The Critical Imagination (Oxford Philosophical Monographs) 9780199661794, 0199661790

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The Critical Imagination

oxford philosophical monographs Editorial Committee anita avramides r. s. crisp william child antony eagle stephen mulhall other titles in this series include Nietzsche and Metaphysics Peter Poellner Understanding Pictures Dominic Lopes Things That Happen Because They Should A Teleological Approach to Action Rowland Stout The Ontology of Mind Events, Processes, and States Helen Steward Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics Mathieu Marion Semantic Powers Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy Jonardon Ganeri Hegel’s Idea of Freedom Alan Patten Metaphor and Moral Experience A. E. Denham Kant’s Empirical Realism Paul Abela Against Equality of Opportunity Matt Cavanagh The Grounds of Ethical Judgement New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy Christian Illies Of Liberty and Necessity The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy James A. Harris Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry George E. Karamanolis Aquinas on Friendship Daniel Schwartz The Brute Within Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle Hendrik Lorenz

The Critical Imagination James Grant

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # James Grant 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–966179–4 Printed by the MPG Printgroup, UK

For Terrence Comeau

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Acknowledgements Many people have provided feedback on this book. For their comments, I would like to thank Martá Abrusán, Paloma Atencia-Linares, George Botterill, Emily Brady, Emily Caddick, Davide Cargnello, Dan CavedonTaylor, Rafael De Clercq, David Davies, Martin Davies, Heather Demarest, Dorothy Edgington, Paul Faulkner, Miranda Fricker, Stacie Friend, Michael Garnett, Berys Gaut, Jonathan Gilmore, Dominic Gregory, Ian Ground, Alex Grzankowski, Samuel Guttenplan, Andy Hamilton, Louise Hanson, John Hawthorne, Allan Hazlett, Rob Hopkins, Jennifer Hornsby, Keith Hossack, Andrew Huddleston, Dan Isaacson, Susan James, Rosanna Keefe, Claire Kirwin, Andrew Klevan, Deborah Knight, Stephen Laurence, Stephen Leighton, Sam Liao, Paul Lodge, Dominic McIver Lopes, Sabina Lovibond, Ofra Magidor, Derek Matravers, Andrew McGonigal, Jennifer McMahon, Aaron Meskin, Peter Millican, Margaret Moore, Daniel Morgan, Victoria Moul, Bradley Murray, Chris Norbury, Yuuki Ohta, Toby Ord, Alex Paseau, Ian Phillips, Jennifer Saul, Elisabeth Schellekens-Damann, Severin Schroeder, Vid Simoniti, Maarten Steenhagen, Josef Stern, Robert Stern, Scott Sturgeon, Christopher Timpson, Kate Tunstall, Ralph Walker, Milly Zimeta, and the readers for Oxford University Press. I would also like to thank audiences at the American Society for Aesthetics 2010 Pacific Division Annual Meeting; Birkbeck, University of London; the British Society of Aesthetics 2010 and 2011 Annual Conferences; Hertford College, Oxford; the London Aesthetics Forum; Oxford’s 2009 Philosophy Graduate Conference, Doctoral Thesis Seminar, Ockham Society, and Topics in Aesthetics Research Seminar; The Queen’s College, Oxford; and the University of Sheffield. I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and Eleanor Collins of Oxford University Press for their help in preparing the book for publication. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my research. Some previously published material appears here with substantial revisions. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint it. Material from the following papers is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics: James Grant, ‘The

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dispensability of Metaphor’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50/3 (2010): 255–272 ; James Grant, ‘Metaphor and Criticism’, British Journal of Aesthetics 51/3 (2011): 237–257 . Material from James Grant, ‘The Value of Imaginativeness’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90/2 (2012): 275–289 is # the Australasian Association of Philosophy and is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. I owe special thanks to my sister, Elizabeth Grant, who provided two of the book’s illustrations. My parents, William and Joan Grant, have given me invaluable support throughout the writing of this book, as they have in everything else. My fiancée, Anna Kemp, has made this book much better than it would otherwise have been. I would need to be a writer of her calibre to express how much better she has made its author’s life. Peter Lamarque and Stephen Mulhall read the manuscript in its entirety, and provided many valuable suggestions. Malcolm Budd has been unfailingly generous with his time and considerable philosophical intelligence. I am very grateful for his perceptive comments on several drafts. Lastly, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my doctoral supervisor, John Hyman. John’s acuity, intellectual rigour, and independence of mind have saved me from many pitfalls. Time and again his example has reminded me what good philosophy looks like. I hope this book shows I learned something.

Contents List of Figures

xi

Introduction

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1. The Aims of Criticism

5

2. Criticism and Appreciation

29

3. Criticism and Imagination

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4. Metaphor and Likeness

87

5. The Dispensability of Metaphor

125

6. Metaphor and Criticism

149

Conclusion

173

Bibliography Index

179 189

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List of Figures 1.1 C. Elizabeth Grant. Drawing after Antoine Babuty Desgodets, Second Ordre du Colisée, à Rome. 2012.

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2.1 C. Elizabeth Grant. Palazzo del Tè, Mantua. 2012.

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6.1 Attic red-figure pyxis decorated with women and erotes or cupids. Close to the Meidias Painter. End of 5th century bc.

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6.2 Raphael. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. 1515–1516.

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Introduction ‘The highest Criticism’, writes Oscar Wilde, ‘is in its way more creative than creation.’ Wilde is an advocate of a view with a long history in aesthetics. According to this tradition, art criticism offers as much scope for imaginativeness as creating art does. The critic’s freedom to imaginatively interpret, experience, and describe works of art is a significant part of what makes criticism rewarding to write and to read. Engaging actively and intelligently with artworks involves exercising one of the aptitudes most closely associated with making them. This attractive idea has taken many forms. Some think the interpretation of literature offers good evidence for it. Literary works seem to admit of many different interpretations. Some hold that this gives critics great scope to interpret works of literature imaginatively, just as theatre directors have great scope to adapt plays imaginatively. Others think a developed sensitivity to art involves the disposition to look at artworks imaginatively. A sensitivity to architecture might be manifested by seeing a row of columns spaced close together as ‘tense and forbidding’, or columns spaced farther apart as ‘stately, serene, meditative’.1 So too, many have thought that critics commonly need to be imaginative to adequately describe the appearance of artworks or the effects they have on us. Vivid metaphors and other figurative descriptions—of music as ‘shimmering’, poems as ‘tightlyknit’, arches as ‘soaring’, and so forth—are commonly employed when critics try to say what is of aesthetic interest in a work. Such descriptions have received much attention in analytic philosophy of art. They have been one of the main sources, within contemporary analytic philosophy, of the view of criticism as a notably imaginative pursuit.

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John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 26.

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INTRODUCTION

This view of criticism is of interest for several reasons. I will mention two. In the first place, it would help explain why it is rewarding to give artworks the kind of sustained attention critics give them. Why engaging with art is rewarding has been a question of perennial interest, and it has received a variety of answers. Aristotle attributed our enjoyment of artworks to our propensity to enjoy reasoning and understanding. Both, he thought, are involved in recognizing what a representational artwork represents. A common view in eighteenth-century aesthetics was that beauty pleases because it engages our cognitive powers in certain ways. On both views, many of the pleasures art provides are explained by reference to the pleasures of understanding. Engaging with art involves, or is importantly like, acquiring knowledge from perception. On the view I am considering, by contrast, engaging with art is importantly like creating art. Criticism is rewarding because it involves exercising imaginativeness. Second, clarifying the role of imaginativeness in criticism will help to explain what it is, exactly, critics do. Criticism is, to many people, a rather mystifying practice. Even after reading much of it, many find it unclear how a critic reaches her conclusions, what constraints there are on the claims she makes, and what the aims of criticism are. Indeed, these are matters of dispute among critics themselves. This division is reflected in the different attitudes people have to the claim that criticism may be, or ought to be, highly imaginative. Some worry that those who stress the creative element in criticism open the way to overly speculative, impressionistic criticism, losing sight of criticism’s genuine aims and the standards to which it must be sensitive. This raises the question of what those aims and standards are. In determining the role of imaginativeness in criticism, we shall shed light on this question. We shall also shed light, thereby, on what characteristics, aptitudes, and intellectual virtues make someone a good critic. This book has two main parts. The aim of Chapters 1–3 is to say what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. In Chapters 4–6, I examine metaphor and its use in criticism. Many influential writers, as I have said, take the prevalence of metaphor in criticism to indicate the role imaginativeness plays in criticism and aesthetic experience. It is therefore appropriate to consider, in the light of my account of the role of imaginativeness in criticism, why critics do use metaphor so frequently. This account will not only explain why metaphor is commonly used in critics’ descriptions. It will also provide reasons why metaphor is such an effective device for

INTRODUCTION

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communication in general. The language of criticism is not alone in attracting philosophical attention on account of being frequently metaphorical. As we shall see, the widespread use of metaphor in the sciences, metaphysics, and theology has also been thought to reveal something important about these areas. My conclusions have implications for these debates as well. In the course of my discussion, I shall answer several questions about metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism that are important in their own right. Those interested in these questions can read the chapters in which I answer them on their own. In Chapters 1 and 2, I argue for a new view about what the aims of criticism are. Philosophers have disagreed on whether the point of criticizing an artwork is to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or to achieve something else besides. Clearly, we need to know what critics are trying to achieve if we are to say what role imaginativeness and metaphor play in criticism. In the first chapter, I take issue with five influential views on the aims of criticism, which have been suggested by Arnold Isenberg, Monroe Beardsley, Frank Sibley, Arthur Danto, and Noël Carroll, among others. None of these views is ultimately successful. A good account of the aims of criticism, however, ought to accommodate the truth in each of them. I provide my own account in the second chapter. To get clear on what the aims of criticism are, I argue, we need to get clear on what it is to appreciate art. At the beginning of this chapter, I present a new account of what art appreciation is. This discussion of appreciation enables me to give an account of the aims of criticism that avoids the problems affecting other views. I identify a constitutive aim of criticism and a non-constitutive aim of criticism, both of which are connected to appreciation. I then explain what characteristics make someone a good critic, given that the aims I have identified are aims of criticism. I conclude by comparing this conception of the critic with Hume’s conception of the true judge of art. This account of critics and criticism puts us in a position to say what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. This is the subject of Chapter 3. Although the belief that imaginativeness has a significant role in criticism has a long history, many philosophers today are unlikely to be familiar with this history. To familiarize my readers with the debate in which I am participating, I give a short overview of the history of this idea at the beginning of this chapter, outlining the views of Hume, Kant, Oscar

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INTRODUCTION

Wilde, and Roger Scruton, among others. I then develop my own contribution to this debate in two stages. First, I defend a new account of what imaginativeness is. Second, based on my accounts of criticism’s aims, of the characteristics of good critics, and of imaginativeness, I explain what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. In Chapter 4, I present an argument in the philosophy of language. I argue for a claim about metaphor that goes against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. I argue that likeness always plays a certain role in determining what is communicated with metaphor and in enabling us to grasp it. My claim resembles, but is not, the claim that metaphors are comparisons or compressed similes. That view is rejected by most philosophers working on metaphor today, and hostility to it has helped prevent philosophers from recognizing the truth of the claim I defend here. I reply to twelve objections, presented by Donald Davidson, John Searle, Richard Moran, William Lycan, Robert Fogelin, Samuel Guttenplan, and others. My view enables us to explain several facts about our use of metaphor. I use it for this purpose in the rest of the book. Chapter 5 is an attack on the belief that metaphor is needed in order to think, express, communicate, or discover certain things. Many contemporary philosophers believe this. Some have appealed to this claim to explain metaphor’s prevalence in critics’ descriptions of artworks and of our responses to them. However, I argue that recent arguments for metaphor’s indispensability, by Stephen Yablo, Richard Boyd, Elisabeth Camp, and Berys Gaut, are unconvincing. Moreover, the view that metaphor is indispensable for these purposes is commonly confused with other, more plausible claims. We ought not to explain the prevalence of metaphor in criticism by appealing to it. I explain in the final chapter why metaphor is so effective, and therefore so prevalent, in criticism of the arts. Building upon the conclusions about criticism reached in the first half of the book, and upon the view of metaphor defended in Chapters 4–5, I argue that there are two importantly different kinds of metaphor used by critics. This distinction has not, to my knowledge, been previously recognized; but drawing it is essential to explaining why metaphor is used so often in criticism. The explanation of why metaphor is such an effective way of achieving the aims of criticism is different for each of these kinds of metaphor. In the course of providing my explanation, I also explain why, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, metaphor has a particularly close connection with perception and with imagination.

1 The Aims of Criticism To characterize the role imaginativeness plays in criticism of the arts, we need to know what the aims of criticism are. If we know what criticism is an attempt to achieve, we shall be better placed to say how imaginativeness enables critics to achieve it. Philosophers and other theorists of the arts have often made claims about what the aims of criticism are. There are at least two things we might be interested in when we ask this question. First, we might want to know what the constitutive aim or aims of criticism are. Being written with this aim or these aims would be part of what makes a piece of writing an instance of art criticism. If criticism has a constitutive aim, it would be both interesting in itself to know what it is, and useful for saying what role endowments such as imaginativeness play in criticism. Second, we might want to know what makes a piece of criticism a piece of good criticism. Perhaps there are aims such that achieving them (or being such as to achieve them) makes a piece of criticism that has them good criticism. That is to say, it makes it good as criticism: a passage can be an example of good writing but bad or indifferent criticism. Aims of this kind may or may not also turn out to be constitutive aims, as we shall see. If there are such aims, knowing what they are, too, would enable us to say what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. In what follows, I will identify both a constitutive and a nonconstitutive aim of criticism. Saying how imaginativeness enables a critic to achieve these aims will show what its role in criticism is. In this chapter, I will consider five answers to the question of what the aims of criticism are. I will argue that none of them is an aim of all criticism. However, each proposal is instructive for what it reveals about the variety of things critics do and attempt to achieve. An account of the aims of criticism should make sense of the fact that critics do and attempt to achieve these things. In Chapter 2, I will provide such an account.

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THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

1. Helping readers choose Monroe Beardsley argues that the primary aim of criticism is to help the critic’s readership decide which artworks to choose to experience. He says that critics, in the strict sense, are ‘those who set themselves up, or are set up by others, to make public judgments for the purpose of guiding the choices of others who are less qualified than they, perhaps by the lack of talent or time’.1 He calls this the ‘Consumers’ union model of (professional) criticism’, and argues that it is ‘essentially correct as an account of art criticism, capturing its primary character, on which its other features depend’.2 Critical activities such as explaining and interpreting are undertaken for this purpose.3 Beardsley’s model is best suited to much journalistic criticism, particularly reviews. Many reviews by theatre critics, film critics, music critics, etc., are written with the intention of helping readers to decide whether to see, watch, listen to (etc.) the work. Virginia Woolf makes this aim explicit in her essay on The Faerie Queene, introducing her piece as ‘some general observations made by one who has gone through the experience, and wishes to urge others, who may be hiding their yawns and their polite boredom, to the same experience’.4 However, Beardsley’s account is a poor model of much academic criticism. It is implausible that guiding the choices of others is the aim of much academic criticism. Such criticism is normally written for readers who have already chosen to experience the work. It is usually presumed that they are reading the criticism because they are studying the work. Good academic criticism is certainly capable of providing information that would be useful to audiences trying to decide whether to experience the work. But it is implausible that being useful in this way is what makes it good criticism, or that it is defective if it is not useful for this purpose. 1 Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘What Are Critics For?’, in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 149. 2 Ibid., pp. 156–157. 3 Ibid., p. 160. Stein Haugom Olsen expresses a similar view of the aim of what he calls criticism in ‘the judgmental sense’. Criticizing, in this sense, is ‘pointing out good or bad qualities in a literary work in order to make a recommendation of some sort either to the artist or to the reading public’ (Stein Haugom Olsen, ‘Criticism of Literature and Criticism of Culture’, Ratio 22/4 (2009): 439–440). 4 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Faery Queen’, in Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott, eds, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 672.

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Furthermore, not even all journalistic criticism has this aim. Some reviews (for example, of a theatre production that has already finished) may simply be written to inform the reader of what was of interest in the work and why it was of interest. It may be of great interest to know how a certain director adapted a certain play, in what respects it was successful or unsuccessful, etc. For works that the reader can no longer experience, the aim of criticizing them cannot be to help the reader to decide whether to choose to experience them. But it is clearly not pointless to write criticism of such works.

2. Perception Many hold that critics describe works in order to cause their readers to perceive features of the work. Stuart Hampshire, Frank Sibley, Michael Baxandall, and many others have held this view.5 The main argument offered in support of it is presented by Arnold Isenberg. Isenberg’s paper has exercised great influence.6 It is widely regarded as the classic defence of particularism in aesthetics. And his view that the aim of critical description is to cause perception has been not only supported but taken for granted by many aestheticians.

See Stuart Hampshire, ‘Logic and Appreciation’, in William Elton, ed., Aesthetics and Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), p. 165; Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Essays on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 15–20; Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 38; Michael Baxandall, ‘The Language of Art History’, New Literary History 10/3 (1979): 455; James Shelley, ‘The Character and Role of Principles in the Evaluation of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 42/1 (2002): 51. 6 See, e.g., Mary Mothersill, ‘Critical Reasons’, The Philosophical Quarterly 11/42 (1961): 74–78; John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 172–173; Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 354; Ted Cohen, ‘On Consistency in One’s Personal Aesthetics’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 112–113; Joel J. Kupperman, Value . . . and What Follows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 53; Dominic McIver Lopes, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 105–106; Robert Hopkins, ‘Critical Reasoning and Critical Perception’, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds, Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 137–153; James Shelley, ‘Critical Compatibilism’, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds, Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 125–136; Keith Lehrer, Art, Self and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 21, 29. 5

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

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Isenberg begins his argument by examining a theory of criticism . . . which divides the critical process into three parts. There is the value judgment or verdict (V): ‘This picture or poem is good—.’ There is a particular statement or reason (R): ‘—because it has such-and-such a quality—.’ And there is a general statement or norm (N): ‘—and any work which has that quality is pro tanto good.’7

Isenberg agrees that critics make value judgements. He also agrees that ‘when we speak of “justifying” or “giving reasons” for our critical judgments, we refer to something which . . . does go on in the world’.8 And he agrees that the value judgement is ‘in some sense conditional upon R’.9 His objection to the theory of criticism he describes is that, though V is in some sense conditional upon R, ‘the truth of R never adds the slightest weight to V ’.10 What we describe as ‘giving reasons’ in support of our value judgements is not a case of making statements whose truth supports our judgements. He uses this claim to argue that getting the reader to perceive is the aim of critical description. The overarching structure of his argument is as follows: (A) The truth of R offers no support for the value judgement. (B) If the truth of R offers no support for the value judgement, the best explanation of R’s function is that using it is a way of getting the reader to perceive. Therefore, (C)

The best explanation of R’s function is that using it is a way of getting the reader to perceive.

Isenberg devotes most effort to defending (A). This defence involves denying that critics do rely on norms of the kind on which, according to the simple theory he rejects, they rely.11 Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, Philosophical Review 58/4 (1949), p. 330. Ibid., p. 333 n. 3. 9 Ibid., p. 331. 10 Ibid., p. 338. 11 James Shelley has recently emphasized that Isenberg is not arguing that there are no true critical norms, but that critics do not appeal to any critical norms (Shelley, ‘Critical Compatibilism’, pp. 128–129). This is true. However, Isenberg appears to be arguing that critics do not appeal to any critical norms by arguing that the only norms to which they could possibly be appealing are untrue. 7 8

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His argument for (A) appeals to the following passage by the art critic Ludwig Goldscheider. Discussing El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz,12 Goldscheider writes: Like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave is the outline of the four illuminated figures in the foreground: steeply upwards and downwards about the grey monk on the left, in mutually inclined curves about the yellow of the two saints, and again steeply upwards and downwards about . . . the priest on the right. The depth of the wave indicates the optical center; the double curve of the saints’ yellow garments is carried by the greyish white of the shroud down still farther; in this lowest depth rests the bluish-grey armor of the knight.13

Isenberg comments: This passage—which, we may suppose, was written to justify a favorable judgment on the painting—conveys to us the idea of a certain quality which, if we believe the critic, we should expect to find in a certain painting by El Greco. And we do find it: we can verify its presence by perception. . . . But the same quality (‘a steeply rising and falling curve,’ etc.) would be found in any of a hundred lines one could draw on the board in three minutes. It could not be the critic’s purpose to inform us of the presence of a quality as banal and obvious as this.14

The point, it seems, is that there is no true norm to the effect that any work which has a steeply rising and falling curve, etc., is pro tanto good. So the argument appears to be: (A1)

(A2)

If the truth of R supports the value judgement, then there are true norms to the effect that any work with the property attributed by R is pro tanto good. But there are no true norms to this effect.

Therefore, (A)

The truth of R offers no support for the value judgement.

That result raises a problem: ‘as long as we have no alternative interpretation of the import and function of R, we must assume either that R is perfectly arbitrary or that it presupposes and depends on some general claim.’15 The above argument seems to show that R does not presuppose 12 For an image of this work, see accessed 14 June 2012. 13 Quoted in Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, p. 335. 14 Ibid., pp. 335–336. 15 Ibid., p. 335.

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and depend on some general claim, so it seems that R is perfectly arbitrary. This leads Isenberg to his alternative interpretation of the function of R. He continues the discussion of Goldscheider in this way: It seems reasonable to suppose that the critic is thinking of another quality, no idea of which is transmitted to us by his language, which he sees and which by his use of language he gets us to see. This quality is, of course, a wavelike contour; but it is not the quality designated by the expression ‘wavelike contour’. Any object which has this quality will have a wavelike contour; but it is not true that any object which has a wavelike contour will have this quality. . . . Now the critic . . . gives us directions for perceiving, and does this by means of the idea he imparts to us, which narrows down the field of possible visual orientations and guides us in the discrimination of details, the organization of parts, the grouping of discrete objects into patterns. . . . It is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the senses, that is, to induce a sameness of vision, of experienced content.16

Isenberg’s positive account thus has two components. There is the inference to the best explanation of the aim of criticism in providing R: The aim of criticism in providing R is to get the reader to perceive certain properties. Isenberg defends the view that this is the best alternative explanation of R’s function by claiming that ‘reading criticism, otherwise than in the presence, or with direct recollection, of the objects discussed is a blank and senseless employment.’17 However, his view has a second component independent of this one. Isenberg also claims that The properties criticism aims to get the reader to perceive are not the properties attributed by the critic in providing R. One might have thought the aim is to cause the reader to see the property the critic attributes (even though the truth of the claim that the object has that property does not support the value judgement). But this is not Isenberg’s view. He is explicit that ‘criticism does not actually designate 16

Ibid., p. 336. Ibid., p. 337. Compare Baxandall: ‘The work of art we discourse on is to some extent present or available, if only in reproduction or in the memory or even more marginally as a visualization derived from knowledge of other objects of the same class’ (‘The Language of Art History’, p. 455). 17

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the qualities to which it somehow directs our attention’.18 Presumably, the argument for this additional claim is that, as he says, the property attributed by the critic in providing R is banal and obvious. Not only can it not be the critic’s purpose to ‘inform us of the presence’ of such a banal and obvious property: it also cannot be her purpose to make us see it. I will take issue with both components of Isenberg’s view. However, there is some truth in what Isenberg says. In fact, it is obvious that critics sometimes try to draw our attention to, or get us to perceive, various properties of a work. Critics include reproductions of paintings in their work to get us to look them, and quote lines of poetry to get us to read them. Sometimes critics explicitly instruct us to look at certain features. Nevertheless, Isenberg’s account is flawed. The first problem is that, when critics try to get us to see a certain quality, they do normally designate this quality. It is worth examining how Isenberg is led to deny this. Other philosophers have also held this. Mary Mothersill, for instance, says that Isenberg has shown that, in a certain sense, ‘critics do not . . . “mean” what they “say” ’.19 But even in the passage of criticism Isenberg uses to support his point, the critic designates the quality he gets us to see. The argument for this is simple. The quality Goldscheider gets us to see is the outline of the four illuminated figures in the foreground. He designates this quality with the definite description ‘the outline of the four illuminated figures in the foreground’. Therefore, he designates the quality he gets us to see. Isenberg claims that the quality Goldscheider gets us to see ‘is not the quality designated by the expression “wavelike contour”’. This may well be true. But even if it is true, it does not establish the conclusion that ‘criticism does not actually designate the qualities to which it somehow directs our attention’. Goldscheider designates the quality to which he directs our attention. It is just that he does not designate it with the expression ‘wavelike contour’. He designates it with a different expression—namely, ‘the outline of the four illuminated figures in the foreground’.

18 Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, p. 339. Elsewhere he says that ‘the “grounds” to which [the critic] is really appealing are not the same as those which he explicitly states or designates’ (ibid., pp. 343–344). 19 Mothersill, ‘Critical Reasons’, p. 77. Compare Baxandall, ‘The Language of Art History’, pp. 455–456, and Lehrer, Art, Self and Knowledge, p. 21.

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THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

Goldscheider does not use the expression ‘wavelike contour’ in the passage Isenberg quotes: he uses the predicate ‘x is like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave’. I assume Isenberg’s claim is a concise way of making the point that the quality he gets us to see is not designated by that predicate. And that claim is plausible. I assume that, in Isenberg’s usage, what is designated by an expression is what is denoted or referred to with (or by) that expression. If anything is designated, in this sense, by the predicate ‘x is like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave’, then it is the quality being like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave. So Isenberg is clearly right that the quality Goldscheider gets us to see is not designated by this predicate. The outline of the figures in the foreground (the quality he gets us to see) is not identical to the quality, being like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave. But this is an uninteresting result. For Goldscheider does designate the quality he gets us to see—with a different expression. What is certainly true is that Goldscheider characterizes the quality he gets us to see with the predicate ‘x is like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave’. He characterizes, but does not designate, the outline of the figures with this predicate.20 What is also true is that Goldscheider gets us to see the outline, and gets us to see that the outline has the quality of being like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave. He gets us to see one quality (the outline), and he gets us to see that it has a further quality (being like the contour of a violent wave). Isenberg does not make the distinction between designation and characterization, or the distinction between seeing and seeing-that. But if we make these distinctions, then another thesis suggests itself. Isenberg might mean that Goldscheider does not characterize the outline as having the quality he gets us to see that it has. Isenberg believes that ‘it could not be the critic’s purpose to inform us of the presence of a quality as banal and obvious as’ being like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave. This is the quality he thinks could be possessed by ‘any of a hundred lines one could draw on the board in three minutes’. And this is the quality Goldscheider characterizes the outline as having. So perhaps Isenberg

20 Again, assuming that what is designated by an expression is what is denoted or referred to with (or by) that expression. If Isenberg thinks what is designated by an expression is what is characterized with or by that expression, then (contra Isenberg) Goldscheider does designate the outline with ‘x is like the contour of a violently rising and falling wave’.

2.

PERCEPTION

13

means that Goldscheider’s purpose is not to get us to see that the outline has this quality. Rather, his aim is to get us to see that the outline has some other quality, which he does not characterize it as having. This claim is implausible for different reasons. First, even if it is not the critic’s purpose merely to inform us that the outline is wavelike, it does not follow that it is not his purpose to get us to see that the outline is wavelike. It may be interesting for the critic’s readers to see that this is the case, but not especially interesting merely to be informed that it is the case. Second, even if one can easily draw hundreds of wavelike lines on a blackboard, it does not follow that the fact that the outline of the figures in El Greco’s painting is like a violent wave is banal or obvious. How easily we can draw a wavelike line has nothing to do with whether this fact about the El Greco is interesting or banal. If El Greco had given one of the figures a square head, that certainly would be an interesting fact, even though squares are easily reproduced on the blackboard, too. So we should not accept Isenberg’s claim that critical communication differs from ordinary communication in the ways he says it does—even in those cases in which the critic is trying to get her readership to see. Goldscheider gets us to see the outline of the figures, and he gets us to see that this outline is like a violent wave. He designates the quality he gets us to see, and he characterizes it as having a quality he gets us to see that it has. Further problems attach to the other component of Isenberg’s conclusion: the view that getting us to perceive properties is the critic’s aim. The first point to highlight is that Isenberg’s argument only supports the conclusion that this is the point of making ‘R’-type statements. As I have noted, his argument is presented as an examination of the function of R (rather than that of V or N), and it only supports such a conclusion as regards R-type statements. This point is worth emphasizing. The upshot of it is that, for all Isenberg has shown, critics do support their value judgements—only not with R-type statements. They may, for example, support some of their evaluations with other evaluations. As I will explain further below, Isenberg regards R-type statements as descriptive, non-evaluative claims. So even if Isenberg’s argument about R-type claims were flawless, it would not show that one value judgement cannot support another. Discussions of Isenberg tend to overlook the fact that the scope of his thesis is limited in this way. For example, Daniel Kaufman and Noël

14

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

Carroll have recently objected to Isenberg on the grounds that such claims as ‘Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross displays Christ’s humanity well’ or ‘Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last contains many successful pratfalls’ support, respectively, such value judgements as ‘Roger’s Descent from the Cross is good’21 and ‘Safety Last is good (pro tanto)’.22 Kaufman and Carroll are wrong to claim that these are counterexamples to the claim Isenberg makes. These are cases of supporting one evaluation with another: to say that Christ’s humanity is displayed well and that the pratfalls are successful is to evaluate. Isenberg’s problem, however, is whether evaluations can be supported by descriptive, non-evaluative claims. It is true, however, that it is possible to support one value judgement with another. It would be absurd to hold that the truth of the claim, ‘Safety Last contains many successful pratfalls’, cannot add the slightest weight to the claim that it is a good slapstick comedy. So not only does Isenberg’s thesis not imply that value judgements cannot be supported by other value judgements: it is clear that they can indeed be so supported, and that they often are in criticism. There is another little-noted consequence of the fact that Isenberg’s thesis is restricted to R-type statements: Isenberg needs to tell us what an R-type statement is. If his thesis about their function is true, they cannot really be those statements whose function is to support value judgements, even though this may appear to be their function. What, then, are they, according to Isenberg? Isenberg says that ‘R is a statement describing the content of an art work’.23 He contrasts descriptive statements with evaluative statements, as many philosophers have done. He acknowledges that this is an idealization: V and R, it should be said, are often combined in sentences which are at once normative and descriptive. If we have been told that the colors of a certain painting are garish, it would be astonishing to find that they were all very pale and unsaturated; and to this extent the critical comment conveys

21 Daniel A. Kaufman, ‘Critical Justification and Critical Laws’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43/4 (2003): 399. 22 Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 167. 23 Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, p. 331.

2.

PERCEPTION

15

information. . . . We shall be concerned exclusively with the descriptive function of R.24

As I mentioned above, Isenberg also says that the critic’s value judgement is ‘in some sense conditional upon R’. This is all he tells us by way of characterizing R. And this creates a number of problems. Suppose Isenberg means that an R-type claim is any descriptive, non-evaluative critical claim made about a work (including the descriptive, non-evaluative claim made with ‘sentences which are at once normative and descriptive’) upon which the value judgement is in some sense conditional. If that is so, then it is not at all plausible that the function of every such claim is to get the reader to perceive properties. First, various kinds of review provide counterexamples. Reviews of works the critic’s readers cannot perceive, such as a theatrical production that has completed its run, are counterexamples. So are negative reviews discouraging the reader from perceiving the work. The aim of making the descriptive claims in such reviews cannot be to cause the reader to perceive features of the work. Reviews like these sometimes do reproduce the work or parts of it, to enable the reader to perceive certain properties. But we do not necessarily fault the review if it does not do this, even if it contains many non-evaluative descriptions on which a value judgement is somehow conditional. Indeed, it is not always possible to enable the reader to perceive every single property ascribed with such descriptions in a review. Reproducing enough of a novel, film, or live performance to allow the reader to perceive every property ascribed in the review is often impractical or impossible. But the review may be none the worse for that. Second, there are several kinds of descriptive critical statement on which a value judgement is sometimes conditional, but which do not always have causing perception or directing perceptual attention as their aim. For example, critics sometimes try to persuade a reader that something is true in the world of the work: that Hamlet only feigns madness; that the governess in The Turn of the Screw did see ghosts; or that Ugolino in the Inferno ate his children. Beardsley has called this the ‘elucidation’ of a representational artwork.25 A value judgement may well be conditional 24 Ibid. The example of ‘garish’ indicates that, when Isenberg says R describes the content of an artwork, he cannot mean that it always gives the representational content of the work. 25 See Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 242–247, 278–280.

16

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

on the truth of such a claim. A critic of The Turn of the Screw may regard the story as better if the governess is suffering from the effects of repression than it would be if she really saw ghosts. But the aim of an elucidation is often to cause the reader to believe that something is true in the world of the work, not to guide perception. Other examples are easily found. The aim of some description may be to get the readership to interpret the work in a certain way, to get them to believe that the work belongs to a certain artistic category or genre, or to inform them of something about the work’s historical or cultural context (e.g., that it had a certain religious or political function). A value judgement can be conditional on the truth of any such claim, even though the aim is not to guide perception. So if an R-type claim is any descriptive, non-evaluative claim on which the value judgement is somehow conditional, Isenberg’s thesis about the function of such claims is false. But if an R-type claim is not just any claim of this kind, then it is not clear which claims are R-type claims. Isenberg offers no more clarification of this than what I have quoted. So Isenberg’s position is problematic. What he writes is unclear, and there do not appear to be clarifications of what he means that render his claims plausible. It is certainly true that the point of some art-critical statements is to get the critic’s readership to perceive properties, or to perceive that the work has certain properties. In fact, this is not only true, but obvious. Isenberg’s thesis is the more ambitious claim that every critical statement of a certain very general kind has this function. Without a characterization of the kind of statement he is talking about that makes his thesis plausible, we are left with the more modest claim that some critical statements have this function.

3. Evaluation Carroll argues that the aim of criticism is to provide a sound justification for an evaluation of a work. As he puts it, ‘criticism, properly so-called, is not merely a matter of evaluating an artwork—of giving it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Critics are expected to supply reasons—indeed, good reasons—in support of their evaluations.’26 Other critical operations, 26 Carroll, On Criticism, p. 13. See also pp. 15n, 18n, 19, 43–47. Although he does not say so explicitly, Carroll presumably holds that the aim is to provide a sound justification for a correct, plausible, or convincing evaluation.

3.

EVALUATION

17

such as ‘description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, analysis . . . typically function as grounds for evaluation’.27 His argument for this is that evaluation is ‘the feature that sets criticism off from comparable discourses’28 about art: For example, certain forms of historical discourse about art will mobilize description, elucidation, contextualization, classification, interpretation, and/ or analysis. For example, an economic historian of art might describe and analyze Rembrandt’s tendency to have large swaths of black in his pictures in order to explain that in this way Rembrandt was able to undertake, for the purpose of maximizing his profit margin, a very large number of commissions, since those empty, unarticulated, black spaces of canvas could be painted very quickly. . . . The notion that, additionally, criticism engages in evaluation provides us with a ready differentia or rationale, which suggestion is also amply supported in everyday speech.29

Thus, ‘evaluation is an essential feature of criticism such that if a piece of discourse lacks explicit or implicit evaluation, it would not qualify as criticism’.30 Carroll holds that reasoned evaluation is possible because, contra Isenberg, there are indeed principles of critical evaluation. But they do not take the form: ‘Every artwork with such-and-such a characteristic is good ( pro tanto)’. Genuine critical principles are not claims about all artworks whatsoever. Rather, they are claims about artworks of a given category.31 According to Carroll, an artwork of a given category that fulfils the artistic purposes or function of artworks of that category is, normally, good ( pro tanto). If this is so, he argues, then there are many true critical principles. For example, the principle he uses to support his judgement of Lloyd’s Safety Last is: ‘Given the purpose or function of slapstick comedy, slapstick comedies that contain many successful pratfalls, all other things being equal, are good (pro tanto).’32

27

28 Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 18n. 30 Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 31 Compare Kaufman, ‘Critical Justification and Critical Laws’, and Daniel A. Kaufman, ‘Normative Criticism and the Objective Value of Artworks’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60/2 (2002): 151–166. See Richard Shusterman, ‘Wittgenstein and Critical Reasoning’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47/1 (1986): 94–95 for a brief discussion of philosophers who have supported this idea (e.g., Aristotle, Collingwood, and Weitz) and of critics who have applied it (e.g., Addison, Johnson, and Coleridge). 32 Carroll, On Criticism, p. 167. I take it that, by ‘other things being equal’, Carroll means ‘normally’. He writes: ‘The Isenbergian may grumble about my Harold Lloyd example, 29

18

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

To illustrate such category-relative evaluation, Carroll uses a review by the dance critic Joan Acocella. Acocella is reviewing a production of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances, a work of modern abstract choreography. She writes: ‘Why is he so popular? One reason, I think, is that he gives people the modern pleasure of seeing abstract work without leaving them scratching their heads over what it was about. Though he may not have a story on the surface, he always has one underneath, in the form of movement motifs.’33 She then describes these movement motifs and the story they suggest. Carroll says of her review: Acocella enables her readers to understand her grounds for maintaining that Morris has subtly articulated the outline of a story. This, in turn, she maintains, gives the viewer a way into a dance of the sort that is often confusing to audiences, presupposing, as she does, that a narrative, typically, enhances accessibility. . . . She is not supposing that a suggested narrative is a good-making feature of every artwork. Rather, she is restricting her claim to works of modern abstract choreography and saying that, all things being equal, it is a good-making feature in such works.34

As I have said, Carroll is right to hold both that it is possible to provide support for a critical evaluation and that critics do this. However, like Beardsley and Isenberg, he overstates the prevalence of the aim he identifies. First, some good criticism merely provides evaluations of artworks without supporting them. For example, many entries in The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music simply rate recordings on a scale of one star to five stars without further comment.35 This is bad criticism if the evaluation is wrong, or if the critic herself is not justified in giving it the rating she gives it. But it is not necessarily bad criticism if she does not provide a justification for the verdict. The readership being addressed may be one that is only interested in the verdict of a good critic, rather than a justification for it. They may look to the critic, as Beardsley held, to guide suggesting that it can be the case that under some strange conditions a particular pratfall might not contribute to the goodness of a slapstick comedy. But that is why the ceteris paribus clause has been added to our formulation’ (ibid., p. 168). The mention of ‘strange’ conditions suggests that, in Carroll’s usage, ‘all other things being equal’ means ‘normally’. 33 Joan Acocella, ‘Mozart Moves’, The New Yorker, 20 August 2007, accessed 14 June 2012. 34 Carroll, On Criticism, pp. 154–155, 168–169. 35 See Ivan March et al., The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 (London: Penguin, 2009).

3.

EVALUATION

19

their choices, and for this purpose they may only be interested in her verdict. Second, Carroll gives us no good reason to believe that the point of other critical operations, such as interpretation and classification, is always to support an evaluation. Some of the counterexamples to Isenberg’s view also serve as counterexamples to Carroll’s view. For example, it seems that a convincing or plausible elucidation, in Beardsley’s sense,36 of a controversial question about the world of a work could be good criticism even if it is not used to support an evaluation. If a critic came up with a convincing answer to the question of why Hamlet procrastinated, that in itself would be excellent criticism. It would not be flawed if the elucidation was not presented in support of an evaluation. Carroll responds to the objection that much good criticism (e.g., of canonical works) appears not to include evaluation: Since it is through operations like interpretation, description, analysis, classification, contextualization, etc. that one grounds one’s evaluations, when it comes to criticizing canonical works, if, for example, these routines bring to readers a view of the unity, complexity, sophistication, and wisdom of the work, then it may not be necessary to round off one’s critical remarks with overt commendation. The recommendation may be implicit. But this only shows that the evaluative moment in criticism need not be explicit.37

This reply is weak because at most it establishes that, when there is no explicit evaluation, there may be an implicit evaluation. This is true. But that does not answer the objection that it seems possible to produce good criticism that contains neither an explicit nor an implicit evaluation. It seems, therefore, that Carroll must rely on his argument that a piece of criticism must contain evaluation, because otherwise criticism would be indistinguishable from similar discourses about art, which can also contain the other operations he mentions. But this argument is also unsuccessful. If the claim is that no piece of writing about an artwork lacking evaluation of the work could be criticism, then the elucidation of Hamlet I suggested seems simply to be a counterexample. Such an elucidation would generally be acknowledged to be criticism. The fact that such a piece of writing 36 Carroll himself uses ‘elucidation’ in a different sense. See Carroll, On Criticism, pp. 108–110. 37 Ibid., p. 21.

