective, the puzzle is how to understand and articulate that the objective facts, norms and values extant in our activities ‘come into view’ though ‘not into being’ in historical contexts. The differences between a relational definition, a disjunctive cluster account and an examination of art’s constitutive norms turn on how to capture this relationship in the form of an account. I hesitate to offer examples of constitutive norms integral to particular art practices since the detailed expertise for filling in this Wittgensteinian framework lies with art historians. Nevertheless, let me indicate how changing to a Wittgensteinian perspective meshes with art-historical approaches and addresses some hard cases. Art historian Linda Nochlin’s work stands out for its Wittgensteinian outlook, for the way it explains the connection between broader historical factors and the force of artistic norms. Nochlin contextualizes artworks within a broader social history to show how specific works respond simultaneously to multiple pressures from their broader social as well as their artistic context, and thereby change extant norms. Her point is not that the pressures exhaustively explain the ‘uniqueness’ or ‘singularity’ of certain pivotal works, but that ‘the corporeal eye, the visceral eye’ – of artists, historians and ordinary viewers alike – is historical: ‘all eyes are located not merely in bodies but in historically specific bodies and can thus be viewed within a history of representation and a history of practices, a social history, in short that can thicken up our responses’. This thesis is developed in her recent Bathers, Bodies, Beauty,64 which examines the changing representation of the human body across the past 200 years from a unique starting point: the mid nineteenth-century Parisian craze for swimming pools. Nochlin details how ‘the practice of bathing and swimming … was coming into being’65 with the building of numerous pools in the river Seine and across Paris, accompanied by new interest in health, sport and hygiene, all of which involved a range of representations, discursive and visual, from magazine articles, illustrations and advertisements to satirical cartoons and paintings. These facts set up her examination of paintings that take the naked body as their theme to the present day. Nochlin argues that the bathing craze exerted pressure not simply

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on paintings of bathing but on the heroic landscape or paysage composé, which presents human subjects in landscape settings and includes bathing as a subtheme. This is because both themes or genres share an apparently ahistorical dimension. The paysage composé locates subjects in landscapes where time seems to stand still. Similarly, the bathing theme ‘seems to be a natural “given” of art history: timeless, elevated, idealized, and as such central to the discourses of high art’.66 But Nochlin’s attention to the social context shows that the contrast with the explosively changing nature of bathing as a recreational outdoor activity for large numbers of people in urban settings could hardly have been more stark and changes painting of the human body. For example, her approach situates Manet’s Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe innovatively at the intersection of the paysage composé and the bathing theme, rather than just within the latter figurative genre67 by showing that the Dejeuner subverts traditional ‘atemporal’ or ‘ahistorical’ landscape painting along with a similarly ahistorical figurative tradition running through the bathing genre. It is in such arguments that Nochlin analyses how a genre is informed by constitutive norms concerning subject matter, means and techniques that give identity to the works, and how these evolve through interplay between the broader social context and a range of artistic permissions and constraints. The following quotation is just one example of her discussion of the visual means by which Manet introduces ‘the instability of the historical process into the realm of the natural’.68 History, in the Dejeuner … refuses to stand still but rather bursts upon us … in the destruction of the ‘natural’ setting and the transcendent harmony of the figure/ground relationship. But the Dejouner does not submit easily to a simplistic analysis of its relation to history either. It is neither flat (that is, totally present, in temporal terms, eradicating history) nor spatially illusionistic (‘deep’, evoking temporality, the passage of time, history) but both: the figures are deliberately flattened, but the wings of the landscape, the peripheries, reveal themselves as illusionistic, suggesting mysterious depth penetrating the picture plane. Yet neither depth nor flatness is really privileged, but rather both in different parts of the picture, so that the artifice of the pictorial construction is itself foregrounded.69

While Nochlin’s work illustrates a Wittgensteinian emphasis on the relationships between specific art practices and forms of life activities through which constitutive norms emerge and change, a Wittgensteinian perspective also highlights Dave Hickey’s point that rules both liberate and constrain us, which helps explain innovative works or movements as responses to the restrictive effect of norms. ‘The Heresy of Zone Defense’ discusses art together

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with basketball, which is unique in having been invented at a specific welldocumented moment through the design of a set of constitutive rules.70 Hickey highlights how novel game-changing acts, such as Jackson’s Pollock’s drip paintings or Julius Erwing’s 1980s basket, ‘elevate’ us into the ‘joy’ that is attendant on seeing that something is ‘at once new and fair’, ‘the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules’.71 But drip painting also came to govern and constrain once it emerged as a norm, Hickey argues, which highlights how ‘the trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern’.72 This is a key point since it draws out that a Wittgensteinian approach is not conservative. Norms are liberatory – innovation is made possible by second-nature activity – and they may also be restrictive – which may also motivate us to innovate. Nochlin and Hickey’s work highlights how a Wittgensteinian approach is apt for considering much of the variety of twentieth century art as challenging extant norms. In contrast, the definitional framework in theories of art suggests we consider how such works clarify our understanding of art by defying or negating conditions that had been taken to be necessary. For a hard puzzle, consider ‘conceptual art’. There is controversy over narrower and broader uses of the term, but for our purposes a narrower use is more instructive since it focuses on works that are ‘distinguished by the relative absence of physically robust material and by the recourse to linguistic specification and description which that absence entailed’.73 Such works tend to do away with an object entirely in favour of a linguistic specification of a process that someone might carry out or an object whose ‘first-order physical properties’ serve only to present linguistic text and textually conveyed ideas. Some often-discussed examples are Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, which resulted from a set of instructions to be carried out by others, Lawrence Weiner’s A River Spanned, which offers the preceding phrase but is neutral over whether the description needs to be realized in any way, as indeed it was not when exhibited, and Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1.36 P.M.; 15 June 1969, New York, which can be entertained only in imagination (if at all). A Wittgensteinian approach highlights that conceptual artists were challenging aesthetic norms associated with abstract expressionism and theorized in Clement Greenberg’s arguments that visual art (like any art) was justified by a Kantian critique of its own limiting and hence necessary conditions.74 In Hickey’s terms, artists such as Sol LeWitt found that the norms developed by abstract expressionism had ceased to liberate, having rather begun to govern in a way that no longer ‘elevated us into joy’.75 Since the aesthetic

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values of abstract expressionism were identified at the time as clarifying the conditions of visual perceptibility as such, conceptual art proposed alternative norms concerning subject matter and means or techniques that do away with a perceptible object. With these facts in the foreground – that conceptual art addresses abstract expressionism and other practices that draw on perceptual effect in order to liberate artworks from norms that had become constraining – it is clear that conceptual art stands in local relationships to art practices just as Wittgenstein’s fibre analogy specifies. Further, the Wittgensteinian framework suggests that conceptual works and the broader context of discussion they engender are part of the process of cultural conversation or ‘disputation’ whereby the norms of specific practices evolve. In particular, part of the discussion surrounding conceptual art addresses whether perceptibility has a defeasible role in art practices, as I will examine in the next chapter. Wittgenstein’s work suggests that this is a contingent matter, unfolding in contemporary debates over conceptual art.

Relational definitions of art and history Yet relational definitions have taken the lead in the past few decades of theorizing for the reasons canvassed above – the neo-Wittgensteinian view was taken to challenge definitions by highlighting family resemblances among features that one can ‘look and see’ while relational definitions showed how appeal to broader context can allow for open-ended variability. This raises the question whether Wittgenstein’s work addresses relational definitions, especially historical ones? Though the full variety of relational definitions in their individual complexity lies beyond our scope here, examining historical definitions will bring out the key point of contact. Historical definitions are especially important since it may seem that my emphasis on Wittgenstein’s historicism fails to appreciate that art may be defined relationally in terms of its actual detailed history. In particular, Jerrold Levinson’s suggestion that art is a uniquely internally historical concept sharpens our understanding of the impasse between Wittgenstein’s later work and the core definitional commitment to abstract away from the role of contingent factors, for which I argued in the last section.76 Like Danto, Levinson believes that in the past 100 years or so just about all the recognizable constraints that characterized Western art have been shown to be inessential. As a result, the contemporary Western concept of art is almost

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completely denuded of substantive content so that ‘[i]t is an almost purely historical notion, where what is essential to being art is having the right sort of (intentional, as it turns out) relation to one’s artistic predecessors – and the same can be said, if pressed, of those predecessors, and of their predecessors, and so on’.77 Like Danto, Levinson believes that a correct understanding of art only becomes possible as a result of recent historical developments: ‘this highly abstract, self-referential condition I propose as the minimal essence of artmaking is one that could not have been evident to us before the deconstruction, if we may call it that, performed on the practice of art by the avant-gardists of the early twentieth century’.78 Here is one representative statement of the definition. (I) X is an art work = df X is an object which a person or persons, having the appropriate proprietary right over X, nonpassingly intends for regard-as-awork-or-art, i.e., regard in any way (or ways) in which prior art works are or were correctly (or standardly) regarded.79,80

Levinson proposes that the concept of art is not merely externally historical in that it changes and evolves, but that currently the concept is internally historical in that it adverts indexically to the actual history of art and specifies that an object must stand in a certain relation to that actual history. Since meanings of concepts involve more than their extension (the actual objects to which a concept applies), Levinson’s definition raises an interesting issue about art: is the contemporary concept of art a limiting case in that its meaning is given almost entirely by its historical extension? Has the concept itself – what it means – become empty of almost all but a self-reflexive specification of the historical objects and regards? Since something must be informatively specified in addition to the extensional part of the definition, Levinson argues that this is only the relation in which an object must stand to the history of art. In particular, the relation concerns the intentions with which the object is produced: the object must be intended to be regarded in certain ways. Two sets of historical entities figure in the definition – artworks and correct regards: ‘not only earlier artworks themselves, but also their associated proper modes of engagement, had to be granted, in extension, for the analysis (of “art now” in terms of “art until now”) to be effective’.81 This purely extensional part of the definition is key both for substantive and definitional reasons since it captures in one stroke how minimal the concept has become and avoids circularity – the way that artworks are intended to be regarded is supplied by the actual ways that artworks have been correctly regarded and by the artworks so the concept of art is not used again to explain or specify these ways of regard.

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A number of objections have been raised,82 but I would like to highlight Levinson’s crucial qualification that the relevant historical art-regards must be correct and not simply rewarding or successful. Levinson agrees that the issue of what makes a correct regard is important and difficult, but insists that a definition is none the worse for not specifying this in any way – and he definitely does not hold out hope for a general specification of correct regards for art. To show how acute the problem is, Levinson transposes Wittgenstein’s notorious example of counting by one and the way it might seem that following this rule could permute to accommodate any counting someone might go on to do. He asks us to suppose that Renaissance portraits ‘come to be regarded in a new and unprecedented way, viz. they begin to be used as thermal insulation … [and that] through an amazing decline in taste or an unparalleled need for insulation, this manner of regard becomes the rule’. He argues, ‘If we omit “correctly” from our definition, or replace it by “commonly” or “rewardingly”, then given the case as described, it follows from our definition that anything subsequently intended by its maker for use as insulation (e.g. a sheet of fiberglass) would be an art work.’ But ‘this must be wrong. It can’t be possible to turn all tomorrow’s fibreglass production into art simply through general misuse today of a certain class of portraits’.83 The problem may be averted, he insists, by indexing only the regards that are correct. But just pointing to actual correct regards won’t do. The problem results from considering a series of additions or regards as much like bits of code – a set of blank items to which interpretation needs to be added for meaning – so that the same regards might either be of portraits or insulation. My discussion of Wittgensteinian realism argued against this view. Wittgenstein’s examinations of rule-following indicate that there is no fact of the matter about a series of additions being correct if we think of them in this way, which is to think of them in abstraction from a structures of permissions and constraints in which they inhere and in which they have a certain meaning. Such a series of ‘blank objects’ abstracted from the structure of permissions and constraints in which they figure cannot determine future application of a rule that is correct. In this respect, the series of ‘correct’ regards of Renaissance portraits (by a community of individuals) is no different from counting by one correctly (by a single individual or community): after 1000 counting by two may be claimed to be the rule that was always being followed, just as at a certain point use as insulation might be claimed to be – ‘as a matter of fact’ – the rule that was being followed ‘correctly’ all along. The idea of determinate rule-following would be empty. To slay this dragon, we cannot simply point to (some finite number of) regards that

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are correct up to or at that time. We need to reorient to correctness as inherent in specific structures of permissions and constraints extant in our ways of doing things rather than as distinct from them. But Levinson insists on excluding broader facts about practices due to considerations about the nature of art and the requirements of definitions. First, he believes that social factors are not essential to art as these have been identified by institutional theories of art that are concerned with ‘social procedures, status or role’ at a time. I do not mean to deny that there is a common practice of art, and a group of people bound together under that umbrella, nor do I deny that art works need to be understood in relation to their cultural situation. What I do deny is that the institutions of art in a society are essential to art, and that an analysis of arthood must therefore involve them.84

Second, social facts are too ‘contingent’ for the purposes of definition. What I have tried to locate … [is] whether we can demonstrate a minimal thread of continuity between what it is to be art in 1990 and what it was to be art in, say, 990 B.C., to go back no further, and to do that without appeal to the social, political and economic structures that surround the making of art at different times-including those which are denoted by the label ‘the Artworld’ which seem too contingent and tangential for the purpose at hand, and arguably absent or only minimally present in some circumstances in which art making seems to occur nevertheless.85 (my emphasis)

Levinson is clear – like Danto and Gaut above – that a definition needs to keep contingent detail out to have the requisite generality, so such detailed facts belong to the ‘sociology’ of art instead. The making of art is primary; the social frameworks and conventions that grow up around it are not. While the sociology of art is of great interest, the essence of art does not lie there but instead in art’s relation to its contingent history. The theory I offer sketches in its main outlines what this relation is.86

But Wittgenstein’s work suggests that the changing structures of permissions and constraints that make certain regards correct for art implicate further social-historical detail, as Nochlin’s work details, for example. So the impasse between Levinson’s historical definition and Wittgenstein’s approach is not as Levinson casts it in line with the usual understanding of the family resemblance passages. Wittgenstein is not suggesting that some concepts depend only on strands of similarity and so have only ‘shards of sense’.87 Rather, the issue is the intricate and diverse contingent facts that help

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explain the structures of permissions and constraints that enter into making and regarding art in different cultural contexts and so are not amenable to general definition. This brings us to the variety of definitional approaches, which follow through on the putatively anti-Wittgensteinian insight that it is the relational rather than manifest, intrinsic properties that ‘make something art’. Relational approaches divide according to whether they cast the essential relational properties as functional, procedural, historical or some hybrid combination thereof.88 Increasingly, some consensus seems to be emerging about at least some of the dimensions that need to be in play, though theories may allocate or combine these with different emphasis. The measure of consensus seems to concern the historically indexical nature of art – that, as Danto put it, the conditions for artworks are historically specific – along with some role for social practices. Insofar as the role of social practices is invoked directly or indirectly, the problem arises of providing some distinguishing marks of art practices in the general terms appropriate for definitions. And along with the measure of consensus about art practices, there seems to be a correlative recognition that this is a ‘difficult’ task. But then this task is either allocated to the sociology of art, as Levinson does, or is treated as not especially threatening to the philosophical task of definition. Let’s consider each in turn. First, here is Robert Stecker’s assessment, for example. To date, institutional definitions of art have not exhibited the resources to distinguish artworld systems, practices, audiences, etc. from non-artworld systems, practices, audiences, etc. Is there any reason to think the resources exist to distinguish in institutional terms central art forms from other things? I don’t know. I take this to be a question for sociologists or anthropologists of art. If there are distinguishing marks of art institutions, practices, or forms, they are empirically discovered marks. If there are really no such marks, I guess we have to give up on the whole idea of an artworld or of art institutions. Since the non-existence of art institutions does seem highly unlikely, I am willing to leave the matter of finding resources … in the hands of the social scientists.89

But I have argued that when it comes to understanding norms and norminformed activity, Wittgenstein’s approach undermines such neat divisions between philosophical work of definition and investigation of social fact allocated to sociologists, while it also counsels against a systematic theory of practice. Stephen Davies casts the problem of needing to distinguish art practices

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as the ‘art world relativity problem’, without allocating it to sociology but also without seeing it as an obstacle for definitions of art: Any theory that makes arthood depend on historical reflexivity within a given Artworld, while allowing (as it should) that there are different Artworlds each with its own history, fails to complete its analysis satisfactorily, if it does not analyze the nature of Artworlds … It is implausible to think that all and only Artworlds exhibit a particular social structure, but, if art is itself Artworld relative, there must be something common to Artworlds beyond the fact that their products are art works … By drawing attention to the ubiquity of the Artworld relativity problem I do not mean to imply that the enterprise of defining art is bound to fail. The point, rather, is that progress in analyzing art’s nature is likely to demand of philosophers closer attention to the wider social setting in which art is produced and received, and a greater sensitivity to the variety of such settings, many of which fall outside the ambit of the Artworld of ‘high’ Western art.90

It is interesting that without noting Wittgenstein’s contribution, the problem of recognizing art’s ‘wider social setting’ is increasingly identified. But if Wittgenstein is right, contingent matters of fact obstruct the generality of a definition of art – though they invite rather than deny understanding that is case by case rather than through a systematic theory of practice. This brings us to the differences between explanations and definitions. Stephen Davies has distinguished between theories and definitions of art to suggest that they have different aims and divide in interesting ways. A Wittgensteinian understanding of art – that pays close attention to the broader social setting of the structures of permissions and constraints that are specifically constitutive for art and that change along with the broader factors – might be thought of as akin to theory or explanation of art in something like Davies’ sense provided that its purview takes its cue from the norms that need to be understood rather than antecedent commitment to ‘high altitude’: By contrast [from a definition], a theory of art can be more general in discussing what is typical or normative for works of art. A theory of art should never be totally revelatory, unless it can also argue that everyone is deeply deceived about the concept they employ. Many theories of art can be expected to consider how artworks are identified and individuated. In doing so, sometimes they will concentrate on difficult cases, such as Duchamp’s readymades, and try to explain why they are borderline and what might be relevant to settling their status or otherwise as art. Lastly but importantly, an adequate theory of art is bound to reflect on art’s significance within human lives and affairs.91

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Conclusion This chapter has argued that Wittgenstein’s later work offers a realist orientation to our activities and practices in their larger contexts. This holistic perspective highlights the context of agreement in norms which is necessary for the immediacy with which we are attuned and responsive to the facts and values available in our ways of living. I argued that this framework reorients us to art as practices whose constitutive norms give identity to the works and the activities. Since norms are specific to practices in their broader historical circumstances, we can appreciate art as a diversity of practices with historically specific permissions and constraints that stand in local relationships. It is the recognition that permissions and constraints are historically specific and ‘imbricated’ with diverse other activities and practices that divides a Wittgensteinian approach from definitional approaches, since these are committed to abstracting away from the role of contingency. Yet the breadth of contingent facts that defy definitions of art also resurfaces as a challenge for a Wittgensteinian approach. If artworks figure in a variety of practices with differing constitutive norms, one might question whether the norms of local practices and their interrelations suffice to explain how just these practices rather than others intertwine into one thick rope of art. This raises the worry that after all is said and done, Wittgenstein’s work merely reframes Danto and Belting’s concerns, from which we set out in Chapter 1, about the diversity of endeavours collected together from the perspective of art history? But, recall the broader textual context of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ passage concerning the variety of all that we call language. The import of the extended discussion is that when it comes to fibrous or ‘family resemblance’ concepts, aside from local circumscribed similarities, any overarching commonality or commonalities are at so great a level of generality that they are not explanatory of themselves. There is no denial that an account might address the commonality of multifaceted practices as it recognizes their diversity. The question is how to do so. Consider the following passage. 12. It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-level, the

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harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro.

Wittgenstein suggests that when we look into a locomotive what we see would be captured by means of a truism – we see handles that are alike insofar as they are all supposed to be handled – but one that we don’t really understand unless we engage the diversity of actual handles. This leaves us with two tasks rather than one. So far, I have focused on clarifying his caution that we won’t understand diversity unless we engage with specific contingent differences. But the task is not only to keep the diversity of art practices in view as the pattern rather than noise. We also need to find the appropriate truistic insight to help individuate the pattern. One needs to handle the diverse handles in the locomotive and one needs to understand what handles have in common. The next chapter will address this issue.

Notes 1

2

3 4

As I indicated in the Introduction, McDowell has written very carefully that Wittgenstein’s ‘conception of linguistic community’ is ‘non anti-realist’. The context of this remark is a response to Crispin Wright’s anti-realist readings of Wittgenstein (§11 p. 253 ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998). For more recent statements of Crispin Wright’s view, see his ‘Following a Rule’, ‘Rule-Following, Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning’, and ‘Rule-Following, Meaning and Constructivism’ in his Rails to Infinity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). The ‘package’ of McDowell’s explication of Wittgenstein’s views is mainly Mind and World, with a New Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and the four papers collected in Mind, Value and Reality: ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, 221–262; ‘Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, 263–278; ‘One Strand in the Private Language Argument’, 279–296; and ‘Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein’, 297–321. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bradford Book, 1991). Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Contant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, all further quotations will be cited using the section number in the text. See especially Diamond, ‘The Realistic Spirit,’ The Realistic Spirit, 39–72.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), VI–28. 6 For examples, see Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Meredith Williams, Blind Obedience, Paradox and Learning in the Later Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Both Stern and Williams parse the structure of passages in the Philosophical Investigations as organized around paradoxes and their resolution. 7 Philosophers of mind dispute whether this is an appropriate explanation for the way that the neural networks of the brain implement representations. Here, my point is that the multidimensional relationships whereby a complex system settles into a state is a good image for the way persons figure in natural cum historical circumstances. In discussion of mental supervenience, such views might be debated as global supervenience, but I am not putting forward a supervenience view or suggesting that Wittgenstein does so. Aesthetic supervenience will be discussed critically in Chapter 6 on beauty. 8 David Pears, Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 1–16. 9 I have mentioned that my interpretation builds on John McDowell’s work, which has been taken up by Hilary Putnam over the last two decades. So the reader may recognize the view I offer as similar to Putnam’s Wittgensteinian turn away from his earlier championing of metaphysical and internal realisms respectively. But our interpretations diverge significantly over the account of perception that is integral to a Wittgensteinian realist framework. This is a key difference on which my approach turns, though it will only emerge in the next chapter on perception and art, where I argue (in tune with McDowell) that a conceptualist realism about perception derives from Wittgenstein’s work, which Putnam denies. The argument in the next chapter about perception and art depends on the building blocks put in place in this one. Here, in reconstructing Wittgenstein’s realism, the chief difference will be that whereas Putnam argues in a more ‘high-altitude’ manner that turns on the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for independently motivated issues in theories of truth and reference, I will proceed from the ground or rather text-up, with close attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with rules, training and immediacy. 10 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI, 23. 11 See John McDowell’s discussion of this understanding of Wittgensteinian quietism, ‘How Not to Read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein’, in his The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2009), 96–111.

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12 Another consideration is that just as Wittgenstein’s own voice becomes more comfortable with constructive statements by his final work in On Certainty, we might find a comfort level greater than that of the Investigations itself with speaking somewhat constructively about what it helps us learn. I am not suggesting that we reinterpret the earlier text in view of the later one, but that it does not do violence to the overall shape of Wittgenstein’s later thought and what we might learn from it to increase our comfort level with constructive statements that do not conflict with his specific warnings, about theorizing attitudes, for example. This brings up the fraught issue of the relationships in which his later work, and the Philosophical Investigations in particular, might stand to Wittgenstein’s earlier and very late work, bounded by the Tractatus and ‘resolute’ readings at one end, and On Certainty and invocation of a ‘third Wittgenstein’ at the other. Here, my aim is to steer a moderate course (if such there is), and I hope that the test of my reading will be its substance rather than explicit address to these disputes. For the ‘resolute’ reading, see James Conant and Cora Diamond, ‘On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely, reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan’, in Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, eds. Max Kobel and Bernhard Weiss (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), especially § 5. For the ‘Third Wittgenstein’, see Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, ed., The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-investigations Works (Aldershot, Hants; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 13 ‘Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom’, ed. E. Villaneuva, Perception, Philosophical Issues, 7 (1996): 283–300, 285. 14 I am not suggesting that the relationships are internal in the sense introduced by Baker and Hacker: that grammar or the relationships revealed in grammar are autonomous, that the internal relations involved in following rules are ‘the product of grammar, of linguistic conventions’(124). Though much that I have written here is in agreement with the points they make in ‘Rule-scepticism and the harmony between language and reality’, I also believe that they introduce a distorting emphasis on linguistic conventions. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1984). 15 This distinguishes building as a form of life activity from building as a life activity of a non-linguistic animal such as a beaver: beavers can build together or alongside one another but not in the cooperative way where one beaver can direct another to specific tasks. It is this specificity that holds the potential for an open-ended multiplicity of possible variations so that in our case there are forms of life activity. 16 David Stern offers a helpful discussion of Wittgensteinian holism by examining the distinction between theoretical and practical holism (following Hubert Dreyfus). The impasse is that theoretical and practical holists agree on the two following points. (1) ‘[W]e are always already within the “hermeneutic circle” – we have no alternative to starting with our current understanding’; and (2) there is a background of ‘practices, equipment, locations, and broader horizons that are

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Beauty and the End of Art not specific presuppositions or assumptions, yet are part and parcel of our ability to engage in conversation or find our way about’. But they disagree on the way to understand the practical background. Theoretical holism argues that, ‘if such a background is necessary, it must be analyzable in terms of further rules, intentions, or a tacit belief system’. But the practical holist argues that this fails ‘to do justice to the contextual, embodied, and improvisational character of practices. Rules are not self-interpreting, and their application depends on skill: “rules leave loopholes open, and the practice has to speak for itself.” ’ (Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Holism and Hermeneutics’, Review of Metaphysics, 34 (1980): 3–24.) Stern argues that Wittgenstein is trying to move us beyond this opposition into a Pyrrhonian suspension of this dichotomy. He points out that though passages in the Philosophical Investigations such as 241, 198–202 (quoted above) seem to support the practical holist view, they are ‘places where the narrator is responding to aggressive questions, and should not be read as a definitive formulation of dogmatic theses … [but] is best read … as a Pyrrhonian dialogue that includes both a voice that is tempted by theoretical holism and a narrator who corrects the first voice by advocating a form of practical holism, rather than as unequivocally endorsing either of these views’ (Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 167). But I don’t think that Wittgenstein’s text opposes two dichotomous alternatives. Stern argues that defenders of either form of holism ‘miss Wittgenstein’s Pyrrhonian point, which is that there is no philosophical problem about rulefollowing, no “gap” between rules and their application of the kind that concerns both sceptic and anti-sceptics’. To be sure, the problematic ‘gap’ between rules and their applications that exercises sceptics and their respondents rests on mistaken presuppositions – this is part of Wittgenstein’s view as I will argue above. I also agree, as Stern writes, that ‘For those looking for an approach to practice that starts from particular cases, for a way of investigating practices without doing practice theory [a systematic theory of practice], Wittgenstein’s unsystematic approach holds out the hope of doing justice to the indefinite and multicoloured filigree of everyday life’ (Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 167). But I don’t think that Wittgenstein isolates the factors that practical and theoretical holists prioritize in order to move beyond them into a Pyrrhonian end state. Rather, what theoretical and practical holists prioritize are dimensions that enter into and are suspended in different weightings or contributions in the ‘multicoloured filigree[s] of everyday life’. There may be circumstances where the dimensions that theoretical holists emphasize have more ‘weight’ in the total state, and there may be circumstances where the dimensions that practical holists emphasize have more ‘weight’. See also Meredith Williams’ discussion of what she calls Wittgenstein’s heterogeneous holism, Blind Obedience, 227–230.

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David Finkelstein has written that Wittgenstein’s holism has no more than a negative ‘therapeutic’ function to dissuade us from a ‘metaphysical’ holism about beliefs that suggests we need to look to context for theoretical understanding. ‘Holism and Animal Minds’, in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). McDowell, ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, 222. My point is very quick here, given the purpose and scope of this chapter. John McDowell has offered a detailed textual examination that shows how a sceptical reading that undermines the idea of determinate meanings introduced by Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein and Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) depends on disregarding much of the actual text. See his ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, op. cit. See PI § 199 and 202. This is Gary Ebbs’ phrase. ‘The Very Idea of a Participant Perspective’ in RuleFollowing and Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord, Mind, Body, and World (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 47, 55. See 44–59. Cavell continues: ‘Official criteria are appealed to when judgements of assessment must be declared; Wittgensteinian criteria are appealed to when we “don’t know our way about. … Then we start finding ourselves by finding out and declaring the criteria upon which we are in agreement.” ’ Cavell emphasizes that ‘nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of the agreement itself.’ The Claim of Reason, 32. Stephen G. Affeldt, ‘The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgement, and Mutuality in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell’, European Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1998): 1–31. Affeldt, ‘The Ground of Mutuality’, 14. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). This notion was developed by Aristotle; see The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle trans. Sir Davis Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). Williams, Blind Obedience, 217. Ibid. McDowell’s ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’ argues that in order to understand Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the community is involved in following rules, it is crucial to grasp exactly how the requirement emerges in the text. ‘We can centre the issue between Wright’s reading and mine on this question: how does Wittgenstein’s insistence on publicity emerge?’ (260). In their shared emphasis on training, McDowell and Williams recognize that the requirement emerges in Wittgenstein’s explaining that rule-following involves a dimension of immediate responsiveness in opposition to the presupposition that rule-following is a matter of interpretation.

