The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 9781472545862

Citation preview

Contributors Thomas Adajian is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University. His research concerns aesthetics, ontology, and C. S. Peirce. He is the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “The Definition of Art,” and is currently at work on a book on the definition of art. Sondra Bacharach is a Senior Lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington. She works in the philosophy of art and is currently thinking about artistic collaborations. JeaneĴe Bicknell is the author of Why Music Moves Us (Palgrave, 2009). Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophy Today, and the Journal of Value Inquiry, among others. Renee M. Conroy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet, specializing in aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. Her work is focused largely on issues in the philosophy of dance. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2009 on the basis of her dissertation, The Art of Re-Making Dances: A Philosophical Analysis of Dancework Reconstruction. Brandon Cooke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His main areas of research are aesthetics and ethics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews. Amy Coplan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Fullerton. Her primary areas of research include aesthetics (especially philosophy of film), philosophy of emotion, ancient Greek philosophy, and feminist philosophy. Rafael De Clercq is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies of Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in its Department of Philosophy. He has published on aesthetic ineffability, aesthetic properties, the perception of music, and modern architecture, as well as on metaphysical topics such as criteria of identity, response-dependence, presentism, and the ontology of Japanese shrines. David I. Gandolfo is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Poverty Studies Program at Furman University. His main teaching and research interests are Latin American Philosophy, Topics in International Justice, and Poverty Studies; he also has teaching interests in African Philosophy. The thread that

vii

9781847063700_Prelims_Final_txt_print.indd vii

2/27/2012 3:49:54 PM

Contributors

ties all of this together is a concern for what those at the center of world power can learn from critiques of the status quo being offered from the standpoints of those on the global margins. James Harold is Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. His principal research interests are in meta-ethics and the philosophy of art. Darren Hudson Hick is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna University. His research focuses on the ontology of art and philosophical issues in intellectual property. His work appears in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, British Journal of Aesthetics, Contemporary Aesthetics, Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, and elsewhere. He is the author of Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Continuum, 2012). Sherri Irvin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She received her BA from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research interests center on the philosophy of contemporary art, the relation between aesthetics and ethics, and the aesthetics of everyday experience. John Kulvicki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on philosophy of the visual arts and philosophy of perception. His book On Images was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Paisley Livingston is Chair Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His most recent book is Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2009). Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is the author of Art and Emotion (Oxford University Press, 1998) and is currently working on a book on narrative. David Osipovich holds doctorate degrees in both philosophy and law, and is currently an attorney with the law firm of K&L Gates LLP. From 2001–06 he taught philosophy, first as an adjunct professor at The College of William and Mary and then as an Assistant Professor at Marist College. He has published several papers on the philosophy of theater and, for the past eight years, has regularly presented on the subject at academic conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom. Glenn Parsons is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Ryerson University in Toronto. His current research focuses on the aesthetics of nature, everyday artifacts, and persons. His publications include Functional

viii

9781847063700_Prelims_Final_txt_print.indd viii

2/27/2012 3:49:54 PM

Contributors

Beauty (coauthored with Allen Carlson; Oxford University Press, 2008) and Aesthetics and Nature (Continuum, 2008). Anna Christina Ribeiro is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University. Among her publications are “Toward a Philosophy of Poetry” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33, 2009) and “Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, 2007). She was the recipient of a 2009–10 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Fellowship for Junior Faculty, to work on a monograph on the philosophy of poetry tentatively titled Poetry: Philosophical Thoughts on an Ancient Practice. Elisabeth Schellekens is Senior Lecturer at the University of Durham, and Associate Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. Her main areas of research are aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of Kant. She is the author of Aesthetics and Morality (Continuum, 2007), Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art (with Peter Goldie; Routledge, 2009), and the coeditor of Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011). Aaron Smuts is an Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at Rhode Island College. His interests range across a wide variety of topics in ethics, the philosophy of art, and general value theory. He has published over two dozen articles in a variety of academic journals, including American Philosophical Quarterly, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy Compass, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sarah E. Worth is Professor of Philosophy at Furman University in Greenville, SC. She writes primarily in topics in aesthetics and narrative, most recently in the intersection of memoir and fraud. Her work has appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Philosophical Forum, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and Journal of Norwegian Philosophy among others.

ix

9781847063700_Prelims_Final_txt_print.indd ix

2/27/2012 3:49:55 PM

Acknowledgments Writing is never an altogether solitary endeavor, and thus contributors wish to acknowledge the feedback received during the writing of their entries from Sondra Bacharach, Christopher Bartel, Charles Bolyard, Stephen Davies, Rafael De Clercq, John Fisher, Patrick Fleming, Jeffrey Goodman, William Knorpp, Donald Lavigne, Jerrold Levinson, Paisley Livingston, Jeremiah McCarthy, Graham McFee, Martin Montminy, Ronald Moore, Daniel Nathan, Charles Siewert, Robert Stecker, Jeffrey Strayer, David Svolba, Grant Tavinor, and Andrea Woody. The editor wishes in addition to thank the Logos Research Group at the University of Barcelona for hosting her during 2009–10, when much of the editorial work for this project was done, and Sarah Campbell of Continuum for her unwaveringly kind support throughout. ACSR Lubbock, September 2011

x

9781847063700_Prelims_Final_txt_print.indd x

2/27/2012 3:49:55 PM

1

Introduction Anna Christina Ribeiro

The word “aesthetics” traces its root to the ancient Greek word for sense perception (αἴσθησις, aisthêsis); on that basis one might be justified in presuming that this book is concerned with the science of perception in general. But words sometimes emigrate to distant countries, and come to acquire new meanings in their new home languages. Although “aesthetics” still retains its root connection to sense perception, it came to mean the study of our perception of the beautiful, both in nature and in works of art, when Alexander Baumgarten used it in 1735 in his Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (Philosophical Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to Poetry), and unwittingly baptized what was then emerging as a new discipline within philosophy. However, the theoretical study of the beautiful and of art had a long history before this fairly recent label, and it has had a rich and variegated history since. Indeed, that history goes back to the very culture that gave it its name, for the first philosophers to discuss the arts were Plato (429–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). It is fair to say that the history of aesthetics is—as A. N. Whitehead said of the history of philosophy as a whole—a series of footnotes to Plato, for he set the topics and terms of the debate, and every philosopher after him either followed or reacted against the views he first set forth, any innovations along the way occurring within the framework he established. It is also fair to say that the history of the philosophy of art in particular, the area of aesthetics concerned with art forms and works, is largely the history of the philosophy of “poetry”—not in the sense in which we generally think of poetry today, that is, as lyric poetry, but in the broader sense of an art that included the composition and creative performance of epics, dramatic plays, and the lyric, accompanied by music and dance. It is predominantly to that art that philosophers devoted their attention for most of the past 2,500 years, even if the art itself underwent considerable change over the centuries. Music and dance did not seem to exist independently of recitation and performance, and, while painting and sculpture were discussed, to tell by the extant literature it is only in the sixteenth century that they received dedicated theoretical treatment. The present Companion to Aesthetics is devoted to contemporary topics and art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the analytic tradition of philosophy (the tradition dominant in the Anglophone world, one that adopts 1

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 1

2/27/2012 10:29:46 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

conceptual analysis as its primary methodology and a scientific-naturalistic approach to its subject). In order to place this contemporary discussion in its historical context, I will briefly survey the central topics and terms and the key figures in the history of aesthetics, noting also the changes in the roles the arts have played over the centuries. This history begins in ancient Greece and continues with the cultures most directly influenced by it, namely, those of the “West”; it is not, therefore, representative of all theoretical work ever done about beauty and the arts. The fundamental terms in the history of our discipline, those to which all other important and later terms and issues may be traced back, are four: beauty, pleasure, art, and imitation or representation. Because the beautiful or fine (tò καλóν, to kalon) was originally understood not only as a good (something of value in our lives) but also as the Good (something to which one ought to aspire, a moral and intellectual value), debate about the beautiful was, for most of the history of aesthetics, not only an aesthetic but indeed first and foremost an ethical and epistemological debate. Because experiencing the beautiful was something that obviously produced enjoyment, pleasure in the beautiful and the emotions it aroused in those who experienced it came in for scrutiny. The descendant notion of aesthetic experience at a later time became definitive of the realm of the aesthetic, and from beauty would emerge the notion of aesthetic properties, that is, those that promoted aesthetic pleasure. In keeping with the connected yet distinct notions of the beautiful and the good, pleasures of the body were regarded differently from pleasures of the mind, and the former were typically accepted only if and when they provided a means of access to the latter. An individual’s ethical education could thus begin with her aesthetic education. The fact that the arts imitated, or represented, nature, by contrast, was used to argue both for and against their educational value (now understood in the loftier, philosophical sense of producing knowledge of the fundamental basis of reality). If the “nature” imitated was understood as the transient world of our experience, the arts were seen as obstacles to true knowledge (as Plato held); if instead artists were able to represent the nature underlying our experience (universals, as Aristotle claimed), then the arts stood as a direct source of knowledge. The imitative theory of art, which in one or the other of these versions held sway until around the eighteenth century, had another important consequence: because nature is something external to us, criteria for the evaluation of artworks could be, and were thought to be, objective. It is only when we begin to think of the artist not as representing something external to him—nature—but as expressing something within himself—thoughts, emotions, ideas—(what has been described as the “subjective turn” in aesthetics) that criteria of evaluation gradually become subjective also, and another notion emerges and becomes a central concern of philosophers of art: the notion of taste. Taste was not required for the evaluation of art and beauty up until the 2