20

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

appears to be criticism is a datum that any account of criticism must respect or explain away. Carroll’s theory does not do this. Carroll is right that ‘the challenge that confronts the skeptic regarding the claim that criticism is essentially concerned with evaluation is to propose another distinction—a more effective and more persuasive dividing line between criticism and comparable modes of discourse—than the one I am advancing.’38 I will answer this challenge in Chapter 2. But we do not have to answer it to show that the claim that all criticism contains implicit or explicit evaluation is mistaken. So it seems there can be good criticism containing evaluation but no support for it, and good criticism containing no evaluation. There is a third reason to doubt that providing support for an evaluation is always the aim of criticism. Even when criticism contains evaluations, and even when what the critic says could be used to support those evaluations, it is not always plausible that the point of the criticism is to support those evaluations. For example, often the evaluations implicit or explicit in criticism of well-known works are already very well supported. This makes it implausible that the point of criticizing those works again is to provide further support for those evaluations. The readership being addressed may not need to be persuaded, and may also be justified in believing, that King Lear is a masterpiece. Their experience of the work may justify them in believing this, and past criticism may have provided ample support for this evaluation. It may therefore be unnecessary to provide further support for it. But it is not pointless to criticize such works further. Carroll might reply that, although this may be true of judgements of the overall value of a well-known work (e.g., the claim that the work is a masterpiece), those are often not the kinds of evaluation critics argue for. He writes that ‘the category-relative evaluation of an artwork is a pro tanto evaluation’.39 For instance, the evaluation in his Harold Lloyd example is not a judgement of the comedy’s overall value. It takes the form: ‘This work is good ( pro tanto)’.40 So Carroll might reply that, although it is often unnecessary to provide support for judgements of the overall value of well-known works, it is often necessary to provide support for various pro tanto evaluations of such works.

38

Ibid., p. 17.

39

Ibid., p. 180.

40

Ibid., p. 167.

3.

EVALUATION

21

What, however, does ‘good pro tanto’ mean? This expression is frequently used in philosophy without explanation. Some writers say they use ‘“good pro tanto” to refer to something’s being good in some respect’ or ‘good in a way’.41 This clearly will not help Carroll. A critic’s readers also frequently have plenty of evidence that King Lear is good in a way— indeed, that it is good in many ways. The point of criticizing such works cannot be to provide evidence for this extremely modest claim. The obvious alternative is to construe ‘good pro tanto’ as meaning ‘good in that way’ or ‘good in that respect’. The dictionary meaning of ‘pro tanto’ is: ‘to such an extent, to that extent’. ‘Good to that extent’ or ‘good to such an extent’ seem to be equivalent to ‘good in that respect’ or ‘good in that way’. If this is the form that a pro tanto evaluation takes, then the claim that something is pro tanto good, unlike the claim that there is some respect or way in which a certain thing is good, can only be understood in a context that makes it clear what way or respect is being referred to. ‘Pro tanto good’ is comparable to a phrase containing a demonstrative referring to a respect or way in which the work is being said to be good. For instance, the claim that Safety Last is pro tanto good, as it occurs in Carroll’s example, amounts to the claim that its many successful pratfalls are a good thing about it. So perhaps the claim Carroll would make is this: when the overall value of the work is already well established, the aim of criticism is to support the claim that the work is good (or bad) in such-and-such a respect or way. It is certainly true that, even when we have ample justification for the belief that a work is a masterpiece, and for the belief that there are many ways in which it is good, it remains of great interest to learn what is good or bad about it. We can continue to learn such things long after we have established a work’s overall value. It is also true that much criticism involves telling us what is good or bad about a work. What is doubtful is that the aim of criticism is always to provide support for the claim that such-and-such is a good or bad thing about a work. Much good criticism simply asserts or implies that this or that is a good thing about the work. This can be of great interest. But the criticism often does not supply reasons to back up the claim that this or that is a good thing about the work. Christine Tappolet, ‘Through Thick and Thin: Good and Its Determinates’, Dialectica 58/2 (2004): 210. 41

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THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

For example, Samuel Johnson, discussing Othello, writes: ‘The scenes from the beginning to the end are busy, varied by happy interchanges and regularly promoting the progression of the story; and the narrative in the end, though it tells but what is known already, yet is necessary to produce the death of Othello.’42 William Hazlitt writes: ‘Macbeth and Lear, Othello and Hamlet, are usually reckoned Shakespeare’s four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the profound intensity of the passion; Macbeth for the wildness of the imagination and the rapidity of the action; Othello for the progressive interest and powerful alternations of feeling; Hamlet for the refined development of thought and sentiment.’43 Here we have several claims about what is good about some acknowledged masterpieces. Johnson claims that it is a good thing about Othello that the scenes are busy and varied by happy interchanges, and that they regularly promote the progression of the story. Hazlitt claims that the profound intensity of the passion is a good thing about Lear, and that its refined development of thought and sentiment is a good thing about Hamlet. But Johnson and Hazlitt do not supply us with any reasons in support of their claims that these are good things about these plays. Moreover, it is clear why they do not: it is unnecessary to provide support for the claim that these are good things about the plays. It would certainly be necessary to provide support for the claim that it is a bad thing about Othello that its scenes are varied by happy interchanges and regularly promote the progression of the story. But it seems no more necessary to support the pro tanto evaluation that this is a good thing about Othello than it would be to support the all-things-considered evaluation that Othello is a great tragedy. An important difference between these evaluations is that a reader may not have entertained the thought that this is one good thing about Othello, whereas she is almost certain to have entertained the thought that it is a great tragedy. But it is no more necessary to support the one claim than it is to support the other. So if this is what a pro tanto evaluation is, then we should agree with Carroll that much good criticism contains many such evaluations. But even in such criticism, it is implausible that the aim is always to provide

42 Samuel Johnson, ‘Selections from the Notes to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 247. 43 William Hazlitt, ‘Macbeth’, in Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 336.

4.

EXPLANATION

23

reasoned pro tanto evaluations. Often, it will indeed be necessary to provide justifications of one’s pro tanto evaluations. But it may be enough that one’s criticism provide numerous correct and insightful pro tanto evaluations of the work. Johnson and Hazlitt’s criticism is flawed if what they say are good things about the plays are not good things about them. But their criticism does not seem to be flawed on account of not including justifications of their pro tanto evaluations.

4. Explanation It is often said that critics explain why a work has the value or the aesthetic properties it has. For example, Arthur Danto holds that criticism is a kind of education, and that the aim of criticism is to provide explanations of a certain kind: ‘Education is not training people to say, Mitchell’s Hemlock is better than Marden’s Cold Mountain. It is rather explaining how and why each of them is good in its own way.’44 Sibley discusses explanation in criticism at greater length than many. He writes: A critic frequently tries, as one of his central occupations, to say why a picture is unbalanced, or what gives a complex work its grace, unity, or serenity. . . . He may mention a concentration of blues and greys as responsible for the unity of tone, certain wavy lines as giving a restless quality, a change in key as giving a sombre or indecisive character.45

Sibley describes explanation as ‘one of the central activities of critics’,46 though he does not claim that providing explanations is the aim of all criticism.47 There are, indeed, several kinds of fact that critics explain, apart from those mentioned by Danto and Sibley. In addition to facts about a work’s value and aesthetic properties, critics also explain facts about the world of a work. Sometimes these facts are explained by appealing to or postulating other facts about the world of the work. I have already mentioned the 44 Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Fly in the Fly Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art’, in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 361. See also Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘Critical Evaluation’, in The Aesthetic Point of View, p. 321. 45 Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, p. 36. 46 Ibid., p. 37. 47 Indeed, Sibley regards ‘helping people to see and judge for themselves that things have’ aesthetic qualities as a more important critical task (ibid., p. 38).

THE AIMS OF CRITICISM

24

example of attempting to explain why Hamlet procrastinated, which might proceed by postulating facts about Hamlet’s psychology. Sometimes, by contrast, facts about the world of the work are explained by citing other kinds of fact. Peter Lamarque holds that an incident in a fiction can sometimes be explained by citing a fact about ‘the contribution the episode makes to the completed artistic structure’ of the work, as when a critic explains why Tess killed Alec d’Urberville by saying that it signifies an end to her journey.48 Similarly, a commonplace about Henry IV, Part One is that Hotspur is impetuous and hot-headed because this makes him a foil to the calculating Prince Hal. Critics also sometimes explain why a work leaves a certain impression or elicits a certain response. Thomas De Quincey does this in his essay, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’. De Quincey writes that, ever since his childhood, the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account: the effect was—that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity: yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.49

His answer is that the knocking at the gate marks ‘the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live’ after the murder, and this ‘makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them’.50 De Quincey argues that if the reader reflects on cases in which ordinary goings-on are dramatically interrupted and then resumed, ‘he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed’.51 This is so, he suggests, when one sees a woman revive after fainting, or hears the rattling wheels of the carriage break the silence of the funeral procession of a great national hero; and the same kind of effect, he argues, occurs in Macbeth.52

48

Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 207. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 81. 50 51 52 Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid. 49

4.

EXPLANATION

25

Not only are there several kinds of fact that critics explain. There are also several kinds of explanation that critics provide. Bas van Fraassen claimed that ‘an explanation is an answer to a why-question.’53 Explanations of why something is the case loom large in aestheticians’ examples of the kinds of explanation critics provide. But as several philosophers have pointed out, not every explanation is an explanation of why something is the case.54 And the most important explanations in a piece of criticism are not always explanations of why something is the case. Some explanations provide answers to how-questions. For example, John Summerson explains how the Romans solved the problem of combining the Ionic order of Greek temple architecture with the archand-vault system needed for major Roman buildings like the Colosseum (see Figure 1.1): Here you have a grammatical construction which is a pretty complete thing. It is controlled by an Ionic order which obeys nothing but its own traditional aesthetic rules. The shape and size of the piers behind the columns and of the arch, on the other hand, have come about through the exigencies of convenience and construction. The two disciplines have got to meet each other harmoniously and I think we may agree that they do. The pedestal moulding of the order ranges with the sill height of the arched gallery. The impost of the arch strikes the columns a little above half their height and the arch sits comfortably between the columns and the architrave above. If this arrangement is satisfactory it has been achieved by a very careful balancing of needs, the aesthetic dictatorship of the Ionic order and the practical needs of the building as a thing of use.55

So too, some explanations provide answers to what-questions. You can explain what a word means, what a gesture signifies, or what an image symbolizes. Such explanations, unlike the previous ones we have considered, do not take facts as their explananda. For example, when you explain what a word means, what you explain is its meaning, not the fact that it has a meaning, or any other fact. Clearly, explanations of this kind, too, are prevalent in criticism. 53 Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 134. 54 See, for example, Sylvain Bromberger, ‘Why-Questions’, in R. Colodny, ed., Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), pp. 89–90. 55 John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), pp. 21–22.

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Figure 1.1. C. Elizabeth Grant. Drawing after Antoine Babuty Desgodets, Second Ordre du Colisée, à Rome. Pen on paper. After Antoine Babuty Desgodets, Les édifices antiques de Rome: dessinés et mesurés très exactement (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1682), p. 263. # 2012 C. Elizabeth Grant. With permission.

It would appear, then, that explanation plays a significant role in criticism. This is all the more obvious when we remind ourselves of the various kinds of explanation that there are and the various explananda we want critics to explain. And it is unsurprising that explanation has such a significant role in criticism. Good explanations provide us with understanding, and this is one of the benefits of good criticism. Nevertheless, it is not the aim of all criticism to provide explanations. First, several of the examples mentioned in section 3 tell against this claim, such as criticism that merely provides unsupported verdicts. Second, although some criticism explains why a work elicits certain responses, some criticism tells us what responses the work elicits, or can elicit, from

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someone who appreciates it, without providing an explanation of why it does so. Third, I noted in section 3 that critics often tell us what is good or bad about a work. Telling us what is good or bad about a work may or may not be part of an explanation. You can certainly explain why a work is good by telling us what is good about it. But you can also tell us what is good about it without explaining why it is good: you can tell us what is good about it without believing, claiming, or implying that it is good, and therefore without explaining why it is.

5. Aiding appreciation As I have stressed, critics sometimes do guide perception, provide evaluations, support them, elucidate, interpret, explain, and describe appreciative responses. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It might be that all of these, and perhaps more, are the aims of criticism, and that there is no further aim. Clearly, however, it would be desirable to find an aim for the sake of which critics do all of these things. An attractive suggestion is that the aim of criticism is to enable the critic’s readers to appreciate the work better than they would be likely to if they experienced the work (or a suitable reproduction, performance, token, etc.) without having read the criticism. This is meant to include the case in which the readers would probably not appreciate the work at all without the criticism. Plausibly, all of the above critical activities are ways of enabling a person to appreciate a work better. This, I shall suggest, is close to the truth of the matter. In Chapter 2, I will show how all of the critical activities we have identified can aid appreciation. However, there are also counterexamples to the claim that aiding appreciation is the aim of all criticism. Criticism of works that the critic knows cannot be experienced anymore, and of which she knows there are no appropriate reproductions, performances, etc., provide counter examples. Such criticism can be addressed to readers who never have been and never will be in a position to appreciate the work. The aim of criticizing them cannot be to aid appreciation of such works. Furthermore, when a work can still be appreciated, the information provided by good criticism may not enable the readership to appreciate it better than they would be likely to without the criticism. Reviews that

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describe the work in such a way as to provide information that is useful to someone trying to decide whether to experience the work provide examples. It might be very useful to know whether a film is terrifying, funny, challenging, clichéd, thrilling, etc., when trying to decide whether to watch it. However, such information might be useless for the purpose of gaining a better appreciation of the work than one would be likely to acquire by experiencing it without the criticism. For those who have seen or are watching the film, being told that it received four stars will probably not enable them to appreciate it any better. Similarly, anyone who sees the film might be unlikely to fail to see that it is terrifying, clichéd, disturbing, etc., and so this information will not enable them to appreciate it any better than they would be likely to without the criticism. Nevertheless, there clearly are close links between criticism and appreciation. And we ought not to abandon the attempt to identify an aim that unifies the various critical activities. In Chapter 2, I shall suggest that such an aim can be found, and that it does have something to do with appreciation. To say what it is, however, we shall first have to say more about appreciation.

2 Criticism and Appreciation In this chapter, I will argue for a view about what the aims of criticism are. These aims, I hold, must be understood in terms of the notion of appreciation. So I will begin by providing an account of art appreciation. This account of appreciation is meant to be a modest one. As I explain below, there are many more specific claims one could make about appreciation that are compatible with it. The facts about appreciation that I will attempt to establish are meant to provide an illuminating account of criticism. I will then identify a constitutive and a non-constitutive aim of criticism. The constitutive aim is shared by all criticism, whereas the nonconstitutive aim is not. But achieving the non-constitutive aim makes criticism that has this aim good criticism. Both aims relate to appreciation. This account enables us to say what makes someone a good critic. I identify nine endowments that make critics good at achieving these aims. I conclude by comparing my discussion with Hume’s well-known account of the characteristics of the true judge of art. This will enable us, in the third chapter, to explain what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is.

1. Appreciation Appreciating a work is clearly not just a matter of knowing facts about it. You can be extremely well-informed about aspects of a work relevant to the appreciation of it without appreciating the work yourself. You could know that the work is beautiful, that it is a satire on the Church, that it achieves a perfect harmony between form and content, that it expresses a horrifying vision of a future dystopia, etc., without appreciating it. A necessary condition of appreciating a work is to be or to have been aware of the work’s features by appropriate means. For example, for many

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objects of appreciation, some form of perceptual acquaintance with the work, or with tokens, reproductions, representations, or performances of it, is an appropriate means of awareness of its features. Forms of perceptual acquaintance such as seeing, looking at, watching, listening to, and hearing are paradigmatic examples of appropriate means of awareness of a work’s features. In some cases, it may be that more than one form of perceptual acquaintance can be an appropriate means of awareness of the same work’s features. Perhaps one can appreciate sculpture either through sight alone or touch alone.1 Perceptual acquaintance with something other than the work itself can be an appropriate means of awareness of some works’ features. It would be implausible to claim that no one who has seen high-quality reproductions of a drawing, but not the original, is in a position to appreciate the drawing. If musical works are abstract, and if abstracta cannot be perceived, then such works can be appreciated by perceiving performances of them. The formulation, ‘awareness of a work’s features by appropriate means’, also allows for the possibility that there are appropriate means of awareness of its features other than perceptual acquaintance with something. There are at least two reasons why one might think that this is, in fact, the case. First, one might deny that reading a work is a form of perceptual acquaintance with the work. But obviously one can appreciate a literary work by reading it, and one can appreciate a musical work by reading its score. Second, it is plausible that accurately imagining perceiving a (token, performance, etc., of a) work can sometimes give one some appreciation of it. Perhaps this is how Beethoven appreciated the works he composed when deaf. We might want to allow that a person could appreciate Malevich’s Black Square, or certain works of conceptual art, if she imagined perceiving these works accurately enough. So awareness of a work’s features by appropriate means is a necessary condition of appreciating it. The second point to emphasize is that one appreciates a work by responding appropriately to it, to its parts, to its features, or to what is represented. We can, I suggest, think of appreciation in the following way. For various parts of a work, features of a work, and represented persons, items, and events, there are various responses to them that appreciation can See Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 575–577. 1

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involve. You appreciate the work in virtue of responding in some of these ways to these parts, features, and represented elements. So, for example, pitying Oedipus is plausibly a response that appreciation of Oedipus Rex can involve. Being amused at his fate is almost certainly not. Let us call the responses that appreciation of a work can involve ‘appropriate responses’. There are three points to clarify about appropriate responses, as I understand them. First, I do not mean that having any one appropriate response would be sufficient for appreciating the work. Second, I do not mean that every response appreciation of a work can involve is a response appreciation must involve. Some appropriate responses are such that you can appreciate the work without having them, but you may appreciate the work better if you do respond in those ways. Third, there are many properties of a work (e.g., a painting’s being 8.51 inches high) to which there is not an appropriate response. I suggest we can distinguish five kinds of response appreciation can involve. As we shall see, some appropriate responses can be of more than one of these kinds. But it is useful to distinguish the kinds to which appropriate responses can belong. First, there are perceptual responses. Appreciating a Chinese jade can involve looking at the smoothness of the surface, the translucence of the stone, or the intricate patterns carved into it; seeing the serene expression on the face of the figures on it; or seeing that it has been made with great skill or that a piece of white ‘lychee-flesh’ jade has been used. If, as Frank Sibley holds, we perceive aesthetic properties like exquisiteness, fineness, grace, and elegance, then appreciation will normally involve perceiving its aesthetic properties as well.2 Second, there are cognitive responses. Plausibly, appreciation of a work can always involve acquiring the knowledge, by appropriate means, of some facts about the work. Appreciating The Waste Land can involve recognizing the many allusions it contains. Appreciating versions of well-known stories, such as Shakespeare’s history plays or the Greek tragedians’ versions of Greek myths, can involve recognizing how they change, add to, or emphasize certain aspects of the story. Grasping the themes of a work, too, can be an important part of appreciating it. 2 See Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 34.

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Acquiring knowledge by appropriate means is not the only kind of cognitive response appreciation can involve. Appreciation can also involve confirming what you know, by appropriate means. You may have learned via testimony that the design of a certain artefact is very well suited to its function, but you may never have seen that this is the case. Appreciation can involve seeing that this is so, even though your seeing that this is so is not a case of acquiring the knowledge that this is so, for you already have this knowledge. And as this example indicates, some appropriate perceptual responses are a sub-set of appropriate cognitive responses—namely, perceiving that something is so.3 Third, it is worth distinguishing another class of responses. M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker distinguish ‘the general cognitive concepts of knowledge and memory’ from the cogitative concepts of ‘belief, thought and imagination’.4 Appreciation can certainly involve cogitative responses. For example, it is unclear whether Ugolino, in the Inferno, ate his own children. In Borges’s view, ‘Dante did not want us to believe it, but he wanted us to suspect it.’5 Coming to suspect that Ugolino ate his own children is a cogitative response to the poem, and it is plausible that appreciation of the Inferno can involve having this response. An appropriate response to a descriptive passage in a written work or an evocative piece of music may be to imagine what is described or evoked. It is also sometimes said that, when reading a play, one should imagine how it might be staged. Finally, it is plausible that appreciation can involve acquiring a justified belief in certain interpretations of a work, even if one does not know that this interpretation is right. Fourth, one can also appreciate at least some works by having appropriate affective or emotional responses: delighting in the colours and sheen of 3

Both acquiring and confirming knowledge should be distinguished from possessing knowledge. Knowledge you already possess (e.g., historical, sociological, or anthropological knowledge) can enable you to appreciate a work better than you otherwise could. But possessing knowledge is not a response, and a fortiori not a response that appreciation can involve. Furthermore, appreciation that is enabled or deepened by the knowledge that p may not involve acquiring or confirming the knowledge that p. Knowing what Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed about English history can enhance one’s appreciation of the history plays. Such knowledge may aid appreciation even if acquiring or confirming it is not a response appreciation can involve. 4 M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 172. 5 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The False Problem of Ugolino’, in The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986, ed. Eliot Weinburger, trans. Esther Allen (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 278.

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a polished gem, being awestruck by the Alhambra, and cringing at a poorly played piece of music are all examples of appropriate affective or emotional responses. Fifth, there are many appropriate responses that do not obviously fit into any of the last four categories. It seems that appreciation can involve being engrossed by a story, taking an interest in the expression of a sitter in a portrait, being fascinated by the movements of water in a fountain, and so forth. These responses involve desiring or being disposed to continue experiencing the object. They are not merely affective or emotional responses. Indeed, it is doubtful that some, such as taking an interest in something, are affective or emotional responses at all. As they involve desire, we might describe such responses as ‘conative’—a term defined by the OED as ‘pertaining to, or of the nature of, the faculty of volition and desire’. Perhaps some conative responses are also affective responses. But as it is not clear that they all are, it is worth distinguishing this fifth kind of response.6 That appreciation can involve affective, emotional, and conative responses is a familiar point. However, it is worth observing that, for many works to which affective, emotional, or conative responses are appropriate, one can appreciate them by acquiring or confirming for oneself, by appropriate means, the knowledge or justified belief that those responses are appropriate, without having those responses oneself. This might be the case if you are in too foul a mood to take pleasure in the work’s beauty. It might also be the case if the work originated in a culture whose sensibilities are very different from your own. Both factors, it seems clear, can prevent 6 This account of conative responses will remind some of Kant’s account of pleasure. He writes:

The consciousness of the causality of a representation in respect of the state of the subject as one tending to preserve a continuance of that state, may here be said to denote in a general way what is called pleasure; whereas displeasure is that representation which contains the ground for converting the state of the representations into their opposite (for hindering or removing them). (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 220). I am not claiming that pleasure is the consciousness of a representation’s causality. But I am stressing that appreciation can involve being disposed to continue experiencing the object. Compare Malcolm Budd’s view that a positive aesthetic response to an artwork or a natural object ‘involves the disposition to continue to attend to it’ (Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 14).

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you from having an appropriate affective response yourself, but do not necessarily prevent you from appreciating the work. Indeed, it is not clear that they would necessarily prevent you from appreciating the work as well as someone capable of having those responses. It is important, however, that one have acquired or confirmed one’s understanding of what the appropriate affective, emotional, or conative responses are by appropriate means. For example, learning by testimony that a certain response to a feature of the work is appropriate, while finding it unintelligible on the basis of your awareness of the work how that could be an appropriate response to it, would (probably) not be a response appreciation can involve. In short, some appropriate responses are meta-responses. One kind of appropriate cognitive or cogitative response can be to acquire or confirm by appropriate means the knowledge or justified belief that some emotional, affective, or conative response is an appropriate response to a feature, part, or represented element. There are two final points to note about the responses appreciation can involve. First, it might sound odd or misleading to say, of some responses, that you appreciate the work by responding in those ways, or that appreciating the work involves having those responses. This might be so when the appropriate response is not a favourable one. It might sound odd to say that one appreciates a boring work by being bored by it, that appreciation of a certain terrible piece of music involves cringing at it, and so on. There is a common use of ‘appreciate’ in which saying one appreciates something implies that one has evaluated it positively or responded to it favourably. We normally say that someone has failed to appreciate the work when we mean to imply that she has not had a favourable response to it that would have been appropriate. In such cases, it will be more natural to say, of something about the work rather than the work itself, that it is appreciated by responding in these ways. For instance, if an experienced theatre critic is bored by a play the audience enjoys, it would be more natural to say that she is the only one who appreciates how badly written it is. She is the only one who showed an appreciation of the play’s flaws. ‘Appreciate’ is also used in these two ways in non-artistic contexts. Someone might fail to appreciate the danger she is in. In saying this, we do not imply that she fails to respond favourably to the danger she is in. But if the danger is posed by an oncoming train, it would be odd to express the same point by saying she

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fails to appreciate the oncoming train. So when I talk of the responses that ‘appreciation of a work’ can involve, these include some responses that it might be more natural to describe as responses that appreciation of something about the work can involve. The last point to make about appropriate responses concerns the relation between them and appropriate awareness. Appreciating a work requires that one must have been aware of the work’s features by appropriate means. But it does not require that one must respond appropriately only when one is aware of its features by appropriate means—only when one is looking at the painting (or a suitable substitute), listening to the music, reading the poem, etc. One can also respond appropriately when reflecting upon the work after experiencing it. One’s appreciation of a film is often deepened by discussing it with others after watching it. Apart from appropriate awareness and appropriate responses, there is a third aspect of appreciation. Often, appreciation does not simply involve responding appropriately. It involves responding appropriately for appropriate reasons. There are certain reasons to pity Oedipus, and appreciating the play can involve pitying him for those reasons, but cannot involve pitying him for no reason or for other reasons. So too, appreciation of the Inferno can involve coming to suspect, on appropriate grounds, that Ugolino ate his children: for Ugolino appears to allude darkly to such an act. Appreciating it cannot involve simply coming to suspect him of this crime for no reason. When appreciation of a work can involve responding for a certain reason, I will call that reason ‘an appropriate reason’ for that response. There are at least two relevant conceptions of responding for a reason to distinguish here. One might think of a reason merely as a fact about the work that explains, or partly explains, your response. So, for example, Stephen Jay Gould has argued that the way in which Mickey Mouse is drawn has changed over the years, making him look more childlike.7 He has acquired, for example, a larger eye size as a percentage of head length, and a larger head length as a percentage of body length. Gould argues that Mickey Mouse is more attractive to us because he looks more like a child. If Gould is right, the fact that Mickey looks more like a child explains our response. But the claim is not that our awareness of this fact explains our response. The fact that he looks more childlike, and our awareness of Stephen Jay Gould, ‘A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse’, in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 93–107. 7

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the features in virtue of which he looks more childlike, explain our response. But our awareness of this fact about these features may not explain our response. We may not even be aware of this fact. Alternatively, one might think of a reason as a fact about the work your awareness of which explains, or partly explains, your response. This is the kind of reason I am talking about when I say appreciation can involve responding appropriately for appropriate reasons. For example, it is our awareness that the speaker has been caught by the monster that explains our amusement at the end of the poem ‘Slithergadee’: The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea. He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me. No you won’t catch me, old Slithergadee, You may catch all the others, but you wo—8

Similarly, a person might be aware that the Purgatorio and Paradiso have 33 cantos each, while the Inferno has 34, and aware that it is appropriate for parts of the poem about the saved to have such a salient relation to the number of the persons of the Trinity, and for a part about the damned to lack this relation. Her awareness of these facts can partly explain her admiration for the design of the Divine Comedy. These are the kinds of fact that can be what I am calling appropriate reasons. If you responded appropriately for appropriate reasons, then you became aware of the facts in question. By contrast, if people’s awareness of the fact that Mickey looks more childlike does not explain their response to him, it is not what I am calling a reason for which they respond as they do.9 It can often be unclear whether our awareness of a fact, or only the fact itself and not our awareness of it, explains our response. Awareness comes in degrees, and it can be unclear whether one was aware of a certain fact. For example, suppose you find a certain typeface in a newly published book strange. Suppose someone points out that the typeface is more characteristic of books published in the 1970s than of books published today. This is not new information about that sort of typeface: you already 8 Shel Silverstein, ‘Slithergadee’, in Uncle Shelby’s Zoo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), quoted in Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 162. 9 When I say that our awareness of a fact sometimes explains our response, I do not mean that the fact itself does not explain our response. The contrast is between cases in which our awareness of the fact explains our response, and cases in which it does not.

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knew that this sort of typeface is characteristic of 1970s books. But you do not recall consciously noting that the typeface of this book is in a 70s style. In such a case, it may be unclear to you whether you were already dimly aware that the book uses a typeface typical of the 1970s. It may therefore be unclear to you whether your awareness of this fact explains your response to the typeface. This kind of experience is not uncommon when reading criticism, as we shall see. At least sometimes, an appreciator must be aware of the fact that is an appropriate reason by certain means rather than others. Suppose you are told that a tree in a landscape painting looks like a lonely person, but you cannot see this for yourself. The fact that it looks like a lonely person may be an appropriate reason to respond to the painting with a certain melancholy. But if, improbably, you responded with melancholy for this reason, without having seen that the tree looks like a lonely person, you would not thereby be appreciating the painting. You are responding appropriately for an appropriate reason, but you are not aware of the reason by appropriate means. Finally, for some features, it seems true that appreciation involves responding to them in a certain way, but false that appreciation involves responding to them in that way for certain reasons. This often seems true of aesthetic features, if these are indeed features objects have. For example, appreciation can often involve admiring an object’s beauty. But it would rarely involve admiring an object’s beauty for some reason. Appreciation can involve admiring a painting’s colours because they are subtle, harmonious, expressive, etc., or being amused by a turn of phrase because it is witty. But rarely, if ever, would it involve admiring beauty for some reason.10 This account of appreciation, as I said initially, is a minimal one. Many further claims about appreciation are compatible with it. For example, I do not provide a general account of what makes a response or a reason appropriate. I also do not claim or deny that, as Kendall Walton holds, ‘appreciation of representational works of art is primarily a matter of participation’ in games of make-believe, or that ‘appreciation not involving participation is nevertheless to be understood in terms of it’.11 My intention has been to provide enough detail to enable us to specify the aims of criticism by reference to appreciation. 10 For a discussion of qualities that can be admired aesthetically for themselves, see Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetics and the Looks of Things’, in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 24–32. 11 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 213, 275.

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2. Appreciation and the aims of criticism There are clearly connections between appreciation and criticism. One of them is this. Appreciation, I said, requires awareness of the work’s features by appropriate means. Someone who criticizes a work represents herself as having been aware of its features by some means needed in order to appreciate it. This is a pragmatic implication of criticizing a work. Someone who criticizes a literary work implies that she has read it or heard it read; someone who criticizes a painting or sculpture implies that she has seen it or a suitable reproduction or representation of it; a theatre critic implies that she has seen a performance of the production she criticizes; a music critic implies that she has heard a performance or read the score of the piece she criticizes; and so forth. This is a striking fact about criticism. No matter how much you know about a work, it is illegitimate to criticize it if you have not been aware of its features by means required for appreciation. If a film critic had not seen the films she reviewed, she would be guilty of a kind of dishonesty—even if everything she said about the film was true, and even if she had good reasons for believing it. Reviewers can lose their jobs for criticizing works they have not seen. This enables us to answer Carroll’s challenge, mentioned in Chapter 1, to identify a feature that distinguishes criticism from comparable forms of discourse about art. You can engage in many comparable forms of discourse about art without implying that you have been aware of the work’s features by means required to appreciate it. When you tell someone that you have it on good authority that the film is excellent, you are not criticizing. This is clear in any case. But we can now explain why: you are not representing yourself as having seen the film, which is a necessary condition of criticizing it. One way in which art criticism differs from art history is that the former but not the latter is necessarily governed by this requirement. Art historians can still write about the lost paintings of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, and there is not necessarily anything untoward about the art history they produce. But no one can legitimately criticize such works anymore, because to do so is to imply that one has been aware of their features by means required for appreciation. A critic also implies that her belief in at least some of what she communicates is based on her awareness of the work’s features by appropriate means. A critic who has seen a building must not tell her reader that the

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spacing of its columns creates a solemn tempo if her belief in this is not based on awareness of the building’s features by appropriate means. It is not enough that she saw the building: her belief in what she says must be based on her experience.12 Let us call the requirement that a critic must have been aware of the work’s features by means required for appreciation, and that her belief in at least some of what she communicates must be based on this awareness, ‘the acquaintance requirement’. The critic says what she does with a certain authority, and this authority must derive from her awareness of the work’s features by means required to appreciate it. The second connection between criticism and appreciation relates to the aims of criticism. One appreciates a work, I said, by responding appropriately to it, its parts, features, or represented elements—and often, by responding appropriately for appropriate reasons. One criticizes an artwork only if one aims to communicate: (a) what parts, features, or represented elements appreciation can involve responding to; or (b) what responses appreciation of it can involve; or (c) what appropriate reasons for these responses there are. A necessary condition of criticizing, I suggest, is that one aim to give one’s reader to understand that such-and-such is an appropriate response, or an appropriate reason, or a part, feature, or represented element to which appreciation can involve responding. Note that I do not claim that critics must say that a fact of one of these kinds obtains. Giving one’s reader to understand this is enough. Often, critics simply ascribe properties to the work, or describe the responses it elicits. What makes this criticism is that the point of this is not just to inform the reader that the work has these properties or elicits these responses, but to convey that these properties are objects of appreciative responses, or that these responses are appreciative responses, or that the fact the work has these properties is a reason to respond appreciatively. A reader who recognizes what she is reading as criticism understands that this is the point. Communicating facts of this kind (that is, (a), (b), or (c)) is, I suggest, a constitutive aim of criticism. One is not engaging in criticism if one does not have this aim. For example, footnotes in an edition of Shakespeare that

12

This does not mean that it cannot also be based on testimony.

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explain the meaning of unfamiliar words are not necessarily critical remarks. One reason why is that such footnotes do not necessarily give us to understand that these words or their meanings are to be responded to appreciatively. Similarly, a psychologist might describe the responses educated readers have to a work. This is not necessarily criticism, because there need be no suggestion that these are responses appreciation can involve. This constitutive aim thus provides a second way of differentiating criticism from many comparable forms of discourse about art. The claim that this is a constitutive aim of criticism also enables us to explain several other things. First, it enables us to explain the acquaintance requirement. If a critic aims to tell us what responses appreciation can involve, what reasons for such responses are appropriate, or what the objects of appropriate responses are, then her criticism has a distinctive authority if it is based on awareness of the work’s features by means required for appreciation. Criticism is a source of information or insight about such matters that is supposed to have this authority.13 This also enables us to explain why some things the critic says need not be based on such awareness. The critic’s assertions of various historical, sociological, and anthropological facts do not necessarily have to be based on her awareness of the work’s features by appropriate means. These assertions can be based on testimony. But when she tells us that suchand-such is an appropriate response, reason, or object of an appropriate response, the acquaintance requirement applies. Second, the claim that this is a constitutive aim of criticism allows us to explain why critics do several things I said in Chapter 1 they do. Critics evaluate for many reasons. For example, they tell us what is good or bad about a work because appreciation can involve responding to what is good and bad about it. They might tell us that a work has a certain value because appreciating the work can involve recognizing or confirming, by appropriate means, that it has that value. Appreciation can also involve responding in a certain way to a work, or to something about it, because it has a certain value. Critics interpret and elucidate because appreciation can involve having cognitive or cogitative responses to the work that have 13 This is not to deny that one can learn such things about appreciation of a work via testimony. It is just that appropriate awareness is a source of greater authority about such matters.

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the content of interpretations and elucidations as their content. They tell us of affective, emotional, and conative responses a work elicits because appreciation can involve having such responses or recognizing that such responses are appropriate. Critics provide explanations for several reasons. For example, appreciating a work can often involve grasping or seeing that p because q: that the painting has a certain unity of tone because it has that concentration of blues and greys; that Tess kills Alec because she is a certain type of folk heroine; or that the knocking at the gate in Macbeth reflects upon the murder a peculiar awfulness because it re-establishes the normal goings-on of the world. Critics’ explanations often reveal appropriate reasons for appropriate responses. Summerson presents it as a reason for admiring the design of the Colosseum that its architects combine the Ionic order with arch-and-vault architecture by having the pedestal moulding of the order range with the sill height of the gallery; by having the impost of the arch strike the columns just above half their height; by having the arch sit comfortably between the columns and the architrave above; and so on. What about the other candidate aims of criticism I considered, namely, helping readers choose what works to experience, aiding appreciation, and guiding perception? I said that critics sometimes, but do not always, try to achieve these things. We can now see why. One of the reasons why one might tell the reader what responses appreciation can involve, what appropriate reasons for them there are, or what objects of those responses there are, is to help her decide whether to experience the work. Criticism necessarily aims to provide information of a certain kind, and one can provide information of this kind for many purposes. Helping readers choose what works to experience is one of these purposes, but not the only one. The same is true of aiding appreciation. A very common reason why a critic tells us these things about the appreciation of a work is to help us appreciate the work better. Again, this is not the only reason why one might provide the information about appreciation that the critic provides. The information might be of interest to the critic’s readership even if it cannot aid appreciation (due to the work no longer being available for appreciation, for instance). But it is certainly a very common reason why critics criticize. In fact, I suggest that aiding appreciation is not just a very common purpose to which criticism is put. Aiding appreciation is itself an aim of

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criticism—though not a constitutive aim. I said in Chapter 1 that an aim is an aim of criticism if achieving, or being such as to achieve, that aim makes criticism that has it good as criticism. Much good criticism, it seems clear, is good criticism because it is such as to enable its readership to appreciate the work better than they would be likely to if they were aware of the work’s features by appropriate means, but had not read the criticism. This is not just one purpose to which criticism can be put. Works are sometimes criticized to help establish when they were made or who the artist was. If the criticism does help establish this, that may be a good thing. The criticism furthers art-historical scholarship. But achieving these aims is not the kind of thing that makes it good criticism. Being such as to aid the readership’s appreciation, by contrast, makes it good as criticism. This aim, in turn, allows us to explain why critics try to guide perception or cause us to have other responses to the work. They do this because this can enable us to appreciate the work better than we otherwise would. Note, finally, that a piece of criticism could achieve the constitutive aim I have identified without this making it good criticism. For example, the criticism might communicate very uninteresting facts of the relevant kinds about appreciation. Having the constitutive aim enables it to qualify as criticism, and it would be a defect if the criticism did not achieve even this aim. But achieving this aim in this way clearly does not make it good criticism. This is one reason why it is worth distinguishing between constitutive and non-constitutive aims of criticism. In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to focus on these two aims: the constitutive aim of criticism I have identified and the non-constitutive aim of aiding appreciation. I wish to determine what endowments make one a good critic. I will do this by determining what endowments make a critic good at achieving these aims.

3. Better appreciation If my account of appreciation is right, there are three basic changes one can effect to enable someone to appreciate a work better.14 If O is an object of an 14 For ease of exposition, I will focus on the diachronic case of enabling someone to appreciate a work better than she did before. But the aim of criticism I identified is to enable someone to appreciate a work better than she would be likely to if she were aware of the work’s features by appropriate means without having read the criticism.

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appropriate response (a part, feature, or represented element), R an appropriate response to O, and P an appropriate reason for R, we can say the following. One can enable someone to appreciate a work better by enabling her: (1) To become aware by appropriate means of O, or to acquire or confirm by appropriate means the knowledge or justified belief that the work represents O; or (2) To have R to O on the basis of appropriate awareness of the work’s features; or (3) To have R to O for P on the basis of appropriate awareness of the work’s features. Note that it would also be possible to effect these changes without enabling a person to appreciate the work better. For instance, the person might become aware of O by appropriate means, but not be able to respond to it appropriately or grasp what an appropriate response to it would be. Whether effecting these changes enables a given individual to appreciate a work better depends on what else is true of her. There are three points to note about how critics effect these changes. First, critics effect these changes by achieving the constitutive aim of criticism I identified. A person could effect these changes by other means. Giving someone a drug might enable her to respond in appropriate ways in which she did not respond before. Giving someone glasses could enable her to become aware of features of a painting of which she hadn’t been aware. Educating someone in the appreciation of other works of art might enable her to appreciate a given work better. But none of this would be criticism of the given work. Criticism effects the changes mentioned above by communicating to the reader what responses appreciation can involve, what the objects of those responses are, or what appropriate reasons there are for those responses. Second, criticism can effect these changes either directly or indirectly. For example, telling someone what features appreciation involves responding to, can, obviously, enable her to become aware of those features. This is a change the criticism effects directly. The critic’s readership may also be sensitive or savvy enough to respond appropriately for appropriate reasons once made aware of this feature, and thereby appreciate the work better. This is a change the criticism effects indirectly. In such cases, it is unnecessary to tell readers, in addition, what responses appreciation can involve having, or what facts about the work are reasons to have it.

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The same can be true of criticism that merely tells the readership what responses appreciation can involve. This can have the direct effect of enabling her to have those responses. It can also have indirect effects. It can, for instance, make her aware of features to which that response is an appropriate response. Told that appreciating a work can involve having a certain response, we naturally seek what it would be an appropriate response to. Walter Pater recognized this when he wrote: ‘“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.’15 Third, critics not only effect these direct and indirect changes by making their readers aware of facts, features, etc. of which they had not been aware before. Sometimes, critics effect such changes by making readers more aware of facts, features, etc. of which they had been only dimly aware before. For awareness comes in degrees. A reader may not have responded appropriately to a feature because she was not aware enough of the feature. Alternatively, she may have responded only weakly or intermittently to the feature. Making her more aware of it can make her response stronger or more sustained. Likewise, she may not have responded for a certain reason because, though aware of the fact that is a reason, she was not aware enough of it to respond for that reason. Critics can aid appreciation by increasing, and not only by creating, awareness. A good example of this is Samuel Johnson’s description of Milton’s style: Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer, and which is so far removed from common use, that an unlearned reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised by a new language. . . . Both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom. . . . The disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian; perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues.16

15 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3. 16 Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, in The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 112.