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Beauty and the End of Art The fact that we need to be trained into our responsiveness to our circumstances is part of the explanation of the requisite immediacy. Williams, Blind Obedience, 217–218. See also 219. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 172. Ibid., 171. Williams, Blind Obedience, 171, 219. Crispin Wright, ‘Human Nature?’ in Reading McDowell, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 156. Ibid. Ibid. Philosophical Grammar, § 88. PI 429 is set up by its companion §428, which discusses how we lead ourselves astray into apparently metaphysical waters when we stop to think and to theorize about the ability of our meanings or our thoughts to reach out to the facts. PI 428. ‘This queer thing, thought’ – but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net. Eldridge, Leading a Human Life, Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Romanticism, 55. PI § 211. How can he know how he is to continue a pattern by himself – whatever instruction you give him? – Well, how do I know? – If that means ‘Have I reasons?’ The answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons. On Certainty § 110. The end is not an ungrounded presupposition; it is an ungrounded way of acting.’ PI § 217. ‘How am I able to obey a rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say, ‘This is simply what I do.’ (Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of their content but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.) More precisely and technically, constitutive rules determine the identity conditions for some entities. The identity conditions for the queen in a game of chess are distinct from the identity conditions for a lump of ivory or plastic: whatever obeys certain movement rules is a queen in chess, but only that which behaves in certain regular way given initial conditions has the physical constitution of plastic. See John Haugeland ‘Patterns and Being’, in Having Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) or my ‘Minds: Contents without Vehicles’.

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41 Truth and Method, op. cit. 15. 42 Ibid., 15–16. 43 ‘It embraces a sense of proportion and distance in relation to itself, and hence consists in rising above itself to universality. To distance oneself from oneself and from one’s private purposes means to look at these in the way others see them. This universality is by no means a universality of the concept or understanding. This is not a case of a particular being determined by a universal; nothing is proved conclusively. The universal viewpoints to which the cultivated man keeps himself open are not a fixed applicable yardstick, but are present to him only as the viewpoints of possible others. Thus the cultivated consciousness has in fact more the character of a sense. For every sense – e.g., the sense of sight – is already universal in that it embraces its sphere, remains open to a particular field, and grasps the distinctions within what is opened to it in this way.’ Truth and Method, 15–16. 44 William E. Kennick, ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?’, Mind, 67 (1958): 317–334; Morris Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1956): 27–35. 45 Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964): 571–584; George Dickie, ‘What Is Art? An Institutional Analysis’, in Art and Philosophy, ed. William E. Kennick (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 82–94. ‘The New Institutional Theory of Art’, Proceedings of the Eighth International Wittgenstein Symposium, 10, 57–64. The two well-rehearsed criticisms are as follows. (1) First, the suggestion that family resemblances might involve similarities to paradigmatic earlier works opens the neo-Wittgensteinian challenge to the criticism that it is both too conservative – how could truly revolutionary artworks be similar to past paradigms? – and too inclusive – since anything is similar to anything else in innumerable respects. (2) More importantly, the idea that Wittgenstein highlights the role of similarities entails specifying which respects of similarity are relevant. But insofar as such information could be supplied, the neo-Wittgensteinian view might seem to collapse back into the sort of definitional approach that looks for relevant art-making features – the very project that the neo-Wittgensteinians intended to challenge. 46 This discussion of the ‘family resemblance’ passages is also in my ‘Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Context and Constitutive Rules’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(1) (2014): 67–82, The American Society for Aesthetics, Wiley Publishing. 47 Such as the assumption that in learning language we learn what objects are called by learning their names through ‘simple’ ostension. 48 I think the charge against the neo-Wittgensteinians is overplayed. In Weitz’s classic paper, the notion of a paradigm only occurs once in parentheses ‘certain

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Beauty and the End of Art (paradigm) cases can be given’ but when the process of extending the concept of art is sketched the notion of paradigm is not used: ‘what is at stake is no factual analysis concerning necessary and sufficient properties but a decision as to whether the work under examination is sufficiently similar in certain respects to other works, already called “novels,” and consequently warrants the extension of the concept to cover the new case’. ‘“Is this collage a painting or not?” does not rest on any set of necessary and sufficient properties of painting but on whether we decide – and we did! – to extend “painting” to cover this case’, op. cit. also reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 188, 189. Wittgenstein does use the notion of a paradigm in §57 in a series of passages examining our use of colour words, to make the point that ‘When we forget which colour this is the name of [red], it loses its meaning for us; that is, we are no longer able to play a particular language game with it. And the situation is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language.’ Mandelbaum, ‘Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts’, op. cit. also reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 197. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, 13. Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, 129. Danto, ‘Introduction: Art Criticism after the End of Art’, 8. To be fair, I think that in hindsight we can also appreciate that Weitz’s suggestion – that our concept of art develops as we make decisions about novel cases by considering whether they are similar in relevant respects to previous works – fits with Wittgenstein’s wording of the way we extend the concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. But Weitz was attempting to distinguish, as he put it, ‘the constructed and completely defined’ concepts of logic and mathematics from empirically descriptive and normative concepts (188). That is presumably why he stayed away from the analogy to intertwining fibres that Wittgenstein offered in discussing numbers, and stuck to discussion of family resemblances that Wittgenstein used in discussing games while attempting to capture the concept of art. The focus on family resemblances led to numerous misunderstanding as I have sketched. It is also important to note that Weitz was not denying that most concepts are definable. Rather he was elaborating what he took to be Wittgenstein’s ‘refutation of philosophical theorizing in the sense of constructing definitions of philosophical entities [my italics]’ (187). Since the primary aim in this chapter is to move the discussion forward, I have not examined Weitz’s view

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in detail from a more contemporary perspective though I think that a more comprehensive or charitable reading is also in order. Danto, ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism’, in After the End of Art, 95. Danto, ‘The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense’, History and Theory, 37 (4 December 1998): 128. Recall that if artworks are embodied meanings, as Danto proposes, then artworks will vary across historical eras because (i) not all contents are available at all times; and (ii) means of embodiment vary as well as possible meanings and contents. This is the reason why artworks have one essence or ‘conditions necessary and sufficient for being an artwork, regardless of time and place’ but that historical conditions give realization to the one essence. See ‘Modalities of History’ in After the End of Art for discussion of this point. Berys Gaut, ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’, in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 25–44. Gaut, ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’, 27–28. Danto, ‘From Aesthetics to Art Criticism’, After the End of Art, 165. Gaut, ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’, 26. Danto, ‘Modalities of History’, After the End of Art, 196. Ibid., 197. Linda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, The Visceral Eye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, 20. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 74–76. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 79. It is interesting that Nochlin expresses dissatisfaction with work in the social history of art on the grounds that it is especially difficult to show the connections between broader social history and art. Here is Nochlin from the Introduction to her collected essays in The Politics of Vision (New York: Harper and Row Publishers), xv. ‘The difficult or thorny issue of mediation is understandably, often sidestepped by the social history model, leaving a heap of historical or social data on one side of the equation and a detailed analysis of pictorial structure on the other, but never really suggesting how the one implicates the other, or whether, indeed, there really is any mutual implication.’ Dave Hickey, ‘The Heresy of Zone Defense’, in Air Guitar (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 155–162. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 157. Charles Harrison, ‘Conceptual Art’, in A Companion to Art Theory, eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002), 320.

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74 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Philosophy of Art, Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995), 111–117. 75 Hickey, ‘The Heresy of Zone Defense’, 157. See Sol LeWitt’s 2003 interview with Sol Ostrow in BOMB, 85 (2003): 22–29. 76 Jerrold Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 19 (1979): 232–250; ‘Refining Art Historically’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1989): 21–33; ‘Extending Art Historically’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993): 411–423. 77 Levinson, ‘Refining Art Historically’, 26. 78 Levinson, ‘Extending Art Historically’, 412. 79 Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, 238. 80 ‘[M]y analysis is aimed just at capturing what the concept of art is at present – that is, what it now means for an object created at any time (past, present, or future) to count as art at that time, rather than what it meant at the time of the object’s creation’ Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, 246. ‘[T]he only common core of art applicable to art-making today and two thousand years ago, and to any activities and artifacts of other cultures we recognize without strain as evidencing art-making is one which makes historical reference or connectedness, that is, reference or connectedness to predecessor works, activities, modes of reception, internal to the idea of art-making itself ’ Levinson, ‘Extending Art Historically’, 412. The second quotation makes clear that the definition does not simply overlook the arts of other cultures (as Levinson has been charged) but emphasizes the sound point that we can only recognize anything from other cultures by using our own concepts. 81 Levinson, ‘Refining Art Historically’, 26. 82 Both Monroe Beardsley and Stephen Davies have challenged Levinson on his qualification that the relevant art regards must be only those that are correct. Two of his papers present the objections and respond to them, see ‘Refining Art Historically’ and ‘Extending Art Historically’. 83 Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, 236. 84 Ibid., 247. 85 Ibid., 411. 86 Ibid., 247. 87 Levinson, ‘Refining Art Historically’; for the full passage regarding the neoWittgensteinian challenge, see 22–23. 88 See Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and ‘Essential Distinctions for Art Theorists’, Philosophical Perspectives on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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89 Robert Stecker, ‘Historical Functionalism or the Four Factor Theory’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1995): 263–264. 90 Stephen Davies, ‘Definitions of Art’, Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut (London: Routledge, 2005 2nd Ed.), 236–237. 91 Stephen Davies, ‘Essential Distinctions for Art Theorists’, 33.

5

Art Practices and Perceptual Engagement: We Can’t Get Enough

‘Sense’ covers a wide range of contents: the sensory, the sensational, the sensitive, the sensible, and the sentimental, along with the sensuous. It includes almost everything from bare physical and emotional shock to sense itself – that is, the meaning of things present in immediate experience. Each term refers to some real phase and aspect of the life of an organic creature as life occurs through sense organs. But sense, as meaning so directly embodied in experience as to be its own illuminated meaning, is the only signification that expresses the function of sense organs through which the live creature participates directly in the on-goings of the world around him. In this participation the varied wonder and splendor of this world are made actual for him in the qualities he experiences. John Dewey, Art as Experience, 221 The ‘wonder’ and ‘splendor’ of perception is that it engages us with the here and now presence of the world, with individuals in their qualitative character in the light of our understanding and secured in part by that understanding. This wonder and splendour are of a piece, I argue, with the unretainable nature of perceptual experience. We cannot recall or retain an experience in its qualitative detail beyond the moments of engagement. And so we cannot get enough. This simple realization provides insight into art as practices that provide artefacts and occasions for engaging perceptually: for extending, enhancing or manipulating perceptual experience. The previous chapter closed by asking for more understanding of the local practices that intertwine into the rope called art. This chapter will draw out Wittgenstein’s idea of forms of life activities to suggest that perceptual engagement is the life activity whose expansion art practices share. Relationships between specific norms and values inform and intertwine across practices, but our inclination towards extending and manipulating perceptual experience

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enters into making this one pattern as well. To be sure, any statement of this fact is at a high level of generality that would be almost completely uninformative – if it were to be taken by itself rather than integrated in accounts of specific art practices. But explaining perception and the role it plays is important for showing how art is both historical and experiential. Both suggestions – that art practices involve perceptual experience as a life activity that specific constitutive norms diversify and elaborate, and that perception is a mode of direct engagement to which our conceptual capacities are internal – are inspired by Wittgenstein. His later work suggests that perception is immediate, rule-informed and relational. Like our thoughts, perceptions do not stop anywhere short of the facts (PI §95). I call this understanding of perception ‘conceptual realism’ – conceptual capacities are involved in object- and property-involving perceptual engagement where mind and world ‘interpenetrate’.2 Though the image that mind and world interpenetrate is John McDowell’s, his view has been labelled conceptualism, owing to its place in the debate over the involvement of conceptual capacities in perception. But it is important to remain clear that the approach McDowell opens is a form of realism, consistent with his understanding of Wittgenstein’s later work. The core idea, in my terms, is that forms of understanding – in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques as Wittgenstein’s investigations of rule following suggest – are necessarily involved in perceptual engagement with objects and properties. This is a non-reductive account of the nature of perceptual experience, it leaves open the nature of the visual processes at the ‘subpersonal level’ that stand in a causally enabling relation to such experience. My suggestion about perception’s role in art might seem counterintuitive at first blush in the context of contemporary debate, where the predominant emphasis has been on interpretation and the ways that artworks evoke reflective, cognitive responses, rather than on visibility and aesthetic properties. For example, we have seen how Alexander Nehamas develops this perspective into a subtle proposal that beautiful works have distinctive manifest properties that require direct experience – which is interpretive rather than perceptual. I want to show that if we turn to contemporary conceptual realism about perception within the Wittgensteinian framework, it becomes possible to dissolve apparent tensions between interpretive and perceptual – even aesthetic – dimensions of art, and to think more fruitfully about recent developments such as conceptual art. Much of the belief that contemporary art engages us nonperceptually stems from impoverished understanding of perceptual experience along with a theoretical framework that considers novel artworks in terms of necessary and

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sufficient condition, ‘either it’s necessary or it’s not part of the essence’ way of thinking. Instead, the unretainable nature of perceptual experience offers a new point of contact for theory of perception and theory of art. This chapter continues the account of art begun in Chapter 4 by turning to the role that our love of perception plays in art practices. The chapter will proceed in four steps that: (i) develop conceptual realism about perception; (ii) argue that perception is a form of life activity that art practices elaborate and diversify; (iii) consider three objections; and (iv) begin to develop the view of aesthetic value and aesthetic properties that conceptual realism makes available. This final section will divide into two parts, to show that conceptual realism (i) supports Kendall L. Walton’s influential view that some aesthetic properties depend on the historical categories of art; and (ii) counters James Shelley’s proposal that aesthetic properties are essentially perceptual in a watered down sense of the perceptual (to accommodate the aesthetics of conceptual art).

The unretainable nature of perceptual experience Let’s start by examining what perceptual experience is like from the first-person viewpoint or the phenomenology of perception. Imagine walking along a busy street looking into shop windows, through an old deciduous forest in high summer amid old-growth maples and beeches and their saplings or in an art gallery. At least three features of one’s experience stand out. (i) It is always an individual belonging to a kind or an instance of a property that I see rather than a ‘?’ that belongs to no category at my disposal. In the forest, I see leaves and trees and undergrowth, and the play of light throughout. I see a range of highly similar shades of green repeat hundredfold across the many trees. Along the sidewalk, I see reflecting panes of glass, signs announcing shop hours and prices, shoes, books, cheeses and artworks. As I pass through the rooms of the gallery, I see paintings hanging on walls, collages, mobiles, three-dimensional works and installations. There may be cases where one might not understand the more specific kind to which something belongs, but one’s experience always individuates what one sees in terms of some higher-order kind or other – as an object that takes shape from a background or a property of an object, for example. Even an I-know-not-what-it-is is as richly informed by my understanding as the leaves or shop signs that I might see. (ii) What I see, I see determinately (since even a blurry grey fog or blurry lettering is determinately blurry just as it is). I see green leaves of determinate shades and hues and saturations and textures – to the extent that my capacities make possible (though I will omit this

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qualification from this point on). I see the greasy smudge of the windowpane or the gnarled rind of an aged cheese in their specific qualitative character. I see the grey blurred appearance of a painting in its texture and tonality. (iii) I am not able to retain or maintain a perceptual experience with equal determinacy as my eyes shift away, let alone to remember or recall the experience (after some interval) with the same determinacy as the original. The determinate nature of the smudged glass is lost to me as soon as I look elsewhere, as is the texture and colouring of the rind of the aged Camembert or of the grey painting. You might test these claims at any moment as you look around. Holding a single leaf in your hand, look away and try to maintain the experience in its determinacy or recall it after a momentary interval. My approach identifies the third, typically unnoted, feature of perceptual experience. That perceptual experience is unretainable in its qualitative character is the way that perceptual experience itself indicates its relational nature. This phenomenological fact fits with the best explanation of perception as genuinely relational: insofar as the content of perceptual experience involves individuals and their determinate properties, that content would not be available beyond the moment of contact. Hence, on this approach, the object and property involving nature of perception is not just a theoretically motivated point but also a core fact of lived experience. The second feature highlighted above is the much noted qualitative character of what we see: colours, illuminations, shapes, textures. Realism argues that the properties we see are properties in the world. And conceptualism suggests that one needs to have some individuative understanding of what it is to be a painting, person or leaf, or a texture, colour or shape in order to engage with the individuals and properties in the world in the way that we do. This delves into the first phenomenological observation on our list. As I walk through the summer forest I am aware of the repeat of the early summer maple green, there is no question that each instance is present to me in its fully determinate character and as repeating the same shade over and over again in abundance (it is rather several similar shades that repeat, but let’s stick with one for ease of exposition). As I walk down the street, I need some understanding of artworks to see the diversity that is for sale inside one of the shops. Putting all three characteristics together, the proposal is that perception is a form of engagement, so that in perceiving we engage with individuals and their properties in a way that depends on the understanding we bring to secure engagement just as much as on the individuals and properties. This is to say that perceptual experience is both world-involving and meaningful or, somewhat more technically, that it is both relational and contentful: perceptual contents involve individuals and

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instances of properties through relations that are a two-way street, dependent both of the perceived objects and properties and on the abilities of perceivers.3 But why is individuative understanding involved in our perception of individuals and their properties, be they green leaves or artworks? Gareth Evans’ work offers a twofold explanation of the core idea. Evans combines Russell’s view that to think about a particular object one must have some grasp of what one is thinking about – so that one ‘knows which’ it is – with Frege’s insight that one can only think of something under some mode of presentation, some mode of specifying it.4 For example, on this view, one needs to have some individuative grasp of what it is to be a painting and what it is to be bland or serene in order to think ‘this painting is serene’ or ‘this painting is bland’. These examples bring up the generality of thought, that insofar as one can think such thoughts about paintings, one must also be able to think related thoughts such as ‘this person is serene’ or ‘this person is bland’. Such generality of thought reflects and captures two differences between individuals and properties: an individual may have other properties from those perceived or considered at a specific time, whereas a property is not tied to a particular individual but may characterize other individuals as well. The leaf that I see in high summer will change its colour and eventually shrivel, and the green of this leaf is a characteristic of other leaves on the neighbouring branches and trees, even ones I cannot currently see. On this view what makes a capacity conceptual, at least in part, is that it is general or recombinatory. The surface grammar of the notion of a concept is not very helpful since conceptualists suggest that what is at issue is an interrelated nexus of abilities that allow recombination and yield generality. Such capacities inform not only our thoughts but range across holistically interrelated life activities: across actions both spontaneous and deliberate; immediate reactions; reflective thoughts, daydreams and so on. So one’s understanding – of what makes something the sort of thing or property it is – is in use in a Wittgensteinian sense across what we say, do, think, see and so on. That John is a person, for example, is in use in one’s bodily comportment towards him – one doesn’t tread on his toes and more generally gives him the bodily respect due to a person, rushes to his aid in distress, asks him to sign permission forms for his offspring, sees that he looks happy and so on. So the well-known generality of thought is not only a generality across so-called propositional attitudes such as our beliefs or desires but across the myriad life activities in which persons and the concept of a person, for example, figure. Conceptual realism argues that this is no less true of perception. The hallmark generality of concepts characterizes interrelated abilities including perception, and this multidimensional generality is what I have in mind when

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I say that conceptual or individuative understanding is involved in perceptual engagement with individuals and properties. Seeing this particular leaf, it is part of my awareness of this leaf that it has other properties, and it is part of my awareness of this green colour that it is shared by the other leaves all around on this tree, which is to say that it is repeatable. To engage perceptually with an individual with properties just is (i) to be aware that the individual might have other properties and (2) that the properties that the individual does have might characterize other individuals. Such understanding does not consist in explicit propositions that one must entertain – which would seem to make our perceptions more like a list of thoughts (depending on one’s understanding of propositions) – but rather a nexus of complex capacities that one must possess even though they need not surface in explicit propositional form as one perceives. Wittgenstein’s investigations of immediate, non-interpretive rulefollowing help explain this, as the previous chapter examined. One might protest that objects (and properties) are sufficient to allow experience insofar as we stand in relations to them supplied by our visual processes without understanding. ‘[W]e can think of [visual processing] as exploiting the location of the object together with something like the Gestalt organization of the characteristics found at that location.’5 But the objection (and the purely relational view it endorses) trades on items that have an antecedent spatial identity, which is what contemporary art has shown we cannot presuppose about artworks. To appreciate that individuative understanding is necessary, imagine that in a corner of Warhol’s factory he had a washer and dryer for convenience and a few days before the 1964 exhibit at the Stable Gallery, a stack of Brillo boxes (indiscernible from Brillo Box) was standing in front of the washer and dryer along with a flattened box looking like an unframed depiction of the Brillo logo. Someone who has heard of a work called Brillo Box but has no understanding that artworks may be indiscernible from ordinary objects says, ‘That work…’ looking in the direction of the washer, dryer, boxes and flattened carton although Brillo Box (the artwork) is standing in another part of the factory. What does the person’s visual processing suffice to pick out?6 In this first case, the attempted reference fails, since there is no artwork where the person is looking but there is also no antecedent sense of just which object(s) might make up the artwork. Alternatively, what if it is Brillo Box that is standing by the washer and dryer alongside the stacked boxes and ‘that work …’ is said by the same person in the presence of washer, dryer, flattened carton, boxes and work. Does her use of ‘that work’ refer to the artwork? I suggest that looking in the

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direction of the various objects does not suffice to pick out the work, which is indistinguishable from the adjacent pile of stacked boxes. In both cases the person fails to single out the artwork without appropriate individuative understanding. Visual processing of the sort that purely relational accounts detail is not sufficient for demonstrative use of language or the perceptual engagement that such language use co-implicates and expresses.7 The individuative understanding that informs our perceptual engagements comes together with the fact that they can be characterized as having contents that are either true or false, veridical or not: contents present a subject as having certain properties and in so doing may go wrong. More specifically, conceptual realism argues that perceptual engagement has content that depends on objects and properties themselves. Imagine seeing grey, brewing clouds and communicating what you see by saying ‘those clouds look stormy’. The clouds themselves figure in the content in the sense that only if there are those particular clouds can the demonstrative utterance be understood. The proposal is that the content of our perceptions is similarly dependent on individuals and properties. Moreover, an experiential or mental episode – one that figures in the mental life of a person – is contentful not simply if there are conditions whereby it is true or veridical, but insofar as the mental episode involves awareness of those conditions, which is also awareness that what one thinks or sees, for example, may not be correct or veridical. Mature human experience involves the awareness, very simply, that one may be misperceiving, that is, one’s experience may be incorrect. This awareness might not be exercised often, depending on circumstances, but even if it is not exercised the capacity is there for potential exercise. This is one of the ways in which a person’s experience is different from a photograph, for example: the latter has correctness conditions as a matter of fact, whereas some awareness of such conditions is integral to a person’s experience. This is the account of perception that Wittgensteinian realism indicates. Perceptual experience is transfigured as any other capacity into second nature. Second-nature perceptual experience is engagement with individuals and properties – the world is immediately present to us.8 This means that criteria of correctness are extant and internalized through training into life activities, though such criteria need not figure in our experience as a list of specifications on which perceptual judgements are based. This account offers a more detailed exposition of Gadamer’s position that to perceive is ‘to take something as true’: perceptual experience is contentful, a taking true of individuals and properties.

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But this proposal is not without opposition as we have already considered. Though I cannot get into the details of objections to this view whose proper home is philosophy of perception, it is important to note that diverse approaches challenge that one can’t have both – either the realism or the conceptualism must go (or both) – perception cannot be both relational and contentful.9 Having outlined how they can, my point is to show how both dimensions of conceptual realism about perception are important for explaining the diversity of art, the complexity of art contents, and aesthetic properties and value.

Art as engaging perceptually We cannot get enough. We cannot get enough of perceptual engagement, of the wonder and the splendour of the world’s determinate perceptible presence – it is not retainable beyond the moment of experience. This is the point of contact between the unretainable nature of perceptual experience (that conceptual realism explains) and theory of art. Precisely because perception is engagement with the world, we cannot conjure experience of determinate qualities and individuals in their particularity at our will. Given these facts, it makes sense that we would have practices that afford occasions for engaging perceptually. Such practices might return to previous occasions or provide new ones, typically by producing artefacts and conditions that retain, prolong, sustain, modify, expand or innovate engagement. As I walk through the forest or down the street, I can’t control what I see or hear. But if I sketch or photograph a forest scene or seek out someone’s portrait of my friend, elements of choice and control are introduced. We may even render perceptible what is not ordinarily available for us to perceive – either because it is geographically or temporally removed, or imaginary, or an abstraction, or holographic, or … we do not yet know. Consider Hickey’s suggestion that the perspectival, illusionist art at the heart of the beaux-arts tradition makes perceptibly present what is lost in the inevitable course of life. ‘You simply take pleasure in seeing the impossible appear possible and the invisible made visible. Because if these illusions were not just illusions, we should not be what we are: mortal creatures, who miss our dead friends, and thus can appreciate levitating tigers and portraits by Raphael for what they are – songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time.’10 Hickey highlights our temporally finite nature, whereby perceptible character, such as the distinctive curve of a friend’s smile is lost

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to us when our friend is absent or passes away. But Hickey’s spotlight falls equally on what the temporal flow of experience sweeps away: perceptible presence. The issue is one with Hickey’s: what is so dear to us that its ongoing loss moment by moment gives perspectival, illusionist art its important role in our history – and based on the work in the previous chapter, I can now suggest that art plays in diverse ways. We miss our friends and children of yesterday, but we realize and refuse to simply concede to the ongoing sense of loss that attends the wondrous determinacy of perceptual experience. The unretainable character of perceptual experience offers a more encompassing entry point to art practices, an understanding of the background role or ‘life activity’ that enters into practices and their local relationships so that they form into one multistranded rope of art. The resulting account is broad and encompassing, and continues to highlight the role of historically contingent facts I will now argue. First, the idea of a life activity that practices may expand and in that sense have in common brings together two ideas from Wittgenstein: of forms of life activities and of the truistic nature of specifying what life activities or artefacts have in common. The notion of a form or forms of life has been taken up widely, though Wittgenstein’s use was sparse and evokes some interpretive disagreement. Wittgenstein coordinates the notion with that of language games, so there is at least no question that the phrase highlights that the activity of speaking is internally connected to human responses and activities. In Chapter 4 we came across two of the five occurrences of the idea of forms of life in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein suggests that the agreement in the language people use that is a precondition for error is agreement in form of life (§241), and that by focusing on the diversity of uses of language other than assertion the notion of a language game ‘bring[s] into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ (§23 my emphasis). In Chapter 1, we saw that Danto draws on the idea of a form of life to explain the historically specific nature of art, stating that art requires an explicit echo of Wittgenstein’s thought that to imagine a language much different from our own, ‘means to imagine a form of life’ (§19 my emphasis). Consider these passages, which highlight that language use opens up many of the dimensions of human life such as expectation, hope and grief.11 1. A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow? And what can he not do here? – How do I do it? – What answer am I supposed to give to this?