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 2

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

Introduction

eighteenth century; rather, education was. Now taste was something at once ineffable and indicative of a superior character; it was accorded its own mental “faculty,” although it seemed that only the chosen few truly had it. Finally, the notion of art (τέχνη, technê) underwent its own transformations over the centuries since the time of Plato. This has mainly to do with a shift, also dating to a few centuries ago, from works of art existing as part of larger cultural practices to their emancipation from these practices. Songs, for instance, were often part of religious rituals, just as paintings in medieval churches served educational and illustrative purposes. Importantly, through and despite this partial decontextualization, artworks continue today to be understood as sources of value—of a unique pleasure, moral guidance, and knowledge which, for many of us, cannot be found in any other human practice. When we look back on ancient Greek culture, we find that public recitations of epics such as Homer’s Iliad, and performances of tragedies and comedies such as those of Sophocles and Aristophanes, played a central role in it, especially as poets had from time immemorial been revered as the teachers of humankind in matters religious, moral, and even historical (the three were very much entangled). Moreover, poetry was composed and inscribed or performed by commission for all manner of significant occasion: weddings, anniversaries, epitaphs, and so on. But by Plato’s time, philosophy had been around for some two centuries, and, as a foremost representative of the new approach to knowledge, he took the poets to task for being mere “imitators,” and for being unable to explain the meaning of their works: like soothsayers, they may have been divinely inspired, but were not wise. They thus stood in the way of knowledge as well as virtue—a radical idea that flew in the face of an ancient tradition. Furthermore, poets engaged our emotions, a lower part of our soul, and thereby demoted reason from its rightful place, again weakening its capacity for knowledge and virtue. Aristotle then came to the defense of poetry and poets, arguing that poetry is in fact philosophical insofar as poets must know what is possible: in particular, how different characters might react to certain circumstances. Poets thus evince a deep, if implicit, knowledge of human nature. Moreover, Aristotle claimed that poetry had a “cathartic” effect upon us: this left us better able, rather than unable, to exercise reason in our daily lives. Poetry is thus “something useful with a view to virtue, purifying . . . the irrational part of the soul” as well as providing us with a more acute insight into human nature. Much is said about pleasure in post-Aristotelian, pre-Christian times, by the various philosophical schools that formed in that period, but the primary focus of the discussion concerns pleasure in relation to moral value, pleasure in the beauty of nature or works of art being valued as a means to moral edification rather than as an end in itself. In this Hellenistic thinkers continued to stress the connection between the beautiful and the good already found in Plato 3

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 3

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

and Aristotle and that would survive until the eighteenth century, but they now emphasized the experience of delight felt in the presence of the beautiful and in the attainment of virtue, an idea that was to find fuller expression in the Catholic mysticism of later centuries. Subscribing likewise to the Classical Greek idea that art imitates nature, Stoics and Epicureans followed that idea to the conclusion that if nature constitutes an objective reality, then the criteria for the evaluation of works that seek to represent it must themselves be objective. Amusingly, some Stoic thinkers argued that some letters in the Greek alphabet were more euphonic than others, and that the quality of a poem could, therefore, be established on the basis of the ratio of euphonic to cacophonous letters found therein. The Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110–35 BCE), whose work is being painstakingly reconstructed from the charred papyri that were buried under lava in Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, showed the absurdity of such theories by drawing attention to the essential importance of content. Similarly, Longinus (first century CE) distinguished between knowledge and passion (content) on the one hand, and figures of speech, diction, and composition or word arrangement (form) on the other, claiming that only the latter could be taught, and sensibly arguing against those who claimed that the quality of a work could be measured by the number of tropes in it. Longinus is also famous for introducing the notion of the “sublime,” the type of feeling literary works should aim to elicit in those who read or heard them recited or performed. This notion would become of central importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it was contrasted with the notion of the beautiful. A couple of centuries after Longinus, the Neoplatonist Plotinus (205–270 CE) wrote a treatise on beauty, and set the stage for how the topic would be treated for centuries, distinguishing between beauty perceived by the senses and beauty perceived by the soul or intellect. The soul partakes in the Form of Beauty, which is also the Form of the Good (concepts drawn from Plato, who also equated these with the Truth), and it is what makes any other beautiful things or actions beautiful. Not only is this beauty bestowed by the soul superior to the beauty perceived by the senses, but the senses, and anything physical, are now considered impediments to the soul sharing in what is natural to it. Thus, Plotinus helped establish the dichotomy between body and soul, and earth and heaven, that became a central characteristic of medieval thought. In the few instances where Christian philosophers spoke of beauty or of the arts— Augustine (354–430), Bonaventure (1217–74), and Aquinas (1225–74) are the main examples—they operated within this framework. On the one hand, the beautiful and the (moral) good were different ways of naming or speaking of the same good; on the other, the sensible good or beautiful was considered inferior, or merely a means to, the ethical and the intellectual good or beautiful. Besides the concepts of the beautiful/good/truth, the notion of pleasure, and that of imitation (μίμησις, mimêsis), another aspect of the framework within 4

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 4

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

Introduction

which these and all Western thinkers up until the eighteenth century were operating concerns the meaning of “art” and the role and social standing of artists. The words τέχνη (technê) in Greek and ars in Latin, signified “craft” or “skill,” already indicating how artists and their products were regarded. They were δημιουργόι (demiourgoi, literally “those who work for people”), that is, craftsmen, paid to write verses for the epitaph of a nobleman or to sculpt basreliefs for the tomb of a tradesman; summoned to set mosaics for a living room or paint frescoes on its walls; commissioned to create statues depicting gods and myths, realistic representations of the professions, or busts of a wealthy politician’s forebears as a means to honor and remember them, much as we might have photos of our grandparents in our living rooms today. Poets had a separate and higher standing than painters or sculptors in part because, as mentioned earlier, they performed a serious role as moral, religious, and historical guides, and in part because the ability to use words well, and to read and write, was the privilege of a minority and, importantly, did not involve manual labor, something openly scorned by those who could afford not to live by it. Music, in addition, had the good fortune of having been associated with mathematics by Pythagoras (who was venerated by Plato and many others), and both in turn with astronomy. It is to the association of poetry with grammar and rhetoric, and of music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, that we owe these two arts being part of the fundamental “liberal” education for some 2,000 years. Together with logic, the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and musical harmony comprised the seven liberal arts (the “skills” to be learned by free citizens); in the Middle Ages, the first three, known as the trivium, were preparatory for the latter four, known as the quadrivium. Even so, although poetry and its attendant arts of music and dance were treated with higher regard than architecture, sculpture, or painting, for most of their history they too were generally treated as skills one could acquire and put in the service of those who could pay for them, in quite the same way one could pay a cobbler to make shoes, a smith to make a sword, or a carpenter to make a bed. All of these, and many others, were artes or technai, and the “artist,” anonymous except for some poets, was a trader of his skill. (This partly explains why nearly all of them were men, since the public realm of trade and study was eminently male, while women’s province was the private world of the home.) Given this bias against the senses and manual labor, and the consequent low standing of any art other than poetry and music up until the sixteenth century, when architects, sculptors, and painters emancipated themselves from artisan’s guilds and formed their own Academia del Disegno in Florence in 1563, it is not surprising that it took two more centuries for philosophers, themselves emancipated from the confines of Catholic scholasticism, finally to dedicate their thoughts to analyses of the arts and of our sense of beauty. Before them, however, artists themselves were writing treatises on the newly emancipated 5