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Many readers of Milton are well aware that his style is peculiar. However, many readers, I suspect, are only dimly aware that he uses words with a foreign idiom, even if they are familiar with the syntax of other languages. They may not become aware enough of it for their response to be much affected by their awareness of this fact. Johnson’s criticism aids their appreciation of Milton by making them more aware of it. Another example is the following observation by Frank Kermode: now and again Shakespeare uses a word neither the original nor the modern audience had ever heard before, which yet remains intelligible to both, as when Goneril (King Lear, I.iv.249) advises her father ‘A little to disquantity’ his train. The dictionary records no earlier use of this word, and it did not catch on, but to the modern ear it has a disturbingly bureaucratic ring, rather like the euphemisms produced by government departments, and it must have surely struck the first audience also as a cold and official-sounding word for a daughter to use in conversation with her father.17

It is likely that many readers of the play are only dimly aware of the officialsounding ring of ‘disquantity’. They would be made more aware of this by Kermode’s remark.18 A reader’s increased awareness of this can enable her to respond to the line in new ways: she might, for example, now find the line chilling. Alternatively, she might respond for a reason for which she did not respond before. She might now admire the line because it has an official-sounding ring, for this makes it a very apt line to give Goneril.

4. Endowments of good critics These, then, are the basic changes a critic can effect to aid appreciation, and some of the principal ways in which critics effect them. The endowments that make a critic good at aiding appreciation will therefore be endowments that make critics good at effecting the above changes by achieving the constitutive aim of criticism. Because of the acquaintance requirement, they will include endowments that enable a critic to base what she says on her awareness of a work’s features by appropriate means. First, to be good at effecting any of changes (1)–(3) by criticizing, one must be good at communicating to one’s readership. One must express 17

Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 5. Critics sometimes overstate how aware ‘we’ or ‘the audience’ already are of the facts and features they point out, or how responsive we already are to them. 18

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oneself in such a way that the readership can grasp, without undue difficulty, what responses, objects of responses, and reasons one has in mind. An impressive display of this skill is Pater’s description of the landscapes in the backgrounds of Leonardo’s paintings: In him first, appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherché in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light . . . all solemn effects of moving water . . . Through his strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.19

In short, the critic must be articulate. Articulacy, however, is not enough. You might convey that appreciation can involve admiring a certain feature, but your readers may be unable to figure out why it merits admiration. To appreciate the work better, they may need to be told what the appropriate reasons for admiring it are. Again, it may not be enough simply to claim that a certain fact is an appropriate reason for a certain response. To aid the reader’s appreciation, it may be necessary to persuade her that the fact obtains, or that it is a reason, so that she can see for herself that it obtains and respond for this reason. (This is one function of providing evidence for a critical evaluation.) A critic must therefore be a good judge of what the readership being addressed needs to be told in order to enable them to appreciate the work better. Furthermore, a critic needs to be a good judge of how to communicate this to her readership. For example, a critic may need to choose her words not only to inform, but to guide the reader’s perception effectively. She must consider not only what information she conveys, but other effects of her words that can aid appreciation. We shall see examples of this in Chapter 6. These endowments help make one good at effecting changes of all three kinds by criticizing. Now consider what makes one good at effecting particular kinds of change. Take changes (1) and (3). Given the acquaintance requirement, a critic must become aware, by appropriate means, of what she wants her reader to become aware of by appropriate means. This is so whether she wants the reader to become aware of a fact that is a reason for an appropriate response, or of a part, feature, or represented element that is an object of an

19

Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 63.

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Figure 2.1. C. Elizabeth Grant. Palazzo del Tè, Mantua. Pen on paper. # 2012 C. Elizabeth Grant. With permission.

appropriate response. I suggest we can identify three endowments that make the critic good at acquiring such awareness. The critic can be more knowledgeable, more observant, or more perceptive than the readership. Being more knowledgeable, in some respect, than someone else can enable you to become aware of what she is unaware of. In a discussion of Giulio Romano’s design for the Palazzo del Tè (Figure 2.1), John Summerson writes: Here is a very strange performance. You recognize, of course, the Doric order. And the major columns are approximately on the triumphal arch pattern. But the pediment rests not on columns but on brackets emerging from the wall, and the keystone of the arch pushes violently up into the pediment. Everything is a bit uneasy, a bit wrong. Do you notice that in the entablature some of the stones have slipped? . . . It is irrational, impressionistic.20

It might be obvious to someone with enough knowledge of the rules and history of classical architecture, and of the date of this building’s design, that it is a very strange performance. For it might be obvious to such a

20

John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 46.

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person that the position of the keystone inside the pediment, and the dropped stones of the entablature, constitute dramatic departures from architectural norms. The fact that the building is strange in virtue of such features is a reason to take an interest in them. A viewer of the building less knowledgeable than Summerson might be unaware of this fact. Sometimes you become aware of what another person misses, not because you are more knowledgeable, but because you are more observant. It was very observant of Helen Vendler to have seen what she calls the ‘Couplet Tie’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets. She pointed out that in nearly every sonnet, a thematically important word in the quatrains is repeated in the couplet. For example, words like ‘old’ (sonnet 2), ‘single’ (sonnet 8), and ‘time’ (sonnets 12, 15) are repeated in the ‘procreation’ sonnets urging the addressee to marry so that he does not die without producing an heir. Vendler claims that ‘Shakespeare clearly depended on this device not only to point up the thematic intensities of a sonnet, but also to show how the same words take on different emotional import as the poem progresses.’21 Those who failed to notice the Couplet Ties prior to Vendler did not fail through lack of knowledge, but because they were, in this regard, less observant. Greater perceptiveness, too, enables critics to become aware of what their readers are liable to miss. For example, it was perceptive of Kermode to see that a line in King Lear is an allusion to a common saying: The Renaissance, like St. Paul, found much value in folly, and Erasmus, who wrote a famous book about it, also recorded the adage ‘Kings and fools are born, not made,’ which Shakespeare may have recalled when he has Lear ask, ‘Dost thou call me fool, boy?’ and receives the reply ‘All thy other titles thou hast given away, that thou wast born with’ (I.iv.148–50, Q only).22

It is partly Kermode’s knowledge of the adage that enables him to recognize the Fool’s line as an allusion to it. But it would not be obvious to anyone who knows this adage and reads the line that this is an allusion to it. Kermode displays both knowledgeability and perceptiveness in recognizing the allusion. To be good at effecting changes (1) and (3), it is not enough that a critic be good at becoming aware of what is in fact an object of an appropriate response, or of what is in fact an appropriate reason. She must also be good at recognizing, or acquiring the justified belief, that it is an appropriate 21 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 28. 22 Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, p. 187.

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reason or an object of an appropriate response. As I will put it, she must be a good judge of the appreciative relevance of what she becomes aware of. What endowments allow critics to effect change (2)—that is, enabling a reader to have an appropriate response she is unlikely to have? Clearly, to effect this change, the critic must be a good judge of the appreciative relevance of responses. She must be good at recognizing that a given response is one appreciation can involve. She must also be good at becoming aware, by appropriate means, of such responses in the first place. We can distinguish two basic endowments that can make someone good at becoming aware of appropriate responses. First, the critic can normally become aware of an appropriate response if she has that response herself. Joan Miró’s report of his response to Courbet’s Stormy Sea provides a good example of an appropriate response many of his readers are unlikely to have.23 He writes: ‘One feels physically drawn to it, as by an undertow. It is fatal. Even if this painting had been behind our backs, we would have felt it.’24 Many viewers are unlikely to respond to the painting as intensely as Miró. Second, being good at thinking of appropriate responses can make a critic good at becoming aware of them. Provided she thinks of them on the basis of her awareness of the work’s features by appropriate means, it is not necessary for her to respond in that way herself. A critic might judge, for example, that melancholy would be an appropriate response to a work, even if she does not feel melancholy herself. It seems, then, that the following endowments make a critic good at enabling her readership to appreciate the work better: (i) Articulacy. (ii) Good judgement regarding what the readership needs to be told to be enabled to appreciate the work better. (iii) Good judgement regarding how to communicate so as to enable the readership to appreciate the work better. (iv) Knowledgeability. (v) Being observant. (vi) Perceptiveness. 23 For an image of this work, see accessed 14 June 2012. 24 Quoted in Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 215.

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(vii) A disposition to have appropriate responses the readership is unlikely to have. (viii) Being good at thinking of appropriate responses the readership is unlikely to have. (ix) Good judgement regarding the appreciative relevance of responses, objects of responses, and reasons for responses. As we shall see in Chapter 3, this account by no means excludes a role for imaginativeness in criticism. Rather, I will argue that this account allows us to understand just what its role is. Before proceeding, however, let us compare my account with the most prominent philosophical account of the endowments of true judges of art.

5. Humean judges The best-known account of what makes one a good judge of art is Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Hume’s view is often described as an account of ‘the true critic’. Hume’s concern, however, is only to say what makes someone a good judge of a work’s beauty. Being a good judge of a work’s beauty is part, but not all, of what makes someone a good critic in the current sense.25 Comparing my account with Hume’s is instructive for what it reveals about how the endowments of a good critic, in today’s sense, differ from the endowments of a good judge, or at least a good Humean judge, of a work’s beauty. Hume identifies five characteristics: good sense, delicacy, ‘practice’ (experience contemplating other works), the ability to compare the work one is judging with many others, and freedom from prejudice. First, communication skills figure in my account, but not in Hume’s. The first three endowments I identify—articulacy, good judgement about what one’s readership needs to be told, and good judgement about how to communicate it—are communication skills. These mark a difference between what makes someone good at criticizing art and what only makes

25 In the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, published two years before Hume’s essay, ‘critick’ is defined as: ‘A man skilled in the art of judging of literature; a man able to distinguish the faults and beauties of writing.’ Note that this suggests not only that a critic, in the sense then current, was only a judge. It also implies he was a judge only of literature. This would explain why all of Hume’s examples are from literature. Even Hume’s reference to relishing a ‘fine stroke’ may be a literary example: Johnson defines ‘stroke’ as ‘A touch; a masterly or eminent effort’, and illustrates this sense with a quotation that discusses ‘strokes of poetry’.

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someone good at judging art. To be a good judge, it is not clear that one needs to be articulate; and it is clearly not necessary to have good judgement about what and how to communicate to others to help them better appreciate works. Second, both a good judge and a good critic need what Hume calls ‘delicacy’. Hume explains the need for delicacy by observing that qualities naturally fitted to produce the sentiment of beauty ‘may be found in a small degree, or may be mixed and confounded with each other. . . . Where the organs are so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call delicacy of taste.’26 Any of knowledgeability, being observant, or perceptiveness can endow a critic with delicacy. In Hume’s example from Don Quixote, Sancho’s kinsmen, who detect the taste of leather and metal in a wine, are more observant than their companions. Summerson’s knowledge of architecture enables him to notice the slipped stones of the entablature, and find them strange, more readily than people less knowledgeable.27 Similarly, both a good critic and a good judge need ‘good sense’. For Hume, a judge with good sense appears to be someone generally intelligent: he says that her good sense enables her to overcome prejudice, apprehend the relations between a work’s parts, determine how well a work fulfils its functions, and follow chains of reasoning in the work.28 My claim that critics must be good judges of the appreciative relevance of responses, objects of responses, and reasons for responses is, in effect, a claim about what critics ought to have good sense about. The reasons why a good critic needs delicacy and good sense, however, are not limited to the reason why, according to Hume, a good judge needs these qualities. In Hume’s view, judges need these characteristics to be able to have appropriate sentiments. Prejudice, similarly, prevents appropriate sentiments.

26 David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 235. 27 This explains why, as Hume says, ‘practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty’ is something that ‘tends further to encrease and improve’ delicacy (ibid., p. 237). One reason why practice can do this is that practice is a way of acquiring knowledge. Knowing, for example, what aspects of an architectural or literary style are conventional can enable you to notice those features of a work that constitute subtle departures from convention. 28 Ibid., p. 240.

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In my view, a disposition to have appropriate sentiments can certainly help make one a good critic. But delicacy and good sense are not qualities of good critics only because they can enable critics to have appropriate sentiments. They can also enable a critic to provide insightful interpretations or sensitive descriptions. This helps make one a good critic whether or not it leads one to have appropriate sentiments. Finally, being good at thinking of appropriate responses figures in my account of the good critic, but not in Hume’s account of the true judge. He is concerned with what allows a person to have appropriate sentiments. One reason why I hold that being good at thinking of appropriate responses helps make one a good critic is that this can compensate for a critic’s inability to have those responses to culturally or historically distant works. Hume discusses the judgement of culturally and historically distant works. In judging oratory, he says, ‘a critic of a different age or nation . . . must place himself in the same situation as the audience, in order to form a true judgment of the oration.’29 But the point of this, it seems, is to enable the judge to have an appropriate sentiment, not to enable her to think of one. Regarding works containing speculative errors, he writes: ‘There needs but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions, which then prevailed, and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them.’30 By contrast, in the case of immoral works, a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever.31

This suggests, though it does not show decisively, that the point of placing ourselves in the situation of the original audience, when we are supposed to do it, is only to enable a sentiment to be excited in us. It may be, then, that Hume would not regard being good at thinking of appropriate responses as a trait that makes one a true judge.32 By contrast, being good at thinking of responses, and of much else besides, is a very important characteristic of a good critic. This endowment will play an important role in the next chapter. 29

30 31 Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 246–247. Ibid., p. 247. For discussion of a similar issue in Hume’s moral philosophy, see Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 188–192. 32

3 Criticism and Imagination We are almost in a position to say what role imaginativeness plays in criticism. We have an account of the aims of criticism, and we have an account of what makes someone good at achieving these aims. In this chapter, I will provide a new account of what imaginativeness is. On the basis of my conclusions, I will then argue for a view about what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. Before doing this, however, I want to say more about why one might associate criticism and imaginativeness in the first place. After all, it is typically the production of artworks, not the reception of them, that we associate with imaginativeness. Great artists are among the most salient examples of imaginative people. Great critics, on the other hand, are associated with judiciousness, sensitivity, and perceptiveness, but not, normally, with imaginativeness. Many who have reflected on criticism, however, have thought that this common-sense view of the critic is incomplete. They have held that intelligently appreciating and criticizing artworks also involves, at least in central or important cases, responding imaginatively to them. They have arrived at this conclusion by several different routes. The interpretation of artworks, especially literary works, has been thought to support this view. The kinds of interpretation some literary critics provide, and the fact that literary works seem to admit of multiple interpretations, suggest to many that imaginativeness plays a crucial role in interpretation. On this view, we cannot explain what makes someone good at interpretation only in terms of qualities like sensitivity and judiciousness. Others reach similar conclusions about the importance of imaginativeness in criticism by thinking about aesthetic experience. According to them, a distinctive kind of perceptual response, characterized by imaginativeness, is involved in aesthetic experience, at least in certain important cases. For example, some hold that when we perceive architecture or instrumental

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music as expressive of emotion we perceive imaginatively. Likewise, many see in the critic’s use of language an indication of imaginativeness’s role in criticism. Descriptions of artworks and their effects are often couched in imaginative figurative language. Often, this not only serves a decorative function, but also makes the critic’s writing more effective as criticism. Many great works of criticism, such as the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, are striking examples of imaginative writing, and are read as literature in their own right. Considerations like these have led many to conclude that having the communication skills of a good critic involves, or even requires, having the ability to use language imaginatively. Such views have been influential. Beliefs about the role of imaginativeness in interpretation have shaped some philosophers’ accounts of literary meaning; their evaluations of certain kinds of literature; and even their views on the ontology of literature. Views on the imaginativeness of aesthetic experience have influenced views on the nature and reality of aesthetic properties. Famous instances of imaginative criticism have shaped many theorists’ views on what the point of criticism is. Many have appealed to claims about the critic’s imaginativeness to mount defences of the value of criticism. The persistence of this conception of criticism, and the variety of forms it has taken, are striking. However, the history of this idea, and the reasons why people have endorsed it, are likely to be unfamiliar. It is not widely recognized that, for example, contemporary philosophers who appeal to metaphor to argue for a significant role for imaginativeness in criticism are endorsing, on independent grounds, a view held by several of the most important aestheticians of the last three hundred years. I will therefore begin this chapter with a brief history of the view that appreciation and criticism involve responding imaginatively to art. My aim is not to give a comprehensive history of this idea, but to familiarize readers with the debate to which I will be contributing. As this discussion will make clear, my approach to this topic, as well as the conclusions I reach, differ significantly from those of others.

1. The pleasures of the imagination Throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers of art took a great interest in the question of what characteristics enable a person to appreciate

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and judge art. Hume’s account of the characteristics of true judges in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ is today the best known of these discussions, but contributions to this debate were also made by Joseph Addison, the Abbé Du Bos, Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, among others.1 Among these endowments, imagination, or at least what philosophers of the time called ‘imagination’, was commonly regarded as having a crucial role. Kant’s view that aesthetic responses to free beauty are a matter of the understanding and what he called ‘imagination’ being set in a harmonious free play is today the most familiar of these theories. Indeed, Paul Guyer goes so far as to say that ‘the central idea to emerge in eighteenth-century aesthetics is the idea of the freedom of the imagination, and it was the attraction of this idea that provided much of the impetus behind the explosion of aesthetic theory in the period’.2 Whether or not this is true, it is certainly true that philosophers of the time repeatedly invoke imagination in their theories of our responses to artworks. One of the main reasons why the imagination was so often appealed to was to explain why artworks give us pleasure. Addison’s very influential essays of 1712, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’, are about pleasures that ‘arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their Ideas into our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the like Occasion.’3 Pleasures arising in the latter way are obviously the ones more closely related to what we would today describe as ‘imagination’, and Addison calls them the ‘Secondary Pleasures of the Imagination’.4 Representational artworks provide such pleasures, he says, by prompting ‘that Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas arising from the Original

1

See Joseph Addison, No. 409 of The Spectator, in Joseph Addison et al., The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 527–531; Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture (Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1733), vol. 2, ss. 21–29 (available at accessed 14 June 2012); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 11–26; Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 3rd edn (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978); James Beattie, ‘Of Taste, and its Improvement’, in Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. James A. Harris (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), pp. 161–182. 2 Paul Guyer, ‘The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 1711–1735’, in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 5. 3 Addison, No. 411 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 536–537. 4 Ibid., p. 537.

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Objects, with the Ideas we receive from the Statue, Picture, Description, or Sound that represents them.’5 We cannot explain why the activity of comparison is pleasurable, Addison says, but many examples, such as our pleasure in mimicry, rhyme, and puns, establish that it is.6 Addison uses this principle to provide a solution to the classic problem of how artistic representations of what is unpleasant can cause us pleasure. When something disagreeable is described, he says, it is not the image of the disagreeable thing that provides pleasure. Rather, if the description is apt, we experience pleasure because the mind ‘compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves’.7 Similarly, the representation of something dangerous, as in a tragedy, causes ‘the Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own Safety’, which results ‘from the secret Comparison which we make between our selves and the Person who suffers’.8 Hume also appeals to imagination to explain our pleasure in beautiful objects. In the Treatise, he argues that ‘the imagination has a set of passions belonging to it, upon which our sentiments of beauty much depend.’9 In particular, ‘most kinds of beauty are deriv’d from’ sympathetic passions.10 For example, A man, who shows us any house or building, takes particular care . . . to point out the convenience of the apartments, the advantages of their situation, and the little room lost in the stairs, anti-chambers and passages; and indeed ’tis evident, the chief part of the beauty consists in these particulars. . . . As this is a beauty of interest, not of form, so to speak, it must delight us merely by communication, and by our sympathizing with the proprietor of the lodging. We enter into his interest by the force of imagination, and feel the same satisfaction, that the objects naturally occasion in him.11

Likewise, someone who knows that ‘a plain, overgrown with furze and broom’ has less agricultural value than ‘a hill cover’d with vines or olivetrees’ will always find the latter more beautiful than the former:

5

Addison, No. 416 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 559–560. Ibid., p. 560. 7 Addison, No. 418 of The Spectator, vol. 3, pp. 566–567. 8 Ibid., p. 568. 9 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), III.iii.1, p. 373. 10 Ibid., II.v.5, p. 235. 11 Ibid. 6

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this is a beauty merely of imagination, and has no foundation in what appears to the senses. Fertility and value have a plain reference to use; and that to riches, joy, and plenty; in which tho’ we have no hope of partaking, yet we enter into them by the vivacity of the fancy, and share them, in some measure, with the proprietor.12

Kant, as is well known, also thinks pleasure in beauty derives from an activity of the imagination, namely, the harmonious free play of imagination and understanding. However, in Kant’s discussion of fine art, we also find an account of the effect on the imagination produced by artworks possessing a special merit he calls ‘spirit’. Artworks can lack spirit even if ‘we find nothing to censure in them as far as taste goes’.13 What is distinctive of artworks with spirit is that they furnish their readers, audiences, or viewers with ‘aesthetic ideas’. Aesthetic ideas are mental images with two distinguishing features. First, they suggest rational ideas to us. Rational ideas are concepts of that which we cannot experience or imagine, such as God, freedom, and immortality. Second, aesthetic ideas stimulate the imagination into producing many other images related to the rational ideas they suggest. In Kant’s words, an aesthetic idea ‘encourages the imagination to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words’.14 This, indeed, is the ‘proper task’ of an aesthetic idea.15 Thus an aesthetic idea ‘allows a concept to be supplemented in thought by much that is indefinable in words’, and so ‘with language, as a mere thing of the letter, [it] combines spirit’.16 To illustrate these points, Kant gives the example of an artwork using an eagle to symbolize the god Jupiter. According to Guyer’s reading of this passage, the aesthetic idea furnished by such a work is the image of Jupiter himself. The idea of Jupiter, in turn, suggests the rational idea of ‘the 12

Ibid. See also ibid., III.iii.1, pp. 368–369, 373–374. For a recent study of Hume’s views on these matters, to which I am indebted, see Paul Guyer, ‘The Standard of Taste and the “Most Ardent Desire of Society” ’, in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 46–57. Sibley suggested a similar explanation of why we aesthetically admire certain qualities for themselves. See Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetics and the Looks of Things’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 31. 13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 313. 14 Ibid., Ak. 5: 315. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., Ak. 5: 316.

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sublimity and majesty of creation’,17 and stimulates the imagination into ranging over a host of representations ‘kindred’ to the idea of nature’s sublimity and majesty.18 Part of the significance for Kant of this imaginative activity is that it gives us a feeling of freedom from psychological laws of the association of ideas. In these responses to artworks, ‘the imagination . . . displays a creative activity, and it sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into movement’.19 The imagination is ‘following principles which have a . . . seat in reason’, and by this means we come to feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of the imagination), with the result that the [perceptible] material [supplied by the artwork] can be borrowed by us from nature in accordance with that law, but be worked up by us into something else—namely, what surpasses nature.20

Kant’s account of our responses to such artworks is similar to his account of the sublime, according to which our feeling of pleasure in the sublime, too, is due to our awareness of aspects of ourselves that transcend nature.21 Many other philosophers in this period, including Burke, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Gerard, Beattie, and Archibald Alison, also assign the imagination an important role in criticism and appreciation.22 Alison lays particular stress on the role of imagination in responses to beauty and sublimity. In Alison’s view, when something excites the emotions of beauty and sublimity, ‘the simple perception of the object, we frequently

17

Ibid., Ak. 5: 315. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 358. 19 Kant, Critique of Judgement, Ak. 5: 315. 20 Ibid., Ak. 5: 314. 21 See ibid., ss. 25–29. 22 See Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 16–26; Gotthald Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed. and trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), ch. 3; Moses Mendelssohn, ‘On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences’, in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 195–196; Gerard, An Essay on Taste, Part III, s. 1, entitled ‘How far Taste depends on the Imagination’; Beattie, ‘Of Taste, and its Improvement’, pp. 160–167; Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2nd edn (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1812), Essay I (available at accessed 14 June 2012). 18

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find, is insufficient to excite these emotions’.23 The emotions produced in a person who experiences something beautiful or sublime can be explained only by ‘a train of thought being immediately awakened in his imagination’: The landscapes of Claude Lorrain, the music of Handel, the poetry of Milton, excite feeble emotions in our minds, when our attention is confined to the qualities they present to our senses. . . . It is then, only, we feel the sublimity or beauty of their productions, when our imaginations are kindled by their power, when we lose ourselves amid the number of images that pass before our minds, and when we waken at last from this play of fancy, as from the charm of a romantic dream.24

This emphasis in both Kant and Alison on the multitude of thoughts, images, and associations produced in aesthetic experience marks a difference between their accounts of imaginative response and those of earlier writers. Addison and Hume, for example, do not stress this. This conception of imaginative responses to artworks would become more common in the work of later writers.

2. The critic as artist In the nineteenth century, the imaginative powers of the critic were frequently compared to those of the artist. The primary purpose of the comparison was often to defend the practice of criticism, commonly against attacks by artists. Thus Charles Baudelaire replied to artists’ complaints about criticism by asserting that ‘the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic’, and that ‘the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy’.25 One of the more popular ways of defending criticism, it seems, was to argue that great critics display qualities highly valued in artists. Matthew Arnold’s celebrated essay, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, begins by discussing a biography of Wordsworth in which Wordsworth is reported as holding ‘the critical power very low, infinitely

23

Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 25 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 50. 24

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lower than the inventive’, and as having said that the time spent criticizing literature would be better spent trying to compose it.26 Arnold writes: The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true happiness of all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticising.27

While granting that ‘judging is often spoken of as the critic’s one business, and so in some sense it is’, Arnold goes on to say that ‘mere judgment and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity’.28 Arnold concludes his essay by reiterating that ‘to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity.’29 Nevertheless, Arnold tempers his conclusion by adding: ‘Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that.’30 Oscar Wilde regarded these claims as too moderate. His dialogue, ‘The Critic as Artist’, is in large part a reply to Arnold’s essay. In reply to the assertion that ‘the creative faculty is higher than the critical’, Wilde has one of the interlocutors answer that ‘that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realizes life for us . . . is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who

26 Quoted in Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 259. 27 Ibid., p. 260. 28 Ibid., p. 283. 29 Ibid., p. 285. 30 Ibid.

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does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art’.31 To the objection that a great work of art ‘will be a thing so complete and perfect that there will be nothing left for the critic to do’, he replies that: Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty . . . so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent. . . . Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.32

This leads to an attack on Arnold’s dictum that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’. This, Wilde writes, is ‘a very serious error’: the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself. . . . No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. . . . Who cares whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery. . . . Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist.33

Wilde thinks that, along with Ruskin’s criticism, Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa embodies this ideal. Pater writes that, as depicted by Leonardo, Mona Lisa

31 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 253. Despite ranking the critical faculty below the creative, Arnold did agree that the sound exercise of the one is necessary for the sound exercise of the other: ‘the critical power . . . tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas . . . to make the best ideas prevail. . . . Out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature’ (Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, p. 261). 32 Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, p. 260. 33 Ibid., pp. 261–262, 266.

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is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary. . . . The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.34

A great critic, in Wilde’s view, will be attracted to ‘such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world’.35

3. Criticism and metaphor In contemporary philosophy, those who believe imagination has a significant role in criticism hold this view for various reasons. One of the main reasons is that vivid, novel metaphors are often used when critics describe

34 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 70–71. 35 Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, p. 265. Compare Harold Bloom: ‘criticism is either a genre of literature or it is nothing. It has no hope for survival unless it is a genre of literature’ (Antonio Weiss, ‘Harold Bloom: The Art of Criticism No. 1’, The Paris Review 118, Spring 1991, accessed 14 June 2012). See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘How Creative Should Literary Criticism Be?’, The New York Times Book Review, 5 April 1981, accessed 14 June 2012; James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), ch. 2.

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artworks and our responses to them. This aspect of criticism will be the focus of the second half of this book. The use of metaphor in criticism is not itself a recent phenomenon. Famously, the term ‘katharsis’, which originally meant ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’, is used non-literally by Aristotle to characterize the emotional effect of good tragedy on an audience. Horace coined the phrase ‘purple patch’ to describe an excessively ornate descriptive passage in a piece of writing.36 Connoisseurs of Chinese jades have for centuries distinguished between the colours of ‘lychee-flesh’, ‘spinach’, and ‘mutton-fat’ jade, among many other kinds.37 Examples of this sort could be multiplied. However, philosophical reflection on the significance of metaphor’s prevalence in criticism is more recent. Two factors, in particular, have brought the use of art-critical metaphors to philosophers’ attention. The first is the observation that many so-called ‘aesthetic descriptions’ are metaphorical. In several very influential papers, Frank Sibley distinguished between what he called ‘aesthetic terms’, such as ‘unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic’,38 and non-aesthetic terms, such as ‘red, noisy, brackish, clammy, square’.39 Sibley claims that the difference between them is that it ‘requires the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic discrimination or appreciation’ to judge that an aesthetic term applies to something, but not to judge that a non-aesthetic term applies.40 Sibley also pointed out that ‘when we employ words as aesthetic terms we are often making and using metaphors’.41 We might describe ‘a passage of music as chattering, carbonated, or gritty, a painter’s colouring as vitreous, farinaceous, or effervescent, or a writer’s style as glutinous, or abrasive’.42 Some have suggested that literal aesthetic descriptions are actually in the minority.

36 Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Satires and Epistles of Horace and Persius, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 190, l. 15. 37 See Craig Clunas, ‘Jade Carvers and Their Customers in Ming China’, The Bulletin of the Friends of Jade 6 (1989): 36; Angus Forsyth and Brian McElney, Jades from China (Bath: The Museum of East Asian Art, 1994), pp. 304, 354–355. 38 Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 1. See also Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic’, in Approach to Aesthetics, pp. 33–51. 39 Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, p. 2. 40 Ibid., p. 1. 41 Ibid., p. 2. 42 Ibid., p. 2 n. 2.

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The second factor is the belief that metaphors employing psychological, motor, and spatial concepts are common, or even indispensable, when we describe important aspects of artworks, especially music. It is widely believed that descriptions of a work’s expressive character are often metaphorical, as when we say that a piece of music is sad, jaunty, or pensive. Similarly, some hold that descriptions of melodies as ‘rising’ and ‘falling’, of musical ‘movements’, of chords as ‘hollow’ and ‘open’, and so forth, are metaphors capturing something essential about music. Many philosophers have been struck by these facts, or apparent facts, about art-critical metaphors. Why are so many aesthetic descriptions metaphorical? Whether aesthetic descriptions are those we need taste to apply, or those that attribute aesthetic properties, or something else, the fact that so many are metaphorical calls for explanation. There is no antecedently obvious reason why such descriptions should tend to be metaphors. Many feel that the prevalence of metaphor in criticism must reflect something important about the nature of our responses to art; about artistic expression; or about aesthetic properties. Numerous views about what metaphor reveals about these matters have been advanced and disputed.43 In particular, many have concluded that 43

See, for example, Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), ch. 2; Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘What Is an Aesthetic Quality?’, in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 106–110; Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 54–55; Richard Wollheim, ‘Correspondence, Projective Properties, and Expression in the Arts’, in The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 147–148; Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 137–166; Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Roger Scruton, ‘Understanding Music’, in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), pp. 89–115; Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 6; Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 10; R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An Introduction (Chesham: Acumen, 2004), pp. 102–108; Roger Scruton, ‘Musical Movement: A Reply to Budd’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44/2 (2004): 184–187; Paul Boghossian, ‘Explaining Musical Experience’, in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 123; Malcolm Budd, ‘Understanding Music’, ‘The Characterization of Aesthetic Qualities by Essential Metaphors and Quasi-Metaphors’, and ‘Aesthetic Realism and Emotional Qualities of Music’, in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 122–153, 171–184; Christopher Peacocke, ‘The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49/3 (2009): 257–275; Paul F. Snowdon, ‘Peacocke on Musical Experience and Hearing

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the prevalence of metaphor in critical language reflects the major role imagination plays in aesthetic experience. Roger Scruton is the bestknown exponent of this view. Scruton holds that metaphors express an experience of imaginatively perceiving one thing as another. The frequent use of metaphor in aesthetic description therefore indicates that aesthetic experience is itself an experience of imaginative perceiving-as. Scruton also argues that, in order to hear sound as music at all, we need to employ concepts of movement and space metaphorically in auditory perception.44 Linguistic metaphors employing concepts of space and movement occur in descriptions of music because musical experience itself ‘is founded in metaphor, arising when unreal movement is heard in imaginary space’.45 As we shall see in Chapter 6, Scruton views his conclusions about the role of imagination and metaphor in responses to art as lending support to an anti-realist view of aesthetic properties. Debate about each of these matters continues.46

4. My approach My own approach to this topic in the remainder of this book differs from that of others in several respects.

Metaphorically-As’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49/3 (2009): 277–281; Christopher Peacocke, ‘Experiencing Metaphorically-As in Music Perception: Clarifications and Commitments’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49/3 (2009): 299–306; Christopher Peacocke, ‘Music and Experiencing Metaphorically-As: Further Delineation’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50/2 (2010): 189– 191; Stephen Davies, ‘Music and Metaphor’, in Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 21–33. This is not an exhaustive list. Scruton, ‘Understanding Music’; The Aesthetics of Music, chs 3 and 6; and ‘Musical Movement: A Reply to Budd’. 45 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p. 239. 46 For discussion of Scruton’s views on these matters, see, in addition to several of the references given already: Philip Pettit, ‘The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism’, in Eva Schaper, ed., Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 17–38; Berys Gaut, ‘Metaphor and the Understanding of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (1997): 223–241; Paul Boghossian, ‘On Hearing the Music in the Sound: Scruton on Musical Expression’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60/1 (2002): 49–55; Brandon Cooke, ‘Imagining Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 47/1 (2007): 29–45; Rafael De Clercq, ‘Melody and Metaphorical Movement’, British Journal of Aesthetics 47/2 (2007): 156–168; Malcolm Budd, ‘Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors’, in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 154–170. 44

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First, we ought to distinguish between (i) doing or producing something imaginative, and (ii) doing or producing something by using the imagination. Many locutions we use blur this distinction. We can characterize someone as having done something imaginative by saying that she used her imagination, put a great deal of imagination into it, or showed she has an excellent imagination. Conversely, we can use the word ‘imaginative’ in the sense given by the OED as ‘of, relating to, or concerned in the exercise of imagination as a mental faculty’. This is the sense in which we speak of ‘imaginative literature’ to distinguish it from non-fiction. It is not, however, the sense in which the imaginative is opposed to the unimaginative. Rather, it is the sense in which the imaginative is opposed to what does not relate to imagining. Moreover, we do not use ‘imaginative’, in this sense, to attribute the property of imaginativeness. In what follows, I will use ‘imaginative’ only in those senses in which the imaginative is opposed to the unimaginative, and in which we use it to attribute imaginativeness. It is not the case that whenever one has imagined, one has done or produced something imaginative, as opposed to unimaginative.47 There can be imaginative imagining and unimaginative imagining. Many works of imaginative literature are unimaginative. Moreover, I will argue below that one need not imagine to do or produce something imaginative. My focus, then, is on the role of imaginativeness, not imagination, in criticism. It is often unclear, in other accounts, whether the claims being made are about imagination or imaginativeness, or both. Much of the interest of the claims that have been made about the place of ‘imagination’ in criticism is due to what these claims suggest about the role of imaginativeness in criticism. Kant’s view that an aesthetic idea ‘encourages the imagination to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations’ suggests that there is great scope for imaginativeness in engaging with artworks that furnish aesthetic ideas. The conception of the critic as artist, which so attracted Wilde and many others, plainly involved

47 Compare Berys Gaut’s claim that not all imagining involves creative acts (Berys Gaut, ‘Creativity and Imagination’, in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155). Gaut’s point is about creativity, but he regards ‘imaginative’, in one use, as a synonym for ‘creative’ (ibid., p. 151).

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regarding great criticism as manifesting imaginativeness. Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa is exceptionally imaginative. Scruton claims that imagining must go beyond the obvious and involves thinking of a description as appropriate to an object;48 but as we shall see, these points are, in fact, closer to the truth about imaginativeness. And what is striking about the metaphors used in good criticism is that so many are imaginative or express imaginative responses to artworks. It is not, or not merely, that they indicate that criticism involves imagining. To make these points is not to deny that there are important and interesting questions about how imagining, whether imaginative or unimaginative, is involved in our engagement with art. Rather, it is to separate out a line of inquiry that is commonly bound up with such questions, and which is interesting in its own right. Second, my focus is on the role of imaginativeness in criticism, not in aesthetic experience or appreciation. Other philosophers draw conclusions regarding the role of imaginativeness in criticism, in appreciation, and in aesthetic experience from the prevalence of metaphor in criticism. I do not deny that one can draw conclusions about these other matters from considerations about art-critical metaphors. But one must distinguish these questions carefully. The prevalence of imaginative metaphors in criticism suggests, in the first instance, that imaginativeness has a role of some kind in criticism. Moreover, as we shall see, not all effective, imaginative art-critical metaphors indicate anything about the role of imaginativeness in appreciation or aesthetic experience. Third, I will remain neutral on the question of the reality or mindindependence of aesthetic properties. The account of metaphor I will adopt is consistent with both realism and anti-realism about aesthetic properties. And although I have said that appreciative responses to artworks can include imaginings, I do not claim (or deny) that these imaginings put the reality or mind-independence of aesthetic properties in doubt. To say what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is, we need an account of what imaginativeness is.

48

Scruton, Art and Imagination, pp. 97–100.

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5. The imaginativeness of acts, omissions, and products I am interested in what it is for a person to be imaginative. To explain this, however, I need to explain what it is for a person’s acts (including her mental acts), her omissions, and the products of her acts to be imaginative. Acts, such as impersonations, retorts, acts of kindness, and theatrical performances, and the products of a person’s acts, such as stories, haircuts, paintings, and plans, can be imaginative in a different sense than persons can be. Omissions can also be imaginative. It might be imaginative of a novelist, in writing dialogue, to leave certain things unsaid by the characters. The imaginativeness of persons is to be understood in terms of the imaginativeness that acts, omissions, and products can have.49 The first point to note is that an act, omission, or product that is both an f and a g can be an imaginative f but not an imaginative g. For example, dancing might be an imaginative way of getting someone’s attention in a crowded train station. But it would not be an imaginative way of responding to a request to demonstrate what dancers do. To take another example, after the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin had become a best-seller, there appeared a popular-science book entitled We Need to Talk About Kelvin. That is an imaginative title for a popular-science book. But it would not be an imaginative subject-line for an email in which you tell someone you need to talk about your troubled friend Kelvin. In these examples, what is imaginative is imaginative as an act or product of a certain type—as a way of getting someone’s attention and as a title for a popular-science book. In what follows, I will say what it is for a product or act to be imaginative as a product or act of a certain type. Whenever I use the schema ‘an imaginative f ’, I am talking about what is imaginative as an f. Second, imaginativeness is relative to persons and contexts. Using a stream-of-consciousness style was, at one time, an imaginative way of writing a novel. By the 1930s, however, it no longer was. Similarly, a solution to a problem might be an imaginative solution for a child to think of, but not an imaginative solution for an adult to think of. Ascriptions of

49

Perhaps there can also be imaginative emotions and attitudes. Perhaps it can be imaginative, in certain situations, to feel affection for someone you normally dislike, or to adopt a tranquil attitude in the midst of a struggle. I will not discuss emotions and attitudes, but the account I provide could be extended, with slight alterations, to imaginative emotions and attitudes, if there are any.

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imaginativeness to something do not always specify a (type of ) person or context, relative to which the thing is imaginative. But when they do not, they rarely, if ever, imply that what is described as imaginative would be imaginative relative to any person or context.50 Third, something can be an imaginative f to f but not an imaginative f to c. Marshalling her forces in a certain pattern could be a highly imaginative tactic for a general to think of at one time, without being an imaginative tactic for her to adopt at that time. Perhaps the tactic would be an imaginative tactic to adopt only if a certain kind of situation arises on the battlefield. It would be suicidal, and not at all imaginative, to adopt it beforehand. But it could still be an imaginative tactic to think of beforehand.51 This example reveals a fourth point. Marshalling her forces in that pattern might be an imaginative tactic for the general to think of if she has thought it up as a response to one kind of situation. But it may not be an imaginative tactic for her to think of if she thought it up as a response to another kind of situation. Whether something is an imaginative f to think of depends not only on the context in which it is thought of. It can depend on the context for which it is thought of.52 These facts will help us provide an account of what imaginativeness is. Preferably, an account of imaginativeness should also enable us to explain these facts. I now turn to the construction of such an account. It is natural to think that an imaginative f must be an original f. Imaginativeness and originality are closely associated, and one might

50 We should be aware of a possible ambiguity here. If we say, ‘That solution was an imaginative solution for a child to think of ’, we are relativizing the imaginativeness of the solution to children. However, we can use the construction, ‘X was an imaginative f for N to f’, without relativizing the imaginativeness of X to N. Suppose you say, ‘Painting Christ that way was an imaginative approach for Salvador Dalí to take’. You do not necessarily mean that, even for Salvador Dalí, this approach was imaginative. That would imply that it was even more imaginative than what Dalí normally does. You may mean only that it was imaginative of Dalí to take that approach in his painting. There are parallel cases of this kind. Compare saying, ‘That was a megalomaniacal thing for Napoleon to do’. We do not necessarily mean that, even for Napoleon, that was a megalomaniacal thing to do. We may mean only that it was megalomaniacal of Napoleon to do that. If we are not alert to this ambiguity, it can seem as though we explicitly relativize imaginativeness to persons more often than we actually do. 51 This is not to imply, however, that an imaginative f can always be described as an imaginative f to f. 52 This is not to imply that there always is a context for which an imaginative f is thought of.