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Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life.… 2. ‘Grief ’ describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the tapestry of life. (my italics)

John Hunter argues that a form of life is an ‘organic human response’ in much the same way as I articulate the idea of second-nature responses and activities in the preceding chapter.12 But he restricts the notion to reactions or dimensions of experience or life activity that would not be possible at all without an articulate language – such as hoping, expecting, grieving or intending – rather than the full range of responses and activities that are what they are by virtue of the fact that we speak an articulate language. [Hope] is one of the stock of human response, and if this stock were depleted by the loss of the word ‘hope’ or its equivalents, we would no longer be able to hope. Saying that this use of language is a form of life is saying that it is not derivative, that it is not done on the basis of evidence, that saying the words is itself part of the stock of human responses and is as natural and primordial as an affectionate gesture. Saying that it is ‘by way of a response’ perhaps means that when we cast our thoughts back to a past situation, then just as in one case we are inclined again to spit out the words ‘I hate him,’ so we may likewise be inclined to say ‘I did not intend …’ This is not a report but a reaction of a person in a situation. He reacts that way, using those words, not because he recognizes that his situation is an appropriate case for the use of those words, satisfying all criteria, but as it were blindly, and because this use of words has been built into him, and has become part of the way he functions. (It is a form of life.)13

The resonances are unmistakable between Hunter’s account and my argument in Chapter 4, since what is at issue are reactions that are inseparable from uses of language, the complex ‘wholes’ into which we are trained so that they become immediate second nature. That their very possibility involves the activity of speaking shows that such responses involve the specificity of norm- or rule-governed ways of acting or experience. The three modes of life highlighted in the fourth passage – expecting, hoping and grieving – involve temporal specificity made possible by use of an articulate language. But in view of the other contexts in which Wittgenstein uses the notion of a form of life, quoted above, rather than being restricted to life activities such as hoping or intending, I suggest that the notion subsumes the range of responses or

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life activities which are bound up with larger contexts to which the activity of speaking is internal. For the purpose of understanding art practices, I want to bring out that the internal connection with language use entails norm-governed diversification in what a life activity may be and what it may involve. Consider how grief opens up normatively into various practices that elaborate it and keep diversifying, so that it is apt to say that grief is a form of life activity.14 For example, these days in North America (and perhaps elsewhere), there is an emerging expectation that the life that was lost be celebrated rather than only mourned. Whereas a few decades ago people would have gathered for a largely preset funeral service, they now come together for a celebration of life that falls on the immediate family or especially close friends to orchestrate. This adds to and changes, at least in part, the activities and responses that make up the weave of grief in our lives. Such possibility of proliferation is no less true of perceptual engagement. Phenomena of looking are no less ‘modes of this complicated form of life’ and ramify into patterns within its weave. Because of perception’s centrality in much of what we can do, its possibilities open up across diverse practices. But certain interrelated practices provide occasions and artefacts for its elaboration and exploration. These are art practices. For example, we engage with a range of artefacts that allow us to see more or differently from what we would otherwise be able to do, that explore what it is to see something, that make it possible to dwell on how something makes us see and that allow us to explore our relationships to perceptible objects and perhaps even to not especially perceptual ones. To be sure, telescopes or microscopes increase or augment our ability to perceive. But they are instruments for increasing scientific understanding of the world, and they figure in practices of scientific explanation. (An artwork, perhaps an installation, might involve telescopes or microscopes. But it would not aim at scientific knowledge – though it might incorporate that aim within the broader occasion for engagement that the work offers, which might, for example, reflect on the nature of perception. There is no question of the complex permutations that might be possible.) A second clarification is that by now perceptual engagement is elaborated in activities and artefacts across painting, drawing, photography, movies, video, installations, video games and so on. What distinguishes visual art within this broad range are the constitutive norms of these practices and their interrelations. For example, some but not

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all photography is governed by constitutive norms that interrelate it with other art practices rather than with the production of items that figure in different practices, such as the production of photos for passports – though artworks might use passport photos for their own ends. A third clarification concerns the historical nature of art. The idea of perception as a form of life activity elaborated and diversified in art practices helps explain the fluidity and changing nature of some of those practices and works, which may be considered from the vantage point of more than one life activity where one or another may predominate in different historical contexts. It helps explains the broad range of objects that we now consider art even though they may have been created in the context of distinct practices that elaborated a different life activity. A key example is religious artefacts – such as icons – from a range of religious practices that may have fulfilled their religious role through their perceptual nature, and may now be considered from the purview of art practices where the elaboration of forms of looking is the form of life activity. It is in this sense of a proliferating norm-governed life activity that I suggest perceptual engagement needs to factor into understanding art practices. The modality of the claim is important. The suggestion is not that perceptual experience enters into art practices as a matter of conceptual necessity, but rather as a matter of contingent fact, in ways that may but need not be obvious depending on the specific constitutive norms of any given art practice, and that may allow for limiting exceptions. To get the strength or tenor of the claim just right, a second idea from Wittgenstein is helpful: that grasping what is common to life activities or artefacts may be at such a high level of generality as to be truistic. This does not deny that in such cases there is commonality, but puts it in its rightful place as it were. It is the idea prefigured at the close of Chapter 4 that ‘handles are all alike insofar as they are supposed to be handled’ so no individual type of handle can be understood without handling it – that is, without attending to the specific contingent facts of its use. Similarly, ‘artworks are alike insofar as they are supposed to be seen’ is truistic in the sense that the commonality is at a level of generality that is virtually unhelpful though not evidently circular.15

Three objections: Perception and the diversity and complexity of art Three objections help clarify this proposal. The first two address the idea that perceptual engagement is a ‘life activity’ common to diverse art practices, and the third raises a more general worry about bringing perception into the

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account of art at all. First, one might object that the suggestion that perceptual engagement is the life activity that art practices diversify amounts to proposing that this is the function that ‘at bottom’ artworks fulfil. Adding the condition reduces the multistranded Wittgensteinian approach to a functional definition. And second, if the background condition doesn’t specify the function that all artworks share, isn’t it too strong, providing too much constraint? Third but not least, even if there is a way to show that its role is not too strong, invoking perception doesn’t do justice to the complexity of content that is thought to be a chief characteristic of contemporary art. First, the suggestion that perceptual engagement is a background condition in the sense of a life activity is not a functional definition because the claim does not purport to stand on its own, to say something that can allow us to understand art independently of focusing on the specific constitutive norms of various art practices. Wittgenstein’s example that ‘All handles are alike in that they are meant to be handled’ is not a functional definition insofar as it tells us nothing specifically informative about the diverse objects that handles are – beyond a bit of background understanding from what we know about what hands are like even though lots of other objects are meant to be handled as well, cutlery and ropes, for example, and the list could go on and on. Similarly, ‘artworks offer occasions for perceptual engagement’ tells us nothing specifically informative about artworks beyond what we know about perceptual engagement. To understand art practices one needs to examine the specific norms of specific practices. But is it too strong to suggest any commonality among artworks that adverts to their perceptibility? The role of perceptual engagement is put to the test by diverse artworks over the last century that de-emphasize their determinate perceptible qualities and hence perceptual engagement with art, or even do away with an object entirely in favour of a linguistic specification of some content. One might object that to the extent that artworks de-emphasize their determinate properties, they demonstrate that perceptual engagement is not a shared ingredient even in the sense of background life activity. The challenge is clearest in works of conceptual art (taken more narrowly rather than broadly). Chapter 4 argued that conceptual art stands in local relationships to previous and contemporaneous art practices with works that displace the norms of those practices. Rules or norms are defeasible. In moral and legal thought, for example, the idea is that moral or legal rules might be defeated in particular circumstances or under particular conditions. Similarly, the constitutive norms of any particular art practice may be defeated in historical circumstances. For

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example, Sol le Witt’s retrospective view suggests that conceptual works of the 1960’s challenged the specific norms extant and ‘standard’ in the practices of the 1950’s, especially those of the dominant abstract expressionism. ‘The reason I think the art of the ’60s is valuable, both the Duchampian and the non-Duchampian models, is that it freed art from the formal and aesthetic. It allowed art to move toward the narrative. Instead of the aestheticism and formalism of modernism, art became politicized, then socialized, then sexualized.’ Since the predominant aesthetic norms were identified at that time with the visual nature of the works, it seemed that challenging the aesthetic norms involved challenging the perceptual nature of the works. ‘Conceptualism provided an escape from the formal and the perceptual into the conceptual and the analytic.’16 Perceptibility is challenged as part of a challenge to existing norms. Yet the continuing debate over conceptual art attests that more is at stake than specific norms. We can recognize this by distinguishing between the specific norms of art practices and the life activity that those intertwining norms diversify. Conceptual art raises the hard issue whether the life activity of perception that art practices elaborate may itself be defeasible given specific cultural and art-historical circumstances. As I suggested in the previous chapter, from a Wittgensteinian perspective this is a contingent matter, unfolding in contemporary practices and debates. Rather than offering a condition that rules out conceptual art, the suggestion that perceptual engagement is the form of life activity that art practices diversify explains the specific challenge that such art poses.17 Turning now to the third objection, the challenge posed by conceptual art to perceptibility is also emblematic of the assumption that the complexity of contemporary art is not a matter for perceptual experience. It is to this third objection that the specific details of conceptualist theory of perception make all the difference. Recall that conceptual realism explains that to perceive an individual, one must have a grasp of what makes it the individual that it is, an individual of its kind. This holds for both artworks and what they show, their contents. This is the sense in which understanding of artworks is internal to seeing a particular painting or readymade, and the sense in which broader understanding (which includes understanding art as well as myriad other dimensions of human life) enters into seeing the content of any particular work. This is also the sense in which what we understand is what we can see noninferentially – so long as it is perceptible of course. This is not to deny that we might need to learn new facts in order to increase our understanding of any particular work (or group of works).

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Rather the point is that whatever one understands at a certain time is what one can see if the artist finds a way to make it perceptible; and that insofar as artists find new or different ways to make something perceptible, they increase what we can understand and what we can see. For a contemporary example of artworks that offer complex artistic and social content for which their determinate perceptible properties are crucial, consider Gerhard Richter’s work, and in particular his October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings some of which are reproduced here.18 There have been attempts to interpret Richter’s wide-ranging work as conceptualist demonstrations of the inability of painting to function as a vital medium in any of its traditional or more newly found genres. But it has become increasingly clear that Richter’s work is a reaffirmation of painting – as a medium that conveys nuanced complex contents by means of determinate perceptible properties, especially with the October 18, 1977 cycle from 1988 (see Figures 5.1–5.8). The cycle of works deals with the controversial deaths

Figure 5.1 Dead 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 667–1). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

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Figure 5.2 Hanged, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 668). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 5.3 Man Shot Down 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 669–1). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

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Figure 5.4 Man Shot Down 2, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 669–2). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 5.5 Confrontation 1, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–1). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

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Figure 5.6 Confrontation 2, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–2). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

Figure 5.7 Confrontation 3, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 671–3). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

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Figure 5.8 Funeral, by Gerhard Richter, 1988. (CR 673). Reprinted by permission from Gerhard Richter, 2015.

of three members of the Bader-Meinhof group who had been imprisoned for terrorist activity in opposition to the Vietnam War. The events were a seismic moment in the relationship between the German state and its individuals, not only the terrorists but also the citizens who had to come to terms with how to deal with the terrorists during their incarceration and after their violent deaths. Richter’s paintings are distinctively cropped renditions of photographs from the German media. But they have the appearance of being blurred. Insofar as the paintings make evident that they start from photographs, they erase any imputation of origination or creation of subject matter to the artist and acknowledge the supposed ‘objectivity’ and indexicality of photographs that derives from their mechanical causal history, which plays a problematic role in the historical evolution of art (perhaps even catalysing its own putative, highly debated ending in distinction from the ending of art as such). Richter’s blurring technique has been the topic of much discussion precisely because it conveys content that is complex along multiple dimensions, simultaneously addressing issues about painting and its relationship to photography, on the one hand, and about the specific subject matter, on the other. It has been argued that the blurring technique allows us to confront death in a way that is neither voyeuristic of its grizzly detail nor benumbed by the repeated voyeurism that attends the reproduction inherent to the original photographs or televised images. Robert Storr urges that the fact that the

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paintings resist any clear depiction of their subjects is especially powerful in the case of death of individual terrorists in the midst of a perhaps irresolvable conflict with authority of a state.19 He likens the opposition between the terrorists and the state to the oppositions in Greek tragedy between roles that the protagonists cannot avoid enacting.20 It has also been debated whether these paintings reaffirm and reinvent history painting in a double-barrelled response that addresses political complexity and art-historical narrative. 21 Michael Kelly argues that the fact that what appear to be images do not allow us to have a clear view of the subject seems to enable viewers to feel the complex emotions associated with these deaths and the issues they raise.22 Richter has also contributed his own understanding in published notes and many interviews. But we need to tread with caution since his thought is similar to Wittgenstein’s in that any excision for purposes of summary or emphasis seems distorting. Here is one part of his own thoughts that the paintings explore: ‘the tremendous, the terrifying power that an idea has, which goes as far as death. That is the most impressive thing, to me, and the most inexplicable thing; that we produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but above all dangerous … [and] what interests me is … the why and wherefore of an ideology that has such an effect on people; … why we have ideologies at all.’ 23 This abbreviated list demonstrates that though interpretations diverge in what they prioritize, they agree on the complexity of content that Richter’s work conveys through manipulation of determinate properties and their appearance. Though some debate whether these works constitute a ‘step backwards’ from his supposedly more conceptualist beginnings, there is no denying the complexity of the contents one can see. This is one dimension of Richter’s extraordinary place in contemporary art, which counters the suggestion that we have reached a point where perceptual engagement with contents that depend on a work’s determinate properties is not adequate to the complexity of the issues we want art to deal with. In addition to the breadth of considerations that art historians and critics have used to address Richter’s work, I would like to suggest that theory of perception might add to explaining why the blurring technique is so powerful, indeed why it may feel revelatory. The root of the contribution derives from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It has been elaborated by Sean D. Kelly, who highlights that ‘[p]art of what it is to be an experience is to be an openness onto the world that in itself eschews lack of clarity’.24 Merleau-Ponty argues that perceptual experience is responsive to its own distinctive norms, which inhere in experience and to which experience pulls. ‘The distance from me to the object

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is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm.’25 This statement deals with the phenomena of perceptual constancy – that we do not see the size or shape that an object projects onto our retinas, but (within limits) a constant size and shape in relation to its context. This is one way that perceptual engagement is distinctive from a purely physiological process that issues in a retinal (or ‘Humean’) image or a purely causal process that issues in a photograph. There are also many examples that each one of us can draw on of ‘experiential difference[s] between seeing something to be blurry and having a blurry experience of something you see to be clear’ which are part of our very understanding of perception.26 Kelly elaborates MerleauPonty’s view by suggesting that an experience is normatively self-referential; it involves a sense of how to improve the experience and actually ‘pulls’ to clarify any property that is experienced unclearly. This emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s idea: ‘For each object, as for each picture in a gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction from which it vouchsafes most of itself, at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency.’27 But are there experiential states that do not eschew unclarity, that remain blurry experiences of something clear? Such states would show that clarity is not a norm distinctive and inherent to perception that experiences themselves are responsive to, to which they ‘pull’.28 Kelly offers an example of the sort of artificial cases where our experiences do remain in an unclear state of a clear object, but shows that they in fact confirm his proposal. Consider a visit to an optometrist where one tries different lenses. ‘[H]e asks me not whether I’m seeing an E or an A, but whether this view of the E is blurrier or clearer than the previous view of it. In such a context I can see that the experience is improvable in certain ways, and this is a way of seeing that the object it is an experience of is clear.’ But ‘by focusing on the particular details of the experience that make it the experience it is ... I can focus on the particular kind of blurriness it involves, on the way that the object is unclear in different ways in its different parts’. The key is to notice that what happens in this case is that one attends to features of the experience. One retreats from engaging with the object and only in so doing is one ‘able to rest content in the unimproved state’.29 How does this help us with the paintings making up October 18, 1977? Richter repeatedly emphasizes that a painting cannot be blurry. This depends on his evolving view that a picture is a real thing that is an appearance or a semblance, to which the manner of its fabrication is not relevant, so that a photograph might be made by painting. (In this sense an abstraction might

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be a photograph as well, insofar as one gets away from ‘hang-ups’ about how something is made rather than the fact of appearance). At this juncture, the key consideration for us is Richter’s adamant denial that a painting can be blurry. Here is one indicative statement. ‘[S]ince pictures are not made for purposes of comparison with reality, they cannot be blurred, or imprecise, or different (different from what?). How can, say, paint on canvas be blurred?’30 His paintings exploit this fact to put us in a condition where we are definitely engaging with an external object – the painting – rather than retreating into an examination of our own states as in a test for corrective lenses. Yet it is not possible for our perceptual experience to pull towards clarity, that is, to resolve between a blurry take on a clear object and a clear take on a blurry object. Because the painting is not blurry and yet there is no way for experience to pull towards clarity, we experience what it is like to be in the world in a way that does not allow this core dimension of engagement with an objective world to hold. The paintings feel revelatory because they are: they place us in a unique perceptual condition that only a painterly strategy affords. And this is especially revelatory when the engagement is with deeply distressing, perhaps irresolvable oppositions inherent in human social life and the extreme actions on all sides to which they may lead.

The aesthetic dimension of perceptible presence The blurriness of Richter’s October 18, 1977 paintings stands out as perceptually noteworthy or significant. More generally, I suggest that aesthetic properties stand out as noteworthy or significant in their perceptible presence. This is the sense of the aesthetic that comes with thinking about the perceptible presence of the world. The next chapter will go on to examine the aesthetic in more detail by examining beauty in these terms. Here, the aim is to develop an approach to aesthetic value by recognizing that perception is relational and involves individuative conceptual understanding. In the spirit of a Wittgensteinian reminder, the idea is very simple. Because perception engages us with the determinate characteristics of particular individuals, properties, scenes and events, perceptual experience is itself of value and perceptual presence has value. The thought that perception is not only a wonder but a splendour from which this chapter set out uses evaluative notions that evoke the value of the determinate or qualitative character of experience. When perceptual engagement draws attention to itself and to what we perceive – when this leaf or

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this blurred half smiling face of a painted gaunt young woman stands out for us in its perceptible presence – it is because perceptible presence is itself of value, even though the leaf or blurred face need not draw attention explicitly to the value of perceptible presence but simply to the property that is noteworthy or significant. Recall that Wittgensteinian realism offers a way to understand how values can be both objective and contingent on human forms of life. Because facts and values are integral to acting in the ways specified by rules, our activities are internally connected to the world of facts and values within which they are conducted. We saw, for example, that to follow the rules of measurement is to discover the measurable facts of length and weight. For there to be rules or constitutive norms of measurement is for there to be measurable lengths; and there can be rules of measurement insofar as there are measurable lengths. I argued that this is a genuine reciprocity, not weighted more in any direction, either to human activity or to the world. Similarly, to follow the constitutive norms of right action is to discern the values of actions, such as the specific value of kind and compassionate action; and there can be constitutive norms of right action insofar as actions have value. My point is that to be fully developed, realism cannot overlook perception. It is not only actions, what we do, or cognitions, what we believe, that are of value. Value informs our seeing as well, informing what we see – the perceptible. Many actions do not stand out for us in their moral value – lots of actions are simply OK, neither good nor its opposite, not noteworthy in any more specific way that falls within the range of moral evaluation. Similarly, many of our perceptual engagements do not stand out for us as having value; that is, many are not noteworthy in any specific way, neither beautiful nor its opposite. But some actions can be morally good – in some specific way that falls within this range of evaluation – only if all actions are in that domain of evaluation, the domain of moral action rather than mere behaviour. Similarly, certain perceptual engagements can be aesthetically noteworthy or significant only if perceptual engagement is in the domain of aesthetic value rather than sheer visual presence. In other words, just as actions lie in a range of evaluation, so do perceptual experiences; and just as we aim to understand the range of evaluation specific to actions, so we wish to understand the range of evaluation distinctive to perceptual experience. Consider that the perceptible presence of the world is inclusive. Insofar as perceptual presence is of value, aesthetic value attaches to the experiences themselves and to ‘what’ we perceive, their individual and property involving content. Any perceptual experience and any aspect of the perceptible presence

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of the world are in this domain of evaluation. The inclusivity of perceptible presence entails that neither nature nor art is the primary home of the notion of the aesthetic; there is no primary home. The aesthetics of artworks is differentiated within this broad notion of the aesthetic by the distinctive features of artworks so that our understanding of art enters into seeing any individual artwork.31 Taking perceptible presence as the entryway for explaining aesthetic properties does not deny that aesthetic properties may also be affective. Rather, my point is that the current emphasis on the aesthetic as affective is due in part to the predominant and impoverished notion of the perceptual as the visual. A holistic approach to our capacities allows us to countenance the interconnectedness of perception and affect, of the perceptible and the affective. This makes it possible to countenance that the perceptible presence of the world may be affectively charged for us so that aesthetic presence may have an affective dimension. When the perceptual presence of something is noteworthy, or when we are alert to its perceptual value, we often try to convey that through our use of language. We may use words that are part of an aesthetic vocabulary to speak of aesthetic properties such as ‘that garish lighting’ or ‘the balancing effect of the dark colours’. But anything that we perceive – including any particular quality, ‘this nondescript grey’ or ‘this painterly grey that somehow isn’t the same as the grey of newsprint’; ‘that slight indistinctness’ or ‘that heavy blur’ – may be perceptually noteworthy. For example, the fully determinate blurriness of Richter’s Dead 1 in the October series stands out for the way it looks and for the value of how it makes us see. And each determinate property – ‘this grey’ or ‘that sheen’ – may depend on context. An aesthetic evaluation may also be implicit rather than explicit. ‘Look at that sheen’, one might exclaim to a friend at the surprising quality of the shearing grey in Richter’s Cage 6. There is no way to delimit what may be aesthetically noteworthy or how we may try to communicate this. But there is a distinction between descriptive and demonstrative attempts to do so. Given the determinate, object- and property-involving nature of perceptual experience, it will be easier to rely on demonstrative uses of language and harder to use descriptive ones. And the issue is not just one of ease but of a categorical difference as well: a description will necessarily leave out the determinate character that can only be captured demonstratively. This is not because aesthetic presence is visual or optical in a way that is non-conceptual but because it is determinate – in a way that our conceptual capacities help engage

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with and that demonstrative concepts or demonstrative conceptual phrases communicate. Moreover, the qualities that stand out need not be so simple as these initial examples suggest precisely because the perceptible character of anything we perceive may be of value. In sum, we do better to think about aesthetic uses of words rather than aesthetic concepts.

Aesthetic properties: Historical and perceptible, or non-perceptual? Here are two ways in which conceptual realism can cross-fertilize with key issues and approaches in philosophy of art: with the recognition that some aesthetic properties are historical, and the question whether conceptual works of art may have aesthetic properties or value. First, conceptual realism helps us recognize that some aesthetic properties are both experiential and historical: perceptible and determined (in part) by the actual historical categories extant at any point in time, as Kendall L. Walton argues, for example. Walton’s ‘Categories of Art’ provides a landmark argument that some aesthetic properties are objective and depend on the perceptually distinguishable historical categories in which artworks belong.32 But Walton struggles somewhat to explain that aesthetic properties are perceptible. By explaining that perceptual experience involves individuative understanding of the categories to which artworks and their properties belong, conceptual realism provides the account of perception that Walton’s approach needs. Walton does not claim that his account applies to all aesthetic properties; he seeks to show that some are determined by the perceptually distinguishable historical categories in which an artwork belongs.33 His thesis is that (some of) ‘the aesthetic properties [a work] actually possesses are those that are to be found in it when it is perceived correctly’.34 That is, Walton explicitly conjoins a psychological thesis about properties a work seems to have with a constitutive thesis about the properties that a work does have – by arguing that there are properties that a work is correctly perceived to have. The aesthetic properties that are correctly perceived in a work are determined by the properties that are standard, contra-standard and variable for the category to which the work belongs. These latter properties are both perceptually distinguishable and historical.35,36 Walton’s central example considers the aesthetic properties of Picasso’s Guernica in larger historical contexts in which it belongs to different categories.

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The work is a painting in our actual context; it is a guernica in the hypothetical context of an imaginary society that does not have the medium of painting but rather three-dimensional bas relief-like works. Flatness is standard for the perceptible category of painting to which Picasso’s Guernica belongs; it ‘is among those features in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category’ so that its absence ‘would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category’. The standard and non-standard properties are governed by constitutive norms, which thereby yield an open-ended range of variable properties. The figures depicted on the surface are variable for this category, so that the particular figures of Guernica stand out as ‘violent, dynamic, vital and disturbing’. These are the aesthetic properties that Guernica has by virtue of the properties standard and variable for its category. But what if Guernica were a member of the class of guernicas? Members of this category would have a range of contours, where some would be ‘rolling surfaces, others are sharp and jagged, still others contain several relatively flat places at various angles to each other, and so forth’. If the flat Guernica were part of this category, the standard properties of bas-relief works would determine that the two-dimensional flatness of its figures would stand out as aesthetically significant, as ‘cold, stark, lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull, boring – but in any case not violent, dynamic, and vital’.37 In short, what is ‘expressive’ or ‘striking and noteworthy’ about a work can be determined by how its variable properties relate to the standard ones. In this example, Walton’s point is that the standard features determine which features can be variable, which in turn determines the aesthetic ones in cases like Guernica. But he also details a range of other kinds of cases to show the complexity of the relationships between the constitutive norms that specify standard, variable and contra-standard properties and aesthetic properties – such as the fulfilling quality of the concluding movement of a sonata that proceeds according to the standard form requiring recapitulation. Walton’s proposal is intended as a corrective to the trend to explain aesthetic properties in terms of non-aesthetic properties conceived as narrowly perceptible ‘formal’ ones, such as colours, for example, which do not implicate historical understanding of the category to which a work belongs. the view that artworks should be judged simply by what can be perceived in them is seriously misleading. Nevertheless there is something right in the idea that what matters aesthetically about a painting or a sonata is just how it looks or sounds.38

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He struggles somewhat to explain that aesthetic properties are perceptible but not simply sensory. His view is that one must be able to perceive aesthetic properties as a result of training so that they are immediately perceivable – in a way that other historically determined facts such as a person’s bachelorhood are not. Yet they are not perceivable just by virtue of their non-aesthetic perceivable properties such as colours, but by virtue of those of their perceptible properties that are standard or variable or contra-standard for their categories. This means that one must have training with ‘other things of the appropriate categories’ such as paintings or guernicas so that what one can immediately and correctly perceive are what the standard, variable and contrastandard properties determine as noteworthy or significant.39 It is unreflective immediate perception of the properties that are variable for paintings that makes the figures of Guernica pop out in their vitality or violence in a way that immediate perception of the properties that are variable for guernicas would not. Conceptual realism insists on and explains precisely the point that Walton wants to bring out about aesthetic properties – that we need individuative understanding to perceive individuals and their properties. All three of the types of properties for artworks that Walton identifies enter into the individuative understanding for particular artworks and their properties: (i) one needs to grasp which properties are standard and contra-standard in order to see a particular cubist painting, and (ii) this means that one needs to appreciate the range of properties variable for Cubist painting. And then it follows, as he argues, that Guernica’s figures are dynamic, vivid and violent. The fact that individuative understanding is necessary for perception of individuals and properties explains that the training and experience of aesthetic properties is no less ‘perceptual’. What is different is that the categories and properties relevant for individuation of aesthetic properties of artworks are determined by constitutive norms, as Walton’s choice of terms makes clear – it is norms that determine which properties are standard or contra-standard – which means that they are historically contingent and evolving in a way that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the biological features that determine the sex of a baby chick, for example, are not. The theoretical support between conceptual realism and Walton’s approach flows in both directions. I have argued that conceptual realism explains Waltons’ contention that some aesthetic properties are perceptual and determined by historical categories of art. But Walton’s view also supports conceptual realism by illustrating the sort of understanding that is specifically relevant to art that

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enters into perception. And Walton details the internal relationship between what we can see and art practices: the historically evolving constitutive norms of an art practice govern the properties that are standard, contra-standard and variable for works of that category and thereby determine (either directly or indirectly) at least some of the aesthetic properties of individual works. But again, conceptual art challenges such a sense that aesthetic properties are both perceptible and internally connected to a work’s complex content and arthistorical moment. This is the second issue that conceptual realism can help us address. A number of theorists reaffirm the integral role of aesthetics in art by arguing that conceptual art has aesthetic properties. The predominant strategy is to show that such art is non-perceptual yet has aesthetic properties. James Shelley’s approach is an instructive example.40 He argues that aesthetic features are essential to art and that conceptual works (in a very broad sense) have aesthetic features by watering down what it would be for aesthetic properties to be perceptual. Shelley reconstructs the contemporary predicament in terms of an inconsistent triad of three ‘independently plausible’ propositions that poses us with the question of which of these it makes best sense to deny. The three propositions are as follows: (R) Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks. (S) Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses. (X) There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks.