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 5

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

art forms. Leon Battista Alberti (1409–72), Leonard da Vinci (1452–1519), and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) wrote variously on painting, sculpture, architecture, geometry, and on the all-important new discovery of perspective in painting. Meanwhile poets such as Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) also wrote on their own craft, continuing the Platonic-Aristotelian debate. That artists themselves were writing about their craft was historically significant: they were now educated not only in their artistic métier, but also in critical and philosophical theory. Their theoretical contributions would go a long way toward earning prestige for arts other than poetry, and toward the radical changes that would take place in the artworld in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century can truly be considered a period of revolution both in the artworld and in philosophical aesthetics—indeed the time when both the “artworld” and “aesthetics,” as we understand them today, were born, and when our four notions of beauty, pleasure, representation, and art underwent radical transformation. Until then, artworks and performances were always part of a larger cultural practice or setting which gave them whatever meaning they had. In medieval Europe, that context was in large part provided by the Catholic church, as evinced by the architecture (e.g., Romanesque and later Gothic churches), sculpture (statues of saints and of the Christ crucified), painting (depiction of biblical scenes), music (Gregorian chant), and theater (morality plays) of the time. Artists were now beginning to produce works that were separate from these practices and settings, and offering them up for appreciation on their own, in a setting of their own—not in the private houses of the nobility, or within the walls of a church, but in a museum or a performance hall; not serving the purposes of a ritual, a festival, or a household tradition, but for their own sake. Likewise, philosophical thought about beauty and the arts was, from the beginning, part of the larger framework of ethics, epistemology, and later on, theology); aesthetics was now emerging as a subdiscipline of its own. It is a testament to the power of art that artworks retained the power to speak to us and move us profoundly independently of their traditional contexts; were that not so, it is unlikely we would have an independent “philosophy of art” today. This new cultural environment was thus reflected in many philosophical treatises written in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century, most of which were concerned with the grounds for the evaluation of works of art. As in other areas of philosophy, we can detect a rationalist and an empiricist trend in aesthetics as well. In keeping with the trend in other areas of philosophy and with the influence of René Descartes (1590–1650), rationalistminded writers hailed mainly from France. Unlike the British empiricists, they were mostly literary theorists and art critics rather than philosophers. French rationalists, or neoclassicists as they came to be known, looked to the ancients for their models and standards. As was the case with some ancient writers, 6

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 6

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

Introduction

neoclassicists firmly believed that there were strict rules to be followed in the making of art, rules which in turn served as principles by reference to which one work could be deemed better than another. Here again the notion of art as the imitation of nature was paramount; among others, it was the principle in Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry mentioned earlier, and in the influential Les beaux Arts réduits à un même principe by the Abbé Charles Batteux (1746). But whereas for Plato that was a reason why the arts were deficient, for the neoclassicists nature became the rule. Standards of taste were thus taken to be objective, and the closer an artist’s work was to what had been produced by the Greeks and the Romans, the better. It is to this time that we owe more and less successful attempts to fit the various prosodies of the Romance and Germanic languages to Greek poetic meters; but Greek meters were based on syllable length and generally did not fare well as an import. Greek and Roman models were also the paradigm to be followed in sculpture and architecture, a marked contrast to what had been produced in the Middle Ages. It is also in this period, as indicated by Batteux’s Beaux Arts and by Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–72), that the arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture are first grouped together as the Fine Arts, and the search begins for what their même principe, or common essence, might be. The wisdom of this search would only be questioned two centuries later, by the philosopher Morris Weitz (1916–81), in his influential “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956). Inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the analytic orientation in philosophy that had by then established itself, his essay was a clear sign that a peculiarly analytic philosophy of art was now flourishing. Because they argued for our role, and, in particular, the role of our senses, in constructing the world around us, the eighteenth-century empiricists turned the notion of beauty on its head: rather than being something objectively existing in the world, it was a pleasurable sensation that some external qualities had the capacity to arouse in us. For the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), humans were endowed with a “moral sense” that enabled us to perceive both the beautiful and the good (themselves identical with truth). We can thus see him as a transitional figure, still holding on to the ancient Platonic idea of a conjoined ethical-aesthetic-epistemological value. Another residue of earlier thought is evident in the notion of disinterestedness that he posited and that would come to be seen as an essential characteristic of the aesthetic attitude and of aesthetic pleasure. At heart, this is an ethical notion, for the attitude betrays a resistance to the physical world already found in Plato. For an action to be truly virtuous, as for an experience to be truly aesthetic, desire or interest could not be present; the same, of course, goes for the pursuit of truth if it is to be considered truly intellectual rather than instrumental. It was left to his follower Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) to make a real break with the past and posit a “sense of beauty” that was purely aesthetic, and which was “activated” 7

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 7

2/27/2012 10:29:47 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

when the proper ratio of uniformity and variety presented itself to it via objects in the external world. Characteristically more skeptical of any such objective standards, David Hume (1711–76) proposed instead that any standard of taste would still have to refer to individuals, in this case those possessing considerable experience with the art in question, in addition to what he called “delicacy of taste” and an unprejudiced attitude. Since such “true judges,” no matter how great their efforts, could never fully overcome the particularities of their time, place, or temperament, we simply had to give up on the idea of a fully objective criterion of evaluation, although Hume did not think that such critics were to blame for those limitations. The joint verdict of such ideal critics was the new standard of value in art. Again as elsewhere in philosophy, rationalism and empiricism were followed by idealism, and the key figures are likewise Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), Georg Friedrich Hegel (Philosophy of Fine Art, 1835), and Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea, 1819, 1844). What is striking in this philosophical school, and in the literary romanticism that followed, is the metaphysical and epistemological elevation of the arts to the top of their grand philosophical systems. From an obstacle to truth, as we had seen with Plato, artworks were now the concrete embodiment of it; consequently, from an impediment to proper learning, they were now necessary to a complete education. Besides enshrining the notion of a disinterested pleasure as paradigmatic of the experience of beauty, the idealists also vindicated the ancient notions of art as representation (mimêsis) and of the artist as divinely inspired by interpreting them in direct opposition to what we had seen in Plato’s philosophy. “Divine inspiration” now meant direct, unmediated access to truth, through the imagination as opposed to reason or understanding. Whereas philosophers and scientists arrived at their conclusions via the painstaking work of observation, analysis, and synthesis, artists had a special communion with a deep, underlying reality not easily amenable to the cool tools of logic and reason. This emphasis on artists and art has the additional consequence of demoting beauty from the pride of place it had held until then: for nature certainly could be beautiful, but it had not gone through the organizing, conceptual filter of the artist. Aesthetics thus becomes principally the philosophy of art. Directly related to this metaphysical turn of the notion of art, and the epistemological turn of the artist as the spokesperson for truth, is the new focus on the artist as a genius that flourished in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century; the expression of the artist’s thoughts and emotions is now by default worthy of our attention for the insight into life that it can bring about. This would have been anathema to Plato for, as we have seen, the idea of the artist as an oracle whose pronouncements we ought to respect was precisely what he argued so vehemently against in the Republic and the Ion.

8

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 8

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

Introduction

The nineteenth-century resurgence of this very ancient, possibly prehistorical notion had two consequences: in philosophy, in the debate over whether and how poetry in particular can convey any truths, and in literary criticism, in the interest in the biography of the artist, a central characteristic of the Romantic movement. This interest, initially influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, broadened in the twentieth century from an interest in the psychology of the individual into an interest in the sociopolitical context of artistic creation, to the effect that, indeed, voices far beyond what the artist might have been aware of were speaking through him. But the Muses at whose mercy the artist was were never too kind, and many artists stood condemned for that very gift for which they were originally thought to be special. They were like oracles indeed, their words never to be taken at face-value but as symbols of something beyond themselves. The difference between them and their ancient counterparts was that the modern oracles never seemed to reveal anything positive, but only the evils of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and so on—or so the various postmodernist schools of interpretation would seem to suggest. Perhaps also in line with how oracles are typically interpreted—we tend to read in them what we wish to read—the most radical version of this approach championed the idea that it is the reader who, in the process of reading, “creates” the work, each reader, therefore, creating a new work. Besides such approaches to interpretation, more typical of the so-called “Continental” philosophical tradition (which nevertheless generated abundant debate on the correct approach to the interpretation of art among analytically minded philosophers), the twentieth century saw assiduous efforts to establish a definition for the arts that had been grouped together in the eighteenth century. Weitz had not questioned the grouping itself, but he argued that all we could, and should, hope to discover were “family resemblances” among the various art forms, thus denying the possibility of definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Philosophers rose to the occasion and countered with functional definitions (Monroe Beardsley), institutional definitions (George Dickie), historical definitions (Jerrold Levinson), and even with disjunctive definitions (Berys Gaut) based on the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances that Weitz had used to argue against the definitional project. Notably, mimêsis or representation was no longer a requisite for art status. But by the turn of the twenty-first century some philosophers were calling for all to desist from the quest for this holy grail and turn instead to the project of defining and analyzing the individual arts (Noël Carroll, Peter Kivy, Dominic Lopes). Another challenge to the definitional project came, repeatedly, from the artworld itself: when photography emerged in the late nineteenth century, it was not originally considered an art form, because, it was argued, it registered what was already there rather than created something new, leaving no room