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think originality is a necessary condition of imaginativeness. However, if being original means being new or very different in some salient, valuable, or significant respect, this proposal will not work. Another popularscience writer could independently think of the title We Need to Talk About Kelvin after the first one did. Her book would have an imaginative title too. But her book’s title would not be new or very different in any salient, valuable, or significant respect. This example suggests another possibility. What seems to matter here is that the second writer came up with her title independently of the first. If she had gotten the idea from the earlier book’s title, her title would not have been imaginative. So perhaps an imaginative f cannot be a derivative f. Being new or unprecedented in significant ways is not necessary, but perhaps being non-derivative is. Indeed, it is plausible that ‘original’ is sometimes used to mean just ‘not derivative’.53 It is certainly true that many imaginative acts and products are not derivative. And this is not accidental. Below, I will explain why imaginativeness and non-derivativeness are so often connected. Nevertheless, it is not true that an imaginative f cannot be a derivative f.54 Suppose that a poet, knowledgeable about the history of literature, chooses to write a poem in a form not used for centuries, as a result of reading poems written in that form. This form turns out to be strikingly effective and appropriate. Using that form could be an imaginative way of writing a poem today. But it is a derivative way of writing a poem today. So being a derivative f is consistent with being an imaginative f. A better suggestion is that imaginativeness is necessarily connected, not with the new or the underivative, but with the unobvious. Using the archaic poetic form is an imaginative way of writing a poem today, despite being derivative, partly because, nowadays, using that form is not an obvious way of writing a poem. If it had been an obvious way of writing a poem, it would not have been an imaginative way of writing a poem. This appears to cover other examples as well. We Need to Talk About Kelvin is not an obvious title to think of; dancing is not an obvious way of getting

53 Sibley claims this. See Frank Sibley, ‘Originality and Value’, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 121. 54 In earlier work, I claimed that non-derivativeness is a necessary condition of imaginativeness. See James Grant, ‘The Value of Imaginativeness’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90/2 (2012): 277–278.

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someone’s attention in a crowded train station; and using a stream-ofconsciousness style was an unobvious way of writing a novel to adopt. I suggest that the unobvious, rather than the new or the underivative, is the notion we want. There are, however, at least three kinds of obviousness. Only one of these kinds is the kind I mean to oppose to imaginativeness. The first kind is exemplified by what is perceptually salient. A colossal sculpture, for instance, might be an obvious feature of the landscape. The second kind is the kind we have in mind when we say, ‘It is obvious that p’. We might say that it is obvious that she is happy about something, or that the artwork is a forgery, or that it will be hours before we get home. Here we are not talking about how perceptually salient something is. We are talking about how evident it is that something is true. Indeed, ‘It is obvious that p’ is at least nearly synonymous with ‘It is evident that p’. We do not always use the construction ‘It is obvious that p’ when we have this kind of obviousness in mind. A fact can be described simply as ‘obvious’, and we might describe an artwork as ‘an obvious forgery’, meaning that it is obvious that it is a forgery. The third kind of obviousness is the kind we can attribute with the construction, ‘Such-and-such is an obvious f to f’. We can describe something as an obvious move to make, an obvious strategy to adopt, or an obvious description to come up with. Here, we are not making a point about how perceptually salient something is, or how evident it is that something is true. There is perhaps no succinct phrase that captures this kind of obviousness as well as ‘perceptually salient’ and ‘evident’ capture the other two kinds. The OED, however, supplies a rough equivalent: roughly (but only roughly), what is obvious in this way is ‘such as common sense might suggest’. We do not always use the construction ‘an obvious f to f’ when attributing this kind of obviousness. We might describe the use of a certain poetic form simply as ‘obvious’ or as ‘an obvious way of writing a poem’, meaning that it is an obvious way of writing a poem to think of. My claim is that imaginativeness is opposed to this third kind of obviousness. Each example that led us to connect imaginativeness with the unobvious is an unobvious f to f. In fact, each of these examples is, specifically, an unobvious f to think of: an unobvious title to think of, an unobvious way of getting someone’s attention to think of, an unobvious

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way of writing a poem to think of, and an unobvious way of writing a novel to think of. Being an unobvious f to think of is, I suggest, the notion we need. Before I develop this proposal further, however, it will help to clarify two things about thinking-of. First, when we use ‘think of ’ as I am using it, we mean ‘think up’ or ‘come up with’. Sometimes, ‘think of ’ means ‘think about’, ‘bring to mind’, or ‘consider’. You might be asked to think of an elephant, or to think of your summer vacation, or to think of those less fortunate than you. But when we say that you thought of a solution to your problem, and mean that you came up with a solution to your problem, we do not mean that you thought about a solution, and we do not mean only that you brought one to mind (if this is even part of what we mean). You can bring to mind a solution you did not come up with, if you have learned about it; and after you have thought of a solution yourself, you may later, perhaps while reminiscing proudly, think of the solution you thought of—i.e., you may bring to mind the solution you came up with. But recalling a solution is not coming up with it again. Second, saying that a person thinks of something does not imply that she says or visualizes something to herself, or that she first has a plan and then executes it. Not all cases of thinking of something conform to the model of having a flash of insight and then acting on it. The comedian who delivers an off-the-cuff reply to a heckler can still be said to have thought of a reply, without its being true that she first thought of the reply and then gave it. Let us now consider what role thinking-of should play in our account of imaginativeness. In view of what I have said so far, it would be natural simply to claim that an imaginative f must be an unobvious f to think of. This proposal certainly covers many of the examples I have considered. However, it will not cover all cases. There are two kinds of counterexample. First, suppose a rugby player makes an imaginative pass. It is doubtful that such a player can always be said to have ‘thought of a pass’. Accordingly, it is doubtful that an imaginative pass must be an unobvious pass to think of. This is so even though we should allow that thinking-of can occur in situations, such as rugby matches, where we do not have time to deliberate. It is mistaken, nevertheless, to say that a rugby player who makes an imaginative pass must have thought of a pass.

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We should deal with this kind of case in the following way. A person who makes an imaginative pass does not necessarily think of a pass, but she does think of something else: she thinks of an unobvious way of putting her teammates in a better position to score, or an unobvious way of keeping the ball from the other team, or something else besides. The pass is, of course, the way of keeping possession that she thought of. But it still might not be true to say that she thought of a pass. Therefore, sometimes an imaginative f is an unobvious g to think of, though not an unobvious f to think of. The second kind of counterexample is different. Suppose someone writes an imaginative play or carves an imaginative sculpture. Such a person cannot necessarily be said to have ‘thought of a sculpture’ or to have ‘thought of a play’. In this respect, these cases are like the imaginative pass. But in these cases, it is doubtful that there is always some f, such that an imaginative play or sculpture is an unobvious f to think of. For example, it is doubtful that an imaginative play is, in any given case, either an unobvious comedy to think of, or an unobvious tragedy to think of, and so forth. These cases need to be handled differently. In these cases, we should consider what makes a play or sculpture imaginative. A play might be imaginative because of the intricate way in which the events of the plot are arranged, as in many Elizabethan comedies. Arranging the events of the plot in this way was an unobvious way of writing a play to think of. Similarly, a sculpture might be imaginative because the stone was left rough-hewn in certain areas, and leaving the stone rough in those areas was an unobvious way of making a sculpture of that kind to think of. In each case, the imaginative product has certain properties, such that giving it or leaving it with those properties was an unobvious f to think of. So the basic idea that imaginativeness is to be explained using the notion of being an unobvious f to think of seems right. An imaginative f must either be an unobvious f to think of, or be an unobvious g to think of, or have properties such that giving it or leaving it with those properties is an unobvious g to think of. These cases suggest something further. It also seems that an imaginative f must either be an imaginative f to think of, or be an imaginative g to think of, or have properties such that giving it or leaving it with those properties is an imaginative g to think of. The imaginative pass is not only an unobvious, but an imaginative, way of keeping possession to think of.

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Leaving the sculpture rough-hewn is not only an unobvious, but an imaginative, way of making such a sculpture to think of. In short, what it is to be an imaginative f can be explained in terms of the notion of being something it is imaginative to think of. I will therefore focus on the latter notion in what follows. So far, we have established that something is an imaginative f to think of only if it is an unobvious f to think of. This is not a sufficient condition of being an imaginative f to think of. A recipe for chocolate-chip cookies that included generous amounts of balsamic vinegar would not be an obvious recipe to think of. But it would not necessarily be an imaginative recipe to think of. You cannot come up with an imaginative recipe merely by thinking of an unobvious recipe. The imaginative is not just opposed to the obvious. It is also opposed, in John Passmore’s words, to ‘the gimmicky, the merely fanciful, the pointlessly innovative, the kitsch’.55 One suggestion is that an imaginative f to think of must be valuable. A number of philosophers have recently tied imaginativeness to being valuable. Berys Gaut, for example, claims that, for something to be creative, it must have ‘considerable value’.56 This suggestion accounts for the recipe. A recipe for chocolate-chip cookies with balsamic vinegar is unlikely to be imaginative because it is unlikely to be a good chocolatechip cookie recipe. This explanation appeals not merely to the recipe’s likely value, but to its likely value as a chocolate-chip cookie recipe. So we might suppose that, for something to be an imaginative f to think of, it must have substantial value as an f.57 There are, however, counterexamples to this claim. For there are striking examples of imaginative failures. The flying machines envisaged by Leonardo would not work. His designs for them were imaginative flying-machine designs to think of. But they do not have substantial value as flying-machine designs, because the machines envisaged would not be capable of flight.

55 John Passmore, Serious Art: A Study of the Concept in all the Major Arts (London: Duckworth, 1991), p. 98. 56 Gaut, ‘Creativity and Imagination’, p. 150. 57 Plausibly, imaginativeness itself often helps to make what possesses it (for instance, artworks) valuable of its kind. If so, then this claim must be understood as the claim that an imaginative f to think of must have substantial value as an f in virtue of something other than its own imaginativeness. An imaginative cookie recipe, for example, might satisfy this condition by having value as a recipe in virtue of being a recipe for cookies that taste good.

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However, we can accommodate this case with slight adjustments. It is significant that Leonardo’s designs are very intelligent failures. It was plausible for him to believe that the machines he designed had at least a reasonable chance of being capable of flight. At the time, this was not a foolish or crazy belief. This contrasts with the recipe. Normally, it would be implausible to believe that a recipe for chocolate-chip cookies with balsamic vinegar has even a reasonably good chance of being a good chocolate-chip cookie recipe. Therefore, it seems that, for something to be an imaginative f to think of, it must be plausible to believe that it has a reasonable chance of having substantial value as an f.58 This proposal will work for some cases. But it will not work for all. Gettier’s counterexamples to the tripartite analysis of knowledge were imaginative counterexamples to think of. But it seems irrelevant that it was plausible for him to believe they had value as counterexamples. What matters is that it was plausible for him to believe that these were counterexamples. Certainly, a counterexample can be imaginative when, and partly because, it is plausible to believe it has substantial value as a counterexample. Being vivid and memorable, for instance, can enhance something’s value as a counterexample. But Gettier’s cases were imaginative counterexamples to think of at least largely because they are plausibly counterexamples, and were not obvious counterexamples to think of. It seems mistaken to require that it must also be plausible to believe they have substantial value as counterexamples. This shows that, sometimes, thinking of an f is in itself a kind of success. Thinking of a solution to a diplomatic crisis, and thinking of a way of forcing checkmate, are other examples. In such cases, thinking of an f with substantial value as an f, when that is possible, would be a further success. By contrast, in other cases, only thinking of an f with value as an f is a success. Thinking of an objection to a claim, unlike thinking of a counterexample to a claim, can fail to be any sort of success. The objection thought of might be terrible. Success in thinking of an objection is thinking of a good objection. 58 The claim here is not that this belief must be justified. If a belief cannot be justified by false beliefs, then, in the case of some imaginative acts and products, the belief in question is not justified. Some of Leonardo’s beliefs about aerodynamics could have been false, and if his belief that his flying-machine designs had a reasonable chance of being good designs was based on them alone, then it was not justified, if this view about justification is right. But it was still plausible for him to believe this.

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Imaginativeness is related to success in thinking-of. For something to be an imaginative f to think of, It must be plausible to believe that it has a reasonable chance of being an f or of having substantial value as an f, depending on whether thinking of an f, or thinking of an f with value as an f, constitutes success. It will be convenient to have a term for what is thought of when thinking-of is a success. I will use the term ‘achievement’ for this. We can now re-state the above condition concisely. Something is an imaginative f to think of only if (1) It is an unobvious f to think of, and (2) It is plausible to believe that it is reasonably likely to be an achievement. Gettier’s counterexamples satisfy condition (2) because it was plausible for him to believe they were counterexamples. Leonardo’s designs satisfy condition (2) because it was plausible for him to believe that they would be good designs. Satisfying conditions (1) and (2) is not, for every f, a sufficient condition of being an imaginative f to think of. I discuss this further in a note.59 But these conditions do give the important features of imaginativeness for my

59 Suppose that, in houses in a certain culture, the bedroom is always on the ground floor on the right-hand side. There is no particular reason for this. A design placing the bedroom on the top floor on the left-hand side might then be an unobvious house design to think of. It might also be plausible to believe that the design is a good house design. Conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied. But such a design would not necessarily be imaginative. If there was no particular reason to place the bedroom where it is normally placed, a design placing it elsewhere might not have much value as a design in virtue of doing so. It might be a good design solely in virtue of other features. What makes it unobvious might be entirely unrelated to what makes it good. Contrast this with Frank Gehry’s imaginative design for the Bilbao Guggenheim. One reason why this design is an unobvious design to think of is that it gives the building’s exterior that unusual shape. Giving the building this shape also contributes significantly to the design’s value as a design: the shape makes the building dynamic, expressive, spectacular from a distance without being overwhelming from street level, and so forth. Here, some properties that make it an unobvious design to think of coincide with some of the properties that it was plausible to believe would contribute significantly to its value. Let us call cases like designs ‘coincidence cases’. Fs are coincidence cases just when, in order for something to be an imaginative f to think of, it must have properties such that (i) these properties make it an unobvious f to think of, and (ii) it is plausible to believe that these same properties have a reasonable chance of contributing significantly to its value as an f. I will ignore coincidence cases in what follows.

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purposes. Moreover, this account enables us to explain several facts about imaginativeness. First, it explains why something that is both an f and a g can be an imaginative f but not an imaginative g. One reason why this is possible is that something can be an unobvious f to think of but an obvious g to think of. Dancing can be an imaginative way of getting someone’s attention in a crowded train station, but not an imaginative way of responding to a request to demonstrate what dancers do, because it is an unobvious way of getting someone’s attention in a crowded train station to think of, but an obvious way of responding to such a request to think of. Second, this account explains why imaginativeness is relative to persons and to contexts. The reason is that obviousness and plausibility are relative to persons and contexts. A solution can be an imaginative solution for a child to think of, but not an imaginative solution for an adult to think of, because it can be an unobvious solution for a child to think of, but an obvious solution for an adult to think of. One reason why using a certain poetic form can be an imaginative way of writing a poem to think of today, but not in the Middle Ages, is that it can be an unobvious way of writing a poem to think of today, but would have been an obvious way of doing so to think of in the Middle Ages. A military tactic might be an imaginative tactic to think of for one situation, but not for another, because it is plausible to believe it is reasonably likely to be successful in the one situation, but it is not plausible to believe it has much chance of success in the other situation.60 60 In saying this, I do not mean to imply that an imaginative f to think of is an unobvious f to think of in every particular context in which it is an imaginative f to think of. An example will illustrate what I mean. Suppose you are a diplomat dealing with an international crisis. As you are a gifted diplomat, you consider many facts about the situation that other diplomats in your situation would not consider. After taking these facts into account, you think of a solution. This solution might be an obvious solution to think of if those facts are taken into account, but not an obvious solution to think of otherwise. But it might still be an imaginative solution to think of, even after those facts have been taken into account. What matters here is that the solution is an unobvious solution to think of in a certain kind of crisis, and you thought of the solution in a crisis of that kind. It does not matter that it is an obvious solution to think of if one takes those facts into account. In assessing the imaginativeness of your solution, certain context-types (e.g., a diplomatic crisis of this kind) have a kind of relevance that other context-types (e.g., a diplomatic crisis of this kind in which those facts are taken into account) do not have. Why this is so is a further question, which we need not answer. The point is that, although the relativity of obviousness and plausibility explains the relativity of imaginativeness, it is false that something is an imaginative f to think of in a particular context only if it is an unobvious f to think of in that particular context.

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Third, we can explain why something can be an imaginative f to f but not an imaginative f to c. I said above that marshalling one’s forces in a certain pattern can fail to be an imaginative tactic to adopt in a context, even if it is an imaginative tactic to think of in that context. One reason why this is possible is that it can be implausible to believe that the tactic would be an effective tactic to adopt in that context, but plausible to believe, in that context, that it would be an effective tactic to adopt in some other context for which it is thought of. Fourth, my account enables us to explain why imaginativeness is associated with originality. If something is very different from what came before, that is often why it is an unobvious f to think of. If this difference also makes it valuable as an f, then it will not be a coincidence if it is plausible to believe that it is an achievement. That is why there is a nonaccidental connection between being original, in the sense of being very different from what came before in a valuable respect, and being imaginative. Fifth, we can explain why imaginativeness is associated with nonderivativeness. The fact that something is derivative is evidence that it was an obvious f to think of. A derivative act or product has to derive from something the agent or producer is already familiar with. Familiarity with something can, though it need not, make it an obvious f to think of. The familiarity of European novelists of the 1930s with the stream-ofconsciousness style would have made it an obvious style for them to think of for their novels, and it would have been a derivative style for them to adopt if they did adopt it. Derivativeness can be evidence of obviousness, and therefore can be evidence that something is not imaginative. Sixth, we can explain the difference between what is imaginative, what is unimaginative, and what is merely not imaginative. Something can fail to be imaginative without being unimaginative. The imaginative and the unimaginative are opposed as contraries, not contradictories. The chocolate-chip cookie recipe with balsamic vinegar is not imaginative. But it is not unimaginative either. With my account, we can explain what the difference between these three concepts consists in. If something is far from an obvious f to think of, it may fail to be imaginative, but it will not be unimaginative. Being unimaginative requires being obvious. Seventh, we can explain why imaginativeness is associated with the imagination. Thinking of possibilities is central to my account of imaginativeness. In this respect, my account resembles those accounts of imagination

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according to which imagination is an ability to think of possibilities. For example, Alan White argues that ‘to imagine something is to think of it as possibly being so.’61 Whatever the right account of imagination may be, imagination is at least associated with the ability to think of possibilities. The fact that thinking of possibilities is involved in imaginativeness therefore explains why imaginativeness is associated with imagination. My account also suggests a reason why many imaginative people have impressive powers of imagination. The power to imagine many possibilities accurately and in detail can enable a person to have plausible beliefs about more possibilities than someone who could think of fewer possibilities, or someone who could imagine the same possibilities less accurately or in less detail. A cook who can imagine, accurately and in detail, how different combinations of ingredients would taste will be more likely to have plausible beliefs about whether those combinations would taste good. A writer who can imagine, accurately and in detail, the psychology of a certain type of person will be in a better position to form plausible beliefs about whether various ways of continuing a story about such a person would be good. Indeed, imagining a character’s psychology in detail can make one more likely to think of many good ways of continuing the story in the first place. We should not conclude from this that one imagines whenever one does or produces something imaginative. I have said that imagining is not a sufficient condition of doing or producing something imaginative. It is not a necessary condition either. Take the case of the imaginative reply delivered by the comedian to the heckler. I said above that the comedian thought of a reply. But it does not seem that, if the comedian’s reply was imaginative, she must have imagined. She needn’t have imagined the reply itself, or have imagined replying, and the reply need not express something she imagined. So exercising imaginativeness does not require imagining. But for reasons my account makes clear, a powerful imagination can help to make one more imaginative. Finally, we can explain why imaginativeness is associated with inspiration. An important part of our conception of inspiration is its non-voluntary character. Traditional images of the inspired person being acted upon or controlled by another force, such as the Muses, capture this vividly. One

61

Alan R. White, The Language of Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 184.

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reason why imaginativeness is associated with inspiration is that it involves thinking-of, and thinking of something is often not voluntary. You can suddenly think of a solution to a problem without having tried to do so, or while giving your attention to something else. There are many expressions for reporting the experience of non-voluntarily thinking of something, and this reflects how common this experience is. In many of these expressions, what is thought of is characterized in active terms, while the person who thinks of it, or her mind, is characterized as inert or passive. A solution can suddenly ‘come to mind’, ‘suggest itself to you’, ‘present itself to you’, ‘occur to you’, ‘strike you’, or ‘hit you’. It is therefore natural to associate imaginativeness with inspiration.

6. The imaginativeness of persons We can use this account to say what it is for a person to be imaginative. Many philosophers have held that the imaginativeness of persons is an ability.62 This is mistaken. If imaginativeness were an ability, then presumably it would be the ability to act or omit or think (etc.) imaginatively. But a person could have this ability without exercising it. And one cannot be an imaginative person without ever acting, omitting, or thinking (etc.) imaginatively. Therefore, imaginativeness is not an ability. The imagination is presumably an ability, but imaginativeness is not. Imaginativeness is, rather, a propensity. In at least in one sense of ‘propensity’, if a person has a propensity to f, then she has f-ed. If someone has a propensity to commit crime, for instance, then she has committed crime. My account of the imaginativeness of acts, omissions, and products shows what kind of propensity the imaginativeness of persons is. If that account is correct, a person who does something imaginative, produces something imaginative, omits to do something it is imaginative to omit to do, etc., thinks of something it is imaginative to think of. This strongly suggests that imaginativeness is a propensity to think of what it is imaginative to think of.

62 See ibid., p. 185; Margaret A. Boden, ‘Creativity in a Nutshell’, in Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 29; Berys Gaut, ‘Creativity and Skill’, in Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley, eds, The Idea of Creativity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 95. Gaut has since changed his view on this.

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There is another reason to believe this. In many instances, both thinking of an act and performing the act one has thought of can be imaginative. A way of rearranging the furniture can be both an imaginative rearrangement to think of and an imaginative rearrangement to undertake. A chess move can be both an imaginative move to think of and an imaginative move to make. But a person who has a propensity both to think of acts it is imaginative to think of, and to perform those acts, is no more imaginative than she would be if she only had a propensity to think of those acts. A person who is constantly thinking of imaginative rearrangements of the furniture, but has no interest in actually rearranging the furniture in those ways and does not do so, would not be more imaginative if she also had a propensity to rearrange the furniture in the ways she thinks of. A chess player who always thinks of imaginative moves but never makes them may lack confidence or a competitive streak, but she is no less imaginative than she would be if she also had a propensity to make those moves. We would expect this to be otherwise if the imaginativeness of persons were simply a propensity to do or produce or omit to do (etc.) what it is imaginative to do, produce, omit to do (etc.), and not, specifically, a propensity to think of what it is imaginative to think of. If the chess player in my example had a propensity not only to think of those moves, but also to make them, she would have a greater propensity to do what it is imaginative to do. But she would not be more imaginative, as we would expect if the less specific characterization of imaginativeness were correct. This suggests that the imaginativeness of persons is a propensity to think of what it is imaginative to think of. We already have an account of being an imaginative f to think of. I said that something is an imaginative f to think of only if: (1) It is an unobvious f to think of, and (2) It is plausible to believe that it is reasonably likely to be an achievement. This allows us to characterize the imaginativeness of persons in more detail. The imaginativeness of persons is a propensity to think of unobvious acts, omissions, products (etc.) which it is plausible to believe are reasonably likely to be achievements.

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7. Imaginativeness and the endowments of good critics According to my account, imaginativeness is a certain kind of aptitude for thinking-of. This marks a basic difference between imaginativeness and many other endowments, including the endowments I have so far identified as endowments of good critics. Some of these endowments are not aptitudes at all. Knowledgeability, I argued, is an endowment of a good critic. But whatever propositional knowledge is, it is presumably not an aptitude for anything. So, too, being disposed to respond in appropriate affective or conative ways can indicate sensitivity, intelligence, and understanding, but it seems mistaken to describe it as an aptitude. Among the endowments of a critic that are aptitudes, imaginativeness contrasts with good judgement. I identified several matters concerning which the critic must have good judgement: she must be a good judge of what needs to be communicated to the readership to enable them to appreciate the work better, of how to communicate it to them so as to enable this, and of the appreciative relevance of features, parts, represented elements, responses, and facts. To make a judgement about such matters is not to think of something. Perceptiveness is another example of an aptitude for something other than thinking-of. Indeed, my account of imaginativeness enables us to see more clearly the differences between perceptiveness and imaginativeness— differences that might otherwise be hard to articulate.63 For there are important similarities between perceptiveness and imaginativeness. Like imaginativeness, perceptiveness is related to obviousness. Perceptive people grasp what is not obvious. And plainly, like imaginativeness, perceptiveness enables people to become aware of what is, at least potentially, valuable. They grasp what is potentially useful, illuminating, relevant, and so forth. Perceptiveness differs from imaginativeness in that it is an aptitude for acquiring knowledge, not an aptitude for thinking-of. It can be perceptive to see, to observe, to note, to grasp, to recognize, to register, or to hear that 63 Philosophers sometimes mistake instances of perceptiveness for instances of imaginativeness. Some of Peter Strawson’s examples of imaginativeness, such as ‘the sensitive observer of a personal situation seeing that situation as one of humiliation for one party and triumph for another’, are actually cases of perceptiveness. See P. F. Strawson, ‘Imagination and Perception’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 61.

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something is (or is not) so. It may be perceptive of a museum curator to recognize that a certain item is a fake. As I noted in Chapter 2, it was perceptive of Frank Kermode to see that the Fool’s line in King Lear is an allusion to a common saying. To take another example, R. R. R. Smith, in a discussion of the Belvedere Torso, perceptively observes that ‘the famous Torso is seated, not on a lion-skin of Herakles, but on a pantherskin, the regular animal wear of satyrs.’64 This supports his hypothesis that the Torso is a satyr, and not, as has been believed, Herakles. Perceptiveness is not only an aptitude for acquiring knowledge, but an aptitude for acquiring knowledge in certain ways rather than others. It cannot, for example, be perceptive to acquire knowledge through testimony. Certainly, it may be perceptive to figure out that someone is telling you that p, or that she is trying to tell you that p. But it cannot be perceptive of you to learn that p from someone else. Perceptiveness is not only an aptitude for acquiring knowledge in certain ways. It is also an aptitude for acquiring knowledge of facts of certain kinds—namely, unobvious facts. Recall my distinction between the kinds of obviousness in question when we use the constructions: (I) It is obvious that p. (II) Such-and-such is an obvious f to f. Imaginativeness is opposed to the second kind of obviousness. But perceptiveness is opposed to the first kind. If it was perceptive of a person to acquire the knowledge that p, then it was not obvious that p. That is, it was not evident that p. It was perceptive of the museum curator to see that the artwork is a fake, because it was not obvious that it is a fake. It was perceptive of Kermode to recognize that the Fool’s line is an allusion to the common saying about fools and kings, because it was not obvious that it is.65 It is therefore clear how imaginativeness and perceptiveness differ. A person is perceptive in virtue of being good at acquiring, in certain ways, unobvious items of knowledge. A person is imaginative in virtue of being good at thinking of (apparent) achievements that are not obvious 64

R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 133. My claim does not imply that it cannot be obvious to the person herself that p, in the context in which she acquired the knowledge that p. It may have been immediately obvious to Smith, when he saw it, that the Belvedere Torso is seated on a panther-skin. But that is consistent with its not having been obvious, in that context, that the Belvedere Torso is seated on a panther-skin. 65

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achievements, or apparent achievements, to think of. Thinking of an achievement is a different kind of attainment than acquiring knowledge. An aptitude for the one is therefore different from an aptitude for the other. This is not to deny that knowledge acquisition can be one aim of thinking-of (e.g., the attempt to think of explanations). Nor is it to deny that something (e.g., a critic’s remark) can be both imaginative and perceptive. But what makes it perceptive will be different from what makes it imaginative.

8. The role of imaginativeness in criticism We are now in a position to say what the role of imaginativeness in criticism is. In my account of the endowments of good critics, I began by saying what good critics are good at, given what the aims of criticism are. Notably, a good critic is good at making various kinds of judgement (e.g., of appreciative relevance), and at acquiring knowledge of various kinds of fact (e.g., about properties of the work), on the basis of her awareness of the work. Is she, in addition, good at thinking of things? Imaginativeness is an aptitude for thinking-of. To determine its role in criticism, we must first answer the question: what are good critics good at thinking of ? My account of criticism suggests a two-part answer. First, good critics are good at thinking of ways of communicating effectively. As I argued in Chapter 2, the critic must be articulate. She must communicate what appreciation of the work can involve in such a way as to be fairly readily understood by her readership. She must also communicate in such a way as to enable the readership to appreciate the work better. She must therefore think of ways of communicating that will achieve these aims. Second, the critic needs to be good at thinking of ways of appreciating the work better than the readership would be likely to appreciate it if they were aware of the work without her criticism. One appreciates a work by responding appropriately to its features, parts, or represented elements for appropriate reasons. You can come to appreciate a work better than you did before in two ways. First, you can respond to an object of an appropriate response in an appropriate way in which you did not respond to that object before. Second, you can respond appropriately to an object of an appropriate response for an appropriate reason for which you did not

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respond in that way to that object before. Therefore, for a critic to think of ways of appreciating the work better is for her to think of (i) appropriate responses to some object O, which the reader is unlikely to have had to O, or of (ii) appropriate reasons for an appropriate response R to O, but for which the readership is unlikely to have had R to O. In short, the critic thinks of appropriate responses and appropriate reasons. So good critics are indeed good at thinking of things. They are good at thinking of ways of communicating effectively and ways of better appreciating a work. To say this, however, is not yet to establish the role of imaginativeness in criticism. Imaginativeness enables a critic to think of unobvious things. It is evident that many effective ways of communicating are not obvious ways of communicating to think of. Miró’s description of his response to Courbet’s Stormy Sea, quoted in Chapter 2, is an example: ‘One feels physically drawn to it, as by an undertow. It is fatal. Even if this painting had been behind our backs, we would have felt it.’ This is far from an obvious way of describing this response to think of, but it is a very effective description. It is also clear that many ways of better appreciating a work are unobvious ways of better appreciating it to think of. That the 33 cantos of the Paradiso and Purgatorio have a salient relation to the number of the persons of the Trinity is not an obvious reason to admire the design of the Divine Comedy to think of. But admiring its design for this reason is a way of better appreciating the work. Another example is a comment Keats made about a line by Shakespeare, according to Leigh Hunt: Mr Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakspeare’s line about bees:– The singing masons building roofs of gold. This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Mr Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakspeare’s negligence (if negligence it was) had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.66

That the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles is like the continued buzzing sound bees make is certainly not an obvious reason to Leigh Hunt, ‘Retrospective Views of Keats’, in G. M. Matthews, ed., John Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 244. 66

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admire the line to think of. But it is plausible that appreciation can involve admiring it for this reason. It was highly imaginative of Keats to think of this way of better appreciating Shakespeare’s line. I conclude, therefore, that the role of imaginativeness in criticism is twofold. First, it enables the critic to think of ways of better appreciating a work that are unobvious ways of better appreciating it to think of. Second, it enables her to think of effective ways of communicating that are unobvious ways of communicating to think of. Note that the role of imaginativeness is not to enable the critic to think of what it is plausible to believe would be ways of better appreciating the work or effective ways of communicating. My account allows that it can be imaginative to think of what are actually ineffective ways of communicating to one’s audience—provided it was plausible to believe they had a reasonable chance of being effective; and it can also be imaginative to think of what it was plausible to believe were ways of better appreciating a work even if they are not actually ways of better appreciating the work. Imaginative failure in criticism is certainly possible. But to characterize its role in criticism, we must characterize the kind of success it enables the critic to bring off, as I have done here. This characterization of the role of imaginativeness in criticism shows that imaginativeness enhances aptitudes I have already identified. I said that good critics are articulate: that is, good at expressing themselves so as to be fairly readily understood. Imaginativeness enhances articulacy, by enabling the critic to think of unobvious effective ways of communicating. So too, I said that good critics are good at thinking of responses appreciation can involve: clearly, imaginativeness enhances this aptitude as well, by enabling them to think of appropriate responses that are not obvious responses to think of. As I observed above, several aspects of criticism have seemed to philosophers to indicate a significant role for imaginativeness in criticism. In the remainder of this book, I will focus on one of these aspects: namely, the prevalence of metaphor in critics’ descriptions of artworks. I will consider the role of metaphor in criticism in the light of my account of the aims of criticism and the role of imaginativeness in it. My aim in the remainder of this book is to explain why metaphor is so prevalent in art-critical descriptions.

4 Metaphor and Likeness The conclusions I have reached in the first three chapters will help us to explain the role of metaphor in criticism. But we must also have an account of metaphor. We must establish what people who use metaphor are communicating. This is what I will attempt in this chapter. Outside philosophy, metaphors are commonly believed to be similes with the word ‘like’ or ‘as’ removed. This is what many people are taught at school. According to this view, Romeo communicates the same thing by saying, ‘Juliet is the sun’, as he would have communicated by saying, ‘Juliet is like the sun’, though the effects on the audience may be different. Inside philosophy, this view is almost universally rejected by those working on metaphor. The so-called ‘comparison theory’ or ‘simile theory’ of metaphor is generally thought to have been defeated by numerous objections. According to many philosophers working on metaphor today, likeness does not play a role in determining what is communicated with a metaphor or in enabling readers to grasp what is communicated—or at least, it does not do so in every case. I hold that this widespread view is wrong. Likeness always plays a role in determining what is communicated with metaphor and in enabling readers to grasp it. The many objections to comparison theories of metaphor fail to undermine this claim. But comparison theories of metaphor are not correct either. They are much closer to the truth than is commonly allowed. But a trope can be based on likeness without being a comparison. I do not claim that all metaphors are comparisons, but that likeness always plays a certain role in determining what is communicated and in enabling us to grasp it. In this chapter, I will explain what that role is. There are several well-known questions about metaphor I will not attempt to answer. The claim I will defend is about what is grasped by someone on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with metaphor. It is also a claim about what enables such a person to grasp what

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she does. But I will not claim (or deny) that what is grasped by such a person is the speaker’s meaning, semantic content, what is said, what is conversationally implicated, what she is caused to notice, etc. Similarly, my claim is also not a claim about whether what is grasped is the metaphor’s meaning or content. I am not concerned with classifying, under any of these heads, what is grasped by the metaphor-user’s audience. It is unnecessary, for the purpose of explaining why metaphor is so often used in criticism, to take a stand on these matters. Most theorists of metaphor can agree with me without compromising whatever view they have on the matters mentioned in the last paragraph. My account is, in this respect, a modest account of metaphor. Accordingly, I call the claim I will defend the ‘Minimal Thesis’ about metaphor. Though this claim is modest, its truth has gone unrecognized in contemporary debates about metaphor. This has had damaging consequences in many philosophical discussions of metaphor, as we shall see. Hereafter, I will use the phrase ‘what is grasped by a reader who understands the metaphor’, rather than the more cumbersome ‘what is grasped by a reader on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with metaphor’. The more cumbersome phrase is less liable to mislead, as some might hold that a reader who understands a metaphor is just a reader who sees what it means or grasps what is said. Since I do not wish to commit to a claim about what a metaphor-user says or what metaphors mean, I do not wish to be taken to be making a claim about what a reader understands when understanding is taken to be specifically a matter of grasping what is said or seeing what the metaphor means. From now on, ‘a reader who understands the metaphor’ is to be taken as ‘a reader on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with metaphor’. The structure of this chapter is as follows. In the first section, I introduce some concepts that I will employ in stating the Minimal Thesis. I then state the thesis, and clarify and elaborate it. In the second section, I discuss prominent objections to other theories of metaphor. I explain why my account avoids these objections. I address objections that do apply in the third section. I conclude, in the final section, by providing further support for the Minimal Thesis by pointing out a range of facts that it allows us to explain.

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1. The Minimal Thesis We often speak of whole sentences or other semantically complex expressions, used in a certain way, as metaphors. We might describe the whole sentence, ‘Juliet is the sun’, used in the way Romeo uses it, as a metaphor. Obviously, however, not every expression in this sentence is being used metaphorically, for ‘Juliet’ is not being used metaphorically. I will call the expression(s) in the metaphor that are used metaphorically ‘the metaphorical element(s)’ of the metaphor.1 For example, the word ‘sun’ is a metaphorical element of Romeo’s metaphor. A metaphor can contain only metaphorical elements.2 Prince Hal calls Falstaff ‘woolsack’ while asking him a question; but he would still have used a metaphor if he had said only ‘Woolsack!’ upon seeing him.3 Many kinds of expression, in many grammatical forms and positions, can be the metaphorical element of a metaphor. For example, a noun or noun phrase can be a metaphorical element, and there are no apparent restrictions on its case. Nouns used metaphorically can appear in subject position (‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns, puzzles the will’4), as part of a predicate (‘Juliet is the sun’), and in the vocative case (‘Woolsack!’). If a verb or verb phrase is used metaphorically, there is no apparent restriction on the verb’s mood, as the imperative mood of ‘cast’ used metaphorically in this proverb from the Book of Ecclesiastes suggests: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’5 Adjectives used metaphorically can occur in the grammatically predicative position (‘Silence is golden’) or in the grammatically attributive position (‘a big fat lie’). Adverbs, too, can be used metaphorically. Emily Dickinson wrote a poem beginning: ‘To fight aloud, is very brave’.6 The variety of forms the metaphorical element can take partly explains the commonly

1 Others have drawn distinctions similar to this (e.g., Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘Metaphorical Senses’, Noûs 12/1 (1978), p. 3). 2 Contra Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 54 (1954–1955), p. 275; and Beardsley, ‘Metaphorical Senses’, p. 3. 3 William Shakespeare, Henry IV: Part One, ed. David Bevington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2.4.129. 4 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3.1.80–81. 5 Ecclesiastes 11:1 (King James version). 6 Emily Dickinson, ‘To fight aloud, is very brave’, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), no. 138, p. 70.

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noted fact that metaphors come in far more forms than the simple subjectpredicate type exemplified by ‘Juliet is the sun’. Still, there appear to be restrictions on what expressions can be used metaphorically. The interjection ‘Ah!’ can be used sarcastically, but it is hard to imagine metaphorical uses of it. Perhaps the only ground for saying that such determiners as ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘any’, and ‘both’ can be used metaphorically is that they can determine a noun used metaphorically. And it is doubtful that such adverbs and adverbials as ‘very’, ‘also’, ‘primarily’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘however’, and ‘therefore’ can be used metaphorically, at least if they are also used adverbially.7 In many metaphors, the metaphorical element is used to characterize something. In calling Falstaff ‘woolsack’, Hal characterizes him as fat. One can characterize a child as very well-behaved by calling her ‘an angel’, or a beer as tasting very good by describing it as ‘nectar’. I will call what is characterized with the metaphorical element the ‘subject’ of the metaphor. Metaphors in which a metaphorical element is used to characterize something dominate philosophical discussions of metaphor. But not all metaphors are of this kind. In metaphorical questions, the metaphorical element may not be used to characterize anything. In the question, ‘Is Juliet the sun?’ Juliet is not characterized with ‘sun’, but ‘sun’ is used metaphorically. Metaphors in the antecedent or the consequent of a conditional do not necessarily characterize anything with the metaphorical element either. The metaphor used by someone who says, ‘If Juliet is the sun, then you should marry her’, does not. There are presumably many other kinds of case in which this is so. The notion of characterizing something is broader than that of predicating a property of something. Many expressions can be used to characterize something as having a certain property without being used to predicate a property. For example, it is possible to characterize someone with an expression by using that expression to address her. One can characterize a deity as mighty when one addresses him by saying ‘O mighty one’, even though one does not predicate mightiness of him. Adjectives used in the attributive position can characterize something as having certain properties, even though, so used, they do not predicate properties. Accordingly, when I say that the metaphorical element of a metaphor can be used to characterize, this is not equivalent to the claim that it can be used to predicate properties. 7

For a way in which they could be used metaphorically but not adverbially, see the discussion of anthimeria, below (p. 120).