These options highlight the starkness of the tensions that result from the perspective of the usual essentializing framework. I have argued against this framework, but it is also instructive to consider the alternatives as stated, which Shelley presents as three sequential ‘solutions’ in theorizing about art. He argues that prior to the advent of ‘non-perceptual’ art – by which he means conceptual art in the broad sense, ranging across Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain to works such as Lawrence Weiner’s A River Spanned – theorists denied the possibility of nonperceptual art (X) in the sense that this possibility was not even entertained. (Shelley attributes this view to Clement Greenberg and Monroe Beardsley, for example.) This first step is also a denial of non-aesthetic art. The second ‘solution’ is Danto’s denial, along with like-minded theorists such as Noel Carroll, that aesthetic properties are necessary for artworks (R).41

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The remaining alternative, which Shelley proposes, denies that there is nonaesthetic art. This solution depends on recognizing that aesthetic properties do not necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses (S). This would allow us to recognize that artworks necessarily have aesthetic features, so that conceptual art is continuous with traditional art insofar as aesthetic appreciation is essential to both. But it requires us to understand what it would be for so-called non-perceptual artworks to have aesthetic properties. According to Shelley, ‘The second-solution advocate may maintain that, whatever else we say about them, aesthetic properties are essentially perceptual. And I agree. My disagreement with the second-solution advocate concerns only what we mean, or perhaps ought to mean, when we say that aesthetic properties are essentially perceptual.’42 And so theory of perception is key to this question. Shelley offers two arguments. First, he argues that the link between aesthetics and perception is typically made by means of a notion of perception that is too narrow. He distinguishes two notions of perception. The narrow notion is that the properties on which aesthetic properties depend are necessarily perceptible by means of the five senses. The broader notion is that aesthetic properties are necessarily perceptible. (Shelley finds the narrow view in Beardsley and the broader one in Sibley.)43 Shelley’s argument is that the broader notion claims only that the perceptible is non-inferential and so does not entail the narrower notion, which links the perceptible to our senses. That is why it is possible to deny (S) – ‘Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses’ – but to affirm (X) – ‘There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks.’ But this mischaracterizes the notion of perception found in Sibley in a way that goes to the heart of ‘what we mean or ought to mean by the perceptual’. Sibley’s view is not simply that the perceptible is non-inferential. The claim overlooks Sibley’s argument in ‘Particularity, Art and Evaluation’ that ‘generally and typically, the qualities responsible for aesthetic meritqualities are determinate’.44 Sibley is clear that his view ‘applies most directly to visual objects’. (And that ‘slightly different but partially parallel things must be said about literature and music’.45 I will return to this qualification shortly, though developing it lies beyond the scope of this discussion.) He takes care to explain why the notion of determinate and determinable better captures the particularity of aesthetic properties than the misleading distinction between the particular and the general: it allows us to capture that the aesthetically

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valuable features of artworks are particular to a work; yet as properties, they are in principle repeatable and hence shareable. ‘With this distinction, it may be said that, even if a part or feature of one work cannot be shared by another work, one work might have a part or feature qualitatively indistinguishable in all respects from part of another, both parts sharing the same determinate, not merely the same determinable properties.’ This in turn has quite far-ranging ramifications, allowing us to understand the sense in which there are no general principles governing aesthetic value from which one could infer that a work would have aesthetic value, and extending all the way to the claim that one needs to experience an artwork oneself in order to discern or judge its aesthetic value.46 Sibley’s view of aesthetic properties is more complex than Shelley allows in a way that holds implications for what may be said to be his view of the perceptible: not simply non-inferential but also determinate, as I have argued. I will return to Sibley’s view in more detail in the next chapter. My point here is not to take Sibley’s view as the last word on aesthetic properties, but to show that his work is not a source for a view of perception that is limited to lack of inference for its substance. Indeed, I don’t think that it is plausible that lack of inference is enough for a characterization of perception. For example, though contemporary theories of perception divide on how to explain perception’s distinctive nature, most concur that it is ‘rich’ – detailed and definite beyond the resources of descriptive language in any given perceptual modality. If perception is characterized by more than lack of inference, then we don’t have a wide notion of perception that eschews the role of sensory modalities entirely to support the view that some art is nonperceptual. Indeed, the first section of this chapter argued in some detail that determinacy is a key feature of perceptual engagement and that this carries over to interweaving art practices if perception is the life activity that art practices diversify and proliferate. Shelley’s second, related argument is to suggest that we need a unified notion of aesthetic properties that would span across visual art, music and literature. For if artworks are aesthetic only if their appreciation depends on a perception of at least some of their aesthetic properties, and if properties are aesthetic only if they depend directly on properties perceived by means of the five sense, it is hard to see how literary works can be aesthetic.47

The presence of literary texts, the nature of reading and the way we engage with them are complex matters that go well beyond my scope here, beyond what we can profitably think about just from the point of view of theories

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of perception. But the distinction between determinate and determinable properties helps make a start. I suggest that for the most part, the determinate nature of language use in literature can’t be simply put aside; it is one dimension of literary aesthetic value. As Sibley noted, when it comes to the determinate properties of artworks – in the broad sense that encompasses literature, music, dance and so on in addition to visual art – then ‘slightly different but partially parallel things must be said about literature and music’. A novel such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is translatable, showing that much of its aesthetic value derives from its more determinable properties, and yet it is also the specific nature of Jane Austen’s sentences that is extraordinary in their cadence to an English speaker’s ‘ear’. That is why we believe that we miss something of a work in a translation, even though any work is translatable. A Russian novel such as Alexei Tolstoy’s The Road to Calvary in English translation is a somewhat different aesthetic experience from that same novel translated into another Slavic language such as Slovak. Such examples show that we believe the aesthetic presence of a work changes across different languages (ranging over languages in the same linguistic group or an entirely disparate one) so that something of the presence goes missing with the determinate properties of the original language use. How precisely to explain such ‘slightly different but partially parallel’ facts about the determinate properties of literary works (and music) is a further issue. But insofar as there are two sets of facts that need to be addressed about literary works – how their aesthetic value derives from their determinate and their determinable properties – a unified notion of aesthetic value across media and perceptual modality would obscure differences in aesthetic presence since it would obscure differences in the relationship and weighting between determinate and determinable properties. From this perspective, it is instructive to consider Noel Carroll’s defence of the aesthetic properties of conceptual art in response to James Shelley’s view. Carroll agrees that conceptual artworks have non-perceptual aesthetic properties, though he disagrees that art is essentially aesthetic. His view is based on his ‘content-oriented approach’ to aesthetic experience, according to which ‘an experience of an artwork is aesthetic, if it involves attention to the form of the work or to its expressive or other aesthetic properties’. Here is his view of form as aesthetic and non-perceptual. Everyone would appear to agree that the formal properties of a work of art belong among its aesthetic properties. The formal properties of an artwork are the ensemble of choices that realize the point or purpose of the work. Works of

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conceptual art can have formal properties. One can grasp the ways in which the formal properties of a work of conceptual art realize its point or purpose without experiencing them directly, but on the basis of a reliable description of them. Therefore, some aesthetic properties of artworks – notably the formal properties of conceptual artworks – can be non-perceptual.48

Though he does not use the distinction, Carroll’s view of form clearly focuses on the determinable rather than the determinate features of a work: the describable choices and design elements by means of which the work’s ‘point or purpose’ is realized. This is also true of his view of other aesthetic properties that are sensory in an extended usage that includes the ‘sense’ of humour and other ‘internal’ senses such as a feeling of excitement. In all these cases, his view is that it is more determinable and hence descriptively specifiable features that are witty or exciting and so aesthetic. His view illustrates how the distinction between determinate and determinable perceptible properties can resolve seeming tensions between the perceptible, the aesthetic and the formal or non-perceptual. The distinction allows us to recognize both of the following points with respect to art: (i) for any determinate property, there is also some range of more determinable properties that we perceive; and (ii) we can access more determinable properties either perceptually or non-perceptually, for example, by means of a description of how the point of a work is realized. That determinable properties need determinate ones for their instantiation – for the most part – accommodates Carroll’s emphasis on the formal properties or ensemble of choices of any particular work without discounting that the determinate properties that instantiate each choice point may have aesthetic value. A choice point and its realization may involve a different weighting of what stands out along the dimension from determinate to determinable in different types of works in different perceptual modalities – in music or literature or visual art – and in different individual works. Here we might contrast Dead 1 from Richter’s October 18, 1977 with Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’ Big Blue, 2007.49 Big Blue is a towering monolith-like rectangle jutting forward at irregular angles from the wall, but it’s light baby blue and has a small button that when pressed erupts in Glen Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. Though one might describe how Richter’s blurring technique is important for the complex point of this work (as discussed above), perceiving the blurring is crucial for its point; the description that the work is blurred won’t achieve the effect. In contrast, describing Big Blue conveys how the key choice points – colour and playful music – realize the humorous point of the work. Carroll’s idea is that this is sufficient to convey the wittiness of the work; one

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need not experience the precise shade of blue, the exact size and shape of the ‘monolith’ or the big band sound. So the aesthetic properties are determined by the more determinable rather than the determinate properties. These examples suggest that conceptual artworks extend the range of aesthetic appreciation from the determinate properties of artworks to their determinable ones. This allows us to appreciate that conceptual art can raise the question whether determinable properties can be aesthetic in the absence of noteworthy determinate properties without needing to deny a link between perceptibility and aesthetics.50

Conclusion Though Shelly’s aim of recognizing the ongoing importance of aesthetic properties is increasingly shared, his reconstruction of the issues forces us into uncomfortable choices: ‘[W]e have reason to deny the existence of non-aesthetic art, and no reason to deny that art is essentially aesthetic.’ The essentializing framework is clear. But the needs posed from an essentializing perspective make better sense if we face them from a Wittgensteinian point of view. The approach developed across this chapter and the previous one suggests that insofar as art is a variety of norm-governed practices, its constitutive norms may, but need not, include aesthetic ones. Many, perhaps most, possibly all do. This accommodates the importance of the aesthetic without needing to claim that art is essentially aesthetic. This chapter has argued that perception plays a role in art practices that is open to historical variation: perception is the form of life activity that art practices elaborate and diversify. The chapter also argued for a specific account of perception as engagement that involves individuative understanding. The argument worked in two different directions. Starting with the facts of perception, I briefly argued that conceptual realism provides the best explanation. Examining the challenges posed by artworks, I tried to show that conceptual realism is needed to do justice to the complex identity of contemporary works and the complexity of their contents. Conceptual realism allows for diversity of artworks and complex contents; for diversity of properties, including aesthetic ones; and it allows us to explain that some aesthetic properties are historical. It also helps us understand the challenges posed by conceptual art by recognizing that some works may try to make determinate properties insignificant to their point. This takes away the need to show that aesthetic properties are not perceptual (insofar as the perceptual

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involves more than lack of inference) or that they have to be understood univocally across literature and visual art in order to include conceptual art. We can regain the sense that the aesthetic dimensions of artworks are important once we recognize the background role being played by the wonder and splendour of perceptible presence, or more simply, by our love of perception, by the fact that we can never get enough of determinate presence. How our love of determinate presence figures in our lives depends on broader historical as well as specific art-historical context. Artists might try to suppress or defeat the background role played by this love if they and their communities believe this is called for by the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, and they might strive to forge new practices accordingly.

Notes 1 2

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John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Penguin, 1934), 22. The term is owing to David Wiggins, who has argued for a similar position in Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). My understanding of the issues owes a great debt to his work, which goes beyond the scope of the discussion here. The fact that we cannot attend to all parts of our surroundings and that we are subject to ‘change blindness’ might be used to object to my view and to suggest that we need a radically different account that denies that we really are engaged with the determinate properties of our surroundings. One example is the view of Alva Noe, see Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). I think that the way to handle these facts is as the sorts of errors to which perceptual engagement is vulnerable, but not to back down from its key function in animal life. But this issue is beyond my scope here. G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, ed. John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 71. For a fuller discussion, see my ‘Perception, Aesthetic Properties, and Understanding’ (manuscript). I would argue that the question is ill-posed since it blurs distinctions between personal and sub-personal explanations. But here the aim is to address the challenge as posed. For a more detailed discussion of the relational view in terms of this and similar examples, see my ‘Perception, Aesthetic Properties, and Understanding’ (manuscript). This is the key difference in Wittgensteinian realism from the realism articulated by Putnam, who recognizes that realism turns on the relational nature of perception

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that provides warrant for what we say and do, but nevertheless wants to retain some room for an unconceptualized ingredient in perceptual experience. Putnam argues that perceptual experience involves apperceptions that need not be conceptualized. ‘Comments on Travis and McDowell’, in Reading Putnam, ed. Maria Baghramian (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 347–358, especially 351–354. I cannot get into the details of his view here. What is important is both Putnam’s motivation and divergence from Wittgenstein. Putnam is concerned to secure a sameness of experience between animals and us, a motivation shared by many that ‘surely what we see is the same’. I don’t think that this is correct, phenomenologically and theoretically, and it is not Wittgenstein’s view, given the thorough interdependence of our capacities, which is a hallmark of that view along with its emphasis on training into language games. In a longer treatment, I could gather more strands from Wittgenstein’s work but that would take us too far afield from the direct concerns of philosophy of art and aesthetics. On the one hand, naïve or direct realist approaches deny that sortal understanding is involved in our capacity to perceive individuals and their determinate properties. We considered the objection from John Campbell’s relational view briefly above. On the other hand, various approaches deny perceptual realism by proposing that perceptual content is general rather than singular, object- or property-involving. Some hold that such general content is of one kind across perceptual, hallucinatory and illusory cases of experience. A range of theories also argues that the contents of perceptual experience are partly non-conceptual – especially when it comes to experience of properties such as colours, shapes or textures. Hickey, ‘This Mortal Magic’, 189. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, ed. P. M. S. Hacker Joachim Schulte. Revised 4th Edition (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 174. John F. M. Hunter, ‘Forms of Life’ in Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 5 (1968): 233–243. Hunter, ‘Forms of Life’ in Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 241, 243. Wittgenstein for the most part writes in the singular, but he writes of a form of life and in one context he uses the plural. I suggest that the notion of a form of life, insofar as it is norm governed, implies a possible plurality. Newton Garver (‘Form of Life in Wittgenstein’s Later Work’, Dialectica, 44 (1990): 175–201) argues that it is a mistake to focus on the diversity of forms of life, arguing that for us there is one form, though there may be other forms, such as the bovine or canine (which we would not understand, if they involved language). His concern is to block the ‘cultural relativity’ that seems to be conjured with the notion of forms of life. But animals don’t speak articulate languages, and the notion of form of life is firmly correlated by Wittgenstein with the activity of speaking and the role it

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Beauty and the End of Art plays – simply, with the notion of language games. My point here is to acknowledge Garver’s view, yet to suggest that one should not deny the diversity implicit in the notion of a form of a life. It is the possibility of variation that comes from norms that entails that our life activities are forms of life activities (in the plural), and that these interweave to make up the broader context that some also call a form or forms of life. In itself this plurality does not implicate Wittgenstein’s approach in relativism, as the realistic framework developed here shows. See also Newton Garver, This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). The conceptualist account of perceptual engagement brings breadth to the account of art as well. Unlike the ‘visual’ or ‘optical’, the notion of perceptual engagement does not distinguish figurative from non-figurative, three-dimensional from twodimensional art works, nor does it distinguish between ‘three-dimensional work’ a ready-made, happening or performance. Since perceptual engagement is an embodied activity, we engage with works as we move about, through an installation, for example, or if we linger in the presence of a two-dimensional work such as a painting. Standing still to experience something is no less embodied and engaged than moving about to do so (as the museum-weariness of our bodies attests). The distinctions and relations between two and ‘three-dimensional’ works, for example, are a matter of the constitutive norms of art practices and their interrelations, not of the life activity embroidered through these diverse practices. Moreover, perceptual experience also subsumes diverse dimensions such as its pleasure or aesthetic value, which the various constitutive norms of art practices might prioritize or downplay. See Sol LeWitt’s 2003 interview with Sol Ostrow in BOMB, 85 (2003): 22–29. Discussions of conceptual art almost invariably cite his writings from the 1960s, but it is instructive to consider his retrospective understanding as well. See discussion of conceptual art and perception in Philosophy and Conceptual Art, eds. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). For the complete cycle of paintings, see Gerhard Richter’s website https://www. gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/photo-paintings/baader-meinhof-56 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003). Ibid., 260–263. Michael Kelly, ‘The Richter Effect on the Regeneration of Aesthetics’, in Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, eds. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 256–273. For a range of readings about Richter’s work see the following: Jason Gaiger, ‘Post-conceptual painting: Gerhard Richter’s extended leave-taking’, in Themes in Contemporary Art, eds. Gill Perry and Paul Wood (New Haven and London:

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Yale University Press in Association with The Open University, 2004), 89–135. Benjamin H. D. Bluchloh, ed. Gerhard Richter October Files 8 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009). Hal Foster, ‘Gerhard Richter, or the Photogenic Image’, in The First Pop Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 172–209. Kaja Silverman, ‘Photography by Other Means’, in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 168–221. ‘Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the cycle 18 October 1977, 1989’, in Gerhard Richter The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews 1962– 1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Obritt (London: Thames and Hudson: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1995), 183–206, 193–194. Sean D. Kelly, ‘The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience’, Perceiving the World, ed. Bence Nanay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 152. This quotation is from Merleau-Ponty, as it is given in Kelly, ‘The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience’, 146; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 302. Kelly, ‘The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience’, 155. This quotation is from Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 302; as quoted in Kelly, ‘The Normative Nature of Perceptual Experience’, 153. Alternative approaches would hold that it is subjects who decide to make their perceptions clear, perhaps that it is a ‘skill’ or ‘know-how’ to clarify our experience; but Kelly proposes that it is a dimension of experiences themselves that they eschew unclarity. Ibid., 156. ‘Interview with Rolf Schon 1972’, in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961–2007, eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (New York, NY: D.A.P., 2009, 1st Edition), 59–61. From the same interview: ‘How objective, in the documentary sense, is your photographic painting? It isn’t. First of all, only photographs can be objective, because they relate to an object without themselves being objects. However, I can also see them as objects and even make them into objects – by painting them, for instance. From that point onwards they cannot be, and are not meant to be, objective any more – nor are they meant to document anything whatever, whether reality or a view of reality. They are the reality, the view, the object. They can only be documented.’ I avoid the expression ‘seeing an artwork as an artwork’ or ‘as such’ in order to avoid the trap of thinking that one sees something which then gets interpreted or allocated to a kind by a distinct mental act or by distinctively conceptual part of perception. Kendall L. Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, The Philosophical Review, 79 (1970): 334–367. I will not always include the qualification that the historical categories at issue are perceptually distinguishable but it is in force throughout.

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34 Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, 363. 35 For example, a person can see a painting in the style of Cezanne or hear music in the style of late Beethoven, though one cannot on this view see that a work is by Cezanne or hear that a work is by Beethoven just as one cannot see that a person is a bachelor. Here are the definitions from ‘Categories of Art’, 339: Standard: A feature of a work of art is standard with respect to a (perceptually distinguishable) category just in case it is among those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category – that is, just in case the lack of that feature would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category.’ Variable: ‘A feature is variable with respect to a category just in case it has nothing to do with works’ belonging to that category; the possession or lack of the feature is irrelevant to whether a work qualifies for the category.’ Contra-Standard: ‘[A] contra-standard feature with respect to a category is the absence of a standard feature with respect to that category – that is, a feature whose presence tends to disqualify works as members of the category.’ 36 I am leaving out the issue of what determines the category to which a work belongs, and, focus on the properties that are determined in relation to the category. The former is not our concern, as it is not the primary issue in Walton’s paper, so let’s just note that Walton argues that a balancing of at least four conditions determines the category to which a work belongs and in which it is perceived correctly. The category is one in which (i) the work ‘has a minimum of contra standard features’; and (ii) in which the work is more interesting or valuable aesthetically. The third and fourth conditions are explicitly historical, the correct category is (iii), the one in which the artist intended or expected the work to be perceived, and (iv), the ‘well established and recognized’ category by the society in which the work was produced. See p. 357. 37 Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, 347. 38 Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, 337. 39 ‘In order to learn how to recognize gulls of various kinds, or the sex of chicks, or a certain person’s handwriting, one must have gulls of those kinds, or chicks of the two sexes, or examples of that person’s handwriting pointed out to him, practice recognizing them himself, and be corrected when he makes mistakes. But the training important for discovering the serenity or coherence of a work of art … is not of this sort. Acquiring the ability to perceive a serene or coherent work in the correct categories is not a matter of having had serene or coherent things pointed out to one, or having practiced recognizing them. What is important is not (or not merely) experience with other serene and coherent things, but experience with other things of the appropriate categories.’ Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, 367. 40 Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’, 363–378.

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41 I have altered Shelley’s wording here since his proposition (R) makes a claim about what is necessary for ‘appreciating’ artworks, which muddies the waters. This is not what Danto denies – when he claims that aesthetics is no part of the nature of art – and so this misrepresents the second solution. Danto’s denial of aesthetics is strictly about what makes something art, and he was always clear that this was compatible with criticism that addresses aesthetic features; indeed he called for such criticism in numerous writings. Criticism is concerned with what is there for our appreciation and so it addresses aesthetic properties in treating the complex whole of embodied meanings. That is why Danto could discuss properties – such as daring, wit and impudence – as important for the appreciation of Duchamp’s Fountain. What makes Duchamp’s Fountain an artwork is not its impudence or wit, even though these might be what we appreciate when we appreciate the artwork. Danto’s denial of the necessity of aesthetic properties for art is also compatible with his later view that aesthetic properties are like inflectors: they are what make us care about the artwork and its content. I mention this problem in Shelley’s argument only to set it aside, since it does affect the three options that we are to choose between, but it does not go to the ‘heart of the matter’, as Shelley writes and I agree, namely perception. 42 Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’, 374. 43 Ibid., 371–372. 44 Frank Sibley, ‘Particularity, Art, and Evaluation’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 98. Sibley qualifies this view with ‘generally and typically’ in order to accommodate a few outlying cases. ‘There may occasionally be cases of merit-responsible properties which are not determinate, in which case x is P simply because it has a determinable property Q. A possible example might be symmetrical (Q), which I take to be determinable, and in virtue of which a thing must be balanced (p). But if so, these are exceptional and peripheral cases, as is shown by the fact that a building or a picture might be balanced without being symmetrical, symmetricality being the limiting case into which balance shades off. We might call such terms as “symmetrical,” if there are a few such, terms for determinable merit-responsible qualities.’ But this qualification does not help us understand conceptual art in the broad sense which de-emphasizes determinate properties as non-perceptual in that its merit-responsible properties are determinable. 45 Sibley, ‘Particularity, Art, and Evaluation’, 96. 46 Though Sibley would put the point slightly differently given his overall view of aesthetic properties, namely that the properties by virtue of which we apply an aesthetic merit term to an artwork such as ‘graceful’ are determinate (in an innocuous sense of ‘properties’).

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47 Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’, 373. 48 Noel Carroll, ‘Nonperceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (2004): 413–423. 49 See John G. Hampton’s Why Can’t Minimal? http://jghampton.com/tagged/ whycantminimal. 50 I suggest that Diarmuid Costello provides the most promising approach to the aesthetic properties of conceptual art by drawing on Kant’s notion of free, harmonious play of the faculties of imagination and understanding in response to attributes that convey aesthetic ideas. But Costello is clear that his proposal works for conceptual art in the broad but not in the narrow sense, which does away with an object in favour of a linguistic specification. See his ‘Kant and the Problem of Strong Non-Perceptual Art’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53 (2013): 277–298. Indeed, most philosophical discussions, such as Shelley’s and Carroll’s, for example, concern conceptual art in a broad sense, whereas it is conceptual art in the narrow sense that poses the clearest and most forceful challenge to understanding the aesthetic. If such works are not literary but visual because their relations to visual art engender an imaginative process that is different from the imaginative engagement with a literary work, what room is there for aesthetic properties and aesthetic value? Does a work such as Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1.36 P.M.; 15 June 1969, New York have aesthetic properties?

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Beauty as the Value of Perceptible Presence

[T]he world as an aesthetic presence is inseparable from what we are.1 With these simple words, Arthur Danto goes to the heart of Kant’s view of beauty. This chapter will develop this insight into an account of beauty’s value. I have argued that Wittgensteinian realism elucidates the world’s historically evolving inseparability from us. But to understand the aesthetic presence of the world, I suggest we need to draw out Kant’s insights about the judgement of beauty and show how they can fit into a Wittgensteinian framework. We also need to recognize the perceptual orientation of Kant’s view, which explains the experiential nature of beauty. This is not to deny the importance of the connections he draws between experiences of beauty and morality, but that is not my focus here. Kant’s approach is perceptualist in the sense that it connects intense distinctively perceptual pleasure with our sense of our relationship as thinking, sensitive perceivers with the world. To take seriously the idea that the world is an inseparable aesthetic presence to what we are is to recognize that the world is an aesthetic no less than a factual presence. Kant’s aim is to explain that factual and aesthetic presence are not disconnected. His view is that judgements of beauty intimate that we find ourselves in a permissive relationship with the world – to put it most simply, if we recall Hickey’s view that beauty engenders trust and trust is permissive. However, Kant’s focus on the constitutive or transcendental conditions of the judgement of beauty might seem to render his account ahistorical in a way that might seem wanting. This is Danto’s understanding of Kant’s work, for example.2 But this chapter will argue that Kant’s leading ideas about the experience of beauty are compatible with a Wittgensteinian realist framework that allocates an integral role to contingent historical factors. Recall that Wittgensteinian realism emphasizes the holistic interconnections between persons and world to help us understand that human forms of life activities

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allow objective facts and values to be available. Developing Kant’s specific ideas about beauty both in their own right and from the perspective of Wittgensteinian realism can help us understand how beauty might be a value that becomes available in the weave of contingent, historical circumstance of human life, a value that is one of the basic dimensions of human life in the world: the value of the world’s perceptible presence to us.3 This approach will bring out how Kant’s ideas help address some key problems that stand out in the evolving contemporary discussion about beauty. Each of the proposals considered in Chapter 3 highlights beauty’s distinctive pleasure, its plurality and normative force, and the difficulty of capturing the unity of what we see and what we understand in the intensity of the experience. I argued that we lose the beautiful if we prioritize either visibility or understanding in the experience of beauty. Kant’s leading idea that the experiential free play of imagination and understanding warrants the judgement of beauty explains the distinctive unity of the visible and conceptual in the pleasure beauty evokes. In this sense, Kant’s account explains the distinctive pleasure of perception and its value, providing insights for further work. Developing these insights within a Wittgensteinian framework offers an account of beauty that is both experiential and historical, just as the previous chapter argued about perception and art. The Wittgensteinian approach will also begin to address the following subjects of contemporary debate: the relationship of non-aesthetic properties to aesthetic ones, aesthetic supervenience and the seemingly interminable stand-off between contemporary forms of aesthetic realism and anti-realism. The chapter will proceed in the following five steps that (i) present the perceptual orientation of Kant’s account of the judgement of beauty in detail, (ii) develop a Wittgensteinian approach to the perceptible presence of the world that explains how Kant’s detailed account fits into this framework, (iii) argue that this approach explains beauty as a value that admits plurality, (iv) challenge contemporary approaches to aesthetics in terms of supervenience and the disagreement of ideal critics and (v) conclude with a critical examination of the view that beauty offers consolation that may be inappropriate.

Kantian free play of imagination and understanding, aesthetic ideas and normativity What is it to feel the value of the world’s perceptible presence? What is the pleasure with which we respond to those parts of the perceptible world that we find beautiful? Contemporary insistence on the pleasure of beauty is often

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considered an alternative to seemingly more austere approaches like Kant’s, which is said to highlight the contemplative or disinterested nature of the judgement of beauty. This is Nehamas’ contention, for example, in arguing that we need to return from the ‘mistaken detour’ taken in Kantian aesthetics to Plato’s originary view that beauty is the object of love. But Kant’s examination of the constitutive conditions of the judgement of beauty details that the judgement expresses the feeling of the reciprocally stimulating – ‘free and harmonious’ – interplay between our imagination and understanding. It is this interplay that grounds the judgement of beauty and feels wonderful. We have considered that Kant’s way of making the notion of judgement precise stresses that ‘[j]udgement in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal’, which shows the commonality to both cognition and perception.4 A judgement of beauty (or more correctly, a judgement of pure beauty or a pure aesthetic judgement, though I will stick with the shorter formulation) is particular, according to Kant, and purely reflective. It is particular in that it concerns a particular individual ‘this rose’ or ‘this painting’. (Judgements that ‘some roses …’ or ‘all roses are beautiful’ are not judgements of beauty, but rather judgements that generalize upon the particular judgements, so Kant calls them ‘logical’.5) Kant’s view is that judgement involves two dimensions – of reflection and determination – which harmonize or work together in ordinary empirical or logical judgements so that in reflection resembling particulars are collected together in integration with being determined by a concept. Such harmonious functioning yields ordinary judgements: ‘This is a snowdrop’ or ‘Snowdrops are white’, for example. Judgements of beauty stand apart in that they are only reflective. The object prompts us to think and to imaginatively present its determinate features along with others that we might recall or envision, but our thoughts and presentations keep reciprocally stimulating one another rather than uniting in one conception because there is no concept of beauty that provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the particular. This is Kant’s leading insight that beauty’s distinctive pleasure is that of finding ourselves in an extended phase of the reflective dimension of judgement where we feel the reciprocal harmonious ‘free play’ between our capacities to entertain presentations and thoughts. So the judgement of beauty expresses ‘a pleasure that is felt at this moment upon apprehending this object’.6 In contemporary terms, we might say that a judgement of beauty is purely reflective in that it eludes conceptualization in two ways: when one judges that ‘this rose is beautiful’ the individual is not subsumed under conditions that would govern a concept of beauty; and it is also not conceptualized as a beautiful

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instance of a thing of its kind, a judgement that we might express by saying, for example, that ‘this is a beautiful rose’.7 Kant’s account of the normative force of judgements of beauty is based on his analysis of the pleasurable interplay of the faculties. We make a judgement that is based in one’s own feeling of the mutually stimulating play of the faculties, yet this does not render the judgement a subjective one concerning one’s own pleasure because the specific nature of the pleasure renders the judgement universal, intimating this delight to all others with justification. It is just this turn to universality in Kant’s thought that many, like Nehamas, find misguided. Whether judgements of beauty have a normative force that distinguishes them from statements of individual pleasure or preference is perhaps the key problem posed by beauty, certainly if one is concerned with beauty’s place in the world, with the metaphysical status held in dispute between realists and subjectivists to this day.8 This is how Kant sees the issue. We can also think about the problem as follows: How is a judgement possible in which the subject, merely on the basis of his own feeling of pleasure in an object, independently of the object’s concept, judges this pleasure as attaching to the presentation of that same object in all other subjects, and does so a priori, i.e., without being allowed to wait for other people’s assent?9

The key to the puzzle, according to Kant, is that we need to think very precisely about what exactly is being intimated with universality? He agrees with Nehamas that if what were at issue is enjoyment that is sensory in nature, universal liking would be out of the question. Sensation [construed] as what is real … in perception and [hence as] referred to cognition, is called sensation proper. The only way for it to be conceivable that what is specific in the quality of such a sensation should be universally communicable in a uniform way is on the assumption that everyone’s sense is like our own. This, however, we simply cannot presuppose about such a sensation. … Yet people must be considered even more divergent concerning the agreeableness or disagreeableness [they feel] when sensing one and the same object of sense, and we simply cannot demand that everyone acknowledge [taking] in such objects the pleasure [that we take in them]. This kind of pleasure, since it enters the mind through sense, so that we are passive, may be called pleasure of enjoyment. (CJ, §39, 291–292)

Insofar as we are all in agreement about sensory pleasure, and we recall the lesson from Nehamas’ account that if aesthetic pleasure is a form of eros or desire it would be possessive and cease with its satisfaction, we can appreciate

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Kant’s aim to distinguish carefully among pleasures. ‘[T]he pleasure we take in the beautiful is a pleasure neither of enjoyment, nor of a law-governed activity, nor yet of a reasoning contemplation governed by ideas, but is a pleasure of mere reflection’ (CJ, § 39, 292). From the point of view of explaining beauty’s normative force, pleasure of reflection lies in experiencing that imagination, which deals in the determinate, is ‘suitable’ to being brought under the conditions for conceptual grasp but not under any specific concept. This is what we feel insofar as our capacity to understand and our capacity to imagine harmonize even though our imaginative capacity remains free.10 Now since a judgement of taste is not based on a concept of the object, it can consist only in the subsumption of the very imagination under the condition [which must be met] for the understanding to proceed in general from intuition to concepts. (CJ, §35, 287, my emphasis)

This is the key, since the condition whereby presentations can resonate with thoughts is common to all perceivers rather than specific to any one individual. Kant offers two characterizations of what it is about an object – or an experiential ‘presentation’ of an object – that brings about the mutual stimulation of the faculties. The first is that the determinate character of the beautiful object – or its presentation – is not required by the purpose of the object: just these determinate contours of the lily’s petals are not required by the functions that the object or its shapes fulfil. Such structures of features go beyond purpose – beyond a conception of the object that is its cause – so it is as if they were designed to fulfil a purpose. They elude our understanding because they are purposive without a purpose.11 Insofar as the object’s ‘form’ is purposive without a purpose, it sends our capacities into a free play rather than allowing them to unite under a conception of the object’s purpose. In this sense, the play of our faculties is also purposive – as if it proceeds from a purpose even though it does not.12 This means that the judgement of beauty ‘must rest on a feeling that allows us to judge the object by the purposiveness that the presentation (by which the object is given) has insofar as it furthers the cognitive powers in their free play’ (CJ, § 35, 287). The upshot is that what we feel, what we find so pleasurable, is simply the power of these faculties and that these powers harmonize. Hence taste, as the subjective power of judgement, contains a principle of subsumption; however, this subsumption is not one of intuitions under concepts, but, rather, one of the power of intuitions or exhibitions (the imagination) under