9

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 9

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

for the unique techné of the artist; this line of argument still has its defenders (e.g., Roger Scruton). Similar arguments were made against granting art status to film, to the ready-mades of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, and later on to works of installation and conceptual art such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed, John Cage’s 4’33, or Vito Acconci’s Following Piece. Time and again novel art forms have won the battle against prescriptive criticism and theory. Though the old forms are alive and well, the erstwhile new ones are today established and ubiquitous. A survey of twenty-first-century thought about beauty and the arts soon reveals that we are still the children of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics. The various definitional approaches mentioned here are answers to the problem bequeathed to us by the cultural forces that led theorists to group various cultural activities and crafts into the “Modern System of the Arts,” as the art historian Paul Kristeller called the eighteenth-century grouping of the fine arts. The concern with beauty that in the eighteenth century became a concern with the qualities in the world that promote the experience of beauty—aesthetic properties—is still a central topic in aesthetics, though it now draws much more heavily from theories of properties in metaphysics. The notion of disinterested pleasure that is presumed to characterize the aesthetic experience, though it has not gone unchallenged, remains of central interest. That we feel pleasure in engaging with artworks also led Hume to ponder why we should enjoy even those that depict profoundly sad events; discussion of the paradox of tragedy remains alive and well today. So does debate concerning the paradox of fiction, the question of why we should care for the fates of fictional characters and whether we can be said to have real emotions for them while remaining rational. The connection made between art and aesthetic experience to the effect that the former was defined in terms of the latter (so that artworks are, by definition, those objects and activities that promote the aesthetic experience) culminated in the work of Clive Bell (1881–1964) and Monroe Beardsley (1915–85). Definitions of this sort are now charged with having divorced artworks from the contexts which once gave them meaning and value. And the ancient Platonic problem of whether art can convey knowledge is still widely discussed under the label of the “cognitive value of art.” Although philosophers may no longer be willing to automatically grant the title of “oracle” or “genius” to artists, the Romantic perception of the artist as someone with something profound to convey continues to hold sway; one will be hard-pressed to find anyone today claiming that artists are merely skilled workers. However fascinating these historical continuities may be, genuinely novel topics and avenues of inquiry did emerge in aesthetics in the twentieth century. One of them concerns the ontology of artworks. What kinds of entities in the world are works of art? Musical works cannot be merely the scores where

10

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 10

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

Introduction

they are set, any more than literary works can be identified with the paper copies in which their texts are inscribed; neither can they be identified with their performances or recitations. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and buildings, they can be read or heard in different parts of the globe at the same or different times. Various theories have been offered to handle the ontological difficulties raised by works of art, difficulties that seem to be peculiar to them and that do not arise with other things in the world whose nature we wish to understand. Some have argued that artworks are mental entities in the mind of the artist, and the work a medium via which others may reconstruct that artistic object (Benedetto Croce, Robin Collingwood); others that they are the actions of the artist (Gregory Currie, David Davies); others that some of them (musical works in particular) are eternally existing universals (Peter Kivy), and still others that they are types (Richard Wollheim, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Jerrold Levinson). Another area of interest, one that could hardly have emerged before the twentieth century, is “evolutionary aesthetics.” While the history of philosophizing about beauty and the arts dates back to the fifth century BCE, the history of our “aesthetization” of life goes back much, much further. The earliest records we have date back to 40,000 years ago, and consist of cave paintings, such as those of Chauvet in France and Altamira in Spain, whose beauty cannot be attributed to mere chance. Far from being utilitarian depictions that might aid a viewer in identifying, say, the animal depicted, their attention to color, shape, and realism is striking. How much longer before then were we already sensitive to such properties? Some today speculate that perhaps as long as 400,000 years ago, since some apparent stone tools of that age also seem to exemplify a concern for the aesthetic, inasmuch as their beautifully symmetrical teardrop shape was not functional. Clearly, this stretches the notion of “we” to pre-Homo sapiens time, but if our species ancestors already had aesthetic inclinations, then that only reinforces the claim that we came around already equipped with them. Inquiry into the evolution and psychology of our aesthetic sensibilities and the evolution of our artistic practices was only made possible after the publication of Charles Darwin’s works on the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century. And if the popularity of Dennis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009) is any indication, evolutionary aesthetics should remain an area of interest throughout the current one. Other new areas of debate include environmental aesthetics, standpoint aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and popular art forms not previously included under the umbrella “art.” Environmental aesthetics pertains to our aesthetic appreciation of nature. Although aesthetic interest in the natural environment was widely discussed in the eighteenth century (especially in connection with the notion of the sublime), discussion today includes ethical issues that were not part of that

11

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 11

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

earlier repertoire, such as that of our responsibility toward the environment. “Standpoint aesthetics” is a label that derives from standpoint epistemology, a new field in the theory of knowledge that endeavors to explain the crucial role of perspective, or standpoint, in the construction of knowledge. With respect to aesthetics, theorists seek to give an account of the role of perspective in our perception of the beautiful, in our conception of what constitutes art, and of what constitutes good art. In particular, it investigates voices that were previously marginalized, such as those of women, minorities, and non-Western peoples, with respect to how the aesthetic and the artistic are construed. Similarly, philosophers have begun to devote serious study to previously marginalized art forms and cultural practices, such as rock music, comics, computer art, and video games. Finally, everyday aesthetics is a very recent area of debate in the field; as its name suggests, it seeks to shed light on the aesthetic value of everyday experiences and objects. Beauty, pleasure, art, imitation: we have now seen how these fundamental notions unfolded and gave rise to new ones in the history of aesthetic thought. With this long and rich philosophical history behind it (only the highlights of which could be covered here), aesthetics and the philosophy of art have developed at a fast pace in the recent past. As noted above, much of this is the result of aestheticians drawing from other areas, not only in philosophy (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language) but also in the related fields of psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, as well as of their taking seriously both perspectives and art forms that were previously marginalized. The present Companion to Aesthetics aims to bear witness to this development and expansion, while covering the issues that have traditionally been central to the discipline. Chapter 2 is devoted to methodological issues, that is, what is the proper object of study in aesthetics, and how we should go about studying it. The main part of the book, “Core Issues and Art Forms,” may be divided into four sections. Chapters 3 and 4, on the definition of art and the ontology of artworks, pertain to the philosophy of art rather than to aesthetics broadly conceived, and consider the arts as a whole. Chapter 5 through 7, on aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and aesthetic and artistic value, discuss topics that straddle aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Chapters 8 through 15 discuss specific art forms, such as music, dance, theater, the visual arts as a whole, and the various forms of popular art. Chapters 16 and 17 are about the two relatively new areas in aesthetics and the philosophy of art mentioned above, namely, environmental aesthetics and global standpoint aesthetics. The final chapter in “Core Issues and Art Forms” effectively constitutes a section of its own, treating of new directions in the field, and focusing in particular on the aforementioned emerging area of “everyday aesthetics.”

12

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 12

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

Introduction

Under “Resources” the reader will find two tools thus far absent from companions and handbooks on aesthetics: the first, an extensive chronology of works in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the fifth century BCE all the way to the twenty-first century CE—2,500 years worth of texts—and the second, a list of resources, including online resources, in the field. The serious student of theories about the aesthetic and the arts, after having a taste of the current philosophical debates in these pages, will know exactly where to go for more.