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Among metaphors in which a metaphorical element is used to characterize a subject, there are various cases to be aware of. First, some only characterize their subjects as having certain properties, and some characterize their subjects as lacking certain properties.8 If Mercutio had told Romeo, ‘Juliet is not the sun’, he might characterize her as lacking certain properties (e.g., those which Romeo had characterized her as having). If there are negative properties, such as not being beautiful or primeness (the property numbers can have), then perhaps such metaphors also characterize their subjects as having negative properties. But the contrast between metaphors that only characterize something as having properties, and metaphors that characterize something as lacking properties, would remain. Second, if we negate a metaphor in which the metaphorical element is used to characterize something as lacking some property, the resultant metaphor can characterize the subject as having that property. ‘No man is an island’ is an example. As used by Donne, this characterizes men as having significant relationships with others. It does this by negating a metaphor (of men as islands) that would have characterized them as lacking significant relationships with others. Third, the content of someone’s speech, thinking, or propositional attitudes can be given with a metaphor, as in ‘Romeo believes that Juliet is the sun’. This metaphor characterizes Romeo as believing that (for example) Juliet is far superior to those around her. The claim I will defend is not a claim about all metaphors. It is about metaphors in which a metaphorical element is used to characterize a subject as having certain non-negative properties, and in which this is not done by forming a metaphor from a metaphor that would have characterized it as lacking certain properties, or by giving the content of the subject’s speech, thinking, or propositional attitudes with a metaphor. However, if I am right about how these metaphors are based on likeness, it will be evident that other metaphors are also based on likeness. In the case of metaphors that characterize something as having a property, there is an important connection between understanding the metaphor, on the one hand, and the properties the subject is characterized as 8 In earlier work, I claimed: ‘If metaphors express or communicate anything, then presumably they characterize something. . . . This being so, the metaphor must characterize it as having some property or properties. You cannot characterize anything without characterizing it as having some property’ ( James Grant, ‘The Dispensability of Metaphor’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50/3 (2010), p. 271). I now retract these claims. In Chapter 5 of this book, I have amended the argument in which these claims originally figured.

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having, on the other. If a property is one that the subject is characterized as having, then coming to understand the metaphor, or coming to understand it better, can at least partly consist in grasping that the subject has that property. Grasping this is at least part of what being on the receiving end of a successful act of communication with this metaphor amounts to. This is true of non-metaphorical characterizations as well. Coming to understand the utterance of ‘O mighty one’ consists, at least partly, in grasping that the god is mighty.9 Before stating the Minimal Thesis, we also need to make some distinctions between types of property. Suppose that this tomato is red, and this stop sign is too. The stop sign therefore has the property, being like this tomato. I will call this type of property a ‘likeness’. One property that makes the stop sign like the tomato is redness. I will call this type of property a ‘likeness-maker’.10 I will also describe properties as likeness-makers for a certain likeness. Thus, redness is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like this tomato. Sometimes, when we speak of ‘the likenesses’ or ‘the similarities’ between objects, we are talking about the properties that make them alike—that is, the likeness-makers. But I will not use the word ‘likeness’ in this way. We should also distinguish between likenesses, such as being like this tomato, and determinates of likenesses, such as looking like this tomato, tasting like this tomato, being shaped like this tomato, and so forth. This distinction between being like N and V-ing like N, where ‘V-ing’ is something other than ‘being’, tends to be overlooked, as we shall see.11 9 Note that this is not a claim about what one is required to grasp in order to understand the metaphor. It is a claim about what coming to understand the metaphor, or coming to understand it better, can partly consist in. One can be required to grasp a certain thought in order to understand an utterance without its being true that grasping that thought is part of what coming to understand the utterance can consist in. We may need to grasp the thought in order to grasp what is communicated, but the thought itself may not be part of what is communicated. What is distinctive about a property that something is characterized as having is that coming to understand the characterization, or coming to understand it better, can consist at least partly in grasping the thought that the thing has that property. 10 In choosing this term, I do not mean to imply support for truthmaker theory. 11 It is worth distinguishing both likeness-makers and determinates of a likeness. This is worth doing even though it may be that determinates of a likeness can be likeness-makers for that likeness. Whether this is possible depends on whether, for example, Audrey Hepburn looks like Audrey Hepburn, France is shaped like France, and so forth. If Audrey Hepburn has the property, looking like Audrey Hepburn, then looking like Audrey Hepburn is both a determinate of the likeness, being like Audrey Hepburn, and a likeness-

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Lastly, I want to distinguish between likeness-makers and properties the possession of which is a way of possessing a likeness-maker. The determinate-determinable relation can be used to illustrate this distinction. If redness is a likeness-maker for the likeness being like this tomato, then scarlet is a property the possession of which is a way of possessing this likeness-maker. Being scarlet is a way of being red. But if the tomato is not scarlet, then scarlet is not itself a likeness-maker for this likeness. Rather, being scarlet is a way of possessing a likeness-maker for this likeness. In what follows, instead of the ungainly phrase, ‘properties the possession of which is a way of possessing a likeness-maker’, I will simply use ‘ways of possessing a likeness-maker’. But strictly, it is possessing the property, not the property itself, that is a way of possessing the likenessmaker. I explain below why I shall be appealing to this relation, rather than simply to the determinate–determinable relation, which illustrates it. I can now state the thesis I wish to defend in this chapter. The first part of the Minimal Thesis about metaphors of the kind I distinguished above is the following claim: Each property a metaphor’s subject is characterized with the metaphorical element as having is either: (1) (2) (3) (4)

A likeness indicated by the metaphorical element, or A determinate of such a likeness, or A likeness-maker for such a likeness, or A way of possessing a likeness-maker for such a likeness.

For short, in what follows I will say, ‘the properties the metaphor attributes to its subject’ instead of ‘the properties the metaphor’s subject is characterized with the metaphorical element as having’. This claim about the properties attributed by a metaphor suggests a claim about part of what enables us to understand a metaphor. To understand metaphors, we must employ our knowledge of what likeness is indicated by the metaphorical element, and our knowledge of what properties are likeness-makers maker for this likeness. Whatever the correct view on this matter is, it does not affect the truth of the claim I will defend. And it is worth speaking of both kinds of property, whatever the correct view is. There is still an important distinction between determinates of a likeness, on the one hand, and properties that are likeness-makers for, but not determinates of, that likeness, on the other. And even if some determinates of a likeness are likeness-makers for that likeness, not all are. If this tomato does not talk, then talking like this tomato is not a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like this tomato.

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for, determinates of, or ways of possessing likeness-makers for, that likeness. This claim about understanding is the second part of the Minimal Thesis. If this is right, then likeness plays an essential role in determining what is communicated with metaphors, and in enabling us to understand them. Contrary to what is often assumed, the traditional idea that metaphor is essentially related to similarity is right. The Minimal Thesis therefore needs defending. Before I defend it, however, I must make several clarifications about it. First, the Minimal Thesis, being a disjunctive claim, leaves it open whether every metaphor that attributes properties attributes a likeness. It may be, for example, that the properties attributed by some metaphors are all likeness-makers for a likeness indicated by the metaphorical element, and the likeness indicated is not attributed. But in such a case, we would still employ our knowledge of what properties are likeness-makers for an indicated likeness in order to understand the metaphor. Second, the Minimal Thesis states a constraint on what properties can be attributed by a metaphor. But it is not a formula for determining what properties are attributed by a metaphor. For instance, I am not making any claim about what determines which likeness is indicated by the metaphorical element. In particular, I am not assuming that, if E is the metaphorical element, then the likeness indicated by it is always being like (an) E. For example, it is possible to characterize someone as aggressive by describing him metaphorically as ‘a gorilla’, even though (as both speaker and audience may know) gorillas are not aggressive. It is plausible, and consistent with the Minimal Thesis, to claim that the likeness indicated by the metaphorical use of ‘gorilla’ is being like a stereotypical gorilla rather than being like a gorilla. So I do not assume that there is a formula applicable in every case for moving from the metaphorical element to the likeness indicated by it; nor is the Minimal Thesis an attempt to state one. But it is normally fairly easy to work out what the indicated likeness is. Similarly, I am not making a claim about what determines which likeness-makers, determinates of likenesses, or ways of possessing likeness-makers are attributed. No metaphor that attributes likeness-makers attributes every likeness-maker for the likeness it indicates. Romeo’s metaphor does not characterize Juliet as a star, or as withering the crops when there is no rain. And the same expression, used as a metaphorical

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element, can attribute different likeness-makers to different subjects, even when it indicates the same likeness. We attribute different likeness-makers for the likeness being like the sun when we describe Juliet as the sun than we do when we describe Achilles as the sun. The question therefore arises of what determines which likeness-makers are attributed. This is an important question, but the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to any particular answer to it. The third point concerns likenesses. There are two varieties of likeness, and it is important to be clear on the difference between them. We sometimes attribute to an object a likeness to a particular item. When you say, ‘She is like her father’, you imply that there is a particular person she is like. Other likenesses are different. You can say, ‘Richard is like a lion’, without implying that there is some particular lion he is like. The question, ‘Which lion is he like?’ is obviously out of place here.12 So too, a metaphor such as ‘Richard is a lion’ can indicate a likeness to a lion, without its being the case that it indicates a likeness to a particular lion. If the Minimal Thesis is correct, it is never out of place to ask about a metaphor, ‘What is the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element a likeness to?’ In this case, the answer is: ‘A lion’. But this should not be mistaken for the claim that it is never out of place to ask, ‘What particular item is the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element a likeness to?’ Fourth, I hold that metaphors can attribute not only likeness-makers, but determinates of likenesses and ways of possessing likeness-makers, because of cases like the following. Suppose that someone says, ‘The forms in all of Kandinsky’s paintings are alive with movement’. It would be implausible to think that understanding a metaphorical use of this sentence, in most normal contexts, involves grasping that the forms in all of Kandinsky’s paintings seem to leap out at the viewer, or that they seem to dance, or that they seem to move quickly across the canvas, etc. Rather, understanding this metaphor involves grasping that the forms look like something alive with movement. Likeness-makers that are not determinates of being like something alive with movement are not attributed. I also hold that ways of possessing a likeness-maker are sometimes attributed by a metaphor. For example, the metaphor ‘Sally is a block of 12

See John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 64–66.

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ice’ attributes emotional unresponsiveness to Sally. Unresponsiveness is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like a block of ice (physical rigidity being a kind of unresponsiveness). And being emotionally unresponsive is a way of being unresponsive. But emotional unresponsiveness is not itself a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like a block of ice. In some metaphors, other words in the sentence help us to work out which ways of possessing a likeness-maker are attributed. The word ‘bloom’ does this in Wallace Stevens’s line: Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.13

The garden is not (or at least, not merely) characterized as being in a state of disorder. Being in a state of disorder is a property that makes it like a slum. Rather, it is characterized as being overgrown, which is a way of being in a state of disorder, but not a property that makes it like a slum. We work this out at least partly because of the presence of the word ‘bloom’. I leave it open whether all such cases are cases of determinates of determinable likeness-makers. How the determinate–determinable relation should be characterized, and whether and how it should be distinguished from relations like the realizer–realized relation, are vexed questions that have received a steadily increasing amount of attention in recent years. If, as some claim, a property is a determinate of another property only if, necessarily, whatever instantiates the first instantiates the second (e.g., necessarily, whatever is scarlet is red), then it is doubtful that the determinate-determinable relation covers enough cases.14 For example, it is not obvious that being overgrown would count as a determinate of being in a state of disorder. For it is not obvious that whatever is overgrown is in a state of disorder. Therefore, I employ instead the notion of a property that is a way of possessing another property. Fifth, it may be that some metaphors attribute properties that the metaphor-user did not intend to attribute. For example, Stephen Yablo, among others, argues that sometimes a speaker uses metaphor to prompt her reader to discover things she did not herself have in mind. Her ‘sense of

13 Wallace Stevens, ‘Banal Sojourn’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 62, l. 4. 14 For a good summary of some of the main characteristics attributed to the determinatedeterminable relation, see Jessica Wilson, ‘Determination, Realization and Mental Causation’, Philosophical Studies 145 (2009), p. 151.

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the potential metaphorical truthfulness of a form of words outruns her sense of the particular truth(s) being expressed’.15 It may be correct to regard the metaphor itself as communicating more than the metaphor-user would have realized, as with certain poetic metaphors. Sixth, it may be that, for many metaphors and for many properties, it is unclear whether the metaphor attributes them. For instance, Stanley Cavell is frequently quoted explaining ‘Juliet is the sun’ in this way: ‘Romeo means that Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that only in her nourishment can he grow.’16 Now, it is fairly clear that Romeo does not mean that his day begins with Juliet. However, if we allow that a metaphor may attribute properties that its user did not intend to attribute, then it is not clear (to me, at least) either that Romeo’s metaphor does, or that it does not, communicate that Romeo’s day begins with Juliet. The sort of elaboration in which Cavell engages here—to which some poetic metaphors, at least, seem to lend themselves—is likely to turn up numerous properties that are neither clearly attributed nor clearly not attributed. A similar but distinct seventh point is this. It may be that at least some metaphors attribute indefinitely many properties to their subjects. It may not be clear when we would be done listing all of the properties that are attributed by the metaphor—whether or not each of the properties already on our list clearly is attributed. Simon Blackburn, among others, has claimed that ‘there is no single list of literal thoughts which cashes’ in certain metaphors.17 Considering metaphors provided with Cavell-style explanations, Blackburn writes that ‘the metaphor is in effect an invitation to explore comparisons. But it is not associated with any belief or intention, let alone any set of rules, determining when the exploration is finished.’18 Again, endorsement of the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to a view on this. It commits one to the claim that each of the

15 Stephen Yablo, ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, in Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 138. 16 Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 78–79. 17 Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 174. 18 Ibid. See also Severin Schroeder, ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, in Semantik und Ontologie, ed. Mark Siebel and Mark Textor (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2004), pp. 95–100, for recent (and sceptical) discussion of claims for metaphor’s open-endedness.

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properties attributed will be of one of the four kinds mentioned in the statement of the Minimal Thesis. Finally, I have claimed that understanding a metaphor involves knowing what at least some of the properties it attributes are. Perhaps, for some metaphors, there are certain properties you must know to be attributed in order to count as understanding the metaphor at all. Perhaps, for other metaphors, you need merely know sufficiently many of the properties the metaphor attributes in order to understand the metaphor, even though there is no property such that you must know that it is attributed to understand the metaphor. And finally, if some metaphors attribute indefinitely many properties, understanding them is surely a matter of degree. If Cavell’s explanation of ‘Juliet is the sun’ is right, you have not failed to understand the metaphor if you do not know that the metaphor attributes the properties he claims are attributed; but presumably you would understand the metaphor better or more fully, other things being equal, if you did know this. The fact that likenesses ought to have such an important role in an account of metaphor is easily obscured by the contemporary philosophical literature. Much of this literature is hostile, in particular, to the view that metaphors are comparisons. The Minimal Thesis may remind many of this view. It is not, however, a version of the comparison theory. The comparison theory is a claim about what metaphors mean and/or what metaphor-users say. The Minimal Thesis, as I have stressed, is a claim about neither. Moreover, I do not support the comparison theory. As I shall explain below, many of the objections usually thought to defeat the comparison theory fail. It is much closer to the truth than many philosophers today believe. But the comparison theory is nevertheless false. There is a simple refutation of the comparison theory. A comparison is a statement of similarity. But not all metaphors are statements. The metaphor used by someone who asks, ‘Is Juliet the sun?’ is not a statement. Again, not all metaphors are statements of similarity. The metaphors used by someone who says, ‘If Juliet is the sun, then you should marry her’, or ‘Juliet is not the sun’, are not statements of similarity. Therefore, not all metaphors are comparisons. Therefore, the comparison theory is false. Nevertheless, because so many other objections have been levelled against the comparison theory, one might think the Minimal Thesis is

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vulnerable to them. It is therefore necessary to point out which of these objections are, and which are not, applicable to the Minimal Thesis. In the next section, I will explain how the Minimal Thesis avoids many of these objections. In section 3, I will identify, and argue against, the principal objections that do apply to the Minimal Thesis.

2. Inapplicable objections The objections raised against the comparison theory of metaphor attack different views that are sometimes not distinguished. First, some apply to the view that a metaphor is just an attribution of a likeness. On this view, Romeo’s metaphor means the same as a literal utterance of ‘Juliet is like the sun’, where such a literal utterance is understood as only attributing the likeness being like the sun, and not likeness-makers. Second, some objections apply to the view that a metaphor is an attribution of both a likeness and likeness-makers for that likeness. On that view, what is communicated by Romeo’s metaphor is what is communicated by: ‘Juliet is like the sun in that she is a sustainer of all that is good in life, far superior to those around her, [etc.]’. So not only do some of the objections to the comparison theory not apply to the Minimal Thesis: some of them do not apply to all versions of the comparison theory either. Let us first consider those objections that apply only to the claim that metaphors are merely attributions of likenesses. Davidson says that all views that identify either the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of a metaphor with the literal meaning of a related simile share a fatal defect. They make the hidden meaning of the metaphor all too obvious and accessible. In each case the hidden meaning is to be found simply by looking to the literal meaning of what is usually a painfully trivial simile. This is like that—Tolstoy like an infant, the earth like a floor. It is trivial because everything is like everything, and in endless ways. Metaphors are often very difficult to interpret and, so it is said, impossible to paraphrase. But with this theory, interpretation and paraphrase typically are ready to the hand of the most callow.19

19 Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 254. See also Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 209.

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There are, in fact, two objections in this passage. The first might be called the Argument from Difficulty. If the literal or figurative meaning of a metaphor were the literal meaning of some related simile, then it would be easy to interpret and to paraphrase metaphors. To do so, one would only have to identify the related simile. This is typically easy. But it is often very difficult to interpret and paraphrase a metaphor. Therefore, neither the literal nor the figurative meaning of a metaphor is the literal meaning of some related simile. The second is what might be called the Argument from Triviality. If the literal or figurative meaning of a metaphor were the literal meaning of some related simile, then metaphors would usually be trivial. For the related simile is usually trivial—indeed, it is usually painfully trivial— because everything is like everything. But metaphors are not usually trivial. The Argument from Difficulty does not apply to the Minimal Thesis. First, the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to the claim which Davidson thinks has the absurd consequence that metaphors are typically easy to interpret and paraphrase—namely, the claim that the literal or figurative meaning of a metaphor is the literal meaning of a related simile. As I have said, the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to any claim about what a metaphor means. It also does not commit one to the similar claim that a metaphor communicates only what some related likeness-ascription does. One might think that this claim, too, would have the same absurd consequence, at least if one thinks that it is typically easy to identify the related likeness-ascription. But the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to the claim that a metaphor communicates only what some likeness-ascription does. It is consistent with the Minimal Thesis to hold, and I do hold, that metaphors attribute likeness-makers, determinates of likenesses, and ways of possessing likeness-makers. So even if it is typically easy to identify the related likeness-ascription, but not typically easy to paraphrase and interpret metaphors, this poses no problem for a supporter of the Minimal Thesis. The Argument from Triviality is also inapplicable to the Minimal Thesis, and for similar reasons. Even if every ascription of a likeness is trivial, not every ascription of a likeness-maker, determinate of a likeness, or way of possessing a likeness-maker, is trivial. So the Minimal Thesis does not commit one to the claim that metaphors are usually trivial. It is also worth noting that Davidson is wrong about similes here. To be trivial is to be unimportant or uninteresting, which is reflected in

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Davidson’s remark about a metaphor’s corresponding simile usually being ‘painfully’ trivial. But even if it is true that everything is like everything, not all similes are unimportant or uninteresting. This simile from the Song of Songs, in which a man addresses his lover, is not: Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.20

This may be a weird and perhaps slightly hilarious simile to our ears. But it is not trivial. Much great poetry contains a wealth of interesting and powerful similes. Moreover, Davidson gives us no reason to believe that the similes that correspond to metaphors, in particular, are usually uninteresting. The point that everything is like everything does not establish this. Neither do Davidson’s examples. ‘Tolstoy is like a great moralizing infant’ is hardly an uninteresting simile; and it is not difficult to imagine a context (e.g., on the space shuttle) in which ‘The earth is like a floor’ would be interesting too. Presumably, the similes that correspond to metaphors are usually somewhat less concise than the metaphors, as they are when they are formed by adding ‘like’ or ‘as’. But this, too, does not show that they are trivial. Davidson claims not only that similes are trivial. He also claims that they are trivially true.21 When we say that something is trivially true, we say something about how evidently true it is. When Davidson says that similes are ‘trivial’ because everything is like everything, he is making a point about how evidently true they allegedly are. But this claim is wrong too. We shall see later that not all similes are trivially true. William Lycan objects that ‘some metaphorical statements are too convoluted to be parsed as similes’.22 He gives this example from Hamlet (1.3.116–117): When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows.

He comments:

20

Song of Songs 4:2. John Hyman pointed out to me that Davidson is apparently running together the notion of being trivial and that of being trivially true. 22 William G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 183. 21

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It is not literally about anyone’s blood, and blood cannot literally burn . . . ‘the soul’ is probably itself being used metaphorically, and, even if not, souls cannot literally lend anything to tongues; but ‘tongues’ is not being used to mean tongues, either, and vows are not the sorts of things that can be lent. So any simile theorist faces the daunting task of translating all of those things at once into resemblance talk. . . . A first pass might be: ‘When x, which is like a person’s blood, does something resembling burning, how prodigally y, which is like a person’s soul, does something similar to lending some things that are vowlike to z, which resembles a person’s tongue.’ We are not much the wiser. And refinement is needed, because for ‘the blood’ metaphorically to burn is probably something distinctive to a bloodlike substance, not for it to do something that resembles the literal burning of, say, a piece of wood.23

Lycan’s objection here has influenced others. Marga Reimer and Elisabeth Camp also endorse it, and claim that it poses a problem for all versions of the comparison theory.24 We might describe it as the Convolutedness Objection. There are two reasons why, as Lycan puts it, ‘we are not much the wiser’ as a result of explanations like the one he offers. First, in this explanation, we are not told what the subjects of the metaphor are. Assume for the sake of argument that all of the expressions Lycan claims are being used metaphorically in this passage are indeed being used metaphorically. (This assumption is false, but I will discuss that point in the next section.) Lycan’s explanation does not tell us what is being characterized with ‘blood’, ‘burns’, ‘soul’, ‘lends’, ‘vows’, or ‘tongue’. As I mentioned above, there may be no expression in a sentence used metaphorically that literally designates the subject(s) of the metaphor. Normally, an illuminating explanation of a metaphor of that kind will have to tell us what the metaphor’s subject is. Lycan’s explanation does not do this. Second, his explanation does not tell us which likeness-makers, determinates of likenesses, or ways of possessing likeness-makers these subjects are characterized as having. This, too, is often what we want from an explanation of a metaphor. In fact, Lycan’s explanation only tells us what likenesses are indicated by the metaphorical elements. But we typically know this already when we read a metaphor, if we know which

23

Ibid. Marga Reimer and Elisabeth Camp, ‘Metaphor’, in Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 851–853. 24

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expressions are the metaphorical elements. So it is no wonder that we are not much the wiser. In view of this, it is clear that the Convolutedness Objection does not apply to the Minimal Thesis. Whatever may be true of comparison theories, the Minimal Thesis certainly does not commit one to the claim that an explanation which only tells us what the likenesses indicated by the metaphorical elements are, but which fails to tell us what the subjects are or what other properties are attributed to them, will be illuminating. I now turn to objections that apply to the claim that a metaphor means what some attribution of both a likeness and likeness-makers means. John Searle provides several objections applicable to any comparison theory that claims that likenesses are attributed. He argues that ‘in the production and understanding of metaphorical utterances, there need not be any two objects for comparison’.25 He develops this point in two directions. First, he claims: ‘If I say 13.

Sally is not a block of ice,

that, I take it, does not invite the absurd question, “Which block of ice is it that you are comparing Sally with, in order to say that she is not like it?” ’26 Here, Searle says, there is no object for comparison in that the question, ‘Which particular item are you comparing her with?’27 is out of place. Therefore the metaphor cannot be a comparison. We can call this the Particularity Objection. Second, Searle claims that ‘there are true metaphorical assertions [“S is P”] for which there are no objects to be designated by the P term, hence the true metaphorical statement cannot falsely presuppose the existence of an object of comparison’.28 He gives the example of the metaphorical assertion of ‘Sally is a dragon’, which can be true even though no dragons exist. It could

25 John R. Searle, ‘Metaphor’, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 87. 26 Ibid., pp. 87–88. 27 As Schroeder points out, Searle misrepresents the comparison theory here as claiming that metaphors are comparisons of A with B, rather than as claiming that metaphors are comparisons of A to B. See Schroeder, ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, pp. 82–83. 28 Searle, ‘Metaphor’, p. 88.

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not be true if it were a comparison, because it would falsely presuppose that dragons exist. We can call this the Non-Existence Objection. The Particularity Objection has been forestalled by the distinction I mentioned above between two varieties of likeness. You can attribute a likeness to a thing even though the question, ‘To which particular item are you likening this thing?’ is out of place. Many examples of literal likeness-ascriptions show this. The fact that this question is out of place in the case of many metaphors therefore does nothing to show that they do not attribute likenesses. The Non-Existence Objection is inapplicable because, as I have stressed, the supporter of the Minimal Thesis does not have to claim that the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element is attributed to the subject. So we do not even need to challenge the implausible claim to which Searle is committed by the Non-Existence Objection: namely, that it cannot be literally true that Sally is like a dragon, since dragons do not exist.29 Even if it cannot be literally true that Sally is like a dragon, a supporter of the Minimal Thesis can allow that the metaphor, ‘Sally is a dragon’ can communicate a truth. For it could still be true that Sally possesses likeness-making properties for the likeness being like a dragon. The metaphor can attribute these properties (and not the likeness itself ) to Sally. It is just that, if Searle is right, Sally would not be like a dragon if she does possess those properties. A likeness-maker for the likeness being like an X would have to be understood as a property that would make Y like an X only if Y possesses it and Xs exist. Something can possess properties of which this is true even if no Xs do exist. Robert Fogelin raises a different objection applicable to any theory that treats metaphors as attributing likenesses, but it has the same upshot as the Non-Existence Objection. Fogelin argues that, even when the likeness ascribed is between existing objects, many likeness-ascriptions are literally false.30 I will explain his grounds for this claim below. The important point, for the moment, is that these false likeness-ascriptions include ascriptions of the likenesses indicated by the metaphorical element of many metaphors. Therefore, if we treat such metaphors as attributing

29 For criticism of the conception of likeness-ascriptions that Searle adopts here, see Hyman, The Objective Eye, pp. 64–66. 30 Though, importantly, he holds that some of these are ‘true if taken figuratively’ (Robert J. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 84).

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these likenesses, we shall have to conclude that these metaphors communicate a falsehood. But many such metaphors do not communicate a falsehood. Therefore, they do not attribute likenesses. We may call this the Figurative-Likeness Objection. Again, the disjunctive character of the Minimal Thesis renders this objection inapplicable. The supporter of the Minimal Thesis is free to maintain that such metaphors attribute only properties related to the likeness indicated, and not the likeness itself. Indeed, nothing would be lost if the supporter of the Minimal Thesis stipulated that ‘likeness’, as she uses it, is simply to be an expression for the sharing of properties, whether or not ‘likeness’ and its cognates are already expressions of this kind in English. Fogelin’s argument is that ‘is like’ and ‘is similar to’ do not in fact have this meaning. As he says: ‘I do not deny . . . that, given any two entities (existent, nonexistent, or mixed), it is always possible to find something that is true of both; I deny . . . that this shows they are similar.’31 Nevertheless, it is not necessary to make this stipulation, because Fogelin’s argument does not establish this conclusion. Fogelin takes certain observations made by the cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky to show that not every claim that A is like B is literally true. Tversky observes that ‘we say “an ellipse is like a circle”, not “a circle is like an ellipse”, and we say “North Korea is like Red China” rather than “Red China is like North Korea”.’32 Fogelin claims that this point ‘refutes Davidson’s claim that everything is, after all, similar to everything else’.33 In Fogelin’s view, A is similar to B ‘just in case A has a sufficiently large number of B’s salient features’.34 Thus, it is literally true that a road grader is like a bulldozer, for ‘like bulldozers, road graders are also used to push about large quantities of dirt, the chief difference being that road graders have their blades beneath their chassis rather than in front of them.’35 But it is literally false that Margaret Thatcher is like a bulldozer, for she does not have a sufficiently large number of a bulldozer’s salient features. Nevertheless, ‘there are people who would consider [this simile] true if taken figuratively’.36 Fogelin regards metaphors as elliptical similes, but he argues that similes are literally false, though they may be true if taken figuratively.

31 32 33 34

Ibid., p. 60. Amos Tversky, ‘Features of Similarity’, Psychological Review 84/4 (1977), p. 328. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking, p. 63. 35 36 Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid.

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One problem with Fogelin’s argument is that the linguistic data he cites do not establish that the likeness-ascriptions in question are false. The fact, if it is a fact, that we do not say that a circle is like an ellipse establishes only that this claim is not (normally) assertible. Fogelin needs more argument to show that ‘A circle is like an ellipse’ and ‘An ellipse is like a circle’ differ not only with respect to their assertibility conditions, but with respect to their truth conditions. A second problem is that other linguistic data support the conclusion that likeness-ascriptions of the kind Fogelin mentions do not differ in truth conditions. Suppose someone says (what also seems to support Fogelin’s view), ‘He is nothing like his father’. We could reply, ‘Well, strictly and literally speaking, he is like his father: he is male and he has blond hair’. Normally, it would be pedantic to say this, and what we say would be irrelevant. We would no doubt be told this if we offered this reply. But we would not be told that we were mistaken. This kind of reply seems to be available for all of the cases Fogelin cites. Strictly and literally speaking, a circle is like an ellipse, Red China is like North Korea, and Margaret Thatcher was like a bulldozer: circles are closed plane figures, Red China is an Asian country, and Margaret Thatcher destroyed much. In many contexts, it may be misleading or otherwise conversationally inappropriate simply to assert that a circle is like an ellipse. Someone who insists in such a context that, strictly and literally speaking, a circle is like ellipse misses this. But the fact that she is only open to this criticism, and not to the criticism that she is wrong, indicates that Fogelin’s account of the truth conditions of likeness-ascriptions is mistaken. Interestingly, there is a large class of similes that are literally false, and uncontroversially so. But the examples Fogelin cites are not of this kind, and the reason why they are false is not the reason Fogelin gives. Not all similes take the form ‘A is like B’. Many take the form ‘A Vs like B’ or ‘A Vs as B Vs’, with a verb other than ‘is’. That is, many similes attribute determinates of likenesses. And many similes of this form are literally false, for in many such cases, B does not V, and therefore A does not V like B. Describing his time in government, Alastair Campbell wrote: ‘most of the time I felt like a round peg in a round hole’.37 Here, if you said, ‘Well, 37 Alastair Campbell, ‘Questions over David Cameron’s Judgment are Justified’, The Guardian, 21 January 2011, accessed 14 June 2012.

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strictly and literally speaking, he did feel like a round peg in a round hole: he felt such-and-such’, you would be wrong, and not merely a pedant. So Davidson is indeed mistaken to claim that ‘all similes are true’.38 But he is not mistaken for the reasons Fogelin gives. Searle raises an objection applicable only to comparison theories that treat metaphors as attributing both likenesses and likeness-makers. Searle’s objection is, in effect, that such theories wrongly construe all metaphors as communicating that the subject possesses the likeness in virtue of possessing the other properties attributed. According to such theories, Romeo’s metaphor does not just communicate that Juliet is like the sun and that she is beautiful, stands out from her surroundings, etc. It communicates that Juliet is like the sun in that she is beautiful, stands out from her surroundings, and so forth. But not all metaphors do communicate a claim of this form. For example, a metaphorical assertion of ‘Richard is a gorilla’ can be true because it is true that Richard is fierce, nasty, prone to violence, and so forth, even though it is false that Richard is like a gorilla in virtue of being fierce, nasty, prone to violence, and so forth.39 Therefore, the metaphor cannot be communicating the latter, false claim. A hearer might rely on his familiarity with the falsehood that gorillas are fierce and nasty to work out that the metaphor communicates that Richard is fierce and nasty. But ‘it does not follow from this fact about his procedures of comprehension that this is part of the speaker’s utterance meaning of ’ the metaphor.40 We might describe this as the Argument from Dissimilarity. The Minimal Thesis avoids the Argument from Dissimilarity for two reasons. First, it does not commit one to the view that metaphors attribute likenesses. Second, as I said above, a supporter of the Minimal Thesis is free to maintain that the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element of the gorilla metaphor is not being like a gorilla but being like a stereotypical gorilla. So if Richard is fierce, then it is true that Richard is like a stereotypical gorilla in virtue of being fierce. A supporter of the Minimal Thesis can therefore claim both that the metaphor is communicating this and that the metaphor does not communicate a falsehood.41 Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 257. Beardsley makes a similar point in Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Metaphorical Twist’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22/3 (1962), p. 294. 40 Searle, ‘Metaphor’, p. 90. 41 Schroeder defends the comparison theory from this objection along similar lines, and I have modelled my response here on his. See Schroeder, ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, pp. 83–85. 38 39

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Finally, Searle objects that comparison theories do not explain why metaphors attribute certain likeness-makers but not others. He writes that, if a defender of the simile theory wants to insist [regarding ‘Sally is a block of ice’] that blocks of ice are literally unresponsive, then we need only point out that that feature is still insufficient to explain the metaphorical utterance meaning of 4 [‘Sally is a block of ice’], because in that sense bonfires are ‘unresponsive’ as well, but 22.

Sally is a bonfire

has a quite different metaphorical utterance meaning from 4.42

Let us call this the Failure-to-Explain Objection. As I noted above, the question of why a metaphor attributes certain properties, but not others, that are related to the indicated likeness in the ways I have described, is an important one. But as I also stress, the Minimal Thesis is not an attempt to answer it. It is a claim about what kinds of properties are attributed by metaphors. An ad hominem point here is that Searle’s own account of metaphor is vulnerable to the Failure-to-Explain Objection. Searle suggests nine principles for ‘computing’ a metaphorical meaning ‘S is R’ for a metaphor ‘S is P’. These principles, however, are themselves ‘insufficient to explain the metaphorical utterance meaning’ of most of the metaphors they apply to. For instance, Searle’s second principle is: Things which are P are contingently R. . . . If the metaphor works, the property R should be a salient or well known property of P things. 39. (MET) Sam is a pig will be taken to mean 39. (PAR) Sam is filthy, gluttonous, and sloppy, etc.43

However, living in mud and being raised for their meat are also salient and well-known properties of pigs, but 39 does not attribute these properties to Sam. Searle’s principles fail to explain why it does not. Thus, none of these eight objections is applicable to the Minimal Thesis. At least some are unsuccessful objections to comparison theories. But they do not even apply to the view I defend. Nevertheless, there are several

42 43

Searle, ‘Metaphor’, p. 96. Ibid., p. 107.

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objections to other theories of metaphor that do apply, or can easily be made to apply, to the Minimal Thesis.

3. Applicable objections Richard Moran writes: ‘resemblance and similarity are both symmetrical relations: if A resembles B, then B resembles A. Hence, if metaphor were some kind of assertion of resemblance, we should be able to reverse any of the parts without loss or change of meaning.’44 Clearly, however, we cannot do so, for the metaphor of the lover’s lips as cherries has a very different meaning than the metaphor of cherries as lips. Similarly, Kendall Walton writes: ‘Many metaphors are not reversible. “Life is hell” is different from, “Hell is life”. But similarity is presumably symmetrical. Life resembles hell in exactly the respects that hell resembles life. This should make us wary of construing metaphor in terms of similarity.’45 Let us call this the Reversibility Objection. I will mention two reasons why the Minimal Thesis does not imply that metaphors are reversible without a change in what is communicated. First, reversing a metaphor of the form ‘A is B’ would change the subject of the metaphor. The reversed metaphor would attribute properties to a subject to which the original metaphor did not attribute them. According to the Minimal Thesis, ‘Her lips are cherries’ attributes certain properties to her lips. These properties are likeness-makers for the likeness, being like cherries. But this metaphor does not attribute these properties to cherries. Her lips are the subject, and cherries are not. The reversal of that metaphor—‘Cherries are her lips’—would have cherries for its subject. It would attribute to cherries likeness-makers for the likeness, being like her lips. Obviously, this would be to communicate something different. If we communicate that her lips are a deep red, for example, we do not communicate that cherries are a deep red.

44 Richard Moran, ‘Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force’, Critical Inquiry 16/1 (1989), p. 93. 45 Kendall L. Walton, ‘Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe’, European Journal of Philosophy 1/1 (1993), p. 48. Beardsley and Guttenplan have also endorsed versions of this objection. See Beardsley, ‘The Metaphorical Twist’, p. 297; Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor, p. 211.

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This is so even though, according to the Minimal Thesis, the original, unreversed metaphor relies on the reader’s knowledge that cherries are a deep red. To figure out what the original metaphor communicates about her lips, you must draw on your knowledge that cherries are a deep red. But the original metaphor does not attribute deep redness to cherries, even though it exploits the knowledge that they have this property. Second, not only would the reversed metaphor attribute properties to a different subject. In the vast majority of cases, it would attribute different properties to that subject. Calling Elvis ‘Mother Teresa’ would communicate something very different about Elvis than calling Mother Teresa ‘Elvis’ would communicate about her. You might attribute compassion in the first case but not the second, and celebrity status in the second case but not the first. Compassion is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like Mother Teresa, and celebrity status is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like Elvis. Of course, if Elvis was compassionate, then compassion is also a likeness-maker for the likeness being like Elvis. But it does not follow, and it would rarely be true, that you would attribute compassion to Mother Teresa by calling her ‘Elvis’. An objection often raised against certain forms of the comparison theory is that, as Reimer and Camp argue, the similarities that we most naturally cite in explaining what a metaphor’s corresponding simile means are often themselves figurative. Consider the opening lines of Sylvia Plath’s (1961) poem ‘Mirror’: ‘I am silver and exact / I have no preconceptions.’ Presumably the protagonist is here describing herself metaphorically as a mirror; on the simile theory she thus means that she is like a mirror. One natural elaboration of what this simile means is that she reflects the world around her, but the key word ‘reflects’ here is itself obviously metaphorical. We seem to have fallen into a vicious explanatory circle.46

Searle, Lycan, and Samuel Guttenplan also raise this objection against forms of the comparison theory.47 It would apply to the Minimal Thesis as well. The claim would be that the original metaphor does not attribute the property of reflecting, which is a likeness-maker for the likeness being like a mirror, to the protagonist. Yet the most natural way of explaining the

Reimer and Camp, ‘Metaphor’, p. 852. Searle, ‘Metaphor’, pp. 95–97; Lycan, Philosophy of Language, p. 180; Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor, pp. 32–33, 209, 270. 46 47

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mirror-metaphor is with the reflection-metaphor. Let us call this the Figurative-Likeness-Maker Objection. This is not a compelling objection. It is certainly true that it is often most natural to explain a metaphor or its corresponding simile with another metaphor. But this does not support the conclusion that the original metaphor attributes no likeness-makers that the subject literally has. If the second metaphor attributes some of the likeness-makers attributed by the first metaphor and literally possessed by the subject, we would expect to be able to explain the first metaphor with the second. It might even be natural to explain it with the second metaphor. Metaphors often come to mind more readily than non-metaphorical ways of making the same point, even when there exist non-metaphorical ways of making the same point. Indeed, suppose it were not just very natural to explain the original metaphor with the second, but impossible to explain it any other way. Even this would not show that the original metaphor does not attribute likeness-makers that the subject literally has. It might only reflect the fact that these likeness-making properties, which the subject literally has, cannot be attributed without using one of those two metaphors. All the objection shows is that the mirror-metaphor does not attribute to the poem’s speaker the likeness-making property of reflecting (the property mirrors literally have). It is true that this particular likenessmaker is not attributed by the mirror-metaphor. But this is not relevant. What the objection needs to show is that the mirror-metaphor does not attribute any likeness-makers for the likeness indicated. It does not show this. Moreover, it is not true of this metaphor. The speaker characterizes herself as being apt to represent the world accurately and neutrally without distortions. This is a likeness-maker for the likeness being like a mirror (as commonly conceived ). Whether or not mirrors do represent their surroundings, they are certainly thought of as being apt to do so accurately and neutrally without distortions. Davidson’s paper contains, or at least provides the materials for, what we might call the Non-Propositionality Objection. Davidson’s denial that metaphors have a special meaning beyond the literal is his best-known claim about metaphor. But he also writes: The central error about metaphor is most easily attacked when it takes the form of a theory of metaphorical meaning, but behind that theory, and statable independently, is the thesis that associated with a metaphor is a

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definite cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. This theory is false as a full account of metaphor, whether or not we call the purported cognitive content a meaning.48

Davidson then goes on to present arguments against this theory, even when it does not take its ‘most easily attacked’ form of a theory of metaphorical meaning. I will here consider whether the arguments Davidson presents undermine the Minimal Thesis. What Davidson says above is just that the following is false as a full account of metaphor: (C)

There is a definite cognitive content associated with the metaphor that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message.

But in the discussion that follows, it emerges that Davidson does not just hold that (C) is false as a full account of metaphor, but that it is false simpliciter. The first thing to note is that there are several implications of (C) to which the Minimal Thesis does not commit one. It does not commit one to the claim that (C1)

What the interpreter must grasp, in order to understand a metaphor, is something the author wishes to convey.

This, I take it, would follow if metaphors ‘carry a message’, a view which Davidson denies in several places.49 As we have seen, it also does not commit one to the claim that (C2)

There is a cognitive content, apart from the cognitive content that would be expressed by using the sentence literally, such that the interpreter must grasp it in order to understand the metaphor.

This is implied by (C)’s talk of a ‘definite’ cognitive content that the interpreter must grasp. What the Minimal Thesis does commit one to is (C)’s implication that

48 49

Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 262. See ibid., pp. 260–263.