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the power of concepts (the understanding), insofar as the imagination in its freedom harmonizes with the understanding in its lawfulness. (CJ, § 35, 287)

This is why the significance of the intense pleasure beauty evokes could not be greater. It allows us to feel that the determinate and the conceptual are amenable to one another; the determinate may be brought ‘under’ or within the conditions for conceptual understanding even as the splendour of that determinate character eludes us. This is truly a wonder. It is one of the constitutive conditions of the judgement of beauty, a dimension in the experience of any particular beauty that warrants the judgement. It is what we feel when perceptual pleasure is taken to its limits. Because what we feel is a pleasure in the very nature of our capacities and the way this allows us to relate to the world13 rather than pleasure in a specific outcome of their unified functioning, we feel that we are experiencing as anyone has the capacity to do, as anyone may and, indeed, as anyone ought. This is why the experience comes with an urge to communicate, or at least a feeling that communicating it to others is possible. This is Kant’s point that in experiencing that our capacities are suited to one another, we experience something that is common to all human beings. ‘This pleasure must of necessity rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions for the possibility of cognition as such’ (CJ, §39, 292, my emphasis). This shows that the experience has a justification or normative force that extends to all of us. It also entails, in Kant’s terms, that the pleasure is disinterested in that it is not based in one’s own specific concerns (though it may additionally or incidentally connect with any variety of one’s own interests),14 nor within any specific concepts, and thereby intimates our commonality with others, since what it intimates is – now in my and Dewey’s terms – the wonder and the splendour of perception, the splendour of determinate presence to us, a determinacy that is not rendered fully comprehensible by any of the functions we might understand. This is why even though Kant writes that the judgement of beauty is contemplative, he is not concerned with a cool contemplative attitude where all that matters is perception ‘for its own sake’, at least not as these phrases are typically understood. Yes, he is concerned with an awareness of perception. But this is an awareness of perception taken to its ‘limit’ that calls attention to itself by calling attention to its own pleasure. Such pleasure conveys that the determinate is thinkable – because it is the feeling of reciprocal free play between our only notionally separated faculties of imagination and understanding. This just is, in the terms that I have developed, to experience

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perception itself, its very nature, as the capacity wherein the determinate is intelligible. For Kant, this could not be more important because it intimates that the world is thinkable – or somewhat more precisely, that judgement has the warrant of a background regulative principle that the world in thinkable. In the experience of beauty we feel that this regulative principle is warranted, which is the most that is possible. Otherwise, if we wanted cognitive grasp of this background regulative principle, we would be launched on an infinite regress where one principle explicitly grounds or warrants another. (We will return to this key motivation of Kant’s account in the next section.) Roger Scruton evokes Kant’s thought in nontechnical terms: ‘In the experience of beauty the world comes home to us, and we to the world. But it comes home in a special way – through its presentation rather than its use.’15 Yet what about the beauty of art specifically? It may seem that Kant cannot accommodate the beauty of art, a problem he explicitly recognizes, since a response must involve awareness that the object is an artwork, an intentional human product. The harmonious play of imagination and understanding is free only if the object’s beauty is not subsumed under a concept of the object or under a concept of beauty (that is condition governed). Recall that in Kant’s terms, the properties of a beautiful object are purposive without a purpose; they seem as if they follow from a conception of the object even though they do not. This fits our awareness of nature, since when we respond to natural objects and in particular to their beauty, we are responding to something that we know did not come into being through a conception or design even though its beauty seems as if it were designed. In contrast, to respond to artworks appropriately, we must be aware of them as produced or brought about through a conception of the intended object. Kant sums the difficulty up as follows: In [dealing with] a product of fine art we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature, and yet the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature. … Nature, we say, is beautiful [schön] if it also looks like art; and art can be called fine [schön] art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature. (CJ, § 45, 306)

The importance of Kant’s recognition of this problem cannot be overstated because it is not simply a matter of the internal coherence of his account. Though he did not think of it in these terms, what is at issue is whether Kant’s idea that beauty evokes a strikingly free reaction is compatible with historically specific understanding that enters into recognizing artworks. Given contemporary

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conviction that art is historical and requires historical individuative understanding, to remain of relevance for our understanding of beautiful art, Kant’s work needs to shows how it accommodates such understanding in the judgement of beauty. To resolve the problem, Kant argues that beautiful objects exhibit aesthetic ideas – which is the way beautiful works convey ‘contents’ in his attenuated sense of the term. This may seem to be an ‘afterthought’ for explaining beautiful art rather than an integral part of his view of beauty. But it is not. It is his second way of specifying what it is about an object (or presentation of an object) that evokes the free play of our faculties. We may in general call beauty (whether natural or artistic) the expression of aesthetic ideas; the difference is that in the case of beautiful art the aesthetic idea must be prompted by a concept of the object, whereas in the case of beautiful nature, mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object is [meant] to be, is sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is regarded as the expression. (CJ, § 51, 320)

What are aesthetic ideas? They are ‘intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate’ (CJ, §49, 314). Kant suggests that a presentation of the imagination that belongs to the exhibition of a concept may prompt much thought so that it ‘aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way’ (CJ, §49, 315). Strictly speaking, Kant calls such aesthetic presentations ideas because they ‘at least strive towards something that lies beyond the bounds of experience’ and give ‘a semblance of objective reality’ to rational ideas such as those of freedom, immortality or God (CJ, §49, 314).16 Two key features of this suggestion stand out. First, in emphasizing that art’s aesthetic ideas ‘strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience’, Kant takes pains to deny the empiricist approach to imagination. In response to beauty the imagination is not constrained by the laws of association: ‘we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature’ (CJ, §49, 314). Second, Kant also takes pains to specify that it is the aesthetic attributes of the depicted object or the artistic work that unleash the imagination. His examples turn on the imagery that a painting or poem offer. Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven, and the peacock is an attribute of heaven’s stately queen. [Through] these attributes, unlike [through] logical attributes, [we] do not present the content of

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our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but present something different, something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. (CJ, §49, 315)

His idea extends readily to works where explicit metaphor is not at issue. Barnett Newman’s Onement Series or his Stations of the Cross offer contemporary examples.17 In Kantian terms, Newman develops a new aesthetic attribute, a zip or thin line separating fields of colour, that evokes ideas of origins – the originary force of a line – or of individuality and uniqueness, of the place of an individual in the larger whole. As Newman put it, ‘I hope that my painting has given someone, as it did me, the impact of his own totality, of his separateness, of his individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate.’18 One might also think about some of Richter’s innovative techniques in these terms since they endow what is depicted with perceptible properties that might function as aesthetic attributes in Kant’s sense. Is the painterly blurring of photographic images an aesthetic attribute that expands on our sense of the fragility of memory or the fraught objectivity of perceptual responsiveness to the world? Does the distinctive smearing of colours in his abstractions – which is brought about by repeatedly wiping layers of colour with a squeegee rather than the unmediated action of a human hand – expand our conflicted sense that properties that are undeniably dependent on our responsiveness also stand in objective relations to one another? Richter’s smeared abstractions seem to reveal an unbounded plenitude of relationships among colours – one feels in the presence of an infinitude of appearances that the world holds for disclosure. Yet precisely because Kant emphasizes that aesthetic attributes expand a concept, it may seem hard to square Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas with the range of contents that beautiful artworks offer. Is Kant suggesting that aesthetic ideas are only those that exhibit the content of rational ideas such as those of freedom or God? Or may any content that is amplified, as it were, through its presentation be an aesthetic idea? I think that Kant’s view connects these two options: any content that is presented so that it ‘prompts much thought that cannot be said’ is also ultimately connected with rational ideas of reason, freedom, infinity or the totality of nature. This seems to be Gadamer’s view, if we recall his suggestion that beautiful art is symbolic in that it evokes our sense of our place in the larger whole. the main reason, for calling those presentations [of the imagination] ideas is that they are inner intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate.

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A poet ventures to give sensible expression to rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and so on. Or, again, he takes [things] that are indeed exemplified in experience, such as death, envy, and all the other vices, as well as love, fame, and so on; but then, by means of an imagination that emulates the example of reason in reaching [for] a maximum, he ventures to give these sensible expression in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience, namely, with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature. (CJ, §49, 314)

Together, these parts of Kant’s view address our contemporary concern with the individuative understanding required for art. Kant clearly tries to show that the free play of imagination and understanding is a response to the contents that artworks intentionally convey. Because a response to content involves awareness that the work is intentionally produced to carry content, the concept of the object also enters into the response. It might be helpful to pause to consider that Kant wants to show that our response to natural objects is analogous to artworks even though such objects are not intentionally designed to carry content. He suggests that when we experience natural beauty our imagination is drawn to go beyond the limits of experience and apprehends the idea of what one might call the ‘supersensible subtrate’ of humanity. So the fact that Kant considers natural and artistic beauty as belonging to one genus is not a failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of art, but emphasizes the free play that expands experience beyond the logical attributes of concepts. Kant writes that this quickens the mind – which we might now recognize is Elaine Scarry’s suggestion that beauty engenders capacious consciousness. To return to art, the problem for Kant’s view is how much understanding of a work is required? Is the awareness that a work is produced through a conception of its intended content sufficient for grasping the aesthetic ideas that its attributes exhibit? We have considered a variety of arguments – beginning with Danto’s and Belting’s in Chapter 1, and continuing across a variety of theorists to Walton’s argument about the determination of some aesthetic properties in Chapter 5 – that suggest that quite specific historical understanding is required for individuative grasp of an artwork and (at least some) of its aesthetic properties. Such specific understanding might seem to render a judgement of a beautiful artwork one of adherent rather free beauty, which is subsumed under a concept of the object. I suggest that Kant’s view explains that a free aesthetic response might involve fairly specific individuative understanding. Consider his discussion that the beauty of architecture is

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adherent or subsumed under a concept, whereas sculpture’s beauty is free.19 Kant argues that the expression of aesthetic ideas in architecture is subservient to the function that the work carries out but that in sculpture there is no extra-artistic function so the beauty of sculpture is free. The difference is that because architecture has its own distinctive functions, aesthetic ideas are conveyed through the fulfilment of those functions. In contrast, sculpture does not have a function in this sense. According to Kant, it just carries content by means of its range of aesthetic attributes. Consider coming upon Urs Fischer’s continuously melting life-size figures of ordinary people, classical nudes and objects like office chairs in the Armoury Hall at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Kant’s thought is that if one finds the enormous hall in which the sculptures figure beautiful, one’s imaginative response will be informed by the function that the building was designed to fulfil – that it was an armoury – and by one’s acquaintance with contemporary appropriations of older spaces for current uses. Such functional understanding constrains the imaginative dimension of our response, so that in seeing the beauty of the building, we would be judging it as an instance of its kind: a contemporary appropriation of a historically specific space, that of an armoury. But given that one would also inevitably have some acquaintance with contemporary sculptures and installations which would enter into one’s recognition of the melting figures, the question is why such individuative understanding allows the imagination to remain free in responding to their beauty? I think that Kant’s point is twofold. First, even if we suppose that it is the ‘function’ of a sculpture’s properties to present aesthetic ideas, this does not constrain what ideas a sculpture might present and how, so that the ‘function’ of carrying content is not one that can constrain one’s response to a work. This holds even if specific historical factors typically constrain which ideas a work may convey and by means of which sorts of aesthetic attributes. What would make response to a sculpture’s beauty not free is if one judged it to be a beautiful instance of its particular content. But the content of a beautiful work – the content of an aesthetic idea – cannot be precisely specified, according to Kant. This is the second point, and it is key to Kant’s proposal: if an aesthetic idea is an unspecifiable expansion of a concept, then there is no specific content that can serve as a kind. There is no specific content that the continuously melting figures convey, for example, by providing aesthetic attributes that help expand one’s grasp of the concept of finite temporality. Similarly, one doesn’t see the beauty of a particular colour field painting as a perfect instance of its kind because (i) grasping the kind ‘color field painting’ does not constrain

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what aesthetic ideas it might exhibit and how (beyond non-figurative use of colour); and (ii) the content of a beautiful painting of this type eludes precise specification so that it does not form a kind with other paintings carrying exactly that same content.20 At least two objections might seem pressing to my reconstruction of Kant’s ideas. Both help clarify the respects in which I am suggesting Kant’s ideas can be responsibly separated from some of their accompaniments to offer abiding insights for contemporary thought. The first questions my suppression of Kant’s transcendental framework. The second turns on my inclusion of colour in Kant’s notion of purposive form and charges that my approach underplays the role of specifically spatiotemporal form in Kant’s account of beauty. The latter is Kant’s supposed formalism, which my reconstruction tempers. First, one might object that Kant’s transcendental framework, which distinguishes things as they are in-themselves from things as we can experience and think about them or things-for-us, cannot be reconciled with the object- and property-engaging realism, for which I have argued. But this difference does not block taking certain of Kant’s insights out of their transcendental frame, where the emphasis lies on our pleasure in the representational nature of our perceptual experience, and locating them within the framework I have developed, where the representational nature of perceptual experience is explained specifically as singular, as a mode of engagement that allows determinate individuals and properties to figure in experiences and thoughts. In the context of Kant’s metaphysics and theory of knowledge, such extraction is controversial and the object of debate. But since much of the point of his account of pure reflective judgement of beauty is to analyse the pleasure we feel in perceptual experience, Kant’s account of the nature and structure of the pleasure in the representationality of perception can be instructive for accounts that might differ in their specific understanding that the representationality of perception is object- and property-involving. Moreover, Kant’s transcendental enquiry need not be understood to posit either ‘two-worlds’–‘two-objects’ or ‘one-world’–‘two-aspects’, though it is beyond my scope here to engage in this debate. I follow Henry Allison’s understanding that Kant’s view is ‘best viewed as an alternative to ontology, rather than, as it usually is, as an alternative ontology’ that explores the fact that experience is subject to its own norms.21 A second line of objection might challenge my emphasis on the determinate nature of our experiences of beauty that includes properties such as colours, in place of a more restrictive understanding of Kant’s notion of purposive form that excludes colour. This is important because perception is not restricted to

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spatiotemporal forms, so Kant’s account is perceptualist as I have suggested only if it does not entail this restriction. To be sure, in the analytic of the beautiful, Kant explains that purposive form in the object evokes the free play of imagination and understanding as follows: ‘A pure judgement of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotion (though these may be connected with a liking for the beautiful), and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of form’ (CJ, §13, 223). This is followed by notorious passages where Kant seems to denigrate colour as a mere charm: in painting, in sculpture, indeed in all the visual arts, … design is what is essential: in design the basis for any involvement of taste is not what gratifies us in sensation, but merely what we like because of its form. The colors that illuminate the outline belong to charm. Though they can indeed make the object itself vivid to sense, they cannot make it beautiful and worthy of being beheld. (CJ, §14, 225)

One reason to set aside the workings of colour on us as ‘charm’ has already come up in the discussion: ‘we cannot assume that in all subjects the sensations themselves agree in quality, let alone that everyone will judge one color more agreeable than another, or judge the tone of one musical instrument more agreeable than that of another’ (CJ, §14, 224). And so, purposive form has for the most part been understood as spatial (and temporal) arrangement. Two avenues of response lie open. First, whatever details Kant may include in his discussion, what controls his conception of purposive form is the notion of free play of the faculties. What drives interpretation are not subsidiary passages such as those quoted above, but Kant’s primary task of explaining judgement and specifically pure reflective judgement, which comes to the idea, detailed above, that the capacity for imagination and for understanding enter into a freely harmonious play, whereby one experiences that they are suited to one another. Within this overarching context, we have seen that Kant offers two ways of understanding what it is about objects (or their presentations) that evokes the free play of our faculties: purposive form and aesthetic ideas. His discussion of aesthetic attributes and aesthetic ideas makes clear that the imagination is not restricted to spatiotemporal forms; there is no corresponding restriction on the aesthetic attributes that exhibit aesthetic ideas to the apparent restriction in the discussion of purposive form.22 Second, Kant’s view of colour is more nuanced than that of an agreeable, passively registered sensory charm. Though space does not allow doing full justice to its twists and turns, let’s consider two passages. From the outset in the

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analytic of the beautiful, Kant makes clear that the theory of colour to which he subscribes takes experienced colour to involve structure – which means that it can allow for free play. Here is how Kant continues the infamous denigration of colour quoted above: if we assume – what is most important (and which, after all, I do not doubt at all) – that the mind perceives not only, by sense, the effect that these vibrations have on the excitement of the organ [for example, if this is what our empirical theory tells us about the causes of sensation], but also, by reflection, the regular play of the impressions (and hence the form in the connection of different presentations), then color and tone would not be mere sensations but would already be the formal determination of the manifold in these, in which case they could even by themselves be considered beauties. (CJ, §14, 224)

In other words, Kant countenances that experienced colours are not discrete sensations, which might figure merely as sensory embellishments of forms, but already contain structure and figure as such in the manifold of experience. And so colours may be beautiful. Kant makes a similar point in his discussion of fine art, where he divides the arts into three kinds, the third being ‘the art of the beautiful play of sensations’ namely music and the art of colour, as we might put it (CJ, §51, 324). This third category immediately raises the problem how arts concerned with sensations could be beautiful rather than agreeable? The issue is that we ‘cannot say with certainty whether a color or tone (sound) is merely an agreeable sensation or whether it is of itself already a beautiful play of [component] sensations and as such carries with it, as we judge it aesthetically, a liking for its form’ (CJ, §51, 324). Kant argues that liking for form would be for the structural relationships inherent among musical tones as well as colours (which we might note is supported by contemporary understanding of colour as involving perception of higher order relationships). He offers two kinds of evidence. First, people who clearly have the appropriate sense may be lacking in the ability to experience relationships, such as the colour blind and the tone deaf. And among those who can perceive qualitative changes, there are definite limits ‘on the number of these varying intensities that can be distinguished intelligibly’ (CJ, §51, 325). Second, there are mathematical relationships among auditory vibrations that we can judge, so that by analogy we can suppose that colour contrast relationships are involved in colour judgements. Kant concludes, ‘If we consider all of this, we may feel compelled to regard sensation of colour and tone not as mere sense impressions, but as the effect of our judging of the

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form we find in the play of many sensations’ (CJ, §51, 325). This supports the further conclusion, that music – and hence by analogy the art of colour as well – may be a play of beautiful sensations or a play of agreeable sensations, and hence a beautiful art or an agreeable art, depending on whether we attend to their structural relationships and those relationships evoke the free play of our faculties. Together, these discussions point to a less restrictive understanding of Kant’s idea of purposive form: structure that evokes a free and harmonious play of imagination and understanding whereby we imaginatively through determinate presentations and with understanding through concepts resonate to aesthetic ideas. I have presented Kant’s ideas in some detail to show that his account includes careful attention to the specific challenges posed by aesthetic judgement of beautiful art. This is a key part of his account of the perceptual pleasure in which we feel the free play that grounds the normative force of judgements of beauty. Kant’s work points us in the right direction by leading us to think about the distinctively perceptual pleasure that beauty evokes and what this pleasure intimates about ourselves and our relationship to the world. At its limit – where it is not possible for determining and reflective dimensions of experience to unite in judgement as they otherwise do – we feel that our capacities are suited for grasping the perceptible world precisely insofar as the beauty of a determinate particular eludes our fully conceptual grasp.23 Though he might not put the point in these words, Kant’s work shows us beauty’s distinctive value – the value of perceptual engagement wherein the fact that the world is amenable to experience is intimated. Kant’s work also explains what it may mean to suggest that the structure of beauty’s value is the structure of trust and permission, as Hickey argues for the beauty of the recent beaux-arts tradition. This is because Kant’s analysis of the judgement of beauty details what it is to feel that we find ourselves in a permissive relationship with the world’s perceptible presence. I suggest that we take Kant’s work as an account of beauty’s higher order value. The particular free play of imagination and understanding in response to a particular artwork or natural object is the specific value of the perceptual presence of the world in that given case. The fact that the free play intimates the value of perceptible presence is the higher-order value that instances of beauty share; it is the higher-order value of purely reflective perceptual judgement, which is the pure aesthetic judgement of beauty.

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But as we saw in Chapter 3, contemporary reaffirmations of beauty call for an account of beauty’s value that does not involve a transcendental metaphysics. This is where Wittgensteinian realism offers just what we need.

Wittgensteinian realism and the aesthetic presence of the world Recall that Wittgensteinian realism shows how the reciprocal relations between persons and world help us understand that human forms of life activities allow objective facts and values to become available. To be more specific, let’s now put together Wittgenstein’s epistemically oriented work in On Certainty24 with his suggestions about aesthetic judgement in Lectures on Aesthetics. On Certainty is concerned, in part, with the normative warrant of our judgements. Lectures on Aesthetics suggests that we need to look at facts about cultural practices in order to understand the aesthetic judgements or taste of any particular time and place. Both approaches are holistic in the specific way characteristic of Wittgensteinian realism – they emphasize the many related dimensions that make up forms of human life activities in the world. Wittgenstein’s approach adds a more outward-looking dimension to the facts that enter into the warrant of our judgements of beauty, while we may continue to take Kant to identify the experiential dimension of free play of imagination and understanding. Wittgenstein’s holistic or multidimensional view of judgement also helps explain the range of variation and disagreement among individual judgements of beauty and the sense in which beauty is a value that admits plurality. On Certainty adds more specific content to the idea of human second nature by examining how judgements no less than actions are instilled in us through training into forms of life activities that are rule governed. ‘We do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules: we are taught judgments and their connexion with other judgments. A totality of judgments is made plausible to us’ (§140) ‘From a child up I learned to judge like this. This is judging.’ (§128) ‘This is how I learned to judge; this I got to know as judgement’ (§129). And just as ways of acting come together with what those actions involve and concern, ways of judging come together with what those judgements involve and concern, as we considered in Chapter 4. This is no less true of perceptual judgement and aesthetic perceptual judgement. Wittgenstein’s claims concerning our ordinary judgements about

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the world apply to our perceptions: a totality of perceptions is made plausible to us. We are trained to perceive – the hollowed eyes of faces that are sad, for example – by learning to ‘perceive like this’ ‘this I got to know as perception’. Any such totality includes the aesthetic significance or value of those perceptions. Our forms of life activities do not simply involve the fact that this or that is red, for example; rather what is integral to many life activities is how vibrant, deep, appetizing, shocking or violent this or that red is. An apple that would be good to eat is not simply red or green, but a shiny, bright, unblemished red or green. The white of a unicorn’s coat, like that of a bride’s dress, is a pure, beautiful white rather than the merely clean white emblematic of hospital linen. Similarly, knights who come to the rescue are not just clad in armour, but in shining armour to be sure. From the outset, what we get to know as perception includes the perceptual or aesthetic significance of what we see. We are trained into a totality of perceptual engagements that involves the aesthetic significance or value of those engagements. Wittgenstein’s realism depends in part on showing that training into a body of judgements must involve some truths that are inalienable from us, truths that must stand fast so that they serve as the unquestioned framework or scaffolding of cognition and perceptual engagement with the world. The related point is that error is possible only to the extent that one acts largely in conformity with the customary ways of doing things that allow facts to be in view. Both themes are explored in On Certainty. First, to be a person who is open to facts requires that there be some ordinary, mundane truths that she grasps. To understand some statements is to grasp their truth: ‘[i]f you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either’; in at least some cases ‘The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements’ (§114, 80). But these truths need not be specified and they need not remain constant. Rather the requirement is that there must be some open-ended subset that will include numerous mundane ordinary facts and true judgements, some of which may differ across cultural eras. Judgement is not independent from truth; the link is not only reciprocal but constitutive: a person, a being who finds things intelligible, is one for whom some truths are immediate and inalienable. Our ability to entertain or make judgements, which lies in a normative domain or range of evaluation for which the defining value is truth, involves that we can grasp some instances of that value.25 I suggest that Wittgenstein’s claims about truth and understanding need to be transposed to aesthetic value and perception. To be an aesthetically aware person requires that there be some apprehensions of beauty – that is, of aesthetic

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or perceptual value – that are immediate and inalienable from one. ‘If you are not certain of any beauty, you cannot be certain of the perceptual presence with which you are engaged.’ ‘The beauties that I can apprehend are the test of my aesthetic sensibility.’ Which beauties are analogous to the truths that form the ‘scaffolding’ of human understanding, the ‘axis’ around which our changing views turn?26 Wittgenstein’s thought concerning the relationship between some truths and understanding indicates that some beauties must play an analogous role for perceptual engagement but not that any specific ones must do so. This is open to change. But the fact that in at least some cases ‘The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements’ suggests that analogously some of my judgements of beauty are a test of my responsiveness to the perceptible aesthetic presence of the world. The connected point about error is that only insofar as I already judge as we do can some of my judgements be incorrect rather than random fluctuations. Wittgenstein asks, ‘But what is the relevant difference between mistake and mental disturbance? Or what is the difference between my treating it as a mistake and my treating it as mental disturbance?’ and continues, ‘Can we say: a mistake doesn’t only have a cause, it also has a ground? I.e., roughly: when someone makes a mistake, this can be fitted into what he knows aright’ (§73, 74). This helps us appreciate that ‘In order to make a mistake, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind’ (§156). That is, I can only err insofar as what I say for the most part are not random emissions but true judgements, which means that they will be in agreement with others. Beauty admits plurality in the sense that there can be much variation in our individual judgements that is not error – but both variation and error require much correct judgement as Wittgenstein suggests. I will develop the suggestion that beauty is a value that admits plurality shortly. Here, the key point is that unless judgements of beauty reduce to mental disturbances or fluctuations – perhaps the fluctuations of sensory preferences – they involve a pattern of both correctness and incorrectness, where the incorrect ones stand out from a background of agreement. As I have highlighted, Lectures on Aesthetics points more specifically to the sorts of facts that enter into the broader context or aesthetic presence of the world. Wittgenstein was a person of his time when it came to beauty and in his own way tried to sideline its importance as a word that doesn’t do much work in ordinary life and leads to confusion in theory.27 But he was very concerned with aesthetic judgement and its historical nature. Here are his suggestions again:

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25. The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. … which fully means really to describe the culture of a period. 26. What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc. … [That children are taught by adults who go to concerts, etc., that the schools are like they are, etc.]

These passages point to the sort of fine-grained facts about cultural practices and forms of life activities that we saw Linda Nochlin detail with respect to French painting of the nude body in the middle of the nineteenth century. Recall her point that the innovation of urban swimming pools for recreational and health-promoting activity for large numbers of people destabilizes two interconnected artistic genres, the ahistorical paysage compose and the nude. Insofar as aesthetic judgements have their own ‘definite role’ in ‘the culture of a period’, this means that they are intimately bound up with historically changing forms of life activities, just as she details. In addition, the account from On Certainty suggests the historically contextual nature of judgements of beauty, some of which will be inalienable for any one of us, standing as the test of one’s aesthetic sensibility and as the axis around which one’s evolving judgements turn. But how does this Wittgensteinian framework accommodate or cohere with Kant’s analysis of judgements of beauty and their pleasure? The point of contact comes out once we appreciate that Kant and Wittgenstein highlight the same problem in explaining the warrant of our judgements, and their responses are complementary. Their shared concern is that the warrant for our judgements cannot be supplied by rules or principles. Realists and anti-realists divide in what they make of this lack. Applying a rule in a particular case cannot be done by virtue of another rule since this would launch an infinite regress of rules for the application of any one rule, as Wittgenstein’s investigation of rule-following show. Kant’s concern with this problem sets the stage for the Critique of Judgement in the Preface of the first edition. ‘So judgement itself must provide a concept, a concept through which we do not actually cognize anything but which only serves as a rule for the power of judgement itself – but not as an objective rule, to which it could adapt its judgement, since then we would need another power of judgement in order to decide whether or not the judgement is a case of that rule.’28 We have seen that Kant suggests that judgement involves a reflective as well as a determinative dimension.

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His point is that the warrant for our reflective capacity is not provided by a concept in the sense of an ‘objective rule’ but more as a regulative principle that warrants collecting particulars together under specific ‘objective rules’ or concepts – and that regulative principle is what experiences of beauty intimate since they allow us to experience the legitimacy of a purely reflective grasp of the many particular beauties which disallow any single determining concept of beauty. Kant’s analysis does not provide an explanation in one specific sense, which Wittgenstein also argues is not forthcoming if we imagine that what we need is an account that factors out just how reflection and determination work together in experience. This specific demand for explanation and justification would launch us either on the regress Kant clearly identifies or in the various mistaken explanatory directions Wittgenstein considers in discussing rulefollowing. Both eschew an account of the normative warrant of our judgements that would turn on some ingredient that is simple or basic or on factoring out the roles of reflection and conceptual determination by means of some ingredient that is simple or basic. Part of Wittgenstein’s point is that we are not making do with second best if we pursue the sort of explanation that he reminds us is available. We are trained into a totality of specific judgements (in which reflection and determination are unified, but some of which are purely reflective as Kant clarifies) that are integral to the way we can live in the world, which enables those judgements and what they concern to become something we can come to entertain in a ‘free and distanced orientation’ and not only by habit, and in that sense to understand. Once we recognize their shared appreciation of the problem posed by normative warrant of our judgements, we can see that Kant and Wittgenstein’s responses are complementary. Kant’s analysis of aesthetic pleasure as the free play of imagination and understanding is an analysis of the experiential stopping point of justification; as such it can be put together with a holistic framework that argues for the integral role of practices. This is important because a holistic account that contextualizes aesthetic judgement in forms of life activities explains the normativity of judgements of beauty in a way that is not as inward looking as Kant’s view of their subjective universality. One objection to Kant’s account is that although it secures the in-principle warrant of judgements of beauty, it does not offer a way of justifying whether in any particular case one is correct in one’s judgement – that is, in claiming that one’s pleasure is of the requisite reflective kind. For example, when I see the beauty of Richter’s Abstraktes Bild 726 or Cage 6, I am justified in believing that if I have correctly identified my reaction as one of the free harmonious play of the faculties, then my judgement

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is correct – but this leaves open the possibility that I am mistaken about my own experience. Yet even though Kant’s account puts the justificatory weight on the nature of one’s response, we have seen that he also specifies what it is about an object that evokes responses of this kind in two ways, in terms of purposive form and aesthetic attributes that exhibit aesthetic ideas. So in questioning one’s experience, one may consider whether the object is such as to evoke free play. Bringing Kant’s approach together with Wittgenstein suggests that broader historical factors enter into and can help explain the concepts that an artwork expands and the aesthetic attributes by which it does so. This gives more factors to appeal to in examining the normative force of specific judgements. I might ask myself, for example, whether the nature of Richter’s squeegee abstractions really is as significant as it strikes me or whether my experience is a free play that takes up the aesthetic attributes of the smearing colours and expands on the very concept of colour and its place in the world in a way that I cannot capture in words? In doing so, I might consider the relationship of Richter’s abstractions both to the historically evolving practice of abstract painting and to his own evolving corpus of techniques and works, and connect both with their broader historical context. But the justificatory potential of such considerations is never complete or decisive. It is also the case, as On Certainty argues, that insofar as we are trained into a totality of judgements in which some stand fast as an axis, ‘We use judgements as principles of judgement’ (§124). Aesthetic judgements are no exception: we use aesthetic judgements as principles of aesthetic judgement – which means that they enter into the normative force of specific individual judgements in a way that cannot be decomposed or explained fully in terms of the factors that enter into them. The judgement that Turner’s Nordham Castle, Sunrise or Vermeer’s The Milk Maid show exquisitely beautiful play of light is perhaps one of the judgements that today we use as a principle of judgement that stands fast and allows us to make myriad specific and potentially varying judgements.