13

9781847063700_Ch01_Final_txt_print.indd 13

2/27/2012 10:29:48 AM

2

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics Brandon Cooke

1. Introduction Philosophy, it is often remarked, is the only discipline that takes itself as an object of investigation. Questions about philosophical methodology are themselves philosophical questions, and demand answers that meet the very same criteria they articulate. This is not to say that other intellectual disciplines proceed unselfconsciously. However, to a significant degree, methodological issues in biology belong to the philosophy of biology. Methodological issues in history are not, or not mainly, historical questions but in large part issues in the philosophy of history. The methodology of philosophy is philosophy of philosophy. For all that philosophy is by nature a highly self-reflexive discipline, attention to method in the recent literature has been Janus-faced. On the one hand, philosophers defend their arguments in part by appeal to the soundness of their method. On the other, there are very few sustained treatments of philosophical method in twentieth and twenty-first-century analytic philosophy, to say nothing of analytic aesthetics. This is partly to be explained by philosophy’s selfreflexive nature. Another significant factor surely is the traditional suspicion of grand philosophical system-building that is often cited as a marker of the boundary between the analytic and continental traditions. Whatever its origins, an unfortunate result of philosophy’s bipolar attitude toward its own method is that some philosophers produce work that is considered not properly within philosophy’s disciplinary boundaries. The lack of a generally accepted method makes the adjudication of such cases highly contentious. For the individual philosopher, the variety of approaches and (piecemeal) methodological claims one encounters in the literature can make it difficult to know just how to go on. But the nature of the practice makes attention to methodology unavoidable—at least if one’s contribution is to be a significant one. The aims of this chapter are to illuminate some of the more important questions of method that have arisen in recent work in analytic aesthetics, and to make some admittedly fragmentary suggestions about how these questions ought to be resolved. A complete method of analytic aesthetics would give 14

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 14

2/27/2012 10:29:51 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

adequate answers to two fundamental questions: first, what are the data of aesthetics, and secondly, what are the criteria for an acceptable aesthetic theory? The first question concerns the objects of aesthetic theory: what are they, and what is their relation to theory? The second question can be thought of as a question of how aesthetic theorizing ought to be accomplished. The two questions are connected. For instance, if some object of our experience, say the natural environment, is a proper object of aesthetic experience, then an aesthetic theory will be inadequate if it fails to cohere with an account of the aesthetic experience of nature. Another possibility is that the most compelling aesthetic theory might imply that we are mistaken to treat certain instances of appreciation as genuinely aesthetic. Since these questions are so intimately bound, I will examine a number of topics that bear on them in tandem. I cannot hope here to provide a comprehensive methodology of philosophical aesthetics. Much of the method of aesthetics is comprehended within the methods of rational argumentation in general, and as that body of literature is so vast and rich I will only point in its direction with the platitude that arguments are the currency of philosophy, and no philosopher can afford to ignore the work of those who directly investigate logic and argumentation. Still, much of what follows will bear on considerations of good argumentation. I also restrict my attention to recent analytic aesthetics. The absence of a historical overview here should not be understood as implying that an awareness of the history of these questions is only of historical interest. Many of the issues examined here are not specific to aesthetics, and some have just begun to present themselves in any explicit fashion in the literature of analytic aesthetics. The present discussion goes only a short way toward answering the two fundamental questions of method, though I hope it will also illuminate (if only dimly) the lay of the path beyond.

2. The Domain of the Aesthetic The first fundamental methodological question is: what is aesthetic theory about? Another way of putting the question is to ask what the data of aesthetics are. This variation is not equivalent to the first, as the word “data” carries associations that bear a particular significance for the way we understand the relation between aesthetic theories and the objects of those theories. I discuss this issue below. Two dead ends should be identified at the outset. One might try to determine the domain of the aesthetic by appealing to ordinary language use. The trouble with this proposal is that ordinary uses of “aesthetic” and its conceptual relatives are often too vague to serve any rigorous philosophical purposes. Another unhelpful proposal is an appeal to etymology. Some writers remind 15

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 15

2/27/2012 10:29:52 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

us that the origin of the word “aesthetic” is the Greek aisthêsis, which means “sense perception.” But then, is the aesthetic simply identical to sense perception or its contents (or both), or is it a special mode of sense perception? Either way, the question is moot, since we prephilosophically accept that any number of different objects that are not objects of sense perception are proper objects of aesthetic appreciation: works of literature, conceptual art, dreams, scientific theories, and mathematical proofs, to name but a few. Philosophers have tended to make use of two different approaches to the question. The first is an object-oriented approach. This way attempts to delimit the domain of the aesthetic by identifying the objects (or their relevant properties), either as paradigms or as items on a complete and comprehensive list, of aesthetic appreciation, judgment, and experience. The second way is subject-oriented, and seeks to distinguish the aesthetic by characterizing the affective, cognitive, and phenomenological features of a particular mode of appreciation, judgment, or experience. The object-oriented approach cannot stand on its own, for two reasons. First, although artworks are taken by most aestheticians as the paradigm object of aesthetic appreciation, most agree that the range of aesthetically appreciable objects is far wider. Apart from art, it is generally agreed that natural environments, scenes, and objects can be appreciated aesthetically. So can various non-art artifacts and events, (arguably) everyday garden-variety sensations, mental objects (such as dreams and fantasies), and abstract objects (such as geometric figures and mathematical proofs). This diverse and heterogeneous group of objects can obviously be experienced and appreciated in many non-aesthetic ways as well, and so something will need to be said about how aesthetic experience is different. Secondly, even if one declares artworks to be the paradigm aesthetic objects and defines the aesthetic only by reference to them, it must still be noticed that it is possible to appreciate or judge artworks in any number of ways, many of which are clearly not aesthetic. One can appreciate the investment potential of a painting by Damien Hirst, or appreciate its usefulness in covering the hole in one’s leaky roof, or in keeping one warm as it burns in the fireplace. This means that a purely object-oriented approach will be inadequate. Some appeal to the kind of appreciation or experience that falls under the label “the aesthetic” is also needed. A variation on the object approach centers instead on distinctively aesthetic properties or aspects. The paradigm here is beauty (and ugliness). Since beauty and ugliness do not seem to admit of some subject-independent characterization à la primary qualities—after all, they do not figure in scientific causal laws, to give one reason—this variation cannot do without an account of the content of aesthetic appreciation or experience. Indeed, the seminal approaches of Hume and Kant depend on some qualitative features of the experience of beauty as a way of analyzing that property. 16

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 16

2/27/2012 10:29:52 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

What, then, are the characteristic qualities of aesthetic experience? Kant and Hume, following their predecessors among the British empiricists, claim that it is grounded in a feeling of pleasure or aversion, but, importantly, one that is disinterested. Nearly all theories of aesthetic experience, appreciation, and judgment follow Kant and Hume in holding some variation of this requirement. A disinterested pleasure is pleasure that does not issue from the satisfaction of some desire or preference of the experiencing subject. Kant imposes a much stronger requirement, namely, that it is not a so-called propositional pleasure (pleasure that something should be the case with respect to the object, including pleasure that the thing even exists). Part of Kant’s motivation for characterizing disinterested pleasure in this way is that it cannot be connected to a desire determined by a concept, which would make aesthetic judgment a low form of cognitive judgment (which Kant denies that it is), or a judgment of the merely agreeable (which could not claim objectivity). A disinterested pleasure does not include the satisfaction of a desire that one’s present pleasure continue, or be resumed in the future. Theories of aesthetic experience sometimes identify other criterial aspects of the experience, some of which appear to be species or aspects of disinterested pleasure. Theories or definitions of the aesthetic can nonetheless be usefully distinguished from one another by examining the relative weight played by the object-oriented and subject-oriented elements of those theories and definitions. Consider this definition schema offered by Malcolm Budd (2002, pp. 12–15): (AES1) A response is aesthetic just when: (i) it is directed at the experienced properties of an item, its parts, and their relations (ii) it involves a disinterested positive or negative reaction to the item. This is perhaps the most basic schema that combines the object- and subjectoriented approaches. One way to understand different theories of the aesthetic is by comparison with this schema. Friends of aesthetic experience will put few if any limits on the kinds of items cited in (i), and the properties in question may be experienced in sense perception, thought or imagination. Opponents of the idea of disinterested pleasure, or more generally of aesthetic experience, will de-emphasize or eliminate the second condition. In so doing, however, these theorists must then attempt to delimit the range of objects which admit of aesthetic appreciation, or at least identify certain paradigms of aesthetic appreciation. In contemporary aesthetics, this typically means identifying art as the paradigm object of aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, many aesthetic theories explicitly identify aesthetics as the philosophy of art, and explicitly define aesthetic properties in terms of artistic properties. Consider a 17