3. (C3)

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The reader must grasp a proposition, apart from the proposition that would be expressed by using the sentence literally, in order to understand a metaphor.

(C) has this implication because Davidson regards cognitive content as propositional content. The Minimal Thesis commits one to the claim that a reader must grasp propositions in order to understand a metaphor, and that these are propositions apart from the proposition that would be expressed by using the same sentence literally. The Minimal Thesis does not commit one to the claim that these propositions are the content of the metaphor. But according to the Minimal Thesis, a reader who understands a metaphor that characterizes the subject as having certain properties grasps that the subject has such-and-such properties. Coming to understand the metaphor consists at least partly in grasping such a proposition. The question is, then, whether Davidson has an argument against (C3). If he does, then he has an argument against the Minimal Thesis. Davidson says of (C): It should make us suspect the theory [namely, (C)] that it is so hard to decide, even in the case of the simplest metaphors, exactly what the content is supposed to be. The reason it is often so hard to decide is, I think, that we imagine there is a content to be captured when all the while we are in fact focusing on what the metaphor makes us notice. If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind on to the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention.50

Further on, Davidson elaborates the point about what we notice not being propositional: It’s not only that we can’t provide an exhaustive catalogue of what has been attended to when we are led to see something in a new light; the difficulty is more fundamental. What we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in character. Of course it may be, and when it is, it usually may be stated in fairly plain words. . . . Seeing as is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight. Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not 50

Ibid., pp. 262–263.

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entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided.51

It is difficult to say exactly which of the several, subtly different points made in these well-known passages are meant as attacks on (C3), and which are not. Rather than attempt to answer this question, I will simply discuss whether they are effective as attacks on (C3). First, it poses no challenge to (C3) merely to say that some of what metaphors make us notice is non-propositional. To hold that coming to understand a metaphor consists at least partly in grasping propositions does not commit one to holding that the metaphor makes one notice nothing but propositions.52 Nor does it pose a challenge to (C3) to say that what metaphors make us notice is not finite in scope. Finally, it does not undermine (C3) to say that metaphors make us see one thing as another. Coming to understand a metaphor can still partly consist in grasping propositions even if metaphors make us see one thing as another. Seeing-as is not seeing-that, but it is not incompatible with seeing-that. Or, for that matter, with noticing-that and grasping-that. To undermine (C3), then, Davidson must rest his case on his claim that, sometimes, what a metaphor makes us notice is not ‘even at all’ propositional. The cases in which what we notice is merely not ‘entirely’ propositional will not do. If there are cases in which the metaphor does not make us notice anything propositional, then coming to understand such metaphors could not consist in grasping propositions (assuming that we grasp a proposition only if we ‘notice’ something propositional). The question is, then: what evidence does he provide for the existence of such cases? The only evidence Davidson provides is his claim ‘that it is so hard to decide, even in the case of the simplest metaphors, exactly what the content is supposed to be’. ‘If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature’, he says, this would not be hard to decide. In that case, ‘we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind on to the metaphor’. But this often is hard to decide. Therefore, what such metaphors make us notice is not propositional in nature and finite in scope. 51

Ibid., p. 263. I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as ‘noticing’ propositions. 52

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There are two problems with this argument as an attack on (C3). First, it does not rule out the possibility that what such metaphors make us notice is propositional in nature, yet not finite in scope. Its conclusion is only that what we are made to notice is not both propositional and finite in scope. Second, it is false that, if what the metaphor made us notice were propositional in nature, it would not be hard to decide exactly what the content is supposed to be. A possibility I mentioned earlier serves as a counterexample to this claim. For many metaphors, there are many propositions which are such that (i) the metaphor makes us notice them, and (ii) it is hard to decide whether they are part of the content of the metaphor. For example, the proposition that Romeo’s day begins with Juliet seems to be of this kind. Romeo’s metaphor made Cavell ‘notice’ this proposition. But it is hard to decide whether it is part of the content of Romeo’s metaphor. Accordingly, it is hard to decide exactly what the content of the metaphor is supposed to be. Being made to notice propositions and finding it hard to decide whether they are part of the content of the metaphor are perfectly compatible. Davidson gives us no reason to believe that, as he says, we would simply ‘project’ whatever content the metaphor brings to mind on to the metaphor, if it made us notice something propositional. We certainly do not project whatever content a literal utterance brings to mind on to that utterance. So even if it is hard to decide exactly what the content of a metaphor is supposed to be, this does not establish that what some metaphors get us to notice is entirely non-propositional. It therefore does not establish that coming to understand metaphors does not involve grasping propositions apart from what would be expressed by using the same sentence literally. I conclude, therefore, that Davidson provides no successful argument against the claim that coming to understand metaphors partly consists in grasping propositions. The final objection I will discuss here is what I regard as the most challenging of the objections that apply to the Minimal Thesis. The objection is simply that there are many counterexamples to the claim that metaphor is based on likeness. Several philosophers, it is commonly thought, have identified numerous metaphors that are not understood by reference to likenesses.

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I will attempt both to show that this objection is mistaken, and to explain why it appears plausible. All the apparent counterexamples of which I am aware are of four kinds. Showing that they belong to these kinds will both disarm objections that appeal to them, and make it clear why these cases have seemed to be counterexamples to the view that metaphors are based on likenesses. Searle gives many candidate counterexamples. As we have seen, he holds that, ‘though similarity often plays a role in the comprehension of metaphor, the metaphorical assertion is not necessarily an assertion of similarity’.53 However, he also provides examples of metaphors in which, he claims, similarity does not play a role even in their comprehension: ‘For example, the numerous spatial metaphors for temporal duration are not based on literal similarities. In “time flies”, or “the hours crawled by”, what is it that time does and the hours did which is literally like flying or crawling?’54 These seem to be clear counterexamples both to the position Searle explicitly targets and to the Minimal Thesis. They are not. We say, ‘Time flies’, when we are talking about cases in which time seems to elapse quickly. We say that time flies when you’re having fun, or that the years fly by after you reach a certain age. You do not understand ‘Time flies’ unless you grasp that seeming to elapse quickly is attributed to time. Now, seeming to elapse quickly is not a likeness-maker for the likeness being like something that flies. Flying things do not seem to elapse at all. This is why this metaphor appears to be a counterexample. However, seeming to elapse quickly is a way of possessing the property, seeming to be quick. And this property is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like something that flies. Many things that fly seem to be quick. This is often because they are quick: they move quickly. So ‘Time flies’ is not a counterexample to the Minimal Thesis. It is merely a metaphor that attributes a way of possessing a likeness-maker for the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element. Several of Searle’s other examples are also cases of this kind. I have already discussed ‘Sally is a block of ice’, and a similar reply deals with his example of ‘sexual frigidity’.55 Sexually frigid people are sexually unresponsive, and being sexually unresponsive is a way of being unresponsive, which is a likeness-maker for the likeness, being like something frigid. Searle 53 55

Searle, ‘Metaphor’, p. 88. Ibid., p. 98.

54

Ibid., p. 99.

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also gives the example of ‘sweet disposition’, writing: ‘Of course, sweet dispositions and sweet things are both pleasant, but much more is conveyed by the metaphor than mere pleasantness.’56 This is true. But, in the first place, some of the other properties attributed by the metaphor are also shared by sweet-tasting things. A sweet disposition, like something sweettasting, is such as to please immediately and easily. And, in the second place, the metaphor may convey that the disposition is pleasant in certain ways, some of which are distinctive of human dispositions and are not ways in which sweet-tasting things can be pleasant. For example, sweet dispositions are endearing. Being endearing is a way of being pleasant; but pleasant sweet-tasting things do not endear themselves to us. Searle’s examples of ‘warm welcome’ and ‘lukewarm friendship’ conform to the same model. Warm welcomes, like many warm things (fireplaces, beds, etc.), are comforting; describing a welcome as ‘warm’ may also be a way of characterizing it as friendly, which is a way in which welcomes (though not fireplaces) can be comforting. So Searle concludes much too quickly—and, indeed, makes concessions inconsistent with the claim—that similarity does not even play a role in the comprehension of these metaphors. Some apparent counterexamples, however, are of a different kind. The explanation of these cases is that they are combinations of metaphor and another way of extending the use of expressions. This is true of Searle’s example, ‘I am in a black mood’. Severin Schroeder criticizes Searle’s use of this as a counterexample to comparison theories by arguing that to call dangerous or depressing things ‘black’ is based on the fact that darkness (which looks black) is typically felt to be dangerous or depressing. This is a fairly straightforward similarity. However, in many figurative uses of the word ‘black’ . . . the exploitation of such fundamental similarity is combined with metonymical shifts. Thus my black mood is not, like a black night, something that makes me gloomy, for it is my being gloomy—a metonymical shift from cause to effect.57

Schroeder’s reply is on the right lines. ‘Black mood’ is indeed an example of both metaphor and another way of extending the use of an expression. As I shall explain below, the relevant likeness is not that between literally

56 57

Ibid., p. 99. Schroeder, ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, p. 91.

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black causes of gloom and metaphorically black causes of gloom. But Schroeder’s basic point here is right. ‘Black mood’ is a combination of metaphor and causal analogy. In a causal-analogical extension of a use of an expression, the expression is applied to something that causes, or is caused or affected by, what the expression attributed or applied to in its previous use. Aristotle pointed out this way of extending the use of ‘healthy’: ‘Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing in the sense that it preserves health, another in the sense that it produces it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of health.’58 Aquinas gives the examples of ‘healthy medicine’ and ‘healthy urine’.59 We attribute the property of being such as to cause, contribute to, or maintain health in the former case, and the property of being caused by health in the latter case. Similarly, Gray’s ‘Elegy’ describes the sound of sheep bells at evening as ‘drowsy tinklings’ that ‘lull the distant folds’.60 The tinkling sounds are such as to cause drowsiness. ‘Black’ in ‘black mood’ is used both metaphorically and by causal analogy. Black moods are like moods or experiences caused by black things of various kinds, such as black clouds and darkness. Similarly, sharp pains are like pains caused by sharp things, and prickly pains are like pains caused by prickly things. In each case, there is a likeness to something caused by things the expression literally applies to. A third class of apparent counterexamples consists of cases in which the use of the expression in question is indeed an extension of a preexistent use of that expression, but is not a metaphorical extension. In these cases, it is not even a combination of metaphor and some other way of extending the use of an expression. One case of this kind is Lycan’s use of the lines from Hamlet as a counterexample to comparison theories: When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows.

58 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1003a. See also Aristotle, Topics, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, 106b. 59 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, trans. Brian Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part 1, Question 13, Article 10, p. 161. 60 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, in Christopher Ricks, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 278, l. 8.

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As we saw, Lycan takes ‘blood’, ‘burns’, ‘soul’, ‘lends’, ‘tongue’, and ‘vows’ to be used metaphorically here. This is mistaken. This line occurs early in the play when Ophelia is trying to persuade Polonius that Hamlet loves her. She says that Hamlet confirmed his expressions of love ‘With almost all the holy vows of heaven.’61 Polonius replies dismissively: I do know When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows.62

Polonius is here alluding to the theory of humours, according to which the blood of people in a passionate state is hot. Hence ‘blood’ is not being used metaphorically. According to the theory alluded to, it is literally true that the blood of such people is hot. Allusion is not a species of metaphor, though some allusions are metaphorical. We allude to beliefs in divine providence when we say, ‘Someone up there must like me’, to communicate that we have been very lucky. But we do not speak metaphorically when we say this, even if we are atheists and so do not mean it literally. ‘Burns’ is perhaps being used hyperbolically, although believers in humoral theories also believed that psychological imbalances could be caused by humours literally burning within the blood and releasing vapours.63 ‘The soul’ is either not being used figuratively at all, or is used as a metonym for the person.64 In either case, it is not a metaphor. The context makes clear that ‘vows’ is being used literally, for Polonius and Ophelia are talking about Hamlet’s vows. ‘The tongue’ is used as a synecdoche, the figure of speech in which an expression for a part of some whole is used to stand for the whole itself, as in ‘All hands on deck’. In this case, ‘the tongue’ is used to stand for the person. Lastly, ‘lends’ is indeed being used metaphorically, and so is ‘prodigal’. The use of ‘prodigal’ here combines metaphor and a figure of speech

61

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.3.114. Ibid., 1.3.115–1.3.117. 63 See Cynthia Marshall, ‘Cosmology and the Body’, in Donna B. Hamilton, ed., A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 221. 64 In metonymy, we apply to a thing a word or phrase for something associated with that thing, as when we ask someone to address ‘the chair’, wonder how ‘the markets’ will react, or accuse ‘the White House’ of a cover-up. 62

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known as ‘anthimeria’. In anthimeria, an expression standardly used as one part of speech is used as a different part of speech, as when we say we had a good cry.65 In Polonius’s line, the adjective ‘prodigal’ is used as an adverb. The metaphorical use of these expressions here is consistent with the Minimal Thesis. People who lend prodigally readily lend to people who are unlikely to honour their debts. Therefore, such lenders readily put people in a position to benefit from something with regard to which those people have obligations they are unlikely to honour. This property is a likeness-maker for the likeness being like someone who lends prodigally. Polonius’s metaphor attributes a way of possessing this likeness-maker. Polonius communicates that he knows how readily, when a person is in a passionate state of mind, his soul causes him to swear vows he is unlikely to honour. Readily causing someone to swear vows he is unlikely to honour is a way of readily putting someone in a position to benefit from something with regard to which he has obligations he is unlikely to honour. A common complaint made against many philosophers writing on metaphor, and especially against defenders of comparison theories, is that they confine themselves to simple, hackneyed subject-predicate metaphors and ignore the rich, complex metaphors of so much actual poetry. Lycan concludes his discussion of the above example by commenting: ‘It is no wonder that simile theorists have in the main stuck to simple subjectpredicate examples.’66 But the Minimal Thesis can accommodate poetic metaphors. The above discussion suggests, not that poetry undermines the claim that metaphor is based on likeness, but that when we look at poetry, we should expect to find many rhetorical devices other than metaphor. Many major poets of the past received an intensive education in rhetoric, which drilled them in the use of many figures of speech that most people now are not taught. The injunction to take the language of actual poetry seriously when thinking about metaphor is good advice. But following it

65 See T. V. F. Brogan, ‘Anthimeria’, in Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, eds, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 74. 66 Lycan, Philosophy of Language, p. 183. For similar complaints about philosophers’ examples, see Roger White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor, p. 93.

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requires familiarizing ourselves with these non-metaphorical ways of extending the use of expressions. Lastly, it is worth distinguishing a special case of this kind. These are cases in which a metaphorical use of an expression has itself been extended in a non-metaphorical way. It is easy to assume that all extensions of uses of expressions are extensions of literal uses of expressions. But this is not so. You can also extend non-literal uses of expressions (which are themselves extensions of some other use). In the cases I have in mind, an established metaphorical use of an expression, or an imaginable metaphorical use of an expression, has been extended in a non-metaphorical way. The resulting use of the expression is not metaphorical. But because it is an extension of a metaphorical use, it is easy to mistake it for one. Searle’s example of ‘bitter person’ is a case of this kind. My discussion of causal analogy gives us the resources with which to explain ‘bitter person’. For a bitter person is someone marked in certain ways by the effects of bitter experiences. Bitter experiences are like experiences caused by bitter-tasting things. Therefore, the use of ‘bitter’ to characterize experiences, like the use of ‘black’ to characterize moods and the use of ‘sharp’ and ‘prickly’ to characterize pains, is a combination of metaphor and causal analogy. It is a metaphorical and causal-analogical extension of the use of ‘bitter’ to characterize bitter-tasting things. The use of ‘bitter’ to characterize persons, in turn, is a causal-analogical extension of the use of ‘bitter’ to characterize experiences. The expression applied non-literally to the experiences is applied to persons affected by such experiences. So these four objections do not defeat the Minimal Thesis. And the apparent counterexamples I have discussed can be accounted for in these four ways. Moreover, the account in each case makes it evident why they have been mistaken for counterexamples to the claim that all metaphors are based on likeness. This discussion should reduce our confidence that metaphors are too various for them all to be based on likeness. It highlights the fact that there are far more non-metaphorical ways of extending uses of expressions than most of us are disposed to recognize immediately. It also shows that we tend to use the term ‘metaphor’ to describe examples of non-metaphorical ways of extending uses of expressions when we do not recognize them.

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4. What the Minimal Thesis explains I will now conclude my account of the Minimal Thesis by discussing four of the explanatory benefits it brings. First, the Minimal Thesis explains how metaphor differs from other ways of extending the use of expressions. As I have stressed, to speak metaphorically is to extend the use of an expression in a certain way. Moreover, this way of extending the use of an expression is not the way in which we extend the use of expressions when we employ sarcasm, causal analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, anthimeria, and so forth. The Minimal Thesis explains how metaphor differs from these.67 Depending on the account we should give of simile, the Minimal Thesis may not explain how metaphor differs from simile. If similes attribute likenesses, likeness-makers, determinates of likenesses, and ways of possessing likeness-makers, then the Minimal Thesis does not explain how metaphor differs from simile. But in that case, we could appeal to the claim that similes attribute these properties by using ‘like’, ‘as’, or other words that can be used literally to attribute likenesses and their determinates. Second, the Minimal Thesis explains why it is often unclear whether a given expression is being used literally or metaphorically. One can imagine people reasonably disagreeing over whether, for example, a horseshoe is a kind of shoe or only metaphorically a shoe, whether a tree surgeon is a kind of surgeon or only metaphorically a surgeon, whether genetic engineering is a kind of engineering, and so on. This kind of uncertainty is possible because metaphors attribute likeness-makers for a likeness indicated by the metaphorical element. We may be unsure whether the properties these expressions attribute not only make something like a surgeon, a shoe, engineering, etc., but actually make it an instance of that kind. If something has the right likeness-makers for the likeness being like a duck, then it is not just like a duck: it is one. Third, the Minimal Thesis enables us to explain why some metaphors are open-ended, or at least why they appear to be. The Minimal Thesis identifies a constraint on the properties a metaphor can attribute. The properties must be either likenesses indicated by the metaphorical element,

67 Comparison theorists have claimed similar advantages for their theories. See Robert J. Fogelin, ‘Metaphors, Similes, and Similarity’, in Jaakko Hintikka, ed., Aspects of Metaphor (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 30–33; Schroeder, ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, pp. 92–94.

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or related to such likenesses in at least one of the three ways I identified. This excludes a great deal. But there are also indefinitely many properties this does not exclude. Suppose that, rather than being asked to explain Romeo’s metaphor, we were simply asked to think of which properties the sun has or is thought of as having, or which ways of possessing such properties, it would be relevant or appropriate for Romeo to attribute to Juliet in the context. If we were given that task, it would be no surprise if we found that, to borrow Davidson’s phrase, ‘there is no end to what we want to mention’,68 or that there is no point at which we feel no more properties could be thought of. So if this is, roughly, the task we set ourselves when we try to interpret certain metaphors, that would explain why they seem open-ended. Finally, the Minimal Thesis enables us to explain why some metaphors seem indispensable. As I shall discuss in the following chapter, many hold that we sometimes need metaphor to express or communicate certain thoughts. There are, I believe, several reasons why metaphors can seem indispensable. I will mention some in Chapter 5. Here I will note that if the Minimal Thesis is right, it should be unsurprising that many metaphors seem indispensable to many people. When we think of an apt comparison, we often cannot think of a better description that does not involve comparison. You might be able to think of no better way of describing how a person’s hands feel than by saying they feel like dead leaves; how a beer tastes than by saying it has hints of bread and caramel; or how a person wears his hair than by saying he wears it like Einstein wore his. It can easily seem that any description you can think of that does not involve comparison would leave out something important that these descriptions capture. Likening one thing to something else can seem to be an indispensable way of expressing what we want to express.69 If the

68 69

Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 263. Austin made a similar point. As he put it, in many situations certain words function as

adjuster-words—words, that is, by the use of which other words are adjusted to meet the innumerable and unforeseeable demands of the world upon language. . . . Vocabularies are finite; and the variety of possible situations that may confront us is neither finite nor precisely foreseeable. . . . One day we come across a new kind of animal, which looks and behaves very much as pigs do, but not quite as pigs do; it is somehow different. . . . What we could do, and probably would do first of all, is to say, ‘It’s like a pig’. (‘Like’ is the great adjuster-word, or, alternatively put, the main flexibility-device by whose aid, in spite of the limited scope of our vocabulary, we can always avoid being left completely speechless.) ( J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 73–74)

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Minimal Thesis is right, it is unsurprising that similar claims are often made about metaphors. I will use the Minimal Thesis to explain why metaphor is used so frequently in criticism. Before providing my explanation, however, I must address an important question that frequently arises in discussions of critics’ use of metaphor. This is the question of whether some metaphors are, in fact, indispensable.

5 The Dispensability of Metaphor In many discussions of the use of metaphor in criticism, the issue of metaphor’s dispensability or indispensability for thinking, expressing, communicating, or discovering various truths often arises. Some philosophers would take the explanation of the prevalence of metaphor in criticism to be that the thoughts critics express or communicate are of a kind that cannot be communicated or expressed without metaphor. Roger Scruton, for example, holds that ‘in our most basic apprehension of music there lies a complex system of metaphor, which is the true description of no material fact. And the metaphor cannot be eliminated from the description of music, because it is integral to the intentional object of musical experience’.1 The metaphors Scruton has in mind include, among others, metaphors of action affecting our experience of rhythm, metaphors of movement affecting our apprehension of melody, and metaphors of open and closed in our perception of chords. Nick Zangwill also holds that metaphorical aesthetic descriptions are ineliminable. He claims that this is because ‘such judgments are based on an inner response or feeling’, and thoughts about the qualitative character of mental states cannot be expressed without metaphor unless they are thoughts about very general characteristics of those mental states, such as their being painful.2

1 Roger Scruton, ‘Understanding Music’, in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), p. 97. See Malcolm Budd, ‘Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors’, in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 154–170, for what I regard as decisive objections to Scruton’s views. 2 Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 172–174.

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Many other philosophers have held that metaphor is indispensable for various other purposes as well. Let us call the Indispensability Thesis the claim that: We use at least some metaphors to think, to express, to communicate, or to discover what cannot be thought, expressed, communicated, or discovered without metaphor. Versions of this thesis are advocated in a remarkable variety of areas: one finds it supported not only by aestheticians, but also by metaphysicians, linguists, philosophers of language, philosophers of mathematics, philosophers of science, and philosophers of religion. But one finds it more often asserted than argued for. I wish to examine arguments for it. I will argue that support for the Indispensability Thesis is based on several confusions. Although I do not show that the thesis is false, I provide eight grounds for suspicion of our sense (if we have it) that some metaphors are indispensable for the purposes claimed by advocates of the Indispensability Thesis. Accordingly, we should be sceptical of explanations of the prevalence of metaphor in criticism that claim critics express thoughts that cannot be expressed without metaphor.

1. Metaphor and make-believe Stephen Yablo defends a version of the Indispensability Thesis by linking metaphor to make-believe.3 Influenced by Kendall Walton,4 Yablo points out that the real properties of props used in a game of make-believe can help determine what we are to imagine in that game. For example, suppose we are playing a game in which a certain mud-cake is used to represent a pie and a certain hollow tree-stump is used to represent an oven. If the mud-cake is, in reality, too big to fit in the tree-stump, we are to imagine in the game that the pie is too big to fit in the oven. Because of this, we could make an assertion within a game as ‘a way of giving voice to a fact holding outside the game: the fact that the props are in such and such a condition, viz., the condition that makes [what we

3 Stephen Yablo, ‘How in the World?’, in Thoughts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 191–220; Stephen Yablo, ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, in Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 117–144. 4 See Kendall L. Walton, ‘Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe’, European Journal of Philosophy 1/1 (1993): 39–56.

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pretend to assert] a proper thing to pretend to assert’.5 You could say, ‘The pie is too big to fit in the oven’, to give voice to the real-world fact that the mud-cake is too big to fit in the tree-stump. According to Yablo, metaphors are like pretend-assertions used for this purpose. A metaphor suggests a game of make-believe in which what is described metaphorically is used as a prop. If we describe Italy as a boot, that suggests a game in which Italy is used as a boot-prop. By using a metaphor, we represent what we describe as having properties that would make our utterance appropriate in a game suggested by the metaphor.6 A metaphor is ‘pretence-worthy’ when the object described does have properties that would make our utterance appropriate in such a game. For example, ‘Crotone is in the arch of the Italian boot’ is pretence-worthy because Italy and Crotone have properties that make it appropriate to imagine, in a game in which Italy is used as a boot-prop, that Crotone is in its arch. What Yablo calls the ‘metaphorical content’ of a metaphor is given by the worlds in which the same sentence, meaning the very same thing, is pretence-worthy.7 Yablo argues that some metaphors are ‘representationally essential’. That is, there is no way to access the ‘ensembles of worlds picked out by their shared property of legitimating a certain pretence’ except via metaphor: The language might have no more to offer in the way of a unifying principle for the worlds in a given content than that they are the ones making the relevant sentence fictional. It seems at least an open question, for example, whether the clouds we call angry are the ones that are literally F, for any F other than ‘such that it would be natural and proper to regard them as angry if one were going to attribute emotions to clouds’. Nor does a literal criterion immediately suggest itself for the pieces of computer code called viruses, the markings on a page called tangled or loopy, the glances called piercing, or the topographical features called basins, funnels, and brows.8

One problem with Yablo’s argument, as presented, stems from the fact that the same expression can be used to attribute different properties on different occasions when it is used metaphorically. For example, Muhammad Ali called Joe Frazier a ‘gorilla’ as an insult. But a primate scientist might use the same expression as a compliment, to characterize someone as gentle and 5 6 7 8

Yablo, ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, p. 131. Yablo, ‘How in the World?’, p. 219. Yablo, ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, pp. 133–134. Ibid., pp. 134–135.

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peace-loving. So there is no F such that (i) all the people we call ‘gorillas’ are literally F, and (ii) we represent them as being F whenever we call them ‘gorillas’ metaphorically. But obviously, this does not show that we ever use ‘gorilla’ to represent people as having a property that cannot be attributed to them by speaking literally. Making the same point about ‘angry’ as applied to clouds does not show that ‘angry clouds’ is an indispensable metaphor, either. Yablo’s claim must therefore be understood as the claim that there is a metaphorical use of ‘angry’ in which clouds are represented as having a certain property,9 but it is unclear how we would attribute this property by speaking literally. In this use of ‘angry’, (i) we represent clouds as having a certain property; (ii) their having this property would make it appropriate to describe them as ‘angry’ in a game of make-believe; and (iii) it is utterly unclear how we would attribute this property by speaking literally. The point is not that no literal criterion suggests itself for all clouds that can be called ‘angry’ in all metaphorical uses of the term. The point is that no literal criterion suggests itself for all clouds that can be called ‘angry’ in this metaphorical use of the term. To assess Yablo’s argument, then, we need to identify the use of ‘angry’ he has in mind. And the problem is that no use that suggests itself is one in which the property we represent clouds as having can be attributed only with metaphor. For example, we sometimes call clouds ‘angry’ to indicate that they look like storm-clouds. Looking like storm-clouds is plainly a property that can be attributed by speaking literally. Again, we sometimes call clouds ‘angry’ to indicate that they look like something expressive of anger, as when a cloud looks like an angry face. But this property, too, can be attributed without metaphor. I take it that the latter use of ‘angry’ is, in fact, the one Yablo has in mind. This use can easily seem indispensable if one disregards the possibility that ‘angry’, in this use, represents clouds as looking like something expressive of anger. Philosophers are liable to disregard this possibility, given the widespread opposition to the idea that metaphors are based on likenesses. If one does disregard it, and one considers all the clouds that can be called ‘angry’ in this use of the term, one is apt to be struck by the enormous variety among them—by the apparent lack of a ‘unifying principle’ for them, as Yablo puts it. Looking like something expressive of anger is, after all, a multiply realizable property. A cloud can look like something 9

Or properties. I omit this qualification in what follows.

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expressive of anger in virtue of many different shapes, and in virtue of many different patterns of illumination and shadow on its surface. We would be hard put to identify a literally ascribable property that the metaphor could be attributing to all these clouds, if we disregard the property of looking like something expressive of anger. Yablo’s other examples also attribute multiply realizable properties that can be attributed without metaphor. And like the use of ‘angry cloud’ I just considered, they attribute multiply realizable determinates of likenesses.10 Some of these examples may now be dead metaphors; but it is clear what they conveyed when they were live. To call a piece of computer code ‘a virus’ is (or was) to represent it as propagating itself like a virus; to call markings on a page ‘tangled’ or ‘loopy’ is to represent them as looking like (a picture of ) something tangled or loopy; to call a glance ‘piercing’ is to represent it as affecting us as something piercing does; and describing topographical features as ‘basins’, ‘funnels’, or ‘brows’ involves characterizing these features as being shaped like basins, funnels, or brows. This suggests that in these cases, too, these metaphors appear indispensable because we disregard the possibility that these metaphors attribute determinates of likenesses, and because the determinates they attribute are multiply realizable. Yablo also argues that a nominalist about numbers would regard the following as a metaphor: (T)

The number of planets divided by the number of stars is 2.4.

And he claims that the nominalist would say that T provides us with access to a content more literally expressed by (U ) There are 12 planets and 5 stars or 24 planets and 10 stars or . . . And now here is the rub. The rules of English do not allow infinitely long sentences; so the most literal route of access in English to the desired content is T, and T according to the nominalist is a metaphor.11

However, it is false that T is an indispensable metaphor if nominalism about numbers is true. T is not a metaphor at all. To be a metaphorical use of ‘number’, the use of ‘number’ in T would have to be an extension of some other use of ‘number’. As I stressed in Chapter 4, to use a term metaphorically is to extend the use of a term in a certain way. But the use 10 11

See Chapter 4, section 1. Yablo, ‘Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?’, p. 135.

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of ‘number’ in T is not an extension of a use of ‘number’ at all. The use of ‘number’ with which nominalists are concerned is not one we understand by drawing on our knowledge of some other use of ‘number’. It is an unextended use of this word. If nominalism about numbers is true and T is false, T might, of course, give us access to a truth. But whether nominalism about numbers is true or false, T is not a metaphor. Yablo also holds that some metaphors are ‘procedurally essential’. He argues that sometimes, the metaphor-user is not (or not merely) using metaphor to communicate a certain message she has in mind, but to prompt her audience to discover things of which she herself may be unaware: Someone who utters S in a metaphorical vein is recommending the project of (i) looking for games in which S is a promising move, and (ii) accepting the propositions that are S’s inverse images in those games under the modes of presentation that they provide. The overriding principle here is make the most of it; construe a metaphorical utterance in terms of the game or games that retromap it onto the most plausible and instructive contents in the most satisfying ways.12

By using S metaphorically, then, we in effect recommend that our audience follow a certain procedure for discovering certain instructive propositions. In calling such metaphors ‘procedurally essential’, Yablo implies that metaphor is needed to carry out this procedure. Metaphor is not, however, needed for this. We do need the concept of a game of make-believe to carry out the procedure Yablo describes. But we do not need to use S metaphorically in order to think of games within which S is a promising move, nor to think of what plausible and instructive propositions would have to be true for it to be a promising move. For S to be a promising move within a game is for it to be appropriate to use S literally within a game of make-believe involving the object as a prop. At least, judging by what Walton and Yablo say, for ‘Crotone is in the arch of the boot’ to be pretence-worthy is for it to be appropriate to pretend to assert, literally, that Crotone is in the arch of the boot. To use S literally within a game is, obviously, not to use it metaphorically within the game. Neither is it to use S metaphorically outside the game. An actor playing a character who is speaking literally is not himself speaking metaphorically. Therefore, if I invite you to think of games in which S is a promising move, I am inviting you to think of scenarios in which it would be appropriate to use S in a certain non-metaphorical way. If there is a 12

Ibid., pp. 137–138.

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sound argument to show that, in order to think of scenarios in which S is used in this non-metaphorical way, or to invite someone to do so, we must use S metaphorically, Yablo does not provide it. Even if Yablo and Walton are right that metaphors suggest games of make-believe, nothing they say shows that we need metaphor to think of the games metaphors suggest. Therefore, even if these games are indispensable for some purpose metaphors achieve by suggesting them, it does not follow that metaphor is too.

2. Metaphor in criticism Berys Gaut holds that metaphors used in art criticism are often indispensable.13 Thinking of the metaphor, according to Gaut, is often the only way to have the experience the metaphor provides. This is ‘because of the role of metaphor in classification’,14 and because the way we classify affects how we experience things. He asks us to imagine that a critic gets us to attend to various properties of a Kandinsky by describing it as ‘alive with movement’: The metaphor classifies together a motley bunch of properties: properties of vibrancy, subdued violence, extreme contrasts of saturation and hue, having jagged edges, acentric composition, a sense of fluctuation in pictorial depth, and so on. . . . How does one decide how to extend this list? There is such diversity here that we have no sense of how to carry on—except by use of the master-metaphor of being alive with movement. And certainly there is no reason to classify together these diverse properties other than because of their connection to the metaphor. So the metaphor cannot be discarded: it guides our ability to group these properties with each other, grounds our sense that they belong together. Further, we are aware not just that these properties belong together, but also that what makes this the case is that they are all connected to the metaphor.15

So Gaut’s claim is that we need the metaphor of the Kandinsky as alive with movement in order to: (a) tell us ‘how to carry on’ extending the list of properties he mentions; (b) ground ‘our sense that they belong together’; and (c) tell us why they belong together. 13 Berys Gaut, ‘Metaphor and the Understanding of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (1997): 223–241. 14 15 Ibid., p. 230. Ibid.

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The basis for this is the claim that ‘there is no reason to classify together these diverse properties other than because of their connection to the metaphor’. But this claim is false. There is another reason to classify together the properties the metaphor classifies together: they are all connected to the property, being alive with movement. They are connected to it in various ways. Some of the properties of the forms are also properties of creatures alive with movement (e.g., causing a sense of fluctuation, violence). Others are properties in virtue of which the forms share properties with creatures alive with movement: extreme contrasts of saturation and hue, for example, can make forms seem to leap out at us, and vibrant colours can arrest our attention. Still others are properties the picture shares with pictures of things alive with movement: acentric composition can be used (along with other features) to show that what is depicted is moving fast, and jagged edges can be used to suggest erratic motion, or the path of something moving erratically. If the properties the metaphor draws to our attention are all connected to the property of being alive with movement, then this undermines Gaut’s argument for the Indispensability Thesis. For in that case, knowing what properties are connected to the property of being alive with movement, and being able to identify them in the Kandinsky, would: (a) tell us how to carry on extending the list of properties he mentions; (b) ground our sense that they belong together; and (c) tell us why they belong together. And one can have such knowledge and exercise such an ability without the metaphor of the Kandinsky as alive with movement. Gaut comes close to acknowledging that the properties a metaphor classifies together are connected to something other than the metaphor. He writes: A person who classified together all and only artworks we call ‘sad’, but denied any connection between them and sadness, would have failed to grasp the aesthetic property we were indicating—would have failed to grasp the sadness of these things, and so would have missed what was of primary interest to us. Hence there could not be a person whose experience and understanding of a work was as ours is, but who did not have a grasp of the metaphor in terms of which we classify features of the work.16 16

Ibid., pp. 230–231.

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The conclusion does not follow. The fact (if it is a fact) that you must accept that there is a connection between certain artworks and sadness in order to grasp the sadness of those works does not show that you need a metaphor to grasp their sadness. It only shows that you need the concept of sadness to do so.

3. Metaphor in science Elisabeth Camp argues that ‘not everything that can be meant can necessarily be given literal expression, even in a private language.’17 Sometimes, according to Camp, we need metaphor to express, and not merely to communicate to others, what we use it to express. Developing an argument advanced by Richard Boyd,18 Camp asks us to suppose that we are scientists investigating sub-personal cognitive processes. We want to identify a certain kind of causally efficacious property. However, we don’t know much about properties of this kind. We know something about the property’s causal relations, but not enough to define it in functional terms; nor can we identify the property ostensively. This is where metaphor comes in. Camp writes: We can still make theoretical and experimental progress, though, by thinking metaphorically—for example, by exploiting the metaphor of memory storage and retrieval as the opening of a computer file. . . . Research progresses, in part, by investigating specific candidate similarities that might underwrite the analogical equations that are implicit in such metaphors. As we establish some similarities and rule out others, our cognitive access to the properties under investigation becomes more fully and literally conceptualized. At some point, if investigation progresses well, we may well be able to dispense with the metaphor in favor of a new, literally applicable concept. But at this early stage of our inquiry, the metaphor plays an essential role in fixing what we are thinking about.19

This is a case, Camp claims, in which metaphor is needed to express what we use it to express. This argument is unconvincing. We do not need metaphor to do what Boyd and Camp describe at any stage of the process of inquiry they 17 Elisabeth Camp, ‘Metaphor and That Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi” ’, Philosophical Studies 129/1 (2006): 17. 18 Richard Boyd, ‘Metaphor and Theory Change: What is “Metaphor” a Metaphor For?’, in Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 481–532. 19 Camp, ‘Metaphor and That Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi” ’, pp. 17–18.

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envisage. Consider what the scientist is doing. She is investigating whether memory has certain properties, which it would share with the process of opening a computer file if it has them. Her research is guided by the hypothesis that memory does share properties, or relevant properties, with the process of opening a computer file. She is trying to establish, for various properties that memory would share with this process if it has them, whether memory does have them. To conduct her research in this way, the scientist does need the concept, opening a computer file. She also needs to know what properties the process of opening a computer file has. But she does not need metaphor in order to think of properties memory would share with the process of opening a computer file if it has them. Nor does she need metaphor in order to investigate whether memory does have them. Camp responds to an objection like this one. She considers the objection that we might make explicit the implicit analogical equation through which the metaphor fixes the property we want to investigate by using a literal description, such as: (8) The property of cognition that causes memory retrieval in a manner that is analogous in some theoretically relevant respect to opening a folder in a computer program.20 Her response is that ‘identifying the denotation of a literal description like (8) requires the same cognitive capacity as the original metaphor does. We still need to identify which particular similarities are relevant, and then construct a positive concept of the appropriate property on that basis.’21 But this response does not vindicate the Indispensability Thesis. If correct, it shows at most that a capacity we need in order to think of or understand metaphor is also needed, in this situation, in order to fix what we are thinking about. It does not show what her argument purports to show: that metaphor itself, in this situation, is needed in order to fix what we are thinking about.

4. Why metaphors seem indispensable A pattern is emerging here. In several of the examples these philosophers have chosen, a certain concept is needed in order to do what these philosophers claim metaphor is needed for. In Boyd and Camp’s example, 20

Ibid., p. 18.

21

Ibid.

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the scientist needs the concept of opening a computer file in order to conduct her research in the way described. In the second example from Gaut, we need the concept of sadness in order to grasp the sadness of music. In Yablo’s first example, we need the concept of anger in order to represent clouds as looking like something expressive of anger. In each case, metaphor is not needed for the purpose in question, but a certain concept is. These concepts all figure in the metaphor that is said to be indispensable for the purpose in question. The concept of opening a computer file figures in the metaphor of memory storage and retrieval as the opening of a computer file; the concept of anger figures in the metaphor of the clouds as angry; and the concept of sadness figures in the metaphor (if it is a metaphor) of the music as sad. We might say that, when we use these metaphors, we apply these concepts, but we apply them metaphorically. This suggests an explanation of why metaphors have seemed indispensable to at least some supporters of the Indispensability Thesis. I suggest they are mistaking the indispensability of a concept for the indispensability of a metaphor in which that concept figures. In Boyd and Camp’s example, for instance, the following things are true: (a) We need to use the concept of opening a computer file in order to conduct research in the way they describe. (b) We can conduct research in this way by applying this concept metaphorically. As my discussion in the last section shows, however, the following is not true: (c) We need to apply this concept metaphorically in order to conduct research in the way they describe. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the other examples. In these cases, too, we need to use a certain concept to achieve a certain end; and it is possible to achieve this end by applying this concept metaphorically. This misleads some into thinking that we need to apply the concept metaphorically in order to achieve the end in question. This is why I say that they have mistaken the indispensability of a concept for the indispensability of a metaphor in which that concept figures. This diagnosis is supported by a second consideration. Advocates of the Indispensability Thesis not only say that metaphor is needed for a certain purpose when, in fact, it is the concept that figures in the metaphor that is needed. The cases in which some of them allow that metaphor is

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dispensable for some purpose are cases in which this concept is dispensable for that purpose. Scruton, for example, writes: ‘we must distinguish among metaphors between luxuries and necessities. . . . I can spell out homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man], for instance, by describing the known facts of man’s aggression towards his fellows . . . For all intents and purposes, it is . . . dispensable.’22 Frank Sibley discusses a metaphorical description of a wine: ‘it will never win a race but it’s a wonderful little jogger’. He comments: ‘We know exactly the prosaic meaning of this last one: “not top class but a satisfying day-to-day tipple you won’t get tired of.” Here the metaphor performs no irreplaceable function; it is dispensable.’23 These metaphors are indeed dispensable. And there is indeed a difference between these metaphors and others. But the difference is not that these metaphors are dispensable and others are not. When we use these metaphors, if Scruton and Sibley are right about them, we are not primarily interested in the fact that the item described metaphorically shares certain properties with what the concept that figures in the metaphor literally applies to. Rather, we are primarily interested in the fact that what is metaphorically described has these properties. A typical user of homo homini lupus, for example, is not primarily interested in the fact that people share the property of aggressiveness with wolves. Rather, she is mainly interested in the fact that people are aggressive towards each other. Similarly, the wine critic is not primarily interested in communicating that the wine’s failure to be top-class, and its being consistently good nevertheless, are properties it shares with wonderful little joggers who will never win a race. Her point is that it has these features. Sometimes, however, we are primarily interested in the item’s sharing of features when we use a metaphor. Bernini’s colonnade around St Peter’s Square has been described as ‘the arms of the Church, embracing her flock’. It has a shape of a kind that embracing arms also have. The point of describing it as ‘the arms of the Church’, however, is not merely to draw attention to that shape. It is to point out that the colonnade shares that shape with pairs of embracing arms. Appreciating the colonnade involves

22

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 52, 91. 23 Frank Sibley, ‘Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 238.