Beauty is a value that admits plurality Just what legitimate variation and disagreement is there in our judgements of beauty? Judgements of what is beautiful vary greatly across cultural eras and individuals, which seems to challenge any attempt to argue that beauty is a value. First, we need to distinguish the variability in individual responses

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to beauty from the variation in the objects we find beautiful, which may be a source of disagreement. Kant’s work helps make this distinction. His approach is outstanding for capturing the individuality of our responses to beauty and the potential depth of these differences – insofar as the pleasure is one of free play, each may and perhaps will differ. I find Richter’s ‘Betty’ beautiful (though it doesn’t move me as extremely as the abstractions), and I expect the experience of art critic Peter Schjedhal to be very different (see Betty by Gerhard Richter, www.bloomsbury.com/sedivy-beauty-end-art). He champions Betty as ‘a Vermeeresque painting … [that] seems to me the single sharpest blow struck in recent art-world debates about the virtues of aesthetic pleasure. … a one-punch knockout for a revival of beauty.’29 But his view is also that Richter ‘holds beauty hostage to skeptical intelligence from which the viewer’s patience partially, but never fully, ransoms it. I’ve often left off looking at works by Richter, wearied by their unrelenting irresolution, but I always come back for beauty’s sake’.30 Not having Schjedhal’s expertise and experience of art, I expect that the considerations and presentations that play freely when he looks at the painting will differ enormously from mine. And each time he or I actually look at Betty, our experiences will be somewhat different. But this does not address the view that we may legitimately differ in what we find beautiful. Beyond individual difference of response, there is also difference in the objects that we judge beautiful – which Nehamas, for example, emphasizes that an adequate account of beauty must secure. Here, Wittgenstein’s approach takes the lead. It inspires a modification of the usual thought that beauty varies tremendously: rather, beauty is a value that admits plurality and the individual variation in our experiences of beauty is the freedom of choice that comes with second nature. That beauty admits plurality follows from the suggestion that it is the value of perceptible presence, which is an open-ended plurality of what stands immediately present to us in different cultural periods. This means that beauty admits twofold variation: in the range of beauties that become available and compelling through intertwining historical practices and forms of life activities, and in the further individual prioritization of the beauties that cultures make available. Consider that the world’s perceptible presence is open-ended and inclusive. First, Wittgensteinian realism provides an account of the way that practices and forms of life activities change and select from this open-ended potentiality, as we have considered. If aesthetic presence is itself of value, then anything we might perceive might be significant to us in its perceptual presence. This does not deny that parts or aspects of the world might not be beautiful, or that we might be wrong in claiming them to beautiful, but rather secures the open-

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ended potentiality of beauty. Second, what is fully determinate for each of us differs to the extent that the path each takes through the world’s determinate presence will be different from the paths of others. The determinate character of the individuals we perceive – the illumination of a lily, for example – is determinate from here, just now; it is determinate from this particular point of view and its determinate character will differ somewhat from a different point of view. This is an inherent plurality in the perceptible presence of the world. It is as if the world offers a banquet so sumptuous that one must make choices. One needs to choose not simply because some of the offerings are less scrumptious than others (though they very well might be), but because of the plenitude itself – the plenitude is too great for all to be valued equally in any one cultural context and by any one individual. The potential and need for prioritizing – the potential for variation in what might be found of value – is contained in the richness itself. Yet to the extent that one cannot but choose and prioritize, one must also be free. Kant’s account emphasizes that beauty intimates our freedom to us, perhaps developing an earlier view that taste is free. The conceptual history is beyond our scope here, but we might just note that Gadamer reminds us in the opening sections of Truth and Method that the notion of taste, which was developed in the eighteenth century into the notion of aesthetic taste on the model of sensory preference, had been a richer concept that emphasized the freedom of human responsiveness to the determinate character of the world.31 Taste had been understood as a freedom of reaction that already lies in our first nature with the potential to be transformed through training into the second-nature capacity for free choice, a capacity that relies on a sense of community while developing its own voice. Much like two sides of a single coin, the open-ended plenitude or plurality inherent in the world’s determinate perceptible presence comes together with freedom that is necessary for choice and reflective distance. Different cultures might set different bounds on individual variation. But the potential for individual freedom of choice within those boundaries is part of learning to perceive like this: ‘this is beautiful’ said in the presence of cherry blossoms or a Japanese Edo period screen on a family outing to the park or gallery. If the individual variability in perception of beauty is understood as the individuality of second nature, then like error, individual free choice requires a background of largely correct judgement. We have considered Wittgenstein’s view that error is possible only to the extent that one acts largely in agreement with the customary ways of doing things that allow facts to be in view. That is, I

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can only err insofar as what I say for the most part are not random emissions but true judgements, which means that they will agree with others. The same holds for individual differences. I can only use my words with distinctively individual style or refinement, for example, insofar as I already speak the language of my community. Having one’s own distinctively individual body language, for another example, depends on already having the bodily comportment of a civilized person – who doesn’t tread on other people’s toes or stand too close, who sits and eats in the prescribed composed way and so on. Similarly, individual variations in my or your perceptions of beauty are only possible insofar as you and I have already come to perceive as we do, for the most part. One can only develop one’s own distinctive choices, one’s own personal style as Nehamas emphasizes, insofar as the open-ended aesthetic plenitude that is the world is present to one. In sum, Kant’s view that beauty evokes a free play of our capacities entails that the reaction of any one of us and on any one occasion to a beautiful work may be different, just as our intuitions suggest. The Wittgensteinian framework explains that given the perspectival plenitude of the perceptible world, there is an inherent, historically evolving plurality in what stands out in its perceptual value, and that a background of shared judgements of beauty and other aesthetic judgements allows individual variation in judgements. To be sure, some judgements of beauty may be mistaken. But if beauty is the value of the perceptible presence of the world, it is a value that admits plurality. On this approach, the plurality of beauty does not detract from its objective value.

Aesthetic supervenience and aesthetic disagreement For contrast, consider a principal contemporary strategy for securing aesthetic realism and its opposition by a contemporary defence of aesthetic anti-realism. One way to argue for aesthetic realism is by appeal to a supervenience relationship between non-aesthetic and aesthetic properties.32 The proposal is that aesthetic properties are ‘determined’ by non-aesthetic properties in the sense that there could not be a change in aesthetic properties without a change in non-aesthetic properties.33 For example, the deep ambivalence of Richter’s Funeral depends on the grey tonality of the entire painting. The idea of supervenience might seem to be a ‘holy grail’ for aesthetic theories for at least two reasons: (i) it seems to capture the dependence of aesthetic properties on more ‘meta-physically bona fide’ non-aesthetic properties, and (ii) it does so in a way that only allows for

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particular post-facto explanatory relations. This supports critical practice or ordinary conversation, where we often try to explain or ‘get someone to see’ certain aesthetic properties by directing their attention to some of a work’s non-aesthetic properties – to see the violence in Picasso’s Guernica by noticing the repeated use of sharply pointed contours – without any suggestion that those non-aesthetic properties stand in a universal or predictive explanatory relationship to the aesthetic properties of other works. Nevertheless, I suggest that aesthetic supervenience does not fulfil the aims for which it was proposed, and Wittgensteinian realism obviates the need for it. First, consider that the ontological and metaphysical relationship posited by supervenience is more minimal than the role in which it has been cast in aesthetics. Strictly speaking, supervenience tells us that the supervening properties covary with the base properties in the specific way captured by the modal claim that there cannot be a change in the supervening properties without a change in the base properties. The ambivalence of Richter’s Funeral could not change unless there were a change in colour, for example. But this modal relation does not suffice for either reduction or ontological dependence. At least, this is a highly debated controversial matter that cannot be taken on board in aesthetics as part of the content of the notion of supervenience. On balance, we can say at this point in time that the idea that aesthetic properties depend on non-aesthetic ones either ontologically or explanatorily goes beyond what the supervenience relationship can secure.34 The issues come out in a striking difference between discussions of mental and aesthetic supervenience. The intricacy of the debate over mental supervenience lies beyond the scope of discussion here, but my aim is to draw out one key disanalogy in the way the notion is used in the two fields. In philosophy of mind, the base properties at issue are physical. Supervenience allows us to countenance that mental properties are ‘real’ in the sense that they covary with physical properties even though there are no intervening kinds (or ‘levels’) of explanation that stand in a (strictly) determining relation to the states, events or properties individuated in terms of mental predicates (such as belief, desire, expectation or hope). For example, the events identified (in a certain spatiotemporal region) in a physiological, chemical or computational explanation do not stand in a law-like relationship to explanation in mental terms, so there is no reductive explanation of the mental in the terms of these different theoretical frameworks. What is being denied is that such explanations ‘intervene’ as it were between the physical and the mental in a law-like way. The fact that the supervenience base properties are identified in physical explanation

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allows one to countenance three key facts about the mental – depending on one’s theoretical commitments: the sui generis nature of rationalizing explanation which provides the identity conditions for mental states; the special role of the physical (in that everything supervenes on it), and the absence of ‘intervening’ explanations between physical and mental explanations. In aesthetics, supervenience is not proposed between aesthetic and physical properties, but between aesthetic properties and those drawn from an intervening kind of explanation: of the perceptible non-aesthetic properties of the objects that artworks are identical with or perhaps of the artworks themselves. This suggestion depends in part on the fact that supervenience is a transitive relation. If A properties supervene on B properties, and B properties supervene on C properties, then A properties supervene on C properties. And so if aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic properties, and non-aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, then aesthetic properties would in fact supervene on physical properties. The problem is that given the limitations or modesty of the supervenience relation, the transitivity of supervenience (i) does not provide grounds for claiming that aesthetic properties are ontologically or metaphysically dependent on non-aesthetic ones, and (ii) the fact that aesthetic properties covary with physical properties does not give us any explanatory purchase on the aesthetic. Though aesthetic supervenience proposals suggest that there is determination or dependence of aesthetic on non-aesthetic perceptible properties, this would only be the case if there were some sense that goes beyond supervenience in which non-aesthetic properties are ontologically or explanatorily intervening. Moreover, if the supervenience base properties are other than physical, ontological issues come up. Which entity do the non-aesthetic properties belong to? Does the base property of grey colour or pigment belong to the artwork or simply to the object that is the stretched canvas? If it is correct that social-historical factors enter into the determination of aesthetic properties, then a physical object – such as a stretched canvas with applied pigment – is not identical with the work, so the non-aesthetic properties of the physical object do not supply the supervenience base for the aesthetic properties. The alternative is that the non-aesthetic base properties belong to the work of art. But insofar as the properties of a work of art stand in various complex relationships to one another and to broader social and historical factors, it is not possible to individuate the entity and its properties in a way that allows us to identify just some of its properties as perceptible non-aesthetic ones. Consider the grey tonal range of the blurred dangling figure in Richter’s Hanged. What

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distinguishes that grey as a non-aesthetic perceptible property of the work or as an aesthetic property of the work?35 Ontological issues of this kind do not arise insofar as the base properties are physical, because the physical explanation or ‘complete snapshot’ does not reveal pigmented canvases anymore than it reveals artworks; it does not provide identity conditions for the entities that artworks are just as it does not show us the entities that physical objects are.36 Precisely because it is ‘mute’ as it were with respect to any of the entities of concern to aesthetics, the properties identified in a physical explanation might provide a supervenience base for aesthetic properties in their full complexity. This suggests that there may be aesthetic supervenience of a sort that some philosophers of mind debate – that any change in aesthetic properties entails a change in the complete physical ‘snaphot’ offered by physics. However, this will not meet the needs of aesthetics to secure determination and post-facto explanation of aesthetic properties in terms of non-aesthetic perceptible properties. Both relations – of dependence and limited explanation – would have to be explained case by case by other means even if supervenience on the physical obtains. Nevertheless, one can appreciate that supervenience might have seemed to be just the theoretical tool that would allow aesthetics to vouchsafe the metaphysical standing of aesthetic properties while preserving their distinctive nature. If we go back to Sibley’s ground-breaking paper ‘Aesthetic Concepts’37 his use of what has come to be the technical definition of supervenience and his use of the term ‘emergence’ rather than supervenience immediately stand out. ‘The nonaesthetic qualities of a thing determine its aesthetic qualities. Any aesthetic character a thing has depends upon the character of the nonaesthetic qualities it has or appears to have, and changes in its aesthetic character result from changes in its nonaesthetic qualities. Aesthetic qualities are “emergent.” ’38 Sibley’s paper predates the way that Donald Davidson put supervenience in the theoretical limelight in philosophy of mind by eleven years.39 Sibley aimed to capture the ordinary ways in which we try to convey to others the aesthetic properties that stand out for us in terms of the nonaesthetic properties of the work. He even went so far as to call this sort of conversation ‘perceptual proof ’.40 In order to support our application of an aesthetic term, we often refer to features the mention of which involves other aesthetic terms … But often when we apply aesthetic terms, we explain why by referring to features which do not depend for their recognition upon an exercise of taste: ‘delicate because of its pastel shades and curving lines,’ or ‘lacks balance because one group of figures

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is so far off to the left and is so brightly illuminated.’ When no explanation of this latter kind is offered, it is legitimate to ask or search for one. … In short, aesthetic terms always ultimately apply because of, and aesthetic qualities always ultimately depend upon, the presence of features which, like curving or angular lines, colour contrasts, placing of masses, or speed of movement, are visible, audible, or otherwise discernible without any exercise of taste …41

This passage makes clear that Sibley’s original concern was with two types of properties that belong to a single entity, the artwork – ‘delicate because of its pastel shades and curving lines’ – through a relation of dependence. Though he used the same wording as the technical definition of supervenience, there is a strong mismatch between his concerns and the implications and limitations that have come to be clear in debating that technical notion in philosophy of mind. In hindsight, it is not clear what exactly Sibley intended in his use of the term ‘emergence’. If he wanted some notion of cultural emergence, then more resources are needed than the condition of supervenience that he broached. However, my main concern with Sibley’s work is more tenuous. Although his interest in the way we ordinarily explain aesthetic properties by appeal to non-aesthetic properties of a work is both understandable and unobjectionable, it may nevertheless leave us with a conjuring trick of the sort Wittgenstein warns against. Wittgenstein’s example is quite different, as he is concerned with the way we become committed to explaining the nature of mental processes, but the structure of the problem applies more generally: ‘The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. … But that just commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)’42 We might similarly be concerned whether Sibley’s interest in the dependence of a work’s aesthetic properties on its non-aesthetic ones seems to leave us with metaphysical explanatory obligations to distinguish non-aesthetic properties from aesthetic ones and to explain the latter in terms of the former. Worries about conjuring tricks aside, my point is not simply that the technical notion of supervenience is not helpful for issues in aesthetics but that it is not needed since Wittgensteinian realism offers an alternative. Wittgenstein’s work gives some fairly specific pointers about what we need to look to in specific cases to understand the facts and values that become available in normgoverned human forms of life activities. The preceding sections outlined the

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interconnected nexus in which aesthetic judgements figure. And we have seen how socially and historically oriented art historians such as Linda Nochlin put the flesh of historical facts on the network of relationships that Wittgenstein identifies. Finally let’s consider briefly how aesthetic disagreement is raised as a problem for aesthetic realism. John W. Bender, for example, argues that because even ideal critics would disagree on the aesthetic properties of an artwork, we cannot give sense to the idea that aesthetic judgements are true and warranted, so anti-realism is the best explanation of the facts, as it were.43 Bender argues that aesthetic disagreement shows that there is no fact of the matter about which aesthetic properties could be claimed to supervene on non-aesthetic properties. As in the discussion of aesthetic supervenience, two lines of response are open. First, if we take the argument from critical disagreement in its own terms, I suggest that it does not block aesthetic realism. Because aesthetic properties are construed to be response dependent, it is suggested that they need to be defined analogously to colours but with respect to an ‘ideal’ critic rather than an ordinary perceiver. In other words, the following definitional schema for colours suggests the ensuing schema for defining aesthetic properties: X is red iff x is perceived to be red by a normal perceiver under normal or standard viewing conditions (such as daylight and middling distance). X is bold iff x is perceived to be bold by an ‘ideal’ critic under ideal conditions (such as absence of distractions, etc.).

But what is the ‘ideal’ critic for the purposes of such definitional schemas? As a matter of empirical fact, a critic might be excellent – having well-trained, acute sensitivities; perhaps even able to pick out paradigmatic works that help form cultural taste along the lines suggested by David Hume in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’.44 But as Hume is clear, the judgements of such critics are open to blameless variation from two sources: ‘the different humours of particular men’ and ‘the particular opinions of our age and country’.45 That the judgements of actual critics may vary – however outstanding those critics may be – is Bender’s point. But are critics who are subject to sources of variation – however ‘blameless’ – ideal?46 This would need to be argued and it is hard to see how it can be construed so that it doesn’t just beg the question in favour of anti-realism. Actual excellent critics are distinct from what we ordinarily understand by ‘ideal’. So the other alternative is that ideal critics really are just that – perfect in a way unconstrained by the limitations and sources of blameless variation of actual critics. But it

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cannot be asserted that the judgements of such critics vary without begging the question. Indeed, if one would expect anything of ideal critics – just by virtue of their being ideal – it would be accord in their judgements. There are no theory neutral grounds on which to hold that ‘ideal’ critics (in either sense of the term) disagree in their aesthetic judgements.47 The second line of response is to consider disagreement from the perspective of the alternative Wittgensteinian framework. The previous section explained aesthetic disagreement in terms of the plurality of the aesthetic presence of the world and individual differences that come with second nature. These explain the ‘sources of blameless variation’ in aesthetic judgements by drawing on a realist framework.

Consolation or permission? The many specific beauties that stand out in different cultures and individual lives hold specific values that also bring out the wonder of perception: a pleasure in experiencing that the perceptible character of the world is thinkable to echo Kant or, as I would put the point, the wonder of engagement with the world’s perceptible presence. But is this consolation? And if it is, is it a consolation that is in some sense inappropriate or false? We saw at the outset of Chapter 3 that reaffirmations of beauty are charged with being a nostalgic return to pleasurable feelings with which beauty consoles us from the troubles of the contemporary world, shielding us instead of motivating action. One of the principal theoretical sources for this general cultural suspicion is Theodore Adorno. I can only acknowledge but not detail his specific case against beauty, which turns on the claim that ours has become a totally administered society where beauty opposes and despises suffering, offering trifles that in fact mask the fundamental coerciveness inherent in the imposition of form and concepts.48 But it is possible to reconstruct some of the key presuppositions or premises that support the general cultural view that beauty consoles more directly. In particular, I will consider Danto’s reconstruction of the extant view shortly. Because Danto’s approach is both sympathetic and somewhat critical, its key points provide a useful summary for discussion. Three principal avenues of response are available to the charge of consolation. First, one may accept that beauty consoles but argue that the specific consolation beauty affords is an important good in human life. Alternatively, one may contest the charge by arguing that the premises for the view that beauty consoles

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inappropriately are flawed rather than compulsory. Hickey opens a third option, which affirms the commonplace that beauty helps us feel better in the face of loss or distress, but argues that it is grace rather than consolation that captures beauty’s role in our recent history. Unlike consolation, grace does not hold open a distinction between inappropriate and appropriate: that it is universally appropriate is part of the very idea, perhaps the very challenge of unconditional, forgiving permission. First, Richard Rorty and Roger Scruton provide two examples of direct responses to the charge of false consolation that re-construe the consolation beauty offers in positive terms. Richard Rorty both rejects the suggestion that ‘beauty offers consolation’ as ill posed and yet ultimately discusses the way that beautiful art might strive to give us some approach to it nevertheless.49 His main point is that the notion of consolation involves at least some possibility of commensuration: a gesture on your part might console me if the gesture is in the same order or commensurate with the loss, if there is some comprehensible way to relate one to the other. But the beauty of a particular butterfly, bird or artwork seems to be of an order and scale entirely different from the ‘oceans of human suffering’ at issue in the charge that beauty consoles inappropriately. There simply is no commensuration when it comes to oceans of human suffering, no way to ‘get back and forth’ between the scale of human suffering and particular beauties. Yet Rorty also turns to Nabokov’s writings to suggest that they continually go back and forth between the intense suffering of an individual person and small private moments of beauty to make some connection even though nothing can be said about the relation itself. Rorty weaves together his own love of bird watching with Vladimir Nabokov’s passion for butterflies. He offers the last two paragraphs from the sixth chapter of Nabokov’s Speak Memory, which recount a particular hunt for butterflies with this characterization of the experience of beauty. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness … is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.50

Roger Scruton distinguishes consolation from satisfaction and likens it to serenity by emphasizing an image of consolation very influential in Western culture: the myth of the fall and redemption. This is an image of homecoming,

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whose structure is that it is through conflict and confrontation that one regains an original sense of oneness or unity in a ‘transformed and self-conscious state’. Scruton argues that the serenity of beauty does not avoid or hide from what troubles us because ‘consolation … comes from having confronted trouble and elicited from the heart of trouble the resolution of it’. ‘Art and music give an absolutely clear perception that there are souls in the world far more interesting than mine which have also lived through troubles and found in the heart of trouble the seeds of harmony and restfulness that is the self.’51 In contrast, Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty offers a qualified and partial defence of beauty’s consolation, accepting the charge that it may be inappropriate. As Chapter 1 mentioned, though Danto details beauty’s abuses to counter that it is one of the core values for human life, ‘a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it’,52 his view nevertheless explains that the range of art that may be beautiful appropriately without beautifying is severely restricted. I will use Danto’s sympathetic approach to the charge of false consolation to bring out and criticize the premises on which it relies. This fleshes out the second option of contesting the charge by showing that its premises are open to challenge. Danto’s restriction on beauty in art follows from two explicit commitments and it accepts a third that is implicit in much thought about beauty. First, Danto’s interpretive view of art and his belief that only Hegel, among philosophers, grasped the historical nature of art led him to share Hegel’s view of artistic beauty: ‘The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again.’ Danto understands Hegel to be suggesting that ‘art is an intellectual product, and its beauty too must express the thought the art embodies’.53 Danto’s Hegelian view that beauty expresses the ‘thought’ an artwork conveys comes together with a second key premise that Danto shares with many: that our feelings drive us so that one raison d’etre of art is to present subject matters with aesthetic qualities that enlist our feelings to the subject matter.54 This applies to art the view that beliefs are motivationally inert; that beliefs together with desires or feelings more generally motivate action. The view seems applicable – indeed inevitable – once one has taken a more ‘interpretive’ and intellectual approach to art. Presumably it is because of his understanding of Kantian aesthetics as ahistorical that Danto does not delve into the alternative provided by Kant’s perceptual approach. Danto accepts that beautiful embodiment of ideas moves us by evoking pleasurable feelings that are consolatory in nature. If this is correct, it would follow that the feeling beauty elicits can only be appropriately evoked for some subject matters.

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Together, Danto’s Hegelian view of beauty as an intellectual product and the emphasis on emotions rather than perception support his proposal that beauty may be internal or external to a subject matter. Beauty is internal to a work if it and the feelings it elicits are appropriate to the subject matter. Beauty is external – a beautification – if it is not connected to the subject matter. Given the inequalities and sufferings in our world, the pleasure beauty brings can only be appropriate for a subset of subject matters, which means that beauty is external to many of the subject matters for contemporary art. If it is appropriate to take an elegiac response to a past wrong or evil, for example, the beauty of a work would be internal. By distinguishing internal and external beauty, Danto captures the ethos that there is something amiss about much beautiful art. In so doing, he also makes clear how the charge of false consolation depends on views we tend to presuppose: feelings are motivational and aesthetic qualities are part of the reason for art in that they elicit our feelings to the subject matter. Danto also tries to explain beauty’s integral role in art while maintaining his essentialist approach. He introduces the term ‘inflector’, which designates that beauty ‘is used to cause viewers to have a certain attitude to what is shown’ much like Frege’s use of the term ‘Farbung’ to designate ‘the way terms are inflected by poets’.55 Danto’s repeated example is Robert Motherwell’s Spanish Elegies, where beauty is used ‘to cause the viewer to feel an appropriate emotion about a form of political life that was vanquished many years ago now, that many hoped would have been beautiful had it survived and prevailed’.56 Yet he doesn’t quite settle whether this additional dimension is one of the necessary conditions of art. ‘Whether we must widen the definition of art to make inflection a necessary condition need not be argued here. But at least inflection helps explain why we have art in the first place. We do so because, as human beings, we are driven by our feelings’.57 Perhaps he thought of the question whether inflection is a necessary condition of art as a task for another day. But it would be difficult to discharge, given his view and the broad consensus that much art is not beautiful. ‘It has been clear from the onset of modernism that something can be art without being beautiful. So beauty is not and cannot be part of the essence of art. Content, on the other hand, is a necessary condition for art’.58 My point at this stage in the argument is not whether inflection might be construed as a necessary condition after all. Rather, we need to recognize the restrictive ramifications of the widely shared view that beauty’s role in art is to elicit our emotions that Danto articulates.

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Danto’s concern is to make us appreciate that ‘[t]he point of creating artistic beauty is not to abandon the viewer to its contemplation, but to grasp it as internal to the thought of the work’.59 But I have argued in detail that this complaint presupposes a theoretical framework about perception that is in dispute – in both Kantian interpretation and contemporary theory of perception – and so cannot be taken for granted in discussions of beauty. When Kant writes that the judgement of beauty is contemplative (§ 5), he is making the technical point that it is not essentially connected to interest, and he goes on to detail, as we have just considered, that it is grounded in the free, harmonious play of imagination and understanding which is intensely and distinctively pleasurable. But it is this framework that suggests that our feelings – in the sense of emotions – need to be harnessed if our experience of art is not to be motivationally inert. This is the second premise identified above. Yet if it is correct that to perceive is to be engaged, in the conceptual realist sense that I have developed, so that perceptual experience is inherently aesthetic and the experience of beauty is a distinctive perceptual pleasure at the limit of the interplay of understanding and imagination, then we can look towards perception as well as emotion to understand how the beauty of art moves us. Insofar as the pleasure of beauty is a sui generis perceptual pleasure, it is an engagement with our circumstances that is integrally connected with our capacities, emotional ones among them.60 Perhaps the strongest counter to the sort of approach that Danto’s view illustrates is that if beauty’s pleasure is distinctively perceptual, we can reclaim the possibility of beautiful art of the disturbing and bad which is blocked by Danto’s proposal that beauty is internal to the content of a work. This is a key consequence of carving out a space for the intuitive view that perception holds its own pleasure and value. It is Kant’s view. Fine art shows its superiority [to beautiful nature] precisely in this, that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and so on are all harmful; and yet they can be described, or even presented in a painting, very beautifully. (CJ, § 48 312)61

By including the ‘devastations of war’, Kant signals that the evils that humans inflict on one another are among the distressing facts that may be a subject matter of beautiful art. His view is that in confronting a human evil, such as a particular event of war, the reflective and determining dimensions of judgement work together so that we recognize the event for what it is. But a beautiful presentation of an act of war frees the imagination beyond the ‘logical attributes’ of the concept of such acts. We say that ‘one’s mind reels at the horror’

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in perceiving a terrible harm; Kant’s point is that a beautiful presentation allows the mind ‘to reel’ at the larger dimensions of that harm. Consider J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship, which fuses historical events to show a cargo hold of slaves being tossed into a stormy sea – either to meet insurance policies that compensated for slaves lost at sea but not for other causes of death such as disease, or to avoid penalties for the transport of slaves following the 1807 abolishing of slavery in Great Britain (see Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On by J.M.W. Turner, www.bloomsbury.com/sedivy-beautyend-art). Though Britain had abolished the slave trade in its colonies by 1838, there was continued concern over the widespread use of slavery elsewhere, and the painting coincides with the Anti-Slavery League Conference of 1840. I think it would be hard to deny that the painting is beautiful – the rendition of the swirling stormy sea takes one to a limit of perceptual splendour and pleasure – and that it draws one to consider the agony of the individuals being engulfed in the enormous waves and so the larger issue of their use as mere means to the ends of others. Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of environmental degradation provide a contemporary example of beautiful visual art of humanly inflicted harm. They give the viewer a unique perspective of enormous scale, whose composition and colour draw the eye to the detail of the vast destruction and waste we cause at a time of perhaps imminent environmental collapse.62 For a more controversial example, what about Johannes Vermeer’s paintings of household scenes? The world that Vermeer painted had its own plentiful share of harsh, mundane suffering. It might very well be charged as a cruel world, a world replete with suffering caused by rigid social stratification. (For example, both the popular novel and film Girl with a Pearl Earring contextualize Vermeer’s works by bringing out the unhappiness endemic in their contemporary rigid social circumstances and art practices.) Yet Vermeer’s paintings are accepted as unquestionably beautiful, now part of the axis around which contemporary, individually varying views revolve. What do they show us; what is their content? Do the paintings simply leave out the social reality as experienced by the depicted protagonists? Do they picture their world in a way that shields us from the dimensions that cause suffering? Or do they offer a complex content that depends in part on what one knows of that world? To be sure, there is a quiet calm that draws one to Vermeer’s paintings. But tranquillity is not yet consolation. Perhaps we might say that the paintings are serene in Scruton’s sense of the harmony one finds from having confronted the ‘heart of trouble’. Perhaps the paintings hold the ecstasy into which rushes everything that one loves, as Rorty suggests – an ecstasy of light that expands upon one’s grasp of the joys and sorrows of human social life.