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 17

2/27/2012 10:29:52 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

few significant examples. Richard Wollheim argues that to take the aesthetic attitude is to regard something as a work of art, and captures the view in this striking passage: “when the Impressionists tried to teach us to look at paintings as though we were looking at nature—a painting for Monet was une fenêtre ouverte sur la nature—this was because they themselves had first looked at nature in a way they had learnt from looking at paintings” (1980, p. 103). Following Wollheim in spirit, Berys Gaut argues for a similar assimilation of the aesthetic to the artistic. Aesthetic properties, on his view, are just those properties that make things valuable qua art; aesthetic properties of non-art objects are “those of their properties that can figure among the aesthetic properties of works of art” (Gaut, 2007, p. 35). Alan Goldman says that “we may accept as our basic criterion for identifying aesthetic properties that they are those that ground or instantiate in their relations to us or other properties those values of artworks that make them worth contemplating” (Goldman, 1998, p. 20; emphasis added). Despite the warranted objections against disinterested pleasure and other purported aspects of aesthetic experience, this sort of move is methodologically dangerous. For if artworks are taken as the paradigm objects of aesthetic appreciation, we immediately incur a requirement to attempt some definition of art if we are to distinguish aesthetic from other appreciative modes. Even granting that this can be done, a more serious worry remains. To the extent that many objects of experience differ from artworks, these other objects will be downgraded by the theory as lesser, derivative, or even non-objects of aesthetic appreciation. In an important paper, Ronald Hepburn (1966) identifies this problem, and argues that certain key differences between art and nature lead to aesthetic theory’s disregard of nature. For instance, unlike art, there is no critical and interpretive discourse about nature. An artwork is the result of a complex of intentional acts, and since they are our acts, we generally know what is involved in their correct appreciation. For non-theists, at least, nature is not an artifact. Artworks have frames of one sort or other, which indicate (if sometimes only vaguely) what is within the work and what without, so indicating what is relevant to their appreciation. Nature is not so framed. And so on. If art is the paradigm aesthetic object, then to the extent that nature (to take only one important non-art example) differs in these significant respects, a purely object-oriented theory will yield a distorted account of the aesthetic. Hepburn argues that there is a practical cost as well: if we lack the theoretical concepts for a certain range of experiences, those experiences tend to be less available in everyday life, and less profoundly so. I contend that it is a serious methodological error to define the aesthetic solely in reference to artworks, despite the challenges involved in formulating an acceptable account of aesthetic experience. The alternative involves denying that nature is truly

18

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 18

2/27/2012 10:29:52 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

an object of aesthetic appreciation or, to the extent that it is, claiming that it is somehow parasitic on our appreciation of art. Such claims often rely on genealogical “just-so” stories, almost entirely speculative, that attempt to establish that there was no aesthetic appreciation of nature until there were artistic practices. Moreover, there seem to be categorical differences between our appreciation of the two that stand in the way of defining the aesthetic solely in terms of art. If that is so, are there any limits to the range of objects of aesthetic appreciation? That is, can the object-oriented component of the schema simply be dropped? Are there any objects of experience that cannot be appreciated aesthetically? Budd’s clarification of component (i) of (AES1) might indicate not: “An item” includes not just physical objects or combinations of objects, but also the activity or behaviour of living or non-living things, events or processes of other kinds, mere appearances, and any other kind of thing that is susceptible of aesthetic appreciation [emphasis added]. By “experienced properties” I mean properties the item is experienced as possessing, in perception, thought, or imagination, and the notion is to be understood in an all-embracing sense, covering not only immediately perceptible properties, but also relational, representational, symbolic, and emotional properties as they are realized in the item, and including the kind or type of thing the item is experienced as being. (p. 14) The italicized clause seems to make any object-oriented requirement vacuous without some specification of what counts as aesthetic appreciation, and the following sentence makes use of a notion of experience so broad that AES1 seems to allow that any object of experience generally is potentially an object of aesthetic experience, so long as it admits of a disinterested response. Indeed, many advocates of “everyday aesthetics” appear to be quite sympathetic to the idea that in addition to art and nature, things like sport, food, weather, social relationships, and games, to name only a few, are also proper objects of aesthetic appreciation. Kant himself argues that mathematical objects and proofs are proper objects of aesthetic appreciation. Philosophical argument might tell against the inclusion of certain candidate objects of everyday aesthetics experience, such as smells and tastes, on the grounds that the associated pleasures are not sufficiently disinterested. That said, it remains open to the advocate for their inclusion within the aesthetic to challenge the criterion of disinterested pleasure, or to mount an argument that those things meet it. In any case, if any part of these claims is correct, then a careful investigation of aesthetic experience (or appreciation, or judgment) becomes methodologically fundamental.

19

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 19

2/27/2012 10:29:52 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

3. Descriptive versus Normative Aesthetics What is the relation between philosophical theory and its objects, the things the theories are about? In the case of philosophical aesthetics, those objects include the actual items of aesthetic experience, along with the experiences themselves. Many of these items are the products of various complex individual and social practices, and those practices themselves, along with their participants, thereby become objects for aesthetic theory as well. Some of these practices are highly reflective, social, and communicative: art history, theory, criticism, and their aims and products sometimes resemble those of philosophical aesthetics. One conception of philosophical aesthetics sees it as a purely descriptive enterprise. We have objects of aesthetic experience (whatever they may be), the experiences themselves, and the various social practices (productive, appreciative, critical, etc.) in which these objects and experiences are enmeshed. The goal of descriptive aesthetics is to provide an explanatory framework of all these things, and do so in a way that treats the experiences and prephilosophical claims about them as authoritative. Classical foundationalist epistemology might serve as a useful analogy. As a research program, it seeks to provide a theory that indicates when our beliefs are justified, and it does so by introducing a distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs. Basic beliefs concern our present sensory experiences (e.g., that something appears red, or that I have a sensation of red), while a non-basic belief is a belief about anything else. Basic beliefs are infallible and self-certifying. Whether a non-basic belief is justified depends on whether it is connected in the right way to a basic belief. So in a sense, basic beliefs serve as incorrigible data, to which all our other beliefs must conform if they are to be justified. But there is no question of revising or rejecting basic beliefs on the basis of any non-basic beliefs. Descriptive aesthetics treats the objects of aesthetic theory (the items of aesthetic experience, the experiences, and the non-philosophical thought and talk of those items and experiences) as data to which theory must conform. On this view, it is philosophy’s task to organize the data, to provide general descriptions and theoretical explanations for it, but not to assert that any of it is mistaken, unjustified, or excludable. Descriptive aesthetics is a cousin to the sort of moral philosophy dominant in the mid-twentieth century, which took metaethics as the only legitimate topic for philosophical ethics. Indeed, what little analytic aesthetics was done around the same time took it as a methodological assumption that the only legitimate topic for philosophical aesthetics was the language of “first-order” aesthetic practices. (Representative work can be found in Elton (1954) and Margolis (1987).) Descriptive aesthetics might well take as its credo Wittgenstein’s characteristically ambiguous remark that “philosophy leaves everything as it is” (p. 42e).

20

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 20

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

What considerations might support descriptive aesthetics over a more heavily normative or prescriptive alternative? It is sometimes said that philosophers who make normative claims about the practices about which they are theorizing are guilty of an intellectual hubris or imperialism. For one, the artists, critics, and audience members do not need the contributions of the philosopher to know how to go on in their respective practices. So there is a kind of independence of practice that is not being respected by the normative aesthetician. The needs and values of artists, critics, and appreciators of the aesthetic are different in kind than those of the philosopher, and so liable to be misunderstood by the meddling philosopher. The philosopher typically does not have the training or practical experience to contribute to “first-order” dialogue within the arts. Rather, the philosopher should treat any pronouncements from that dialogue as self-certifying. Several of these arguments feature in Robert Kraut’s Artworld Metaphysics (2007). Kraut compares the honest aesthetician’s plight to that of a working field linguist [who] has gathered information about speech dispositions and inferential uniformities within a geographic region, and then presented the data to her peers for unification, explanation, and interpretive conjectures, only to be told (dismissively) that the data are inadmissible because her native informants speak incorrectly. That is no way to do linguistic theory; the task is to explain the linguistic data, not to criticize it. Analogously: criticizing actual practices among denizens of the artworld is no way to do the philosophy of art. (p. 17) In this spirit, Kraut inveighs against philosophers who argue against the claim that music is a language. Kraut correctly points out that very many musicians talk about music as if it were a language. For him, this is a piece of data that aesthetic theory must accommodate and explain. The pronouncements of artworld practitioners are self-certifying and authoritative. The philosopher, as an outsider to those practices, lacks the standing to challenge those pronouncements. And so any theory that ignores or denies this or any other artworld phenomenon (including the pronouncements of its inhabitants) is simply inadequate. There is one decisive consideration against a purely descriptive aesthetics such as Kraut advocates, and that is the fact that artworld discourse is loaded with contradiction. Artists, critics, and art theorists routinely make pronouncements that are mutually incompatible. Perhaps the most common case of contradictory discourse is the type identified by Hume in “Of the Standard of Taste,” in which he remarks that many people are happy to assert that there is no disputing matters of taste, but will protest if someone proposes that Bunyan is superior to Addison. It is possible, of course, that the correct aesthetic theory