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noticing this, for the building expresses welcome by sharing a shape with arms in a gesture of welcome. Now, what is true of the metaphors Scruton and Sibley discuss is that, to do what we are mainly interested in doing with them, we do not need to use the concepts that figure in the metaphors. To point out that people are aggressive towards each other, we needn’t use the concept of a wolf. This leads some philosophers to say that, in such cases, we needn’t use the metaphor to communicate what we want. As it happens, this is true; but it is the same confusion of metaphors with the concepts that figure in them that leads them to say it. By contrast, we need to use the concept of embracing arms to point out that the colonnade shares a certain shape with pairs of embracing arms. But we do not need to apply this concept metaphorically to point this out. So there is a genuine distinction to be made among metaphors with respect to the dispensability of the concept that figures in the metaphor. But if the concept that figures in the metaphor is indispensable, it does not follow that the metaphor is too.

5. Clarifications It is important to be clear about what is at issue when metaphors are said to be indispensable. First, there are trivially true versions of the Indispensability Thesis, and these are plainly not at issue. For some things we use metaphor to think, to express, to communicate, or to discover, it is trivially true that we need metaphor in order to think, express, communicate, or discover them. For example, we obviously cannot discover, without at least thinking of metaphor, that a given metaphor draws our attention to a certain feature or fact. The modality of the version of the Indispensability Thesis being advocated also affects how interesting that version is. Friends of indispensability sometimes distinguish their position from the view that metaphor is sometimes needed to communicate something we merely happen to lack non-metaphorical means of communicating.24 If we lack such nonmetaphorical means, but could easily develop them (and do so without metaphor), that would not establish the truth of an especially interesting 24 See Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954–1955): 280– 282, and his ‘More about Metaphor’, Dialectica 31/3 (1977): 439. Compare John R. Searle, ‘Metaphor’, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 114.

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version of the thesis. Beyond saying this, however, advocates of the thesis do not tend to make clear the modality of the version they advocate. Second, the Indispensability Thesis is not a claim about the manner in which we think, express, communicate, or discover things when we use metaphor to do so. Where f-ing ranges over thinking, expressing, communicating, and discovering, it is not the view that we could not f in suchand-such a way without metaphor. It is the view that what we f with some metaphors cannot be f’ed without metaphor. One might hold, to take one example, that a single metaphor can communicate many propositions, and that these propositions are emphasized to different degrees when we use the metaphor to communicate them. One might also hold that there is no other way to communicate those propositions with just that distribution of emphasis. An oft-quoted complaint Max Black makes about the attempt to state the content of certain metaphors in plain language is that when we attempt to do so, the metaphor’s ‘implications, previously left for a suitable reader to educe for himself, with a nice feeling for their relative priorities and degrees of importance, are now presented explicitly as though having equal weight’.25 The Indispensability Thesis is not the view that metaphor is indispensable for communicating in this, or any other, manner. Third, I have so far said nothing about the paraphrasability of metaphors. Several philosophers hold that at least some metaphors cannot be paraphrased. One might think that this claim implies the truth of the Indispensability Thesis. This would be a mistake. In fact, the claim that some metaphors cannot be paraphrased does not imply the truth of the Indispensability Thesis, although the claim that we use metaphor to communicate or to express what cannot be communicated or expressed without metaphor (which is a version of the Indispensability Thesis) implies that metaphors cannot be non-metaphorically paraphrased. There are several philosophers whose views commit them to the claim that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but not to the Indispensability Thesis. Davidson, for example, appears to hold that a paraphrase would give the non-literal meaning or special cognitive content of the metaphor. But according to him, metaphors have no non-literal meaning or special cognitive content. Therefore, they cannot be paraphrased. He writes:

25

Black, ‘Metaphor’, p. 293.

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I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. . . . Metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact—but not by standing for, or expressing, the fact. If this is right, what we attempt in ‘paraphrasing’ a metaphor cannot be to give its meaning, for that lies on the surface; rather we attempt to evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention.26

Davidson is committed to the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased (although he acknowledges that there is a point to the activity we call ‘paraphrasing’). But he is not committed to the Indispensability Thesis. He does not claim that there is a content expressed or communicated by metaphor that no non-metaphorical paraphrase can express or communicate. He claims that there is no special cognitive content expressed or communicated by metaphor. From this, it follows that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, in Davidson’s sense. But it also follows that metaphors are not indispensable for the expression or communication of such a content. Of course, if Davidson had said that what metaphor brings to our attention cannot be discovered without metaphor, then he would be committed to the Indispensability Thesis; but he makes no such claim. To take another example: Samuel Guttenplan regards it as wrong to take ‘ “paraphrasing X” to be more or less equivalent to “saying what X tells us or means” ’.27 You can say what a photograph tells us, but you cannot paraphrase one. Rather, following the OED, Guttenplan holds that ‘a paraphrase is a “re-statement of the sense of a passage in other words”.’28 Since it is a re-statement of a thought in other words than those in which the original expressed the thought, one can only paraphrase something that expressed a thought in words in the first place. And ‘since a photograph, whatever it tells us, is not itself in words, it is inappropriate to paraphrase it.’29 On Guttenplan’s view, metaphors also do not express thoughts in words. Rather, ‘it is words in the metaphor that call on [an] object’, and it is what Guttenplan calls ‘the “proto-predicate”, object included, which 26 Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 246, 262. 27 Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 18. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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conveys a message, not the words themselves.’30 The burden of Guttenplan’s theory of metaphor is to explain these ideas and to show how speakers can use objects in this way. It is unnecessary to enter into the details of it here. The point is that he draws from his theory the moral that, as in the case of photographs, ‘it would be bizarre to ask someone to express this same information in other words. . . . Since the speaker is using an object, not words, to convey a message, it makes no sense even to try to paraphrase a metaphor in the strict sense of the term.’31 It would follow from the truth of Guttenplan’s theory that metaphors cannot be paraphrased in the sense he identifies. But here too, it would not follow that metaphor is indispensable. One would need to argue that the thoughts expressed by metaphor could not be expressed without metaphor. Establishing that the thoughts expressed by metaphor are not expressed by the metaphor in words, and therefore that nothing can count as expressing these thoughts in other words, does not show this. It sometimes goes unrecognized that the impossibility of paraphrase does not entail the indispensability of metaphor for communication or expression. Camp, for instance, holds that a paraphrase of a metaphor should state only ‘the content of the speaker’s intended illocutionary act’, and therefore ‘should not . . . include contents the speaker merely insinuated, or merely caused her hearer to entertain’.32 Moreover, in a paraphrase the content is stated ‘in a literal and explicit fashion’: that is, the paraphrase ‘should enable an otherwise linguistically competent speaker to understand the original utterance’s content simply in virtue of understanding the meanings of the paraphrasing sentence’s constituent terms and their mode of combination’.33 She defends the idea that certain metaphors cannot be paraphrased (at least in certain circumstances) by arguing that various plausible candidates fail to meet the criteria she sets for paraphrase. But if these arguments succeed in showing that such metaphors cannot be paraphrased in her sense, they still do not establish the Indispensability Thesis. They show, at most, that in many circumstances we communicate with metaphor something we cannot communicate by making a statement satisfying the criteria she sets for being a paraphrase. Camp, however, takes her argument to establish the stronger conclusion that we sometimes cannot communicate certain contents without metaphor. 30 32

31 Ibid., p. 129. Ibid. Camp, ‘Metaphor and That Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi,” ’ p. 2.

33

Ibid.

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She considers this example: (7) When he finally walked out the door, I was left standing on the top of an icy mountain crag, with nothing around me but thin cold air, bare white cliffs, and a blindingly clear blue sky. ‘Here’, she says, ‘the speaker is claiming to have experienced a specific property, one for which the language has no existing expression, and one which the hearer has not (let us suppose) experienced himself.’34 Under these circumstances, Camp grants, ‘the speaker herself is still not forced to speak metaphorically’.35 The speaker could have said: (72) I felt an emotion which was like the way it would feel physically to stand on top of an icy mountain crag . . . Statements like these, however, ‘still rely at least implicitly on the original metaphor, and so they fail to provide explicit formulations of the speaker’s meaning’: if ‘like’ expresses a substantive relation which holds just in case a particular, contextually salient similarity holds between the two objects . . . then (72) implicitly builds those similarities into its content. It may then succeed in capturing the speaker’s intended content, but it arguably also fails to be fully explicit, in much the way that ‘He’s ready’ fails to specify its implicit argument.36

Thus, (72) violates the requirement that a paraphrase must be an explicit statement of the metaphor’s content. This argument does not show that (72) ‘relies at least implicitly on the original metaphor’. It shows, at most, that (72) ‘implicitly builds [certain] similarities into its content’. Implicitly building similarities into its content is different from implicitly relying on a metaphor—even a metaphor which has those similarities as part of its content. It is true that, if (72) has this content built into it only implicitly, then (72) is not an explicit statement of the metaphor’s content. It would therefore fail to satisfy one of Camp’s requirements for a paraphrase. But that does not show that (72) relies on the metaphor, or that it fails to communicate the content of the metaphor. Indeed, if it has the metaphor’s content implicitly built into it, then it succeeds. 34

Ibid., p. 11.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid., p. 12.

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She also considers a paraphrase in which we are citing the relevant similarities explicitly, as in (73) I experienced an emotion which is like the physical feeling of standing on an icy mountain crag . . . in respects i, j, k. . . .37

The problem with this is that, construed as a paraphrase, (73) attributes unintended content to the speaker. In uttering (7), the speaker isn’t making any claims about what icy mountain crags are like or about their relation to her emotional state—she’s just characterizing her emotion, using shared attitudes about icy mountain crags to do so. Her intended claim has the form: ‘When he left, I felt that way’.38

(73), in short, violates the requirement that a paraphrase must state only the content of the speaker’s intended illocutionary act. Again, this may show that (73) fails to be a paraphrase. It does not show that by using (73) we would fail to communicate what the metaphor does. It shows at most that, if (73) does communicate what the metaphor does, then it also communicates more besides—namely, the claims about icy mountain crags. Moreover, if the problem with (73) is that it does not just communicate that the emotion has features i, j, and k, but also communicates that it shares these features with the physical feeling of standing on an icy mountain crag, then it is unclear why this cannot be easily corrected. If we managed to cite these properties explicitly in (73) by talking of ‘respects i, j, k . . . ’, it is unclear why we cannot attribute these features to the emotion without also claiming that they are shared by the feeling of standing on a crag. Finally, if the metaphor-user manages to communicate that the emotion has these features by using shared attitudes about icy mountain crags to do so, it is also unclear why a speaker could not use these shared attitudes to communicate the same thing without metaphor. It is unclear, for instance, why she could not communicate the same thing with a simile. Suppose the speaker had said: ‘When he left, my emotions were like the feelings of someone left standing on the top of an icy mountain crag, with nothing around her but thin cold air, bare white cliffs, and a blindingly clear blue sky.’ It is far from clear that she would not have communicated to a hearer what she would have communicated with the metaphor. The fact that this simile would not be an explicit statement of what the shared

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid.

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features are does not prevent it from communicating what they are to her audience. The metaphor, after all, is not an explicit statement of what those features are, either.39 Not all of these points would constitute problems if Camp wanted to establish only that there are unparaphrasable metaphors. But she also wants to establish that there are indispensable metaphors. Camp holds that metaphor is needed for successful communication in situations like that in which she imagines (7) being used: ones in which the language lacks an expression for the property the metaphor-user has in mind, and in which the hearer has not experienced the property (which, she says, prevents the speaker using any demonstrative that would enable the hearer to identify the property). She takes the impossibility of paraphrase in these situations to show that, ‘even if she avails herself of all possible literal means’ of coining a word for the property, the speaker could not introduce that word into the language, because her hearer would be in no position to comprehend it—not as a result of linguistic incompetence, or irrationality, but just from a lack of worldly experience. . . . It is of course true that after the speaker has gotten her hearer to identify the relevant property by metaphorical means, she can then introduce a new term which denotes it. . . . But because the metaphor here plays an essential role in defining the new term, this possibility cannot be used to show that metaphor in general is theoretically eliminable. Although each particular metaphor can eventually be eliminated, the situation exemplified by (7) can always arise anew for a different property.40

But as I have argued, nothing Camp says about paraphrase shows that all possible literal means will fail to enable the hearer to identify the relevant property, even in the kind of situation exemplified by (7). She shows at most that her candidate paraphrases fail to be paraphrases, not that they fail to enable the hearer to identify the relevant property without relying 39 Camp rejects other candidate paraphrases on the grounds that, contrary to her second requirement for paraphrase, ‘an otherwise linguistically competent, rational hearer could no longer understand the paraphrasing sentence simply in virtue of his basic linguistic competence and rationality. . . . He would need to engage in just the sort of interpretation called for by the original metaphor’ (ibid., p. 14). The same kind of objection as I raised above applies here. The fact that basic linguistic competence and rationality would not be enough to enable a hearer to understand a candidate paraphrase may show that it is not a paraphrase. It does not show that the hearer could not understand the candidate paraphrase at all. And the fact that a hearer of the candidate paraphrase would need to engage in the same sort of interpretation demanded by the metaphor does not show that the speaker would need to rely on the metaphor to be understood. 40 Ibid., pp. 15, 16.

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implicitly on the metaphor. And if she does not establish that metaphor is essential for communication in this situation, she also does not establish that metaphor plays an essential role in defining a new term for the property. What implies the truth of the Indispensability Thesis, then, is not the thesis that metaphors cannot be paraphrased. It is the claim (i) that metaphors do communicate or express something, and the claim (ii) that there is no nonmetaphorical way of communicating or expressing what the metaphor does. Of course, if paraphrase just is the expression by non-metaphorical means of what the metaphor expresses, or the communication by non-metaphorical means of what the metaphor communicates, then the impossibility of paraphrase plus claim (i) together imply the truth of the Indispensability Thesis. But this is what paraphrase must be in order for the denial of the possibility of paraphrase and claim (i) to imply the truth of the Indispensability Thesis. And it is, as we have seen, not universally acknowledged that this is what a paraphrase is. The final clarification I wish to make concerns the value of metaphor. Nothing I have said casts any doubt on the idea that some metaphors express what they do more beautifully, more powerfully, or more succinctly than any other form of words could. That view, being one about the manner in which metaphors express what they do, is distinct from the Indispensability Thesis. Many writers seem to hold that they must defend the Indispensability Thesis in order to defend the claim that metaphor is of great value. If metaphor is one among several possible ways of communicating or expressing what it does, then (the assumption seems to be) it is of minor importance. Scruton insists that metaphors are indispensable ‘not merely because they are part of some unique literary experience’,41 and Black stresses that metaphor provides more than ‘the incidental pleasures of stating figuratively what might just as well have been said literally’.42 Such impatience with the idea that great metaphors are valuable ‘merely’ because of their power, beauty, vividness, and so forth is curious. Pointing out that a piece of writing is an imaginative, beautiful, vigorous, clear, and concise way of communicating something, as many metaphors are, is normally sufficient to show that it is a very valuable way of communicating. If someone were to show that there is a dull, laboured, and rambling way of communicating the same thing, we would not 41 42

Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, p. 91. Black, ‘More About Metaphor’, p. 441. See also Black, ‘Metaphor’, pp. 282, 293.

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conclude that the original way of putting things is of little value. We would certainly not conclude that what we communicated ‘might just as well have been said’ in the dull way. Perhaps it is because philosophers are so often concerned with questions of truth and knowledge that they are inclined to defend metaphor by arguing that it is essential for the expression or discovery of certain truths.

6. Prospects for the Indispensability Thesis I have not, of course, demonstrated that the Indispensability Thesis is false. Rather, I have shown that various arguments for it do not succeed, and I have distinguished it from a variety of related claims. Some of these other claims are plausible, and the Indispensability Thesis acquires an air of plausibility when it is not clearly distinguished from them. As I said at the beginning, however, many philosophers do not even attempt to argue for the Indispensability Thesis. They simply assert that metaphors are indispensable. This being so, it may be that some will respond to my discussion so far in the following way: perhaps these arguments do fail, but is it not obvious that some metaphors are indispensable? Arguments for the Indispensability Thesis, it may be felt, are unnecessary. Consider complex poetic metaphors such as: Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.43 selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.44 There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.45

43

Ecclesiastes 11:1 (King James Version). Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 175, l. 14. 45 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 61, ll. 25–30. 44

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Is it not obvious that we could not express what these express in any other way? I have not shown that these philosophers are wrong. What I hope to have shown is that asking rhetorical questions like this is not good enough. Advocates of the Indispensability Thesis do need to provide arguments for it. If the arguments that are given for it so often turn out to be based on confusion, we have reason to be suspicious of our sense (if we have it) that very apt, striking, or complex metaphors are indispensable for the purposes claimed by advocates of the Indispensability Thesis. I have so far provided six grounds for suspicion. First, I have shown that the indispensability of a concept of something in terms of which metaphor is explained (e.g., the concept of a game of make-believe) is sometimes confused with the indispensability of metaphor itself. Second, the indispensability of the concept that figures in a metaphor is often confused with the indispensability of metaphor itself. Third, the fact that we happen to lack expressions with which to attribute a certain property non-metaphorically, and the fact that we can attribute it with metaphor, would not by themselves establish an interesting version of the Indispensability Thesis. Fourth, the fact that we use some metaphors to f in a manner in which we could not f without metaphor would not show that they are indispensable for f-ing what we f with them. Fifth, the unparaphrasability of metaphor is sometimes confused with the indispensability of metaphor. Sixth, the fact that some metaphors are tremendously valuable ways of communicating and expressing things is consistent with the claim that they are dispensable for these purposes. In short, supporters of the thesis need to argue for it because they need to show that they are avoiding these common confusions. It is not simply obvious that certain metaphors are indispensable, because it is not simply obvious that our sense of the indispensability of certain metaphors is not due to one of these confusions. Argument is required to show this. There are also more general grounds for suspicion. For ease of exposition, I will focus on the case in which metaphor is claimed to be indispensable for expressing something; but the points I will make can be made, mutatis mutandis, about communication. I have said that metaphors are indispensable for expressing what they do only if they do express something. In addition, to know that a given metaphor is indispensable for expressing what it does, we need to know what it expresses. If we do not know what a given metaphor expresses, we

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cannot claim that metaphor is needed in order to express what the given metaphor does. This consideration shows that not just any complex or poetic metaphor can be used as evidence for the Indispensability Thesis. It must be one that we understand: we must know what it expresses. But many difficult metaphors are difficult precisely because it is unclear what they express. Philosophers often write as though we find difficult metaphors puzzling only because we find it hard to put them into other words. In fact, we often puzzle over difficult poetic metaphors because we are unsure what they are expressing. Take Eliot’s metaphor: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’. Perhaps some people know what this expresses. But I expect that for many of us it is not clear. And if we do not know what it expresses, then we do not know that it expresses something inexpressible without metaphor. Since many metaphors are like this, this is a seventh reason to be suspicious of the impression that some metaphors, surely, are indispensable. Suppose, then, that we have examples of metaphors that express something, and we do know what they express, and they seem indispensable. We would still need an argument for their indispensability, for the following reason. If we know what a metaphor expresses, such that we understand the metaphor, and the metaphor characterizes, then we know what property (or properties) it characterizes its subject as having or lacking. We can identify the property. Knowing what is expressed by metaphors that do not characterize still involves being able to identify certain properties. For example, understanding the metaphorical question, ‘Is Juliet the sun?’, involves knowing what properties Juliet would have if the answer to the question is ‘Yes’. Again, if we understand the metaphor, we can identify these properties. An ability to identify relevant properties is also involved in understanding other metaphors that do not characterize (e.g., some metaphors in the antecedent or consequent of a conditional). Given these facts, a tempting but over-hasty argument against the Indispensability Thesis would be to say this: if you can identify a property, then you can coin a non-metaphorical expression for it—a name for it or a predicate or an adjective with which we can characterize something as having it. To think otherwise is comparable to thinking that there are particulars we can identify but cannot name. Consequently, any metaphor that expresses something and is understood is dispensable. In the case of any such metaphor, we can identify the relevant properties, and

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therefore we can coin a non-metaphorical expression for the property. And if we can coin a non-metaphorical expression for the property, then we can use it to express whatever we expressed with the metaphor. We can use the term to characterize the metaphor’s subject as having or lacking the property, to ask the same question as was asked with the metaphor, and so forth. So the Indispensability Thesis is false—or, at least, it is not true of any metaphor we understand. This is certainly a challenge that needs to be met by a supporter of the Indispensability Thesis. But I call this argument over-hasty because it overlooks the possibility that we sometimes need metaphor in order to identify certain properties in the first place, or to enable others to identify them. To my knowledge, no advocate of the Indispensability Thesis does explicitly and directly claim that there are properties such that, even when we have identified them, we cannot then name them or coin a predicate or adjective with which to characterize something as having them.46 Camp shows greater awareness of this problem than many. She is careful to claim only that we sometimes need metaphor in order to identify a property or to enable others to do so. As we have seen, however, her arguments do not establish this. So this is an eighth reason why advocates of the thesis must provide arguments for it. It is very implausible that we cannot coin a non-metaphorical expression for a property once we have identified it. If any metaphors are nevertheless indispensable for communication or expression, they must be needed (either by the metaphor-user or her reader) in order to identify certain properties. It is not simply obvious that they are needed for this, and so it is not simply obvious that metaphors are indispensable. None of this demonstrates that the Indispensability Thesis is false. Its prospects, however, do not look good.

46

Zangwill, however, comes close to saying this, and appears to be committed to it. He writes: ‘My view is that there are some aspects of the world which cannot be described without metaphor, for I think that the world has properties that are literally indescribable. And I think that thoughts about those properties cannot be linguistically expressed without metaphor.’ (Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 174).

6 Metaphor and Criticism My aim in this chapter is to answer the question: why is metaphor so often used in criticism? As I said in Chapter 3, the prevalence of metaphor in criticism has been explained in many ways. It has usually been thought to reveal something important about aesthetic experience and artistic expression. Kant wrote that ‘we call buildings or trees majestic and stately, or plains laughing and joyful; even colours are called innocent, modest, soft, because they excite sensations containing something analogous to the consciousness of the state of mind produced by moral judgements.’1 Kant takes the kinds of descriptions he mentions to support his view that we experience the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good. E. H. Gombrich is struck by the fact that ‘as long as criticism has existed, critics have used metaphors to express their approval or disapproval. They have branded colour combinations as “vulgar” or exalted forms as “dignified”, have praised the “honesty” of one artist’s palette and rejected the “meretricious” effects of others.’2 Gombrich explains this as a reflection of ‘how, in art, a visual quality may be experienced as the equivalent of a moral value’.3 Stuart Hampshire regards critics’ use of metaphor as evincing the kind of attention characteristic of aesthetic contemplation, and Nelson Goodman argues that reflection on metaphorical descriptions of artworks reveals how artistic expression differs from forms of artistic representation such as depiction.4 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ak. 5: 354. 2 E. H. Gombrich, ‘Visual Metaphors of Value in Art’, in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), pp. 14–15. 3 Ibid., p. 14. See also E. H. Gombrich, ‘On Physiognomic Perception’, in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, pp. 47–48. 4 See Stuart Hampshire, ‘Logic and Appreciation’, in William Elton, ed., Aesthetics and Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), pp. 166–167; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), ch. 2.

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My approach to this question is to consider what critics achieve by using metaphor. Whatever the use of metaphor in criticism reflects about aesthetic experience or other matters, it certainly reflects something about criticism. It enables critics to achieve what they are trying to achieve. What, then, are they trying to achieve? And what makes metaphor such an effective way of achieving it? Other philosophers have appealed to the Indispensability Thesis to explain the prevalence of metaphor in criticism. On such views, critics are trying to express or communicate facts that cannot be expressed or communicated without metaphor (for instance, certain facts about how artworks look and sound, and about our responses to them). I will not appeal to this claim. Rather, I will appeal to my account of the aims of criticism (defended in Chapter 2) and to the Minimal Thesis (defended in Chapter 4). I will begin by defending the Minimal Thesis against those who would object that it does not apply to art-critical metaphors. I will then draw a distinction between two kinds of art-critical metaphor. This distinction has not, to my knowledge, been previously recognized; but drawing it is essential to understanding the function of metaphor in criticism. I will then provide my own explanation of metaphor’s prevalence in criticism.

1. What the critic communicates The first part of the Minimal Thesis is this claim: Each property a metaphor’s subject is characterized with the metaphorical element as having is either: (1) (2) (3) (4)

A likeness indicated by the metaphorical element, or A determinate of such a likeness, or A likeness-maker for such a likeness, or A way of possessing a likeness-maker for such a likeness.

The second part of the Minimal Thesis is the claim that, to understand a metaphor, we employ our knowledge of what properties are of kinds (1)–(4). If the Minimal Thesis is correct, the same is true of metaphorical descriptions in criticism. A critic who describes music metaphorically as ‘chattering’ attributes to the music the likeness being like something chattering,

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and/or properties related to this likeness in one of the above ways. She might, for instance, communicate that the music sounds like something chattering. To understand the metaphor, the critic’s readers must draw on their knowledge of what likeness is indicated by ‘chattering’ and what properties are related to this likeness as determinates of it, likeness-makers for it, or ways of possessing likeness-makers for it. Views inconsistent with the Minimal Thesis are common in aesthetics. Some believe that, in criticism, metaphors are not used to attribute any property to the object—even if they are so used elsewhere. I will call this view ‘anti-realism about metaphor’. Some aestheticians go further. They claim that the fact that aesthetic descriptions are often metaphorical lends support to an anti-realist understanding of aesthetic descriptions in general. John Bender says that one thing that makes it difficult to argue that aesthetic properties are real is that many of them are ‘metaphorical’,5 by which he presumably means that (apparent) ascriptions of these properties are often metaphorical. Frank Sibley writes: I include [among aesthetic descriptions], moreover, those remarks, metaphorical in character, which we might describe as apt rather than true, for these often say, only more strikingly, what could be said in less colourful language. The transition from true to apt description is a gradual one.6

In the same paper, Sibley also says that he poses the question of objectivity in aesthetics as a question about the truth and aptness of remarks, rather than as a question about the possession of properties by objects. One thing that leads him to do this is the existence of metaphorical aesthetic descriptions. He explains: ‘while we might replace the question “Is she graceful?” by talk of properties, we might feel less happy, with metaphorical remarks, saying that a work has the property of gemlike fire or marmoreal hardness (though we might say it has properties that make these descriptions apt).’7 In a later paper, Sibley says straight out that figurative descriptions ‘are apt rather than true’.8

5 John W. Bender, ‘Aesthetic Realism 2’, in Jerrold Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 80. 6 Frank Sibley, ‘Objectivity and Aesthetics’, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 71. 7 Ibid., p. 72. 8 Frank Sibley, ‘Making Music Our Own’, in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 152.

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These remarks suggest that Sibley endorses anti-realism about metaphor. It is a familiar claim that what we say with metaphor is, normally, not true. But if Sibley’s view was only that a metaphor-user does not normally say, but may communicate, something true, he would be unlikely to describe this as the view that metaphors are ‘apt rather than true’. Similarly, if Sibley believed only that metaphors are not used to attribute the property the object is said to have, though they are used to attribute properties, he would be unlikely to cite the existence of metaphorical aesthetic remarks as a reason for eschewing all talk of properties in favour of talk of the aptness of remarks. So I take it that, although Sibley wrote little on metaphor, he was an anti-realist about metaphor. However, the reasons given in Sibley’s (admittedly cursory) discussion are bad reasons to embrace anti-realism. He says that ‘we might describe [metaphorical aesthetic descriptions] as apt rather than true, for these often say, only more strikingly, what could be said in less colourful language’. But the fact that we could say something in language less colourful than the language we actually use is, of course, no reason at all to believe that our actual remark is apt rather than true. A remark’s colourfulness has nothing to do with its truth. Similarly, although it is perhaps true that ‘we might feel less happy, with metaphorical remarks, saying that a work has the property of gemlike fire or marmoreal hardness’, that is no reason to doubt that some property is being attributed. It is just that we cannot be attributing the property we would have been attributing had we been speaking literally—which should come as no surprise, since we are not speaking literally. We would be equally unhappy saying that a brave person has the property of being a lion. That, however, is no reason to doubt that we attribute bravery to the person when we describe her metaphorically as ‘a lion’. So the considerations Sibley advances do not provide good reasons to endorse anti-realism about metaphor. The most developed and influential argument for anti-realism about art-critical metaphors is provided by Roger Scruton. According to Scruton, a metaphor ‘attributes no property at all’ to the work.9 Rather, we use art-critical metaphors ‘to describe something other than the material world’, namely, ‘how the world seems, from the point of view of the active imagination’.10 9 10

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 154. Ibid., p. 91.

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Like Davidson, Scruton holds that an expression used metaphorically means exactly what it would mean if used literally. When we say metaphorically, ‘The music is sad’, ‘sad’ means exactly what it would mean if we were speaking literally. Clearly, however, we are not attributing literal sadness to the music. It follows, Scruton thinks, that we are not attributing any other property to it, either. ‘To say that the word ascribes, in this use, another property, is to say that it has another sense—in other words that it is not used metaphorically but ambiguously.’11 So we claim that we are attributing another property to music on pain of denying that expressions used metaphorically have the same sense as they would have if used literally. But that is unacceptable. ‘It follows that the word “sad” attributes to the music neither the property that is possessed by sad people, nor any other property. It therefore attributes no property at all.’12 There are several problems with Scruton’s position. First, it is false that ‘to say that the word ascribes, in this use, another property, is to say that it has another sense.’ The same predicate can be used in the same sense to attribute different properties on different occasions. You do not have to use a word in a different sense to attribute a different property. A parallel will illustrate this. By parity of reasoning, we could use Scruton’s assumptions to show that a speaker who describes someone sarcastically as ‘friendly’ is not attributing unfriendliness to her—or, indeed, any property at all. For clearly, ‘friendly’ used sarcastically means what it means when used literally. Equally clearly, the speaker does not believe that the person described is friendly. So she is not attributing friendliness to her. Nor is she attributing any other property. To hold that she is would commit one to the claim that ‘friendly’ is ambiguous. Indeed, one would have to say that one meaning of ‘friendly’ is ‘unfriendly’, which is absurd. Therefore, you attribute no property at all when you describe someone sarcastically as ‘friendly’. Obviously, this argument is faulty. The sarcastic person is attributing unfriendliness to the person she describes. But she is not using any word in a different sense than she would be if she were speaking non-sarcastically. She is attributing unfriendliness by other means.

11

Ibid., p. 154.

12

Ibid.

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Scruton might make the following reply: Granted, it is possible to use a word in its usual sense to attribute a property that is not attributed when we use it in this sense and speak literally. But in order to show that this is actually the case with ‘sad’ as applied to music, we must identify some plausible candidate for a property that is being attributed here. And this, he might claim, we cannot do. However, even if this is true of the notoriously puzzling example of ‘sad music’, it is not true of a vast range of art-critical metaphors. In these cases, there are very plausible candidates for properties that are being attributed. I pointed out in Chapter 3 that connoisseurs of Chinese jades distinguish between the colours of ‘spinach’, ‘lychee-flesh’, and ‘mutton-fat’ jade. These metaphors characterize these different kinds of jade as being coloured like these substances. There are numerous examples of art-critical metaphors for which there are plausible candidates for the properties being attributed. So if Scruton’s case rests on the example of ‘sad music’, he does not have adequate support for his conclusion. Finally, suppose one did show that neither a likeness to sad people, nor any properties related to this likeness in ways (2)–(4), are attributed to music with expressive terms such as ‘sad’. This would pose a problem for the Minimal Thesis only if ‘sad music’ is a metaphor in which being like a sad person is the likeness indicated by the metaphorical element. If another likeness is indicated by the metaphorical element, then it does not matter if neither being like a sad person, nor any related properties, are attributed to the music. If Scruton is right that words do not acquire new senses when used metaphorically, then it seems that this likeness is indicated only if ‘sad’ is used metaphorically with the sense it has when literally applied to sad people, and not used metaphorically with, say, the sense it has when literally applied to sad gestures or sad feelings. But, in the first place, it is far from obvious that ‘sad’ is used metaphorically here with the sense it has when applied literally to sad people. If this were so, then applying it to music would be an example of personification. We personify the weeping willow when we describe it as ‘sad’. But we do not appear to be personifying music when we speak of ‘sad music’.13

13 This is so even if Jerrold Levinson is right that we hear sad music as an expression of sadness (as a sad gesture of some sort) and imagine a sad persona in the music (see Jerrold Levinson, ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’, in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 91–108). If these claims are right,

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Second, it is not obvious that ‘sad’ is here used metaphorically at all.14 It is certainly not as obviously metaphorical as ‘The weeping willow is sad’. Moreover, to assume that expressive terms are metaphorical is to assume that several theories of artistic expression are false. Philosophers often introduce the claim that expressive terms are metaphorical as though this assumption begs no relevant questions. But this is not so. If a certain version of the arousal theory of expression (to take one example) is correct, then to call music ‘sad’ is to say that it is such as to cause sadness. In that case, ‘sad’ is being used only as a causal analogy. It is like ‘healthy’ as applied to food: as I said in Chapter 4, we attribute, not health, but the property of being such as to cause, contribute to, or maintain health when we call food ‘healthy’. And if we are using ‘sad’ only by causal analogy, then we are not using it metaphorically. ‘Healthy food’ is no metaphor (not even a dead one). Expressive terms are clearly metaphors only if a range of theories of artistic expression are clearly false. So the possibility that expressive terms do not attribute likenesses or related properties should not concern a supporter of the Minimal Thesis. There are independent grounds for hesitating to regard them as metaphors anyway. We saw in Chapter 4 that there are many nonmetaphorical ways of extending the uses of expressions. If applying ‘sad’ to music is an extension of some pre-existent use of ‘sad’, that by itself is poor evidence that it is a metaphorical extension. Numerous clear cases of metaphor in criticism are accurately described by the Minimal Thesis. I conclude that these arguments do not show that the Minimal Thesis fails to apply to art-critical metaphors. Anti-realism about art-critical metaphors, widespread as it is in aesthetics, is an obstacle to understanding why critics frequently use metaphor. However, before explaining why they do, I should make two important clarifications.

then the most plausible view about the sense of ‘sad’ as applied to the music (rather than ‘sad’ as applied to the persona imagined in the music) is that it has the sense it has when applied to an expression of sadness, such as a sad gesture. 14 Several philosophers, at least, have doubted it. See R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music: An Introduction (Chesham: Acumen, 2004), pp. 102–108; Paul Boghossian, ‘Explaining Musical Experience’, in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 123.

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First, the Minimal Thesis does not necessarily establish that critics’ metaphors attribute aesthetic properties. That depends on what aesthetic properties are. Realism about aesthetic metaphors may not be sufficient to establish realism about aesthetic properties. This is important because Scruton, for one, wants to establish antirealism about metaphor partly because he wants to establish anti-realism about aesthetic properties. The assumption seems to be that, if these metaphors are used to attribute any properties, they are used to attribute aesthetic properties. That assumption is not obviously correct. It depends, again, on what aesthetic properties are. If the likenesses, likeness-makers, or other properties attributed with aesthetic metaphors are not themselves aesthetic properties, then an aesthetic anti-realist can happily accept the Minimal Thesis. Anti-realism about aesthetic metaphor may not be necessary to establish anti-realism about aesthetic properties. Second, the aesthetic realist could also accept the Minimal Thesis, even if the likenesses or related properties attributed by art-critical metaphors are not themselves aesthetic properties. It is consistent with my position to say that speakers attribute properties in addition to the properties identified by the Minimal Thesis when they use some particular metaphor. Critics may often imply, for example, that the work is aesthetically interesting in virtue of having the likenesses or likeness-makers attributed. However, if they do attribute such properties, they do not do so in virtue of using a metaphor, but in virtue of something else (e.g., contextual factors). Acceptance of the Minimal Thesis, then, does not by itself commit one either to aesthetic realism or to aesthetic anti-realism.

2. What interests the critic So much, then, for what the critic communicates. A further important point is this. To say that critics attribute likeness-makers for a certain likeness is not to imply that the critic is always interested in the fact that those properties give the object that likeness. Sometimes, the critic is indeed interested in those properties because they give the object the likeness. However, sometimes she is interested in these properties, but not for this reason. Some examples will make this clear. The critic is often interested in the fact that certain properties give the work a certain likeness. As I said in Chapter 5, Bernini’s colonnade around

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St Peter’s Square has been compared to a pair of arms embracing the pilgrims. A certain shape—call it S—makes the colonnade like a pair of embracing arms. A critic who describes the colonnade as ‘a pair of arms embracing the pilgrims’ would probably not be interested only in the fact that the colonnade has S. She is also interested in the fact that S makes the colonnade resemble a pair of embracing arms. The colonnade expresses welcome by resembling arms that do. Sometimes, by contrast, the likeness-makers are of interest, but not because they give the work the likeness. Victor Hugo says of Hamlet: ‘In this tragedy . . . everything floats, hesitates, delays, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution a crepuscule; the action blows each moment in an inverse direction, man is governed by the winds.’15 Take the metaphor, ‘will is a vapour’. Hugo is interested in the fact that Hamlet’s will has certain properties. For instance, his will is continually changing. These properties make his will like a vapour. However, Hugo is not interested in these properties because they make his will like a vapour. The likeness to a vapour does not have the sort of importance here that the likeness of the colonnade to embracing arms has. Another example is art historians’ description of the drapery in late fifthcentury Greek vase-painting as being drawn in ‘the spaghetti style’.16 As Figure 6.1 shows, this description is used because there are many lines of drapery-folds drawn close together, making the drapery resemble spaghetti. The critic is not interested in the fact that the drapery resembles spaghetti. It is hard to imagine what relevance that could have to the appreciation of ancient Greek vase-paintings. Rather, her interest is in a certain way of looking, which makes the drapery look like spaghetti. I should mention a significant sub-class of this second kind of metaphor. Frequently, when the critic is interested in the likeness-maker, but not because it gives the object the likeness, the likeness-maker is the property of being such as to provide an experience, or elicit a response, of a certain kind. Keith Miller describes Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty in this way: ‘Faintly perfumed and of fractal complexity, Hollinghurst’s

15 Victor-Marie Hugo, William Shakespeare (extract), trans. A. Baillot, in Jonathan Bate, ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 350. 16 Whether or not the phrase ‘the spaghetti style’ is itself a metaphor, one could certainly communicate the same thing by describing the drapery as ‘spaghetti’.

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Figure 6.1. Attic red-figure pyxis decorated with women and erotes or cupids. Close to the Meidias Painter. End of 5th century bc. # Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Detail. Adapted with permission.

prose endows Nick with a rounded, ironical inner life.’17 The prose is like something faintly perfumed in a key respect: it is such as to provide an experience of a certain kind, which something faintly perfumed also provides. The property of being such as to provide that kind of experience is the likeness-maker attributed to the prose. That it is such as to provide this kind of experience is of greater interest here than the fact that it is like something faintly perfumed in virtue of doing so. Metaphors that tell us the kind of response a work elicits loom large in certain kinds of criticism. There is, then, a distinction to be made between metaphors used by critics. Sometimes, the critic is interested in the fact that the subject of her metaphor has the likeness-makers, or ways of possessing them, that she attributes to it. But she is not interested in the fact that the subject has the likeness indicated, or a determinate of it, in virtue of having these likenessmakers. Sometimes, by contrast, she is interested in this fact. This distinction will enable us to explain why metaphor is so prevalent in criticism.

Keith Miller, ‘People Who Can’t Love People’, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 2006, p. 22. 17

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3. Why critics use metaphor In Chapter 2, I argued that one criticizes an artwork only if one aims to communicate: (a) what parts, features, or represented elements appreciation of it can involve responding to; or (b) what responses appreciation of it can involve; or (c) what appropriate reasons for these responses there are. Communicating facts of this kind is, I argued, a constitutive aim of criticism. I also argued that aiding appreciation—that is, enabling one’s readers to appreciate the work better than they would be likely to if they were aware of the work’s features by appropriate means without having read the criticism—is a non-constitutive aim of criticism. Being such as to achieve this helps make a piece of criticism good as criticism. I will argue that using metaphor is a particularly effective way of achieving both of these aims. Establishing this will explain why critics often use metaphor. First consider those cases in which critics are interested in the fact that the likeness-makers give the metaphor’s subject the likeness. Why are they interested in this fact? I suggest that it is because appreciation of the work can involve acquiring or confirming, by appropriate means, the knowledge that these properties give the subject of the metaphor the likeness. Appreciating Bernini’s colonnade can involve seeing that the shape makes it like a pair of embracing arms. That is plainly why the critic is communicating that it is the case. This suggests a partial explanation of metaphor’s prevalence in criticism. As I observed in Chapter 2, critics often try to convey to their readers what cognitive responses appreciation of a work can involve. Appreciation often can involve acquiring or confirming by appropriate means (e.g., by perceptual means) the knowledge that certain properties give something a certain likeness (hereafter, for the sake of brevity, I will mostly speak only of perceiving this). Metaphors enable critics to indicate a likeness and attribute likeness-makers for that likeness. They thereby enable critics to convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the likeness-makers give the subject the likeness. That is one reason why metaphor is so common in criticism.