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This brings us to a third presupposition typically at work in the charge that beauty offers false or inappropriate consolation that Danto’s reconstruction accepts implicitly: the world has only recently become sufficiently cruel to render beauty inappropriate. The received narrative structure is that already the First World War, and certainly the Second World War, brought such increase in human wrongdoing and suffering that it seemed wrong to go on making beautiful art. The presupposition is that only with that increase did the level (and perhaps kind) of suffering become sufficient to require us to turn away from beauty. There is no question of the increased scale of our cruelty, or of the ‘unintended consequences’ of our activities and discoveries. But the question is why it would be supposed that extreme wrong calls for rejecting beauty or that the cruelty of life in the past did not warrant repudiating beauty? This is where specific analyses of twentieth-century society and the evils of human reason, such as those offered by Theodor Adorno, come in, arguing, for example, that ours has become a totally administered society in which there is no longer the possibility of authentic, free responsiveness. My point is simply that if cruelty and suffering require us to turn away from beauty, then so did the horrors we inflicted on one another in eras long gone. We need not parade examples. If cruelty calls for rejecting beauty, then the fact (if it is one) that the evils rife in human social life escalated in the twentieth century would not show that they were not sufficiently horrific earlier to warrant rejecting beauty. Yet we did not respond by repudiating beauty. The issue is not whether there is a threshold level of human wrongdoing or cruelty at which beauty is to be rejected. Rather, the question is why did we not react to our cruelty by rejecting beauty in other cultural eras whereas this was our reaction in the early and later twentieth century? This question calls for detailed investigation to explain why in those specific circumstances we respond to our cruelty by shunning beauty. Though this discussion is but a prolegomenon to further argument, it suffices to show that the charge that beauty consoles inappropriately rests on presuppositions that are at least questionable. This could support attempts to defend the specific consolation that beauty affords such as Rorty’s or Scruton’s. But my work across the last three chapters supports Hickey’s more radical lead that grace – or visible, unconditional forgiving permission – better captures beauty’s place in human life. This is the third avenue of response to the charge that the feelings beauty evokes are inappropriate. Hickey doesn’t address the charge of false consolation; he just argues directly for the identification of ‘what beauty does’ with grace. This is the challenge his work poses. Consider the contrast between Hickey and Danto’s proposals. Danto agrees with the prevailing view

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that artworks elicit feelings to make us care about a subject matter and explains how this entails that the feelings beauty elicits are internal to and appropriate for a subset of subject matters. Hickey suggests that beautiful artworks engender trust, which permits us to open ourselves to distressing subject matters among others, so that we can discuss and discover what we value. As we saw in Chapter 3, Hickey develops this view by considering our specific art-historical inheritance in a way that emphasizes beauty’s visibility and the evaluative nature of perceptual experience. The following three chapters have offered a philosophical approach in terms of perceptual engagement and the value of the perceptible presence of the world. That we engage with individuals, that the world is present to us in determinate, qualitative character that is amenable to thought even as we recognize that descriptive concepts cannot capture that presence – these are of paramount value. When our experience of the determinate perceptible character of a particular face, leaf, blurred image or smear of colour is most pleasurably intense, the free harmonious play in the experience intimates that the world is thinkable in Kant’s terms. Or more simply, we are aware of the wonder and splendour of perceptual engagement. That this is one of the dimensions of value in human life would scarcely seem to need argument, if it were not for the twists and turns of our historical circumstances. This historical provenance also makes the idea of grace all but lost to many of us, insofar as the concept seems integral to a specific religious worldview. But recognizing the role of historical circumstance extends here no less, making it possible to consider how Catholic practices enable grace – or the very idea of unconditional forgiving permission that is visible – to come into view. Once this value has become available and compelling it may continue in other, increasingly secular forms of life activities, such as those of the beaux-arts tradition that Hickey’s writings detail.

Conclusion What I have tried to show can really be put very simply; the amount of detailed argumentation but a measure of the accumulated theoretical obstacles. The many historical beauties whose specific values come into view in human forms of life activities have a higher-order, distinctively perceptual value. At least three theoretical resources help us recognize this value. Hickey’s reminder that grace is visible and Kant’s detailed account of the world’s permission are especially helpful, when considered in their own right and from the Wittgensteinian

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perspective of conceptual realism. Such realism about perception can stand on its own as well by explaining that perceptual engagement with individuals and their properties is a dimension of value. Is grace not fitting for the fact that these are the blues and the greens, these the shadows and endless plays of light, the contours and textures, the varied individuals that make up the world? Isn’t this a visible permission? And it cannot but be part of what it is to be sensitive and thoughtful, a human being in the world. That the world is an inseparable aesthetic presence is the condition of grace in which we find ourselves.

Notes 1 2

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Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 156. ‘The only figure in the history of aesthetics I found to have grasped the complexities of the concept of art – and who had almost an a priori explanation of the heterogeneity of the class of artworks, since unlike most philosophers he had an historical rather than an eternalist view of the subject – was Hegel.’ See entire discussion 194–195. ‘History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and, again, with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical dimension of art’ (Danto, After the End of Art, 196). This continues to be his view in his discussion of beauty in The Abuse of Beauty. Danto also believes that Kant does not have resources to distinguish the beauty of nature and art. ‘No distinction is especially drawn between natural and artistic beauty in Kant.’ See p. 82 and ff. I am not suggesting that Wittgenstein defended beauty himself. As far as it is possible to tell from his written remarks, he was a person of his time when it came to ‘beauty’ and demoted its significance. He thought the term itself did not hold much content. See his Lectures and Conversations, on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, example: § 35. In order to get clear about aesthetic words, you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgements like ‘This is beautiful,’ but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgements we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity. I am weaving together many of his ideas, fully developed outside the Lectures on Aesthetics, to help address the challenges posed by beauty. Critique of Judgement, Second Introduction, iv, 179. Perhaps one caveat needs to be made at the outset. Some philosophers believe that the notion of judgement introduces an explicitly discursive structure where concepts are ‘applied’. The previous two chapters have argued against this

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understanding of the conceptual in terms of the holistic Wittgensteinian view that conceptual capacities are in use (and characterized in part by generality). The notion of perceptual judgement to be elaborated here is continuous with the preceding accounts of perception and conceptual capacities. That is, I treat Kant’s detailed analysis of judgement as compatible with the Wittgensteinian view that conceptual capacities are in use across our holistically interdependent activities. 5 Kant writes that the judgement is singular in the sense that it is connected ‘directly’ not to the object but to the presentation of the object: ‘all judgements of taste are singular judgements, because they do not connect their predicate, the liking, with a concept but connect it with a singular empirical presentation that is given’ CJ, §37, 289. See Beatrice Longuenesse’s discussion in her ‘Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful’, in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Kukla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 194–219. Also in Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 265–290. 6 Longuenesse, ‘Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful’, 201. 7 Kant denies that beauty is a concept. What he means is that judging a particular beauty does not subsume the subject of the judgement under a descriptive concept ‘beauty’ because there are no general principles that apply to all beauties and only to beauties. For Kant conceptual structure is syllogistic, allowing us to subsume a particular instance under a concept in syllogistic form; whereas the contemporary understanding is truth-functional, concepts figure in truth-preserving inference understood more broadly in the terms of modern symbolic logic rather than just syllogistic form. In keeping with the contemporary understanding of concepts, it would be better to say that Kant believes that the concept of beauty is not condition governed, following Sibley, in the sense that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions whereby the concept of beauty is applied, rather that beauty is not a concept. See Mary Mathersill’s discussion in Beauty Restored, ‘Kant: Three Avoidable Difficulties’, 209–246. 8 Among contemporary theorists, Nick Zangwill agrees that the normativity of judgements of beauty is the key problem – as he puts it ‘Whence normativity?’ But he argues that Kant’s work is on the subjectivist side. See his ‘Aesthetic Realism I’ in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69. 9 Kant, Critique of Judgement, §35, 289. My discussion here draws on the sections surrounding the ‘Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements’ more than on the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’. Further quotations will be cited in parentheses. 10 For a more detailed discussion of the distinction between the harmonious and the free play of the faculties, Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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11 CJ, § 10 On Purposiveness in General, 220. 12 For further discussion, see for example Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 125–127, and Longuenesse ‘Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful’. 13 That is, because in Kant’s terms, the experience of beauty intimates the warrant of a regulative background principle that nature is thinkable. 14 See Henry Allison’s discussion in Kant’s Theory of Taste, 85–97. See also Eva Shaper, ‘The Pleasures of Taste’, in The Pleasures of Taste: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39–56. 15 Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 67. 16 The fuller passage is given: ‘a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it. It is easy to see that an aesthetic idea is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational idea, which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (presentation of the imagination) can be adequate’ (CJ, §49, 314). 17 Diarmuid Costello suggests that we can understand Barnett Newman’s Onement 1 in terms of aesthetic ideas. His point is to argue that Kant’s account can accommodate non-representational art. ‘Both [Newman’s Onement 1 and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam) take God’s creation as their theme, so neither depicts a possible object of knowledge or experience for finite rational beings. But nothing in Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas precludes the pared down abstraction by Newman, consisting of a single “sip” of light emanating from an indeterminate background, from expressing the idea of creation ex nihilo (Genesis 1: 1–5); indeed, precisely because it is abstract, there is reason to think the Newman better placed to indirectly communicate the indeterminate and indeterminable idea of something coming out of nothing,’ 290–291. ‘Kant and the Problem of Strong NonPerceptual Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 53 (2013): 277–298. 18 Barnett Newman, interview with David Sylvester, 1965, in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 2001), 40. 19 Allison draws attention to this passage in connection with this issue, but my interpretation diverges from his in emphasizing that what is at issue are the contents that artworks carry. See Kant’s Theory of Taste, Chapter 12 ‘Fine Art and Genius’, 290–298. 20 This suggests that insofar as the beauty of a natural being such as a horse would lead to an experiential free play that passes beyond what is available in experience to aesthetic appreciation of what it is about nature that eludes our experience, such as the totality of nature, then the judgement of the beauty of a horse would also be free. As Allison suggests, and I agree, Kant’s view of aesthetic ideas controls the earlier distinction between free and adherent beauty rather than vice versa.

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21 Henry Allison, ‘Kant’s Transcendental Idealism’, in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 124, 111–124. See also Robert Hopkins’ work which engages Kant’s detailed work about aesthetic judgement with contemporary concerns such as those about disagreement and testimony (or quasi-realism). Robert Hopkins, ‘Beauty and Testimony’, in Philosophy, the Good, the True & the Beautiful, ed. A. O’ Hear (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 209–236. ‘Kant, Quasi-Realism & the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement’, European Journal of Philosophy, 9 (2001): 166–189. 22 In ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, Gadamer’s thought on this point is congenial. He urges that we consider that ‘The interesting thing is what Kant is clearly aiming at. What is it that is distinctive about form? The answer is that we must trace it out as we see it because we must construct it actively – something required by every composition, etc. There is constant co-operative activity here’ (27). In the extended discussion, Gadamer explains and sets aside Kant’s remarks about colour and form as a ‘remarkable doctrine’ owing to ‘the one-sidedness of … historically conditioned taste’ before going on to consider what Kant was really aiming at. 23 If we recall the point of conceptual realism about perception from the previous chapter – that all dimensions or aspects of perceptual experience, including its qualitative character, involve conceptual understanding – we can see that Kant’s work provides the crucial missing insight. His detailed analysis of the judgement of beauty explains that determinate aesthetic presentations elude capture by specific concepts but are subsumable within the conditions for conceptual thought. This is not ordinarily accessible in the phenomenology or first-person experience of perception. It takes beauty to make this both experientially and theoretically available: when a beautiful particular disrupts the normal flow of experience, we feel that perceptible properties are suitable for the conditions for conceptual thought. 24 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). References will be indicated by section number in parentheses. 25 I disagree here with Danielle Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. She argues that the myriad, unspecifiable, ordinary, immediate, unquestioned judgements that form the framework of our thoughts are more like statements of rules that lack truth value. I can’t get into the detail of the disagreement here, but Wittgenstein’s investigations of such ordinary judgements cannot be assimilated to statements that lack truth values – even if we allow that in some uses they might have fact stating ‘doppel ganger’ while in certain unusual uses they would be stating ‘techniques of description’ to put it in McGinn’s excellent terms (Sense and Certainty). An interpretation needs to accommodate passages where Wittgenstein makes the sorts of claims I quote above.

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26 On Certainty, §152. I do not explicitly learn the proposition that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility. 27 For example, §13. What does a person who knows a good suit say when trying on a suit at the tailor’s? ‘That’s the right length’, ‘That’s too short’, ‘That’s too narrow’. Words of approval play no role, although he will look pleased when the coat suits him. Instead of ‘That’s too short’ I might say ‘Look!’ or instead of ‘Right’ I might say ‘Leave it as it is.’ A good cutter may not use any words at all, but just make a chalk mark and later alter it. How do I show my approval of a suit? Chiefly by wearing it often, liking it when it is seen and so on. 28 Critique of Pure Judgement, Preface, 169. 29 Peter Schjedhal, ‘The Good German’, The New Yorker, March 4, 2002, 84–85. 30 Peter Schjedhal, ‘In the Mood’, The New Yorker, December 5, 2005. 31 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004), 31–37. 32 I am grateful to William Seager for discussing aesthetic supervenience with me from the perspective of debates over mental supervenience. 33 Jerrold Levinson, ‘Aesthetic Supervenience’, reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 134–158. Gregory Currie, ‘Supervenience, Essentialism and Aesthetic Properties’, Philosophical Studies, 58 (1990): 243–257. 34 See the Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Supervenience for a state-of-the-art summary. Brian McLaughlin and Karen Bennett, ‘Supervenience’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2014 Edition), http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/supervenience/ 35 Peter Lamarque makes a similar point against aesthetic supervenience theories in arguing for his aesthetic essentialism. ‘Aesthetic Essentialism,’ in Work and Object, Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95–122. 36 See Jennifer Hornsby’s work on Donald Davidson’s supervenience thesis of the mental on the physical. Simple Mindedness, in Defense of Naïve Realism in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 37 Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, The Philosophical Review, 68 (1959): 421–450. 38 Here are the first two of his four conditions, though all four are important. ‘(i) Aesthetic qualities are dependent upon nonaesthetic ones for their existence. They could no more occur in isolation than there could be facial resemblances without features, or grins without faces; the converse is not true. (ii) The nonaesthetic qualities of a thing determine its aesthetic qualities. Any aesthetic character a thing has depends upon the character of the nonaesthetic qualities it has or appears to have, and changes in its aesthetic character result

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from changes in its nonaesthetic qualities. Aesthetic qualities are “emergent”. Like (i) above, which it entails, (ii) concerns the nature of aesthetic properties in general’, Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, The Philosophical Review, 74 (1965): 137–138. ‘[M]ental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect’ (214). Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 207–224. Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, 39. Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, 3? Sibley’s claims concerning the dependence of aesthetic terms on non-aesthetic terms are even stronger in the subsequent ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, 135–159. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 308. John W. Bender, ‘Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (1996): 371–381; ‘Aesthetic Realism 2’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, 81–98. See also Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in The Philosophy of Art Readings Ancient and Modern, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1995), 255–268. Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 265. Hume’s qualification is very careful. ‘But notwithstanding all our endeavours to fix a standard of taste, and reconcile the discordant apprehensions of men, there still remain two sources of variation, which are not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame.’ ‘The one is the different humours of particular men; the other, the particular manner and opinions of our age and country.’ For an argument against construing Hume’s critics as ideal, see Geoffrey SayreMcCord, ‘On Why Hume’s “General Point of View” Isn’t Ideal – and Shouldn’t Be’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 11 (01): 202–228. Nick Zangwill also argues that arguments for anti-realism from the disagreement of ideal critics beg the question; see his ‘Realism 1’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Van de schoonheid en de troost [videorecording] = Of beauty and consolation / compiled by Wim Kayzer (Hilversum: VPRO, 2007). Episode 23. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), 139.

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51 Van de schoonheid en de troost [videorecording] = Of beauty and consolation / compiled by Wim Kayzer (Hilversum: VPRO, 2007). Episode 2. 52 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 160. 53 Ibid., 93. 54 See Ibid., 122. ‘Whether we must widen the definition of art to make inflection [which causes “an attitude to its content,” beauty being the most important of the inflectors] a necessary condition need not be argued here. But at least inflection helps explain why we have art in the first place.’ See his discussion especially on pp. 118–124. 55 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 121. 56 Ibid., 122. 57 Ibid., 122. 58 Ibid., 120. 59 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 122. 60 The suggestion that perceptual engagement and emotion are internally connected relies on a more fully developed holistic account of our mental capacities. So this is a promissory note, backed up by the approach I have proposed, rather than a detailed case that I can provide at present. 61 Kant continues with the following qualification: ‘There is only one kid of ugliness that cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic linking and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust.’ The disgusting has become the topic of much interesting work but it is beyond my scope here. See, for example, Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 62 See Edward Burtynsky’s website http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ for diverse examples.

Conclusion: Beauty and the End of Art

Two apparently distinct themes concerning art in our time sparked this discussion. There is a sense of ending felt across recent decades by artists and theorists alike, and a newly emerging sense that beauty’s absence is a loss. Might there be an as yet unrecognized connection between them? More specifically, could understanding the emerging sense of beauty’s loss speak to the longer-standing apprehension that the narrative structure of the art of the west has come to an end? The pieces are now in place to address this question. The arc of Belting and Danto’s pursuit of the sense of ending demonstrates the need to distinguish between a substantive sense of ending, from which both ultimately distance themselves, and a structural sense implied by the concepts of art and art history. Belting in due course demurs from the view that art-historical concepts might not develop to encompass the plurality of contemporary art and from a marked discontinuity in art in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast, Danto continues to argue that the point at which the nature of art as embodiment of meaning becomes culturally available is also the ending of any possibility of direction that might be dictated by art’s nature or what we take to be that nature, a development that is also the end of a history of art. Art ends in a condition of pluralism that is one and the same as understanding that the history of art cannot mandate any particular embodiment once it is clear that the nature of art is embodiment of meaning that involves the broader context of understanding in which artworks figure. That context might enable works that are indiscernible from counterpart objects that are not artworks, as indeed it did in the 1960s. Once this possibility is realized, it can no longer be supposed that the nature of art or its history indicate or favour some embodiments rather than others – which is just the recognition that there are no limits imposed on how artworks look by art’s nature or history. This sense of ending is structural rather than substantive because it underscores that art might be a vital part of human life even though the concepts of art and its history entail that art can no

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longer have a progressive history. Despite their ultimate disagreement over the end of art, Belting and Danto’s shared focus on the relationship between art history and art accentuates the important role of historical detail. Four recent voices demonstrate how acutely one might feel beauty’s loss and how variously one might rise to its defence. Belting and Danto’s work offers a perspective from which it becomes clear that each reaffirmation of beauty contests a substantive sense that art is no longer adequate while also marginalizing or disputing the import of a structural sense of ending. In Scarry’s telling, Matisse’s Nice paintings show that beauty need not be displaced by modernist enquiry into the nature of art and, even more strongly, that when properly understood, beauty might be integral to such self-reflexive pursuit. Nehamas’ account suggests that beautiful art figures in our lives in the trajectories of loves and aesthetic choices that shape who or what we may become. This ongoing role complements the pluralism of contemporary art rather than being undermined by it. Indeed, the role identified by Nehamas suggests that beautiful art comes together for each of us in individual or personal collections that may be independent of the narrative structure of art history. Hickey offers an alternative history that challenges Danto’s thesis that there is a structural sense in which art has ended dictated by the internal logic of the nature of art. Art today is continuous with the beaux-arts tradition. What distinguishes the identity of works in this tradition is that they enfranchise freely evaluative perceptual experience. Contingent pressures and developments have undermined our sense that art’s beauty is of value and that we can value art because of its beauty. This undercuts the capacity of beautiful art to enfranchise freely evaluative response, thereby undermining this tradition. But these are pressures that we might try to redress. And Gadamer offers an opening salvo, a detailed hermeneutic analysis of the concepts that entered into the subjectivization of beauty and art, showing that if we rethink beauty from the horizon of our present concerns, we will find resources to understand the nature and continuity of art – which will also require a theory of perception that is adequate to undo the historical twists and turns of art’s subjectivization and the attendant displacements and losses. To these diverging yet also intertwining proposals about beauty I added a fifth suggestion: these attempts form part of an emerging ethos that beauty is, after all, a value – a core dimension of value in human life that may be reaffirmed for art. Beauty is the value of perceptual engagement, of the world’s inseparable perceptible presence to us. This raises the challenge to understand

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that value becomes available in historically contingent practices and forms of life. A broadly Wittgensteinian framework answers this call, helping to explain how values as well as facts can be both objective and historically available in contingent practices and forms of life. I argued more specifically that the experience of beauty is perceptual, where perception is understood to be a capacity for engaging with individuals in their determinate properties. Perceptual engagement is both determinate and conceptual since engaging with individuals in their determinate character involves understanding the kinds of which these are individuals and instances. This is a conceptual realism about perception. The detailed nuances and tensions in the reaffirmations of beauty offered by Scarry, Nehamas, Hickey and Gadamer show that nothing less is adequate to explaining the experience of beauty’s particularity, and its significance and role in human life. Yet even though these contemporary reaffirmations of beauty suggest that beautiful art has a vital role in human life, except for Hickey’s alternative history of the beaux-arts tradition, they do not explain how beauty might have a more integral role than that of an inessential add-on that is not part of the nature of art. So long as the background commitment that art has a nature stays in place, the only role open for beauty is that of an optional extra – perhaps belonging to pragmatics or rhetoric – that may be added to art’s core nature. But to the extent that reaffirmations of beauty suggest that beauty’s role may be more vital and integral to art, they show that rethinking beauty calls for rethinking art, and for rethinking art in a way that allows beauty its more integral roles. Wittgensteinian resources offer just what is needed, I suggested, since they allow us to explain art as overlapping practices with differing constitutive norms and values, so that beauty might be a constitutive value for some art practices even though it would not have a constitutive role in many. Wittgenstein directs our focus to the way constitutive norms and values inform our practices and forms of life activities. This suggests that art is interrelated practices that are integral to different ways of living in different times and places, and that we need to look at their actual historical contexts to understand that their constitutive norms and values are available and compelling. On this view, art is like a thick rope made of many different intertwining fibres. The strands differ insofar as their constitutive values, aims and means are different along with the divergences in the ways of living in which they figure. This understanding of art is more adequate to the historical phenomena – which now includes the emerging reaffirmation of beauty as a value along with the pluralism of contemporary art – than the view that art has a distinctive essence, albeit a

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relational one that allows for open-ended change but is nevertheless definable in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that are specifiable ahistorically. But what makes all these different practices the intertwining strands of a single rope? Different practices overlap as fibres of one rope – the long, thick rope we call art – by virtue of the local relationships between their norms and insofar as they extend and diversify our perceptual engagement with the world. The key to this understanding of art practices is the new approach to perception as engagement with particular individuals and properties that cannot be retained in its determinate character. Understanding art as practices that extend and explore perceptual engagement is at a level of generality that is all but vacuous, just as Wittgenstein suggests, and needs to be made historically specific and informative with detailed investigations of various practices that show how their diverging constitutive norms and values are available within those forms of life. This is the key juncture for addressing the question of art’s ending. The clearest connection between reaffirming beauty and the sense of ending in art is that beauty’s reaffirmation directs us to rethink art in a way that undermines retaining an essentialist framework. Recall that Chapter 1 argued that Danto’s essentialism is the key contentious premise on which the structural ending of art depends. The Wittgensteinian approach provides the alternative: the view that art is overlapping local practices with differing constitutive values and aims allows us to focus on art practices without a driving meta-narrative structure. In Danto’s telling, art spends much of the first half of the twentieth century engaged in self-scrutiny, exploring the ‘what is art’ question with distinctively visual resources. In the tale that comes to an end, the protagonists do not waver from the presupposition that art has a nature. As a result, there is a putative realization that the question cannot be answered with any of art’s perceptible means. To arrive at this answer is to conclude that visual criteria do not distinguish or define art. Consider the climactic moment that precipitates the end of the narrative structure of Western art, as told by Danto. It was Warhol himself who revealed as merely accidental most of the things his predecessors supposed essential to art, and who carried the discussion as far as it could go without passing into pure philosophy. He brought the history to an end by demonstrating that no visual criteria could serve the purpose of defining

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art, and hence that Art, confined to visual criteria, could not solve his personal problem through art making alone [my emphasis].1

The narrative goes on to explain that once the project of understanding ‘what is art’ passes to the discursive means of philosophy, the resultant definition must be completely open: ‘A philosophical definition (of art) has to capture everything and so can exclude nothing.’ This means that there is no way that works of art need to look, since a philosophical definition of art must be compatible with every kind and order of art – with the pure art of Reinhardt, but also with illustrative and decorative, figurative and abstract, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, primitive and non-primitive art, much as these may differ from one another. A philosophical definition has to capture everything and so can exclude nothing. But that finally means that there can be no historical direction art can take from this point on.2

But how exactly should we understand that Warhol ‘revealed’ ‘as merely accidental most of the things his predecessors supposed essential to art’? It is important to ask this: Were Warhol’s works discoveries of the true nature of art despite what we may have erroneously supposed across time? Or were Warhol’s works suggestions and persuasions in an ongoing cultural conversation that enters into art’s changing structures of permissions and constraints – art’s constitutive norms and values? Danto’s narrative locates Warhol’s work in a specific domain of discovery that is akin to other theoretical demonstrations or discoveries such as establishing what really distinguishes species from one another despite former mistaken theories. This view can be questioned regardless of what the protagonists themselves and their theorists believed. Looking back at the cultural era that were the 1950s and 1960s in the West, one might come to understand how the forms of human life activities at the time would make available precisely the deflationary aims and values, and the multiply reproducible means championed by Warhol’s art. This would involve examining the connections between, for example, consumerism, advertising, mass media and mass reproduction and Pop Art, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box or his silk screens of mass-produced cultural icons and products. Such connections have been much discussed, but that is not my point here. Rather, I am suggesting that even if it seemed at the time that artists like Warhol were making radical discoveries about the nature of art, the ensuing decades might bring a shift in understanding. These same works might now suggest that it was mistaken to suppose either that visual features are essential to art or if not essential, then merely accidental. The properties

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that came under fire as putative necessary or sufficient conditions might rather answer to the constitutive norms of certain interconnected art practices that together make up the many locally overlapping practices of art. In this new narrative structure, art does not fail to solve a problem of self-definition and so does not hand it over to philosophy. Rather, there is a growing sense that the question is ill-posed, a sense that attends the emerging ethos that beauty is a value in human life that may be more integral to art than essentializing presuppositions allow. This apprehension is hard-won and involves complex re-understanding of ourselves, our relationship to the world, our practices and our values – just as we are challenged to do in order to re-examine beauty’s loss. In this alternative narrative, art continues in a different self-consciously non-essentializing ethos that characterizes the works, an awareness that constitutive values and aims inform our cultural practices and projects – which is not immediately but with the support of several decades informed by the emerging recognition that constitutive values may be ours, both contingently available and objective. It is this selfawareness, or perhaps rather the struggle towards this awareness, that enters into many recent art works. But such an account does not attempt to provide a master or meta-narrative; it tries to understand what is happening at the turn of the twenty-first century by asking how the structures of permissions and constraints and their broader context, including the context of understanding, might be changing. In sketching this alternative, I am not taking any stand on the view that we need to understand much of twentieth-century art as successively posing and answering questions about art’s nature, a view that Danto shares with many theorists. Even Hickey does not so much reject this narrative structure as recast it in his own terms as art undertaking an educative mission, so that he can refuse to endorse the importance of that task. I am working with this view for illustrative purposes, to show that one may believe that art undertakes the task of self-understanding without thereby being committed to anything like an ending once it is clear that the quest for self-understanding need not presuppose an essentialist view of art. On the alternative I have offered, self-reflexivity would itself be a constitutive aim or value that informs some art practices, so that some locally overlapping twentieth-century art practices have self-understanding as a constitutive aim or value. There is nothing about self-reflexivity – taken out of an essentialist frame – that suggests ending. This is the most evident connection between rethinking beauty and the theoretical framework that underpins Danto’s structural explanation of art’s

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ending. But there are other dimensions of interconnection. Or rather, perhaps, there are dimensions of connection at work in the more readily apparent link just canvassed – that reaffirming beauty calls for rethinking art in a way that allows a more integral role for beauty and, in so doing, undercuts the key essentialist premise for the structural sense of ending. Consider that the sense of ending in art is concerned principally with art’s plurality and freedom, and that these are two principal hallmarks of beauty that played a key role in its indictment. In offering the view that Western art had ended, Danto’s prime concern was to understand the condition of plurality in art from the 1970s onwards. His exploration of the ending of art is the theoretical resource he suggests is most helpful. Pluralism is often associated with a denial of objectivity. For example, plurality in certain values has seemed to suggest the need to deny their objectivity, to deny that values or aims inform our endeavours with objective commonalities rather than splintering into multitudinous individual or group projects. This is pluralism as free fall – in art, it would be the free fall that comes after the putative discovery that no visible values or features enter into art’s essence. It is pluralism as art making after the end of narrative structure. Even though Danto’s pairing of essentialism and historicism argues that the pluralism of art is entailed by the objective fact of art’s nature as embodiment of meaning (which can hold no constraint on the means of embodiment), this view also starkly denies that values or norms enter into art – into its nature as art, rather than into an associated function or role it might carry out. This is free fall indeed. From this perspective, is it not striking that plurality is also one of beauty’s challenging hallmarks? One response has been to concede that beauty admits too much plurality to allow for the intersubjective agreement that value involves. This concession is one of the targets in re-examining beauty. In its place, I argued that beauty is a value that admits plurality, something we can appreciate if we consider beauty as the value of the world’s perceptible presence. Danto’s view of the end of art was concerned not only with the plurality of contemporary art but also its freedom, and made the link in a specific way: he sought to explain the plurality of contemporary art as the freedom that attends the end of art’s narrative, progressive history. And just as beauty is marked by plurality, so beauty also seems to intimate our freedom. The freedom inherent in experiences of beauty was underscored by Kant and is reinvigorated in contemporary terms by all four of the theorists considered here, though this might stand out most explicitly in Hickey’s work. In specific historical circumstances beauty enfranchises freely evaluative response to the

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way things look, Hickey urges, and such free evaluations and the conversations that come with them are a key dimension in the recognition and emergence of values. Though the interplay between plurality and freedom that Danto strove to understand in contemporary art also marks beauty, the parallel underscores that Danto’s explanation turns on a negative understanding of freedom, since he suggests that the plurality of contemporary art is freedom in the sense of an absence of constraint from a progressive history of art. Yet if beauty enfranchises an inherently evaluative dimension in perceptual experience, then the freedom that beauty intimates is not a mere absence of constraint, but a substantive freedom that is integral to the possibility of value. To the extent that the return to beauty challenges us to rethink beauty’s freedom and plurality, these insights might inform understanding art as well. Perhaps the freedom and plurality of contemporary art are not an absence of constraint, but need to be understood as part of the emerging recognition that plurality is a value. This would suggest that the new twist that is unfolding in art involves the emergence of the value of plurality, an emergence that is aided and abetted by the re-examination of beauty. According to the full arc of Danto’s thought, the diversity of contemporary art makes the value of plurality evident. His work helped me to recognize this. In the unfolding and interpolating communities I inhabit, plurality is emerging as a value. By the end of the journey that is this book, I would have wished to be able to write that pluralism is emerging as a value – that the plurality of contemporary art and the re-evaluation of beauty are part of a more encompassing nascent ethos. But I can only make this claim of some communities. Yet there is also the thought that if the Wittgensteinian framework is on the right track, value emerges locally, here and there, in different communities that might increasingly unfold and interpolate into one another. Throughout, I have also tried to give perceptual experience its due – to show that we need to countenance the distinctive nature of perceptual engagement if we are to understand beauty and art. Building on the resources of conceptual realism with the challenges of understanding our experience of beauty in view, I suggested that perceptual engagement is a form of grace. The perceptible presence of the world is a condition of grace or permission in which we find ourselves: the presence of these many greens and yellows and blues, of boundlessly various illuminations and shadings and contours; the presence of determinate hues and

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shapes of leaves and eyes, of shelters and waters and skies. This is a stunning plurality. In becoming awake to the value of perceptible presence, to its generous visible permission, we are alert to an unbounded plurality, whose value is undiminished thereby.