21

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 21

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

is one that preserves all of the contradictions within the discourse, and explains why this is so. But surely this is the last or next-to-last resort for a philosopher. It is one of the most important criteria for the rational understanding of a discourse or practice that contradictions be minimized, and so the aesthetician cannot avoid exercising some judgment in deciding which items are data to be accommodated and explained, and which are to be explained in terms of error or some other fault. Aestheticians are not, as the field linguist in Kraut’s analogy is purported to be, outsiders to the practices that they investigate. Indeed, the linguist is not an absolute outsider either. The language she studies might not be her mother tongue, but she too is a member of a linguistic community, and uses language to accomplish many of the same things as the people she studies. Perhaps, then, the distinction between outsider and insider is not a sharp binary distinction, but one between regions along the same spectrum. So too with aestheticians and artworld inhabitants. The values and ideas of the artworld are not hermetically sealed within it. They must bear some relation to the wider world, one which the artist and the philosopher both inhabit, if they are to be intelligible and shareable. If that is so, then those values are subject to criticism, revision, affirmation, and rejection. Indeed, many artworld values are fundamental human ones, about which the philosopher might be thought to have some special expertise. The aesthetician’s relationship to the artworld is frequently even more intimate. Many aestheticians are also artists and art critics, and (one would hope) all of them are serious spectators of one art form or another. Of course it is true that the philosopher-musician is not (or not obviously) doing philosophy when he plays the trumpet, nor is he playing jazz when he tries to work out a coherent theory of the ontology of improvised musical works. In the Theaetetus, Socrates defends himself and his confederates against the worldly jibe that while it might be true that philosophers do not know how to “tie up bedclothes into a neat bundle or flavor a dish with spices”—indeed, Socrates agrees that the world laughs at the philosopher “partly because of his helpless ignorance in matters of daily life” (Plato, 1989, p. 880). But, he says, only the philosopher knows how to wear his cloak as a gentleman. The advocate of descriptive aesthetics would have the philosopher leave the various tasks of daily life (including their description and evaluation) to the experts, and rest content in his sartorially marked wisdom. But unless the philosopher is barred from reflecting on his own experience—and could philosophy even get off the ground with such a restriction?—the aesthetician who is also an artworld inhabitant appropriately draws on his experience as an artist, critic, or committed spectator even when wearing the philosopher’s cloak. Socrates should not have conceded so much to his critics.

22

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 22

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

Aestheticians, then, cannot avoid engaging in normative aesthetics. They must make considered judgments about what is true of the practices and objects they investigate, and what is false. Since they are also frequently central participants in those practices, it is appropriate for them to allow their experience as participants to influence their philosophical judgments. But this is not to say that aestheticians may simply arbitrarily legislate what the facts are. I take Kraut’s insistence that aestheticians engage in a descriptive practice to be partly motivated by this reasonable concern. What distinguishes proper normative philosophical practice from hubristic legislation is a vexed and important question, which I take up in the next section. Monroe Beardsley’s aesthetic definition of art, to take a familiar case, straightforwardly implies that certain items accepted by the artworld as artworks are in fact not artworks (see Beardsley 1982). Many philosophers consider this to be an unacceptably legislative move on Beardsley’s part. On Kraut’s descriptivist account, there are stable and largely shared conceptions of what art is, how it is created, and how it is properly received within the artworld. Nick Zangwill (2007) argues that there is no such thing, which gives the aesthetician very wide latitude to engage in prescriptive theorizing. Philosophers of art typically take it as a working assumption that we have some shared (if vague) understanding of what art is. But Zangwill insists that [t]he disconcerting fact is that there is no common folk concept of art that we must respect. It is simply not true that English-speaking folk use the English word “art” to pick out the arts that were selected in the Modern System of the Arts or those arts that tend to be covered in philosophy of art courses and textbooks. Many dictionaries list no such usage. (Philosophers’ opinions about what the folk think is often an expedient mythology.) Gilbert Harman notes the way philosophy instructors have to teach students to make the analytic/synthetic distinction. It doesn’t come naturally to them. And that is because they are being taught a piece of theory, not something they knew all along [see Harman, 1999, p. 142]. It is the same with the notion of “art” in aesthetics courses. There is no pre-theoretic notion that students are recollecting or making explicit [emphasis added]. Instead they are imbibing and internalizing the ideology of the Modern System of the Arts, which is embodied in the notion of Fine Art. The idea that students are drawing on a neutral folk concept which they already possess, and which can be analysed at leisure, is an illusion. Instead, the students are being subtly indoctrinated. (p. 77) If there are no stable prephilosophical concepts about what art is, then it seems that philosophical theory is at least strongly prescriptive. This raises the worry that much if not all philosophizing is indoctrination.

23

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 23

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

A strongly prescriptive theory is one that demands an error theory for a significant portion of the data. Zangwill claims that, at least for the cases that concern him, the range of examples is insignificant, numerically and conceptually. He presents these arguments in an attempt to neutralize two substantial groups of apparent counterexamples to his thesis that something is an artwork only if someone successfully intends to endow the thing with aesthetic properties. Much so-called “anti-aesthetic” art, best exemplified by the aesthetician’s favorite example in Duchamp’s Fountain, fails to be art according to Zangwill’s definition. Some narrative works will also fall outside his definition. One of the most important criteria of an adequate philosophical definition of art is extensional adequacy—a definitional theory is stronger if, all other things being equal, it picks out more of the items identified as art in our prephilosophical discourse. However, Zangwill thinks that extensional adequacy is not an important theoretical criterion. He voices skepticism about the possibility of providing a definitional theory of “all and only the items in the Modern System of the Arts” (p. 81) and indeed says this is not something to which philosophers should aspire. This attitude is meant to reduce our worry about the fact that his theory defines as non-art a significant body of items—anti-aesthetic twentieth-century art—which many artworld inhabitants regard as art. He finds the emphasis on such items “objectionable” (p. 60), for a number of related reasons: “The art of past ages is no less art because it existed back then. It is difficult to see why fitting the contemporary art scene should have special weight in constructing a theory of art” (pp. 60–1); “the only artists in the current Western visual artworld, at the turn of the twenty-first century, who say they reject the aesthetic are a somewhat dated minority” (p. 61). Isn’t this just the sort of philosophical hubris that Kraut and Socrates warn against? It appears that anything that can serve as a premise in a philosophical argument is called into question. How can we decide which premises are stable enough to deliver conclusions we can accept with any degree of confidence? This is the subject of the next two sections.

4. Reflective Equilibrium Given that there are many instances of mutually incompatible claims within aesthetics, and surely no less conflict and obscurity among our prephilosophical beliefs about the aesthetic, we need a procedure for deciding which beliefs to give up and for justifying the beliefs we maintain. That procedure is reflective equilibrium; the term also refers to the end state of the procedure. John Rawls (1951, 1999) provides the canonical point of reference, though he says that variations of the procedure are found in the British moral philosophers through Henry Sidgwick and in Aristotle (1990, p. 45). He also points out that 24

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 24

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

the procedure is not limited to ethics, citing Goodman’s remarks on the justification of inferential principles (1990, p. 18) and Quine’s arguments for naturalized epistemology (1990, p. 507). Apart from its pedigree, the procedure is so basic to philosophical method that its importance cannot be underestimated. In general terms, the procedure is a very simple one. Take some aspect or object of our experience which is to be clarified or explained, say, the ontology of artworks. We describe that object in terms most neutral to the different parties to the debate, and see if those terms are sufficient to deliver general theoretical conclusions. Most likely they will not, and the initial terms will need to be supplemented by additional claims. We must then compare the supplemented theoretical account to various pretheoretical beliefs, say, about how artworks are individuated, or whether they are created or discovered, and so on. We will no doubt find conflicts between what the theory implies about work identity (among other things), and here we must decide whether to modify the theoretical account or the relevant pretheoretical beliefs. None of the claims figuring in the procedure, whether theoretical or pretheoretical, are immune from revision. Once we make the needed modifications, we continue in the same way, bringing various theoretical implications and other relevant pretheoretical beliefs under examination, and going back and forth in the process of revision and adjustment until we arrive at a set of beliefs that have now ostensibly withstood rational examination—in Rawls’ words, these are our “considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted” (1990, p. 18)—and a theory that explains and lends justification to those judgments. This is the state of reflective equilibrium. As Rawls says, “it is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what our principles and judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At the moment everything is in order” (1990, p. 18). The state of equilibrium might only be temporary. The introduction of new relevant beliefs might upset the equilibrium and call for further adjustment, or even rejection, of the previously held theoretical claims. The procedure is intended to filter out beliefs based on prejudice and inferential error. Rawls’ own use of reflective equilibrium makes this explicit by conducting the procedure from behind what he calls the veil of ignorance, which serves to filter out sources of distortion and bias (1990, pp. 16–17). But even without such a procedural constraint, the procedure can help filter out prejudicial beliefs, since often a symptom of prejudice is that its holder tends to disregard conflicting evidence. As the number of beliefs input to the procedure increases, accommodating false beliefs becomes harder. If the prejudicial belief happens to be true, then we can expect that as the procedure is carried on the belief will not be a merely prejudicial one, but will gain some genuine justification. But since no propositions within the procedure are immune from revision, the sheer weight of conflicting claims will, ideally, force out a false prejudice. 25