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If anything needs defending in this explanation, it is presumably the claim that appreciation often involves acquiring or confirming, by appropriate means, the knowledge that certain properties give something a certain likeness. There is, however, a great deal of evidence that this is so. The appreciation of literature often can involve this. Allusions are a very large class of examples. Appreciating Eliot’s lines that begin a description of a woman in an unhappy marriage, The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble,18

involves recognizing that their wording makes them like the beginning of Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra when she first meets Antony: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water.19

Nor is the evidence from literature limited to allusions. Henry James’s short novel The Aspern Papers is about the narrator’s efforts to get the unpublished letters of a famous poet from an old woman and her niece. At one point, the narrator meets the niece in her garden and tries to get her to relinquish the papers. It has been pointed out that this scene is like the temptation of Eve by the serpent in the garden of Eden. Appreciating the story can involve recognizing how this incident is like the incident in the Bible. There are similar cases in the visual arts. In a discussion of the arrangement of the Apostles in Raphael’s cartoon for a tapestry, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Figure 6.2), Kenneth Clark comments that the Apostle ‘Zebedee . . . seated in the stern [on the extreme right], is intended to recall an antique river god’.20 In some Greek temples, a sculpture of a reclining figure, often identified as a river god, was placed at either end of the line of figures in the temple’s pediments.21 Appreciating Raphael’s painting can involve seeing this resemblance. 18 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 64, ll. 77–78. 19 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.2.198–199. 20 Kenneth Clark, ‘Raphael: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, in Looking at Pictures (London: John Murray, 1960), p. 64. 21 For example, Figure A from the west pediment of the Parthenon. For an image, see accessed 14 June 2012.

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Many consumer products exploit likenesses. Toothbrushes, for example, often have an aerodynamic shape to make them look like pieces of advanced technology. Jonathan Woodham, in a work on twentieth-century design, discusses the design of the tailfins of the Cadillac Fleetwood in the 1950s. He remarks that ‘the detailing . . . relates to the contemporary fascination with the Jet Age, the rear lights simulating “rocket-burn”.’22 Appreciation does not only involve perceiving likenesses that the artist intends the audience to notice. Frederick Hartt describes Christ’s head in a crucifix by Coppo di Marcovaldo in this way: ‘The closed eyes are treated as two fierce, dark, hooked slashes, the pale mouth quivers against the sweat-soaked locks of the beard, the hair writhes like snakes against the tormented body.’23 Hartt is describing how the details of the picture combine to produce ‘a total effect of the greatest expressive power’.24 Whether or not Coppo intended it, appreciating the expressive power of this work can involve seeing that the parts of the painting depicting the eyes are like slash-marks, and that the locks of Christ’s hair are shaped like writhing snakes. Similarly, in an account of the development of Panathenaic prize amphorae, vases given as prizes to the victors in athletic contests, John Beazley remarks: ‘The Burgon vase is stout and squat; let us compare it with some later Panathenaics. . . . In London B 134, by the Euphiletos Painter, about 530, the neck is shorter, the body longer, and the whole vase gives a deeper impression of collected power. In London B 133, by the Eucharides Painter, about 480, the shape is even stronger and more compact.’25 London B 133 gives a deeper impression of collected power, and the shapes of later vases are described as ‘stronger’, because the later vases are more like a taut, strong human body than the ‘stout and squat’ Burgon vase is.26 Seeing that the shape makes it like something strong can 22

Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 114. For an image, see accessed 14 June 2012. 23 Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 3rd edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 43. For an image, see accessed 14 June 2012. 24 Ibid. 25 J. D. Beazley, The Development of Attic Black-Figure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 82. 26 For the Burgon vase, see accessed 14 June 2012. For London B 133, see accessed 14 June 2012.

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be involved in appreciating it. These likenesses to strong bodies are especially relevant, given the function of these vases as prizes for athletes. I conclude that we can be confident in the partial explanation I have provided of the prevalence of metaphor in criticism. Appreciation often can involve perceiving that certain properties give something a certain likeness. One reason why critics frequently use metaphor is to convey that appreciation of a certain work can involve such a perception. I turn now to cases in which critics are interested in the fact that the subject of her metaphor has the likeness-makers, or ways of possessing them, that she attributes to it, but not in the fact that it has the likeness indicated, or a determinate of it, in virtue of having these likeness-makers. I said above that metaphors in this class include both cases in which the property attributed is the property of providing an experience of a certain kind, and cases in which it is not. Let us first take cases in which it is not. In these cases, it seems clear, appreciation can involve perceiving that the subject of the metaphor has the property attributed, but cannot involve perceiving that it gives the subject the likeness indicated. Appreciating Greek vase-paintings in the spaghetti style can partly consist in perceiving that the drapery-folds are painted in a certain pattern. But it would be ridiculous to suppose that appreciation of them can partly consist in perceiving that this pattern makes the drapery like spaghetti. So an explanation of why critics use such metaphors suggests itself. Critics commonly use metaphors of this kind to convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the subject of the metaphor has the likeness-makers, or ways of possessing likeness-makers, attributed. But they do not use them to convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the likenessmakers give the subject the likeness indicated or a determinate of it. Consider now cases in which the likeness-maker attributed is the property of being such as to provide an experience of a certain kind, as when Miller calls Hollinghurst’s prose ‘faintly perfumed’. Here the explanation must be different. It is implausible to say that appreciating the prose can involve perceiving that it provides this kind of experience. Rather, appreciating the prose involves having this kind of experience. Miller is using this metaphor to communicate that this is a response that appreciating the novel can involve. Metaphors that attribute the likenessmaking property of being such as to provide an experience of a certain kind are prevalent because critics use them to convey that appreciation can involve having such experiences.

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Both of these cases, however, raise a question not answered by the explanations I have given so far. We have established what critics are doing in each case and why they are doing it: communicating that the subject has certain likeness-makers or ways of possessing them (to convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the subject of the metaphor has those properties), and communicating that the work provides a certain kind of experience (to convey that appreciation can involve having that kind of experience). Why, however, is the critic communicating these things by using metaphor? As I have stressed, appreciation, in these cases, does not involve becoming aware of the likeness indicated by the metaphor. For example, it does not involve perceiving that the drapery is like spaghetti or that the prose is like something faintly perfumed. So why bring in spaghetti or perfume at all? Why indicate a likeness that is irrelevant to appreciation in order to communicate something that is relevant to appreciation? To answer this question, I must first point out two things about these metaphors. Consider the following passage by John Ruskin, who describes arriving in Venice by boat and seeing ‘the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its black boat moored at the portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation’, and observing how ‘the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation’.27 The first notable feature of the metaphors in this passage is that they are very specific descriptions. Take the metaphor of breezes breaking the water’s surface into fantasies of rich tessellation. There are many ways water looks when breezes blow across its surface. There are fewer ways it looks when breezes blow across its surface and make it look like something broken into many pieces. And there are still fewer ways it looks when breezes blow across its surface and make it look like something broken into pieces forming a rich mosaic with the colours of Venetian palaces and a greenish tint. Ruskin’s metaphor communicates that the waters of Venice have properties making them look like that. And to characterize them this way is to characterize them very specifically—especially in comparison

27

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: George Allen, 1900), vol. 2, p. 3.

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with many other, more obvious alternative descriptions. The more specific description is the more informative; and Ruskin’s metaphor is an unusually informative description of the way the waters of Venice look. Metaphors used to communicate that the object elicits a certain response can also be very specific. The response itself can be characterized very specifically. An example is Clark’s description of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Figure 6.2). After a night spent without catching anything, the Apostles, on Christ’s command, are hauling up their nets, which are suddenly full of fish. Clark writes: A rhythmic cadence runs through the whole composition, rising and falling, held back and released, like a perfectly constructed Handelian melody. If we follow it from right to left . . . we see how the ‘river god’, like a stoker, drives us into the group of heroic fishermen and how the rich, involved movement of this group winds up a coil of energy; then comes an artful link with the standing Apostle, whose left hand is backed by the fisherman’s billowing drapery, and then St Andrew himself forming a caesura, a climax in the line, which holds us back without lessening our momentum. Then, at last, the marvellous acceleration, the praying St Peter to whose passionate movement all these devices have been a preparation, and finally the comforting figure of Christ, whose hand both checks and accepts St Peter’s emotion.28

Consider the metaphors of the rhythmic cadence and of the standing St Andrew forming a caesura. A caesura is a pause near the middle of a line of poetry. Elaborating the rhythmic-cadence metaphor, Clark communicates with the caesura metaphor that an appropriate response to this part of the painting is like a response to a caesura in a line of poetry. He does not, however, communicate that it is like this response merely in that it is one of pausing. He characterizes it much more specifically than that. We pause here after having followed the line of Apostles from the right, our gaze moving along naturally as we attend to salient parts like the heads, shoulders, arms, and hands, in turn. Our attention to these salient parts as we move along is like our attention to the stressed syllables in a line of poetry, which are spaced at regular intervals in an intelligible pattern, propelling our attention along as we read. And we pause at St Andrew without finding the pause jarring, despite the fact that it interrupts the prior movement of our attention. 28

Clark, ‘Raphael: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, pp. 64–65.

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Figure 6.2. Raphael. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. 1515–1516. Bodycolour on paper laid into canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Royal Collection # 2012, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum. With permission.

The second thing to note about metaphors of this kind, in addition to their specificity, is that they tend to cause a reader to have, or to imagine or recall having, certain experiences. What makes Ruskin’s metaphor vivid and evocative is that it tends to cause a reader to imagine seeing the waters of Venice. Clark’s description accompanies a reproduction of Raphael’s painting. It causes us to look at the picture and try to have, or imagine having, the kind of response he is communicating that the painting elicits. Other metaphors I have mentioned have similar effects. When you first hear of the spaghetti style, and a (reproduction of a) painting in that style is visible, you are likely to look at it to see what is being attributed. Many have held that there is a causal connection between metaphor and perception. As we have seen, Davidson and Scruton, among others, think there is such a connection between metaphor and perceiving-as. Many have also held that metaphor causes us to imagine having certain experiences. Aristotle says that ‘liveliness is got by using the proportional type of

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metaphor and by making our hearers see things’.29 George Orwell writes that ‘a newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image’,30 while Richard Moran cites numerous philosophers and writers who have held such a view.31 However, few have seen why there is this connection. Moran discusses the temptation among those he cites to suppose, not only that metaphors cause us to imagine, but that having certain mental images ‘is what constitutes the full understanding of a metaphor’.32 That temptation is certainly to be resisted. But what is true is that, often, one cannot figure out what properties the metaphor attributes unless one perceives, recalls perceiving, or imagines perceiving the subject of the metaphor. Many metaphors are more or less impenetrable until you take a look at (or imagine or recall seeing) the subject, and see what properties make it like what the metaphor communicates that it is like. In many contexts, you need to see (or imagine or recall seeing) that the subject has certain likeness-making properties in order to tell that the metaphor attributes them.33 This is not what understanding the metaphor consists in: rather, it is often what enables us to understand metaphors. It seems clear that perceiving and imagining perceiving play this role in our coming to understand the metaphors considered above. We look at the vase-painting and try to see what the speaker means by describing it as being drawn in the spaghetti style. To figure out what kind of visual appearance Ruskin is claiming the waters present, we try to imagine seeing water that looks like what Ruskin communicates that Venice’s waters look like. We also use imagination, while perceiving the reproduction of the painting, to figure out what kind of response Clark claims the painting elicits. This is not, I stress, a claim about every property attributed by every metaphor. For example, it would obviously not apply to properties one cannot perceive that something has. Moreover, it would not normally be 29 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1411b. 30 George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in Essays, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 350. 31 See Richard Moran, ‘Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force’, Critical Inquiry 16/1 (1989), pp. 89–94. 32 Ibid., p. 92. 33 The same is often true of figuring out what ways of possessing likeness-makers the metaphor attributes.

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true of the likeness indicated by a metaphor that (imagining or recalling) perceiving is the easiest way of figuring out that it is indicated or attributed. Rather, we often need perception, perceptual memory, or perceptual imagination to figure out what other properties are attributed. Why is this so? The answer is not hard to find. For many expressions used metaphorically, but especially those of which this claim is true, we cannot rely wholly or even partly on our familiarity with past metaphorical uses of them to figure out what properties they attribute—as we often can rely on familiarity with past literal uses of an expression to figure this out when it is used literally. Certainly, with some metaphorical uses of expressions, we can do this. Expressions like ‘pig’, ‘lion’, and ‘block of ice’ normally attribute certain likeness-makers rather than others when used metaphorically, at least when the subject of the metaphor is human. In these cases, we can rely on familiarity with past metaphorical uses of the expression. Many metaphorical uses of expressions, however, are not like this. This may be because we never have encountered a metaphorical use of that expression before. Vivid or interesting metaphors are often novel. Alternatively, it may be because we have never encountered that expression used metaphorically to attribute the properties it attributes on this occasion. The same expression can be used metaphorically in different contexts to attribute different properties. We attribute different properties when we call John Major ‘grey’ than we do when we speak of a ‘grey area’ in morality or law. So a metaphor may have for its metaphorical element an expression we have never seen used metaphorically before, or an expression used metaphorically to attribute properties we have never known it to attribute before. If so, then we cannot rely entirely, or at all, on familiarity with past metaphorical uses of the expression to figure out what likeness-makers it attributes. We need some other way of figuring this out. In such cases, perceiving the metaphor’s subject, or imagining or recalling perceiving it, is sometimes the only way, or the easiest way, of figuring out what likeness-makers are attributed. This explains why it is novel metaphors that have been singled out for their connection with perceiving and imagining perceiving. In the quotation given above, for example, Orwell characterizes ‘newly invented’ metaphors as evoking visual images; similarly, Scruton writes that ‘dead metaphors achieve nothing, but living metaphors change the way things

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are perceived.’34 Examples of metaphors that prompt us to perceive, or to imagine perceiving, support belief in such a connection. They tend to be novel, like Ruskin’s and Clark’s, rather than clichéd. To recapitulate: I said above that there are two reasons why critics often use metaphor in cases where appreciation does not involve perceiving that the (ways of possessing) likeness-makers attributed give the subject the likeness indicated. First, in such cases, appreciation often does involve perceiving that the subject has the likeness-makers or ways of possessing them. Second, in such cases, appreciation often involves having the response which the metaphor communicates that the subject elicits. This raised the question of why critics use metaphor at all, given that they indicate or attribute likenesses that are irrelevant to appreciation. We are now in a position to answer this question. The first reason why metaphor is used is to cause readers to have responses appreciation can involve. Critics use metaphor to get their readers to perceive, or to imagine or recall perceiving, that the subject has the properties attributed. They also use it to cause readers to have, imagine having, or recall having other responses, which the metaphor conveys that the subject can elicit. Getting one’s readership to perceive, and to have other responses appreciation can involve, is a way of enabling them to appreciate the work better. Aiding appreciation, in turn, is an aim of much criticism. I have not much discussed the claim that critics often want to get their readers to imagine or to recall perceiving. It is a commonplace in aesthetics that critics try to get their readers to perceive. But philosophers less often note that critics try to get their readers to imagine or recall perceiving. But clearly they often do attempt this. As I have argued, in many contexts critics do not presuppose that their readers are in a position to perceive what they describe. Many passages in Ruskin and Pater illustrate this, as do many reviews (e.g., of a theatrical production that has finished its run). And critics may also describe works they do assume their readers have perceived, in order to get them to recall perceiving what the critic wants to discuss. One can aid appreciation by getting one’s readers to recall having a perception or other response involved in appreciation. As I argued in

34

Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 124.

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Chapter 2, one needn’t be experiencing a work when one comes to appreciate it better. One can come to appreciate a film better in discussing it afterward with friends. Similarly, if the critic tells you of a reason to admire a certain detail of the work, recalling seeing that detail might enable you to find it intelligible that the reason stated is indeed a reason to admire that detail. You might then admire the detail for that reason, and thereby appreciate the work better. Alternatively, you might appreciate the work better simply by recognizing that the reason stated is a reason to admire it. As I observed in Chapter 2, recognizing or confirming by appropriate means that a certain response or reason is appropriate can itself be a response appreciation can involve. Appreciation often can involve such meta-responses. Causing someone to imagine perceiving or having another kind of response can also aid appreciation. Sometimes, this may be because imagining having a certain response or perception is itself a response appreciation can involve. To return to examples used earlier, it is plausible that Beethoven was able better to appreciate music he composed while deaf by accurately imagining hearing it performed; and one might be able to acquire some appreciation of Malevich’s Black Square, or certain works of conceptual art, by accurately imagining perceiving them. In other cases, imagining having a certain response, though not itself a response appreciation can involve, can enable you to have such responses. For instance, imagining, like recalling, can enable you to have appropriate meta-responses to a work you have perceived. Being able to imagine having a certain response to a work can enable you to find it intelligible that it is an appropriate response to the work. Even when the critic’s aim is not to aid appreciation, it makes sense that a critic would often want to get readers to imagine having the responses appreciation can involve. It is understandable that a critic reviewing a work that her readers can no longer experience would try to get them to imagine perceiving or otherwise responding to the work. In short, by speaking in a way her reader cannot fully understand without perceiving, imagining perceiving, or recalling perceiving, the critic impels the reader to perceive, imagine, or recall what she wants them to. Similar points can be made about responses other than perceptions. This, then, is a reason why metaphor is often used in criticism even when the likeness indicated by it is irrelevant to appreciation.

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This brings us to the second reason why critics often use metaphors of this kind. I said that metaphors can characterize their subject, or the response elicited by it, very specifically, especially compared with more obvious alternative descriptions. This by itself will often be a reason to prefer the metaphor to the more obvious alternatives. Moreover, on account of their capacity to be specific, metaphors can enable us very accurately to imagine or recall perceiving their subject. Obviously, a critic who wants to cause the reader to imagine or recall experiencing the subject of the metaphor wants to cause her to imagine or recall this experience as accurately as possible. It is clearly possible to imagine experiences of objects more or less accurately.35 If the object is a red square, for example, then you more accurately imagine seeing it if you imagine seeing a red square than you do if you imagine seeing an otherwise identical black square. This is so even if the square you have imagined seeing does not possess the shade of red possessed by the actual square. You have still imagined the experience of seeing the actual square more accurately than when you imagine seeing a black square, even though you have not imagined this experience with perfect accuracy. The more specific a description is, the more informative it is. Therefore, assuming the reader can imagine perceiving that the object has the properties attributed by a more specific description, the critic can be sure of the reader getting more right when she uses the more specific description than she can be when she uses a less specific description. A reader might, of course, imagine the experience of seeing the red square with perfect accuracy if she is only told that what she is to imagine seeing is ‘a coloured shape’. But the critic obviously does not ensure this by using this description. Describing the object as ‘a red square’, by contrast, ensures at least that the reader imagines something square and red. Therefore, given that the critic wants to cause the reader to imagine, as accurately as possible, the experience of perceiving the object, she does well to get the reader to imagine perceiving that the subject has the properties attributed with a more specific description. So it is not just that metaphors often prompt a reader to imagine or recall perceiving their subjects. Metaphors often prompt a reader to 35 For the sake of brevity, I will hereafter discuss only the case of imagining perceiving. What I will say also applies mutatis mutandis to recalling perceiving, and to imagining or recalling having other responses to the subject of the metaphor.

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imagine or recall this experience very accurately. A reader who imagines perceiving that the waters of Venice have the properties attributed by Ruskin’s metaphor imagines with great accuracy the experience of perceiving the waters of Venice. Ruskin ensures that she imagines this with greater accuracy than he would if he prompted her to imagine perceiving that the waters have the properties attributed by more obvious, less imaginative alternative descriptions (e.g., saying that the waters sparkle in the sunlight). This account not only provides reasons why metaphors are common in criticism when the likeness indicated by them is irrelevant to appreciation. Plausibly, when the likeness is relevant, metaphors are often used because they have these effects. For in these cases, too, critics often try to have these effects on their readers. This is an additional reason why metaphors of the first kind are prevalent in criticism.

4. Conclusion We now have an explanation of metaphor’s prevalence in criticism. (1) Critics often attribute properties, in describing artworks, to convey that appreciation can involve perceiving that the object has those properties. Appreciation, in turn, often involves perceiving that certain properties give the object a certain likeness. By using metaphor, critics can give us to understand that certain properties give something a certain likeness, and thereby convey to us that appreciation can involve perceiving that this is so. That is one reason why critics frequently use metaphor. (2) Critics often want to cause readers to perceive that the object has certain properties, when appreciation involves perceiving that it has those properties; or to imagine or recall this experience accurately. So too, they often want to cause readers to have, or to accurately imagine or recall having, other kinds of response that appreciation involves having. Using metaphors, especially novel ones, is an effective way of achieving both of these goals. Such metaphors are often hard to understand without perceiving, imagining perceiving, or recalling perceiving the object. Using one therefore prompts a reader to perceive, imagine, or recall what the critic wants her to. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of

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responses that are not perceptions. Metaphors can also be very specific, and this can ensure that the reader recalls or imagines the relevant experience very accurately. I argued in Chapter 3 that the role of imaginativeness in criticism is to enable the critic to think of unobvious ways of communicating effectively and unobvious ways of better appreciating a work. This distinction is reflected in the distinction I have drawn between the two kinds of artcritical metaphor. Imaginative art-critical metaphors in which the likenesses are irrelevant to appreciation are imaginative ways of communicating effectively. Describing the vase-painters’ style of painting drapery as ‘the spaghetti style’ was an imaginative way of communicating how the drapery in their paintings look. It was an unobvious way of communicating to think of, and it is effective. In the case of imaginative art-critical metaphors in which the likeness is relevant to appreciation, it is imaginative of the critic to think of the way of better appreciating the work she thinks of. That the colonnade’s shape makes it like a pair of embracing arms is not an obvious reason to take an interest in it to think of. Hence taking an interest in it for this reason is an imaginative way of better appreciating it to think of.

Conclusion Criticism of the arts is a major part of our cultural life. Critics help determine which films and plays get seen and which books get read, and criticism commonly affects our experience and evaluation of paintings, poems, music, the urban environment, fashion, and much else. But as I said in the introduction, many people find it rather mystifying how critics do what they do. Critics cannot explain what they do by identifying definite procedures, rules, or algorithms which they consult and which ensure they get things right if they follow them. As in other areas in which this is the case—such as, notably, the creation of art—it can be mysterious how those who are good at it succeed. One aim of this book has been to make criticism less mystifying. If my arguments have succeeded, they have given us a better understanding of what critics do and how they do it. The first step was to consider what appreciation involves. Appreciating an artwork involves having appropriate perceptual, cognitive, cogitative, affective, or conative responses to the right aspects of a work for the right reasons. Much more, of course, could be said about appreciation; but clarifying even this much about its nature allows us to identify an aim shared by all criticism. A critic aims to communicate what appreciation can involve responding to, what responses appreciation can involve, or what appropriate reasons there are for such responses. This, I argued, is a constitutive aim of criticism. Knowing this much enables us to understand many other features of criticism. It explains why a critic is required to be acquainted with a work in the same way (e.g., perceptually) as one must be to appreciate it. It helps us see how criticism differs from similar forms of discourse about art, such as art history, which have different aims and are subject to different requirements. Finally, identifying this constitutive aim prompts us to look at the question of the aims of criticism itself in a new light. It prompts us to distinguish criticism’s constitutive aims from its non-constitutive aims. Aiding appreciation, I argued, is a non-constitutive aim of criticism.

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Knowing both of these aims helps us to make sense of further aspects of criticism. First, it helps us to see what unites a great variety of things critics do, such as describe responses to works, and evaluate, interpret, and explain works. Critics do much of what they do in order to achieve the aims of criticism I identified. They describe responses and interpret in order to communicate what appreciation involves; they guide perception to aid appreciation. In other cases, critics achieve these aims of criticism in order to achieve something further. Critics sometimes communicate facts about appreciation to help their readers decide what works to experience; often, too, they communicate such facts to aid appreciation. Seeing this allows us to understand both what is wrong and what is right about the five rival views on the aims of criticism in the philosophical literature. Second, knowing these aims makes it clear how critics produce good criticism. If I am right about appreciation, there are three basic kinds of change critics can cause to help us better appreciate a work. They can affect what we respond to, how we respond, and why we respond. Accordingly, the endowments that make someone good at criticism are those that make a person good at effecting these changes by achieving the constitutive aim of criticism. I singled out nine endowments that make critics good at this. Metaphor is no less mystifying than criticism. A second primary concern of this book has been to shed light on it. Why some metaphors are so effective, how they work, and what their distinctive effects are, are questions of perennial interest. They have received especially close attention in recent decades. My arguments give us new answers to these questions. Three widely held views have made a correct understanding of metaphor difficult to attain: anti-realism about metaphor, the Indispensability Thesis, and the denial that all metaphors are based on likenesses. I have argued that these views are false or poorly supported. Instead, I have based my account of metaphor on the Minimal Thesis about what metaphors communicate. The Minimal Thesis can withstand an array of objections and putative counterexamples, as we have seen. And just as my view of the aims of criticism puts us in a position to explain many other aspects of criticism, so the Minimal Thesis enables us to explain many other aspects of metaphor. The Minimal Thesis helps us understand how metaphors guide our thinking. Much has been made of the impact of metaphor on thought. The history of science and the history of philosophy both bear witness to the hold a metaphor can exert on our minds. The metaphor of the mind as

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a computer, of the body as a machine, of knowledge as a structure supported on foundations, and many others have exercised a powerful influence on our thinking. We fail to see how metaphors influence thought if we ignore the Minimal Thesis. Metaphors prompt us to seek likeness-makers for an indicated likeness. As we saw in Chapter 5, the cognitive scientist guided by the computer-file metaphor is looking for properties that would make memory like a computer file. This may lead her to discover properties of memory she would not otherwise have looked for. It may lead her to postulate further likeness-makers to explain properties she discovers. And it may, of course, cause her to overlook important differences as well (recognizing the limitations of a useful metaphor can also constitute progress). We can thus explain metaphor’s influence on our thinking without making the vague claim that metaphors make us think of one thing ‘in terms of ’ another, the unwarranted claim that our concepts are themselves metaphorical, or the false claim that metaphor is indispensable for thinking in these ways. We also have a better understanding of what makes some metaphors effective. Some metaphors cause us not only to seek likeness-makers for an indicated likeness, but to perceive or imagine perceiving that the subject has them. Some characterize their subjects very specifically. Both features make metaphor especially well-suited to the critic’s task. My conclusions also have a bearing on other questions about the effects of metaphor. For example, it has been common since Davidson to appeal to perceiving-as to explain various features of metaphor. My account, however, has explained many of the same features (such as metaphor’s open-endedness and the difficulty of paraphrase) without reference to perceiving-as. When I have discussed perception, I have appealed only to the connection between metaphor and perceiving that something is the case. We should reconsider what, if anything, is explained by the claim that metaphors make us perceive one thing as another. Finally, the third principal aim of this book has been to provide us with a better understanding of the nature of imaginativeness and its role in criticism. Imaginativeness is a propensity to think of unobvious achievements. It contrasts with perceptiveness, which is an aptitude for acquiring the knowledge that p when it is not obvious that p. The role of imaginativeness in criticism is to enable critics to think of unobvious ways of better appreciating a work and unobvious ways of communicating effectively. Imaginative art-critical metaphors exemplify both aspects of this role.

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Many are unobvious ways of effectively communicating what appreciation involves. And in many cases, what they communicate is itself an unobvious way of better appreciating the work to think of. This says what imaginativeness’s role in criticism is. It does not say how large its role is. I will conclude with some remarks about how my account of the role of imaginativeness in criticism should guide reflection about how much scope there is for imaginativeness in criticism. Claims about the role of imaginativeness in criticism are often coupled with the claim that the critic’s task offers broad scope for imaginativeness, or even that it requires her to be imaginative. For example, it follows, from Scruton’s claim that aesthetic descriptions express an experience of perceiving the work imaginatively, that critics need to be imaginative to provide aesthetic descriptions. Again, much of the appeal of Roland Barthes’s claim that some texts are scriptible is due to the suggestion that there is broad scope for imaginativeness on the part of the reader. Barthes writes: ‘Why is the scriptible our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.’1 A purely lisible text, by contrast, denies the reader access ‘to the pleasure of writing’ and would leave him ‘no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text’.2 My explanation of the role of imaginativeness in criticism can contribute to an assessment of these influential views. On the one hand, it clearly is not true that a critic always needs to be imaginative in order to achieve the aims of criticism—for example, in order to aid the reader’s appreciation. Depending on the readership being addressed, thinking only of obvious ways of better appreciating the work and of communicating effectively may be adequate. On the other hand, if there are many unobvious ways of better appreciating a work (for instance, because there are many unobvious but appropriate responses to it), or many unobvious yet effective ways of communicating what the ways of better appreciating it are, then there is much scope for imaginativeness in criticizing the work. But whether philosophical argument can show that one of these conditions is satisfied by many, most, or all works of art is another question. Perhaps the best prospect for someone who wants to argue that the role imaginativeness 1 2

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 4. Ibid.

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plays in criticism is (or can be) a large one is to consider a certain claim often made about great artworks, but less often examined. This is the claim that the works of art we value most lend themselves to criticism by generation after generation. It is not just that we continue to value them—that, in other words, they stand the test of time. It is that critics keep finding new things to say about them. For many works, it seems absurd to suppose critics will ever finish thinking of the responses to them that appreciation can involve having, or finish thinking of appropriate reasons for such responses. Of course, the claims made for the inexhaustibility of great artworks may be exaggerated. But even if they are, the truth they exaggerate may provide reason to believe that there is broad scope for imaginativeness in criticism of such works. The critical attention lavished on canonical works certainly suggests that, at any given time, there are indeed many unobvious ways of better appreciating them that remain to be thought of. Coleridge said of Shakespeare: ‘You feel him to be a poet inasmuch as, for a time, he has made you one—an active creative being.’3 If my account here has been successful, it helps us to make sense of the thought that engaging with art can make poets out of critics.

3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry’, in Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 251.

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Index Acocella, Joan 18 Addison, Joseph 17n31, 55–6, 59 aesthetic experience 53–9, 64–5, 67, 149 aesthetic properties 23, 31, 37, 54, 64–5, 67, 156 Alhambra 33 Ali, Muhammad 127 Alison, Archibald 58–9 allusion 31, 119, 160 anthimeria 90n7, 119–20 appreciation 29–52, 84–5, 173 awareness of a work 29–30, 34–7, 44–9, 51, 169 cogitative responses 32–4, 169 conative responses 33 criticism and, see criticism, acquaintance requirement; criticism, aims of of culturally and historically distant works 33–4, 52 emotional and affective responses 32–3, 49, 51–2, 162 imaginativeness and 53–65, 67 knowledge 29, 31–4, 159–62 meta-responses 33–4, 169 perception 30–1, 159–62 pleasure 33n6, 54–9 reasons for responses 35–7, 46–9, 84–5, 169 Aquinas, Thomas 118 Aristotle 17n31, 63, 118, 165–6 Arnold, Matthew 59–61 art history 17, 38 Austin, J. L. 123n69 Barthes, Roland 176 Baudelaire, Charles 59 Baxandall, Michael 7, 10n17 Beardsley, Monroe 6–7, 15, 18, 23n44, 89nn1–2, 107n39, 109n45 Beattie, James 55, 58 Beazley, John 161–2 Beethoven, Ludwig van 30, 169 Belvedere Torso 83

Bender, John 151 Bennett, M. R. 32 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 136–7, 156–7, 159, 172 Bible 89, 101, 145, 160 Black, Max 89n2, 137n24, 138, 144 Blackburn, Simon 97 Bloom, Harold 62n35 Boden, Margaret 80n62 Borges, Jorge Luis 32 Boyd, Richard 133–5 Brogan, T. V. F. 120n65 Bromberger, Sylvain 25n54 Budd, Malcolm 33n6, 125n1 Burgon vase 161 Burke, Edmund 55, 58 Camp, Elisabeth 102, 110, 133–5, 140–4, 148 Campbell, Alastair 106 Carroll, Noël 13–14, 16–23 causal analogy 118, 121, 155 Cavell, Stanley 97–8, 115 Cervantes, Miguel de 51 Clark, Kenneth 160, 164–8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 17n31, 177 Collingwood, R. G. 17n31 Colosseum 25, 41 Coppo di Marcovaldo 161 Courbet, Gustave 49, 85 criticism academic criticism 6 acquaintance requirement 38–40, 45–6, 173 aims of 5–28, 39–52, 173–4 aiding appreciation 27–8, 41–50, 159, 168, 171–4 communicating facts about appreciation 39–52, 159–63, 170–1, 173–4 constitutive vs non-constitutive aims 5, 39–42, 173 evaluation, see evaluation explanation 23–7, 41

190

INDEX

criticism (cont.) guiding perception 7–16, 41–2, 46, 168 helping readers choose 6–7, 18–19, 41 description 45–6, 52, 54, 59, 61–5, 85 see also criticism, metaphor and elucidation 15–16, 19, 23–4, 40–1 endowments of good critics 45–52, 82–6, 174 imaginativeness and 53–67, 82–6, 172, 175–7 interpretation 40–1, 52–4 metaphor and 54, 62–5, 67, 86, 125, 131–3, 135, 149–72 reviews 6–7, 15, 27–8, 38, 168 value of 59–62 versus Humean judgement 50–2 versus other discourses about art 38–40, 42 Dalí, Salvador 69n50 Dante 15, 32, 35–6, 85 Danto, Arthur 23 Davidson, Donald 99–101, 105, 107, 111–15, 123, 138–9, 153, 165, 175 De Quincey, Thomas 24 determinates and determinables 93, 96 Dickinson, Emily 89 Donne, John 91 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste 55 El Greco 9–13 Eliot, T. S. 31, 145, 147, 160 Erasmus 48 Eucharides Painter 161 Euphiletos Painter 161 evaluation 8–10, 13–14, 16–23, 27, 40, 46, 60 category-relative 17–18, 20 principles 8–10, 17–18 pro tanto 20–3 reasons 8–10, 13–14, 16–18, 20–3, 46 expression 53–4, 64, 136–7, 149, 153–5 Fogelin, Robert 104–7, 122n67 Frazier, Joe 127 Gaut, Berys 66n47, 74, 80n62, 131–3, 135 Gehry, Frank 76n59

Gerard, Alexander 55, 58 Gettier, Edmund 75–6 Goldscheider, Ludwig 9–13 Gombrich, E. H. 149 Goodman, Nelson 149 Gould, Stephen Jay 35–6 Gray, Thomas 118 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 76n59 Guttenplan, Samuel 99n19, 109n45, 110, 120n66, 139–40 Guyer, Paul 55, 57–8 Hacker, P. M. S. 32 Hampshire, Stuart 7, 149 Händel, Georg Friedrich 59 Hardy, Thomas 24, 41 Hartt, Frederick 161 Hazlitt, William 22–3 Hollinghurst, Alan 157–8, 162 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 145 Hopkins, Robert 30n1 Horace 63 Hugo, Victor 157 Hume, David 50–2, 55–7, 59 Hunt, Leigh 85 Hyman, John 95n12, 101n21, 104n29 hyperbole 119 imagination 32, 55–62, 65 versus imaginativeness, see imaginativeness, versus imagination see also metaphor, imagination and imaginativeness 66, 68–86, 175 of acts, omissions, and products 68–80 criticism and, see criticism, imaginativeness and of emotions and attitudes 68n49 inspiration and 79–80 obviousness 70–2, 77–8, 82–5 of persons 68, 80–4 relativity of 68–9, 77–8 thinking 71–6, 78–86 value and 74–7, 82, 86 versus imagination 66, 78–9 versus originality 69–70, 78 versus perceptiveness 82–4, 175 versus the unimaginative and the non-imaginative 78 Isenberg, Arnold 7–17

INDEX

James, Henry 15–16, 160 Johnson, Samuel 17n31, 22–3, 44, 50n25 Kandinsky, Wassily 95, 131 Kant, Immanuel 33n6, 55, 57–9, 66, 149 Kaufman, Daniel 13–14 Keats, John 85–6 Kermode, Frank 45, 48, 83 Lamarque, Peter 24 Leonardo da Vinci 46, 61–2, 67, 74–6 Lessing, Gotthald Ephraim 58 Levinson, Jerrold 154n13 likeness, see metaphor, likeness and Lloyd, Harold 14, 17, 20–1 Lorrain, Claude 59 Lycan, William 101–3, 110, 118–21 make-believe 37, 126–31, 146 Malevich, Kazimir 30, 169 Marden, Brice 23 Marshall, Cynthia 119n63 Mendelssohn, Moses 58 metaphor anti-realism about 151–6, 174 characterizing versus noncharacterizing 90–2, 147–8 comparison theory 87, 98–111, 115–21, 122n67 criticism and, see criticism, metaphor and expressions used metaphorically 89–90, 102–3, 119–20 imagination and 165–72, 175 indispensability of 123–48, 150, 174–5 why metaphors seem indispensable 123–4, 134–7 likeness and 92–3, 95–6, 100–1, 103–11, 116–18, 128–9, 141–3, 156–8, 166–7 mathematics and 129–30 meaning of 87–8, 99–101, 111–12, 138–9, 153 Minimal Thesis 87–124, 150–6, 174–5 open-endedness of 97–8, 122–3 paraphrase and explanation of 102–3, 111, 138–44, 146

191

perception and 113–14, 125, 131–3, 165–9, 171–2, 175 poetic and novel metaphors 118–21, 145–7, 167–8 science and 133–5 specificity of 163–4, 170–2, 175 subject of 90, 102 understanding metaphors 87–8, 91–4, 98, 107, 111–16, 146–8, 166–7 value of 144–5, 163–72, 175 versus other ways of extending the use of expressions 117–22, 155 what metaphors communicate 87–8, 93–8, 111–15, 123–4 see also metaphor, Minimal Thesis metonymy 119 Miller, Keith 157–8, 162 Milton, John 44–5, 59, 85 Miró, Joan 49, 85 Mitchell, Joan 23 Moran, Richard 109, 166 Morris, Mark 18 Mothersill, Mary 11 nominalism 129–30 obviousness, see imaginativeness, obviousness Olsen, Stein Haugom 6n3 Orwell, George 166–7 Palazzo Ducale (Venice) 163 Palazzo del Tè 47–8 Parrhasios 38 Parthenon 160n21 Passmore, John 74 Pater, Walter 44, 46, 54, 61–2, 67, 168 Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 18–19 perceptiveness, see imaginativeness, versus perceptiveness Plath, Sylvia 110 pleasure, see appreciation, pleasure Raphael 160, 164–5 Reimer, Marga 102, 110 Rembrandt van Rijn 17 Romano, Giulio 47–8 Ruskin, John 54, 61, 163–8, 171

192

INDEX

Santa Maria della Salute 163 sarcasm 90, 153 Schroeder, Severin 97n18, 103n27, 107n41, 117–18, 122n67 Scruton, Roger 65, 67, 125, 136–7, 144, 152–6, 165, 167–8, 176 Searle, John 103–4, 107–8, 110, 116–18, 121 Shakespeare, William 15, 19, 20–2, 24, 31–2, 39–41, 45, 48, 83, 85–6, 89–90, 101, 118–21, 157, 160, 177 Shelley, James 8n11 Shriver, Lionel 68 Shusterman, Richard 17n31 Sibley, Frank 7, 23, 31, 37n10, 57n12, 63, 70n53, 136–7, 151–2 Silverstein, Shel 36 similarity, see metaphor, likeness and simile 87, 99–101, 105–7, 110–11, 122, 142–3 Smith, R. R. R. 83 Sophocles 31, 35 spaghetti style 157, 162–3, 165–6, 172 Spenser, Edmund 6 Stevens, Wallace 96 Strawson, P. F. 82n63 Stroud, Barry 52n32 Summerson, John 25, 41, 47–8, 51

synecdoche 119 Tappolet, Christine 21 testimony 83 see also criticism, acquaintance requirement thinking, see imaginativeness, thinking Turner, J. M. W. 61 Tversky, Amos 105 van der Weyden, Roger 14 van Fraassen, Bas 25 Vendler, Helen 48 Walton, Kendall 37, 109, 126, 130–1 Weitz, Morris 17n31 White, Alan 79, 80n62 White, Roger 120n66 Wilde, Oscar 60–2, 66 Wilson, Jessica 96n14 Woodham, Jonathan 161 Woolf, Virginia 6 Wordsworth, William 59–60, 85 Yablo, Stephen 96–7, 126–31, 135 Zangwill, Nick 125, 148n46 Zeuxis 38