Notes 1 2

Danto, ‘Warhol’, in Encounters and Reflections, 287. Danto, ‘Three Decades after the End of Art’, 36.

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Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes Abstraktes Bild 726 208 Abuse of Beauty (Danto) 34–5, 40 n.50, 41 n.51, 41 nn.56–7, 220, 226 nn.1–2, 232 n.52, 232 n.55, 232 n.59 Adorno, Theodor W. 3, 218, 224, 231 n.48 aesthetic(s) anti-realism 212 attributes 8–9, 47, 54, 66, 85, 196–9, 201, 209, 222 commercial art 34–5 disagreement 212–18 ideas 8, 46–7, 54, 59 n.14, 188 n.50, 190–204, 228 n.17, 228 n.20 judgements 6, 52, 54, 71, 203–4, 206–9, 212, 217–18, 226 n.3, 227 n.9 pleasure 192, 208, 210 properties 150–1, 170, 172–81, 187 n.41, 187 n.46, 188 n.50, 212–17, 230–1 n.38 properties and beauty 1–2, 4–5, 8, 97, 156, 170, 190, 198 realism 190, 212, 217 rupture 34 supervenience 190, 212–18, 230 nn.32–3 Affeldt, Stephen G. 105, 141 n.23–4 After the End of Art (Danto) 11 n.3, 28, 34, 38 n.16, 38 n.20, 38 n.22, 38 n.25, 39 n.30, 39 n.32, 41 n.54 Allison, Henry 200, 227 n.10, 228 n.12, 228 n.14, 228 n.19–20, 229 n.21 anti-realism 190, 212, 217 Aristotle 105, 106, 108, 141 n.25 A River Spanned (Weiner) 129, 176 Art. See also art’s nature; end of art autonomous temporality 51 beauty of 1, 195, 220, 221–3

concept 20, 124, 126, 130–1, 143–4 n.48, 144 n.54, 146 n.80, 226 n.2 definition 35–6, 78, 125, 130–5, 221, 232 n.54, 237; cluster account 125, 127; historical definitions 98, 130, 133; institutional definitions, 134; relational definitions 2, 33, 101, 123, 125, 127, 130 intertwining practices 119, 122–30, 144 n.54, 162, 210, 234–6 constitutive norms 6–7, 11, 97, 122–4, 126–8, 136, 150, 159–61, 171, 174–6, 181, 184 n.15, 235–8 and perceptual engagement 149–50, 154–6, 159–63, 168–71, 178 rupture in 1, 4, 54, 78–9 theory of perception 4–5, 10, 49, 55, 57, 150, 162, 168, 177, 222, 234 twentieth-century 3, 36, 45, 238 art’s nature Danto on 22, 24, 27–9, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 238–9 embodiment of meaning 24, 26, 34, 233 cluster concept 125–7 essentialism and 18, 97, 122, 125 experiential 1–2, 4, 97, 101, 150, 155, 169, 173, 189–90, 193, 204, 208 Gadamer on 56–7 Hegel on 3, 25, 27 Kant on 195–200 historical diversity 1–2, 30, 37, 125–6, 136–7, 152, 156–7, 160, 181, 240 historical understanding 8, 24, 31, 38 n.20, 52, 56, 61 n.43, 174, 198 neo-Wittgensteinian approach 28, 33, 114–15, 118–20, 122, 125, 130, 143 n.45, 143–4 n.48

252

Index

pluralism 17–37, 55–6, 66, 68–9, 78, 86–7, 93 n.53, 122, 190, 204, 206, 209–12, 218, 233–5, 239–41 social settings 127–8, 133–5, 163, 170, 214, 217, 223–4 artistic beauty 68, 198, 220, 222, 226 n.2, 232 n.58 Beardsley, Monroe 146 n.82, 176, 177 beautiful art consolation 219, 224 Danto on 189, 198, 218, 220–2, 224 Hickey on 80, 82, 84, 225, 235 in human life 65, 78, 89 Kant on 63, 71, 196–8, 204, 206–7, 212, 217–18, 226 n.2 pluralism 87, 234 relevance 43–52, 56–7 rupture 43–52, 56–7 structural relationships 203 visual pleasure 79 beauty aesthetic properties 1–2, 4–5, 8, 97, 150–1, 156, 170, 172–81, 190, 198, 212–17 capacious consciousness 65, 68–9, 71, 89, 198 consolation 10, 35, 190, 218–21, 223–4 contemporary reaffirmations 4, 8, 10, 36–7, 43–4, 64–6, 88–90, 97, 204, 218, 235 Danto on 218, 220–2, 224, 232 Gadamer on 4, 43–7, 49, 51–2, 54, 56–7 Hegel on 3, 50–1, 53, 55, 220–1 Hickey on 79–89 Kant on 63, 71, 196–8, 204, 206–7, 212, 217–18, 226 n.2 loss of 1, 3, 31–2, 36–7, 57, 87, 104, 157, 219, 233–4, 238 Nehamas on 71–9, 89 Nostalgia 63–4 Plato 45–7, 71, 74–5, 89 permission 2, 9–10, 67, 98, 128, 132–6, 153, 203, 218–25, 237, 240 perceptible presence 189–226 plurality 190, 204, 206, 209–12, 218, 233–5, 239–41 Scarry on 65–71, 89 value 2, 10, 69, 101, 103, 109, 113, 136, 171, 190, 204, 216

beaux arts tradition 79, 81–2, 85–8, 90, 92 n.37, 126, 156, 203, 225, 234–5 Belting, Hans art-historical approach 18–21, 27–9, 80, 136, 233–4 hermeneutic concept of art 55–6, 61 n.43 on end of art 2–3, 17, 20–1, 31, 36–7 inadequacy of art historical concepts 18–22 Bender, John W. 217, 231 n.43 Bernasconi, Robert 45, 58 n.8 Bernstein, J. M. 40 n.41, 67, 90 n.5 Betty (Richter) 210 Big Blue (Borins) 180 Blind Obedience (Williams) 106, 138 n.6, 139–40 n.16 Brillo Box 23, 33–6 Budd, Malcolm 73, 74, 91–2 n.24, 92 n.28, 92 n.30 Cage 6 (Richter) 5, 8, 172, 208 Carroll, Noel 13 n.15, 38 n.20, 39 n.34, 40 n.48, 144 n.51, 188 n.48, 188 n.50 on aesthetic properties 176, 179–80 on visual art 8 Categories of Art (Walton) 13 n.15, 151, 173–5, 185 n.32, 186 nn.34–5, 186 nn.37–9 Cavell, Stanley 97, 100, 104, 107, 108, 137 n.2, 141 nn.22–3, 142 n.30 The Claim of Reason (Cavell) 107, 137 n.2, 141 n.22 commercial art 34 conceptual art 7–8, 17, 129–30, 151, 161–2, 176–7, 179–82, 184 nn.16–17, 187 n.44, 188 n.50 conceptual realism 6, 8, 13 n.15, 150–1, 153, 155–6, 162, 173, 175–6, 181, 226, 229 n.23, 235, 240 Confrontation 1 (Richter) 165 Confrontation 2 (Richter) 166 Confrontation 3 (Richter) 166 constitutive norms of art 6–7, 11, 97, 122–4, 126–8, 136, 150, 159–61, 171, 174–6, 181, 184 n.15, 235–8 constitutive rules 101, 110, 112, 122–3, 129, 142 n.40 constitutive values 235–6, 238 contemporary art characteristics 161–2

Index demotion of aesthetics 35 Hegelian history 22 historical details 18, 20 non-perceptuality 150, 176–81 participatory nature 48 plurality 29, 55–6, 58 n.7, 233–5, 239–40 sense of community 52 spatial identity 154 subject matter 221 temporal dimensions 43 Costello, Diarmuid 12 n.9, 59 n.14, 188 n.50, 228 n.17 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 73, 98, 107, 113, 155, 189, 191–2, 202–3, 226 n.4, 227 n.9 cultural context of art 7, 25, 28, 31, 33, 36, 53–4, 56–7, 66, 101, 106, 114, 123–4, 126, 130, 133–4, 162, 204–5, 207, 209–11, 216–18, 224, 233, 237–8 Danto, Arthur aesthetics 34–5 art’s nature 22–4, 27–9, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 238–9 beauty 34–7, 189, 198, 218, 220–2, 224 beauty’s consolation 218, 220–2, 224 concept of art 126, 130–1 denial of aesthetics 34–5, 176, 187 n.41 embodiment of meaning 50–1, 68, 85, 93 n.47 on end of art 2–4, 18, 22, 27, 30–2, 36, 45, 63–5, 78–9, 86–7, 89–90, 122, 202–3, 233–4, 236, 238–40 essentialism 18, 22–30, 87, 125, 93 n.53, 115, 127, 236, 239 grace 81 on Hegel’s view 25–7, 30, 68 historicism 22–30, 32–3, 52, 80–1, 134, 136 inflector 221, 232 nn.54–5 on Kant’s view 189, 198 on neo-Wittgensteinian approach 33, 120, 122 philosophical perspective 17–18, 22–3, 25–7, 30–1, 33–4 pluralism 31–2, 34, 55–6, 69, 78, 86, 93 n.53 problem of indiscernibles 22–3 relational definition of art 125, 133 and Wittgenstein 28–9, 33

253

Davies, Stephen 134-5, 146 n.82, 146 n.88, 147 nn.90 Dead 1 (Richter) 163, 172, 180 defeasibility of art 130, 161–2 desire 73–5, 79–80, 83, 192, 213 determinable perceptible 177–81 determinate properties 11, 152, 161, 168, 179–81, 235 determination of aesthetic properties 191, 198, 202, 208, 214–5 Dewey, John 149, 182 n.1, 194 Diamond, Cora 97, 137 n.2, 137 n.4, 139 n.12 Dickie, George 115, 122, 143 n.45 Eldridge, Richard 100, 112, 138 n.6, 142 n.38 embodiment of meaning art’s nature 24, 26, 34, 233, 239 artworks 23 beaux-arts tradition 81 Danto’s idea 31, 36 monochrome works 24 pluralism 2, 56 emotion 35, 73, 125–6, 201, 221–2, 232 n.60 end of art Danto’s reasoning 2–4, 18, 27, 30–2, 36, 45, 63–5, 78–9, 86–7, 89–90, 122, 202–3, 233–4, 236, 238–40 Hegelian view 22, 25–6, 30–2, 68 Matisse on 71 narratives 10–11 Nehamas on 78 pluralism 17–37, 86 self-reflexivity 65 structural sense 3–4, 18, 30–2, 36, 45, 63–5, 78–9, 86–7, 89–90, 122, 202–3, 233–4, 236, 238–9 substantive sense 2–4, 18, 27, 30, 32, 36, 45, 51, 55, 57, 65, 78–9, 86–7, 89, 98, 101, 131, 233–4, 240 essentialism artistic directions 36 art’s nature 18 Danto on 18, 22–30, 87, 125, 236, 239 historicism with 2, 32 variety of embodiment 3 visual art 5–6 Wittgenstein 32–4, 97, 122 Evans, Gareth 153, 182 n.4

254

Index

formalism 46, 48, 59, 64, 80, 84, 162, 174, 179–80, 200 forms of life activities 2, 102, 105, 109, 111, 113, 118, 123–4, 128, 139 n.15, 189–90, 204–5, 207–8, 210, 216, 225 contemporary 30 and Gadamer 53 range of possibilities, objective (Danto) 27–9 Wittgenstein’s notion 28, 30, 48, 52, 149, 157, 171, 183–4 n.14, 235–6 Fountain (Duchamp) 27, 176, 187 n.41 free play 8, 46, 49, 54, 74, 190–1, 193–4, 196, 198, 201–4, 208–10, 212 Funeral (Richter) 167, 212–13 Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Gjesdal) 52, 58 n.2, 60 n.32, 61 n.36 Gadamer, Hans-Georg on art’s nature 56–7 autonomous temporality 51 on beautiful art 4, 43–7, 49, 51–2, 54, 56–7 beaux arts tradition 81 Bildung 44, 114 on criteria 48, 53 criticisms 52–5 and Danto 56–7 on end of art 55–7 on festival 52 on Hegel end of art 50–1 hermeneutic approach 43, 48, 53, 55, 61 n.38, 61 n.43 historicism 53, 55, 60 n.32 idea of objectivity 113–14 on Kant 45–7, 59 n.21 notion of aesthetic taste 211 on Plato 45–7 on play 47–9 on symbol 49–50 theory of perception 49, 55, 57, 64, 68, 89, 155, 234–5 Truth and Method 44–5 and Wittgenstein 53, 59 n. 18 Gaut, Berys cluster concept of art 61, 125–7, 133, 145 nn.58–9, 145 n.61

contrast with Danto 125 on family resemblance 125 German idealism 46, 48 Gjesdal, Kristin 52, 58 n.2, 60 n.32, 61 n.36 Greenberg, Clement 39 n.29, 46, 59 n.14, 85, 129, 146 n.74, 162, 176 Grey (Richter) 24, 27 Grief, form of life 157–9 Guernica (Picasso) 173–5, 213 Hanged (Richter) 164, 214–15 Hegel, G.W.F. on art’s nature 3, 25, 27 on beauty 3, 50–1, 53, 55, 220–1 Danto's divergence 22, 25–7, 30, 32, 221 embodiment of meaning 51 on end of art 22, 25–6, 30–2, 60 n.32, 68 historicism 3, 22, 25 on modern art 25 philosophical ideas 45, 50, 68, 220 The Heresy of Zone Defense (Hickey) 128–9, 145 n.70, 146 n.75 Hickey, Dave art-historical context 79–80, 89–90, 93 n.49 on beautiful art 79–80, 82, 87, 89 on beauty’s value 79–80, 84, 88–90 end of beaux-arts 85–6, 234–5 end of art 85–7 notion of objectivity 88–9 oil glazing 79–81, 83–4, 86, 88, 92 n.40 on visible permission 79–80, 203, 218–25, 237, 240 on visible pleasure 79–89 historical contingency 97, 101–14, 125, 127, 136 historicism Danto on 22–30, 32–3, 52, 80–1, 125, 134, 136 Gadamer on 52–3, 55 Hegel on 3, 22, 25 Hickey on 87 Wittgenstein on 3, 28, 33, 114–15, 118–20, 122, 125, 130 hope, form of life 157–8, 213 Hume, David 217, 231 nn.44–6 Hunter, John F. M. 158, 183 nn.12–13

Index identity of artworks 18, 21, 23, 26–7, 34, 47–9, 51, 55, 57, 68–9, 85–6, 123, 128, 136, 154, 181, 214–15, 234 illusionist art 79, 86, 156–7 imagination 8–9, 46–7, 49, 54, 59, 74, 129, 188 n.50, 190–1, 193–9, 201, 203–4, 208, 222, 228 n.16 The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio) 82 Individuality of beauty 71–9, 89, 197, 211 judgements aesthetic 63, 71, 204, 206–7, 212, 217–18, 226 n.3 criteria and 104–5 Kant on 73, 98, 107, 113, 155, 189, 191–3, 202–3, 227 n.5 methods of measurement 106–7, 110–11, 171 normative 98, 107, 205, 208–9, 227 nn.8–9 objective 73, 113 perceptual 155 pluralism 209 second nature 106, 108 Kant, Immanuel 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 39 n.29, 189, 190–204, 227 n.5 aesthetic ideas 190–204, 228 n.17, 228 n.20 aesthetic attributes 196–9, 201, 209, 222 aesthetic pleasure 192, 208, 210 beautiful art 196–7, 203 Critique of Judgement 73, 98, 107, 113, 155, 189, 191–2, 202–3, 227 n.5 formalism 46, 59, 64, 162, 200 free play of imagination and understanding 8, 46, 49, 54, 74, 190–1, 193–4, 196, 198, 201–4, 208–10, 212 on judgement 189, 191–2, 202–3, 227 n.5 notion of purposive form 200–1, 203, 209 perception 189, 201 theory of colour 197, 199–203, 209, 225, 229 n.22 transcendental framework 8, 189, 200, 229 n.21 Kelly, Michael 11 n.3, 38 n.21, 168, 184 n.21 Kelly, Sean D. 168–70, 185 nn.24–8 Kennick, William E. 40 n.46, 120, 143 n.45

255

language games 59 n.18, 99, 101–2, 107, 109, 111–12, 116–18, 121, 157, 183 n.8, 183–4 n.14 Lectures on Aesthetics (Wittgenstein) 6, 98, 204, 206, 226 n.3 Levinson Jerrold 146 nn.77–8, 230 n.33 historical definition of art 97, 130–3 on sociology of art 134 LeWitt, Sol 129, 146 n.75, 184 n.16 life activity, forms of 7, 139 n.15, 149–51, 157–62, 178, 181, 184 n.15 love of beauty 26, 45, 68–9, 71–5, 78, 89, 91–2 n.24, 151, 182, 191, 198 Man Shot Down 1 (Richter) 164 Man Shot Down 2 (Richter) 165 McDowell, John realist orientation 97, 104 on Wittgenstien 6, 12 n.12, 105, 108, 137 n.1, 138 n.9, 138 n.11, 140–1 nn.17–18, 141–2 n.28 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 168, 169, 185 n.25, 185 n.27 Mind and World (McDowell) 141 n.25, 150 modernism in art 17, 19–21, 35, 39 n.29, 69, 86, 162, 221 Nehamas, Alexander aesthetic judgements 71–3, 78 beauty of individuality 71–9 and Danto 71–2, 78, 80–1 end of art 78–9 on interpretation 72, 75, 77–8 embodiment of meaning 83 love of beauty 71–9 Manet’s Olympia 75–7 notion of judgement 191–2, 210, 12 notion of objectivity 71–3 Plato 71, 74–5, 89 reaffirmation of beauty 89, 234 rethinking art 71–2 theory of perception 77, 80, 150 Nice paintings (Matisse) 69–71, 77, 91 n.20, 234 Nochlin, Linda 127, 128, 129, 133, 145 nn.64–5, 145 n.69, 207, 217 non-aesthetic art 176, 181 non-aesthetic perceptible properties 214–15

256

Index

non-aesthetic properties 174, 176, 181, 191, 212–17, 231 n.41 non-perceptual art 173–7, 179–80 October 18, 1977 cycle (Richter) 8, 24, 163–8, 180 Olympia (Manet) 75–7 On Certainty (Wittgenstein) 6, 11 n.1, 139 n.12, 142 n.39, 204–5, 207, 209, 229 nn.24–5, 230 n.26 painting 167–70, 174–5 perceivers 153, 189, 193 perceptible/perceptual presence 9, 203 aesthetic dimension 170–2 beauty’s value 189–90, 203, 210–12, 234–5, 239–41 cultural suspicion 218 philosophical approach 225 plurality 211 theory of art 156–7 perceptual engagement/perceptual experience aesthetic value 9, 171 art as 156–60, 178 art practices 149–52, 155–7, 160, 162, 168, 170–3 concept 7, 184 n.15 conceptual realism 6, 8, 13 n.15, 150–1, 153, 155–6, 162, 173, 175–6, 181, 226, 229 n.23, 235, 240 Danto on 26, 157 determinate properties 168, 182 n.3, 234–6, 240 emotion and 232 n.60 Gadamer on 43, 46, 52, 56, 229 n.22, 234 Hickey on 79–80, 88, 225, 240 Kant on 200, 203, 222 as life activity 149–50, 161–2 unretainable nature 151–6; conceptual 152–6; contentful 152, 155–6; determinate 151–2; individuative understanding 152–5; qualitative 151–2 Wittgenstein on 4, 7, 182–3 nn.8–9, 183–4 n.14, 205–6 permission 2, 9–10, 67, 98, 128, 132–6, 153, 203, 218–25, 237, 240. See also visible permission

Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 6, 11 n.1, 98, 101, 115, 122, 138 n.6, 139 n.12, 140 n.16, 157, 183 nn.11–13 Pippin, Robert 12 n.6, 40 nn.41–2, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60 n.32, 61 nn.38–9 Plato 5, 12 n.11, 45, 47, 50, 65, 68, 71, 74, 75, 89, 92 n.31, 191 Pluralism of art 17–37, 55–6, 66, 68–9, 78, 86–7, 93 n.53, 122, 190, 204, 206, 209–12, 218, 233–5, 239–41 art of 1960’s 24 artistic directions 3 art’s nature and 30 Belting on 21 Danto on 31–2, 34, 55–6, 69, 78, 86, 93 n.53 contemporary art 26, 29, 31–2, 55, 234–6, 240 denial of objectivity 239 embodiment of meaning 233 essentialism with 32 Hegel on 68 Hickey on 86–7 post-historical 2, 22 structural conceptions 30, 36 Wittgensteinian perspective 32–6, 122–3 pop art 22–3, 34, 40 n.49, 41 n.53 The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art (Shelley) 13 n.15, 186–7 n.40, 187 n.42, 188 n.47 Putnam, Hilary 97, 104, 137 n.2, 138 n.9, 141 n.21, 182–3 n.8 quietism 99, 101 reaffirmation of beauty art’s ending 10, 236 consolation and 10, 35, 190, 218–21, 223–4 contemporary life 43, 97, 204 Gadamer on 44, 235 Hickey on 4, 79, 89, 235 nostalgia 63 Nehamas on 4, 71–9, 235 Richter’s painting 163 Scarry on 4, 65–71, 88–9, 235 Sense of loss 36–7

Index structural and substantive senses of end of art 2–4, 18, 27, 30, 32, 36, 45, 51, 55, 57, 65, 78–9, 86–7, 89, 98, 101, 131, 233–4, 240 ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful,’ (Gadamer) 3, 12 n.7, 44, 47, 56, 58 n.9, 59 n.17, 59 n.19, 60 nn. 26–7, 60 nn.30–1 religious artefacts 124, 160 Richter, Gerhard abstractions 64, 209 artworks 78 blurr 24, 169–70, 180, 214 determinate properties 168 diversity of painting 24, 163–7, 170, 172, 180, 208, 210, 212–114 (See also specific paintings) innovative techniques 197 October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings 8, 24, 163–8, 180 perceptual account 168–70 websites 184 n.18 rule-following 53, 103–8, 113, 132, 141–2 n.28, 154, 207 Scarry, Elaine 65–71, 234–5 on beauty attributes 65–71 intelligible perceptible structures 65, 68–71, 76 on opportunity and capacity 65–6 reaffirmation of beauty 65–71, 234–5 symmetry 69 Schjedhal, Peter 210, 230 nn.29–30 Scruton, Roger 195, 219, 220, 223, 224, 228 n.15 second nature 106–10, 113–14, 125, 129, 155, 158, 204, 210–11, 218 sensation 192, 201–2 Shelley, James, on conceptual art 151, 176–9, 188 n.50 Sibley Frank aesthetic properties 5, 178, 187 nn.44–6, 216, 230 n.37 determinate properties 179 on non-aesthetic properties 216 notion of perception 177–9 Slave Ship (Turner) 223 social factors, nature of art 133–5 social justice, beautiful art 65–6, 69

257

Spanish Elegies (Motherwell) 221 Stecker, Robert 134, 147 n.89 Storr, Robert 167, 184 n.19 structural sense, end of art 3–4, 18, 30–2, 36, 45, 63–5, 78–9, 86–7, 89–90, 122, 202–3, 233–4, 236, 238–9 substantive sense, end of art 2–4, 18, 27, 30, 32, 36, 45, 51, 55, 57, 65, 78–9, 86–7, 89, 98, 101, 131, 233–4, 240 supervenience 138, 190, 212–17, 230 n.32, 230 nn.34–6, 231 n.39 systematic theory of practice 123, 134–5, 139–40 n.16 theory of art, perceptual experience 28, 33, 40, 119, 135, 151, 156 theory of perception 4–5, 7–8, 12–13 n.14, 49, 55, 57, 150, 151–6, 162, 168, 177, 222, 234 October 18, 1977 cycle of paintings 8, 24, 163–8, 180 Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto) 38 n.20, 60 n.29, 72, 92 n.26 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 44–5, 49, 57–8 n.1, 58 n.2, 58 nn.4–5, 59 nn.16–18 twenty-first century, aesthetic ideas 1, 36, 59 n.14, 238 values and vocabularies 64 facts and 2, 69, 101, 103, 109, 113, 136, 171, 190, 204, 216 visual criteria, defining art 236–7 Walton, Kendall L. 173–176, 185 n.32, 186 n.34, 186 nn.36–9 on aesthetic properties 173–5, 198 on art categories 8, 13 n.15, 151, 173, 176 Warhol, Andy 23, 35, 60 n.29, 78, 154, 236–7 Weitz, Morris 40 n.46, 120, 143 n.44, 143–4 n.48, 145 n.54 Williams, Meredith 106, 107, 108, 138 n.6, 139 n.12, 139–40 n.16, 141 n.26, 141–2 n.28, 142 n.29, 142 n.32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig on beauty 206, 230 n.27

258 on criteria 103–4 on constitutive norms 97, 122–4, 126–8, 136 on essentialism 32–7 historicism 28, 33, 130 holism 99–100, 123, 204, 139–41 n.16 on judgement 98, 104–8, 110, 113–14 and Kant 204, 207–9, 212 language games 59 n.18, 99, 101–2, 107, 109, 111–12, 116–18, 121, 157, 182–3 n.8, 183–4 n.14 multidimensional space 84, 100, 105, 138 n.7, 153–4, 204 notion of family resemblance 33, 98, 114–22, 124–5, 130, 133, 136, 143 nn.45–6, 144–5 n.54

Index notion of forms of life 28, 30, 48, 52, 149, 157, 171, 183–4 n.14, 235–6 on philosophical investigation 103–4, 106, 150, 154, 229 n.25 quietism 99, 101 realism 1–8, 53, 98, 101, 110, 113, 132, 155, 171, 182 n.8, 189–90, 204, 210, 213, 216 rule-following 53, 103–8, 113, 132, 141–2 n.28, 154, 207 on second nature 106–10, 113–14, 125, 129, 155, 158, 204, 210–11, 218 on training 103–9, 111–14, 130, 138 n.9, 141–2 n.28, 155, 183 n.8, 205 Wright, Crispin 12 n.12, 109, 110, 137 n.1, 141–2 n.28, 142 n.33