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 25

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

The idea that no claim within the procedure is immune from revision is important. No claim is independently justified, but only so in virtue of its relation to the rest of our beliefs. This does not mean that any belief is equally vulnerable to revision or rejection. Beliefs about logical truths, for instance, enjoy a great many connections to very many of our beliefs. They are in principle revisable, but doing so will demand revision of a vast number of inferentially related non-logical beliefs. The use of arguments is central to the practice of philosophy, and there is a great deal of agreement about what makes for a compelling argument and what does not. Nonetheless, standards of rational argumentation are open to revision, but doing so requires independently convincing reasoning (e.g., showing that the paradoxes of material implication express formally valid but intuitively flawed patterns of inference forces a choice between truth functionality and relevance). Similarly, fundamental beliefs about physical laws are revisable, but have so many explanatory connections to other beliefs that they enjoy a high degree of stability within the web of our beliefs. On the other hand, beliefs that have few connections to other beliefs are especially vulnerable. One consequence of this is that error theories, those which claim that some practice or feature of our experience is founded on error, have the burden of proof over theories that are less revisionary of our ordinary conception of those practices or experiences. A significant concern about Zangwill’s claims about the “ideology of the Modern System of the Arts” is that it too readily demands an error theory. He claims that “we should hold an error theory about the bourgeois concept of art because the things it groups together have no common nature. But this error theory is modest and restricted. The folk, or at least most of the Englishspeaking folk, are not in error” (p. 78). The trouble is that the people Zangwill labels the bourgeoisie, though not in the majority, are likelier to be just those people who are educated and informed participants in a certain set of appreciative, critical, and creative practices. Even if their concepts are not the most numerically common concepts, they are the ones that give content to the practices that we are trying to understand and explain. One of the pretheoretical beliefs shared by participants to those practices is that artworks are typically objects of interpretation. Another is, arguably, that any sort of artifact can, in principle, be an artwork (or part of an artwork). Perhaps the “common folk” do not share these beliefs, and so would not, as art-theoretical innocents (comparatively so, anyway), be disposed to count Duchamp’s Fountain as an artwork. But (if this is right), then theirs are not the practices an aesthetic theory aims to explain. Zangwill cannot evade the threat of counterexamples to his theory in one quick move by asserting the judgments of the art-concerned bourgeoisie are in error, since it is largely their beliefs and values (or at least the ones of theirs that withstand rational reflection) of which philosophical theory is intended to give an account. This is why error theories are in general the last resort of 26

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 26

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

the responsible aesthetician, and being responsible here means giving a convincing argument that the practices in question are indeed in error. Zangwill fails to accord proper respect to much of the data relevant to his project. Still, if my remarks about Kraut’s pure descriptivism are correct, then neither can the responsible aesthetician wholly evade the task of deciding that some of the apparent data is simply noise. Consider a few examples. Gregory Currie states that we cannot understand what art is except by understanding how art works . . . We need, I think, to take Frege’s advice on the subject. In the course of analyzing the concept natural number he proposed that we judge the analysis in terms of its ability to deliver the intuitive judgements about number we pre-theoretically make. Similarly we shall look at the ways in which works are to be judged and appreciated. This will provide a set of constraints on a theory about what art works are. (1989, p. 11) The pretheoretical inputs to the procedure are beliefs about art appreciation and evaluation, as well as beliefs about the nature of art. Despite Currie’s talk about their serving as constraints, these pretheoretical beliefs are not unrevisable. Part way through the process of reflection and reasoned adjustment, Currie concludes that the pretheoretical belief that artworks are created must, on balance, be rejected. This is arguably a substantial revision of ordinary beliefs about art (which opens an opportunity to object to Currie’s project), as is Currie’s conclusion that all artworks are action types, which are in principle multiply instantiable. But Currie’s argument is, in essence, that this conclusion enjoys a higher degree of justification by way of coherence with our theoretical and pretheoretical beliefs, compared with alternative proposals for the ontology of artworks. David Davies (2004) gives an exceptionally clear articulation of his use of the reflective equilibrium procedure in service of his own ontological project. Given that one of our concerns in the philosophy of art is to explain our art-related practices, theoretical claims about the ontology of artworks will be constrained (in the same sense as above) by the features of our creative and appreciate practices that have been duly pruned and adjusted. Davies encapsulates this methodological approach in a so-called “pragmatic constraint”: “Artworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed ‘works’ in our reflective and critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in the way such ‘works’ are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to ‘works,’ in that practice” (p. 18). Davies’ strategy is to conjoin this pragmatic constraint with an epistemological premise, whose content is that rational reflection confirms that certain properties are rightly ascribed to works, and then derive a conclusion about the ontological nature of artworks (p. 23). Again, Davies’ theoretical conclusion 27

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 27

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

demands some revision of various pretheoretical and theoretical beliefs about artworks and the practices in which they are enmeshed. His conclusion is that artworks are performances, and although he claims that this result delivers the greatest degree of coherence with our various beliefs, a common response to this has been that it is “counter-intuitive.” This raises the issue of “intuitions,” about which I say more below. As reflective equilibrium is such a central component of the philosophical method, it is unsurprising that it has attracted continued critical scrutiny. The most important objection against the idea of reflective equilibrium as a model for epistemic justification is one that Folke Tersman (1993) calls “the truth objection.” This is the objection that unless some of our considered beliefs are justified independently of their coherence with other beliefs, there is little of value to be gained by increasing the coherence of our beliefs. The result of such a procedure might just be an entirely false but internally consistent set of prejudices. Or, we can maximize coherence by reducing our belief set to a Parmenidean unity. Tersman is correct in thinking that most if not all of the objections commonly raised against reflective equilibrium can be reduced to this objection, including the complaints of vicious circularity and belief conservativism (p. 94). Of course if we only held one belief—the Parmenidean option—we would have perfect coherence. But this option overlooks the fact that we cannot help but have many beliefs, not least the beliefs that arise from our sensory experiences. Once we have a set (perhaps innumerably large) of beliefs, the truth objection essentially is the claim that moving toward a greater coherence of those beliefs gives no reason to think that a greater number of those beliefs are true. Tersman points out that the truth objection “rests on a view or intuition to the effect that there is a certain connection between epistemic justification and truth. The connection is expressed in many ways: epistemic justification should ‘lead toward’ or ‘grow toward’ or provide an ‘indication’ of truth. Epistemically justified beliefs must be highly likely to be true, and holding epistemically justified beliefs must increase one’s chances of attaining truth, and be conducive to the aim of holding true and avoiding false beliefs” (p. 96). One response to this objection is to deny the intuition by pointing out that two persons can be justified in holding mutually incompatible beliefs, and so having justification for a belief is not the same as possessing a guarantee of its truth. A different response, adopted by Jonathan Dancy among others, is to link a coherence theory of justification with a coherence theory of truth—and so truth just consists in being a member of a maximally coherent set of propositions. It is, however, possible to accept the intuition and respond to the objection without adopting a coherence theory of truth. The intuition behind the objection is somewhat ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. It can be understood as the idea that it is rational to hold justified beliefs in light of the goal of holding true and avoiding false beliefs, if there is some (defeasible) 28

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 28

2/27/2012 10:29:53 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

reason to think that justified beliefs are true. If this is how the intuition is meant, then, Tersman argues, the justification coherentist has an effective response to the objection: The fact that the beliefs of person A cohere well with her system [comprising all and only the beliefs held by A] implies that the members of the system are related so that each member is evidentially supported by the rest. The more coherent her system is, the better each member is supported by the rest. Thus, in such a case, for each of her beliefs, she holds other beliefs which give her reason to think that it is true. (p. 101) A different interpretation of the intuition leads to an impasse between the defender of reflective equilibrium (or coherentist justification) and her opponent. That interpretation holds that for justification to provide reason for thinking that the belief in question is true, justification must take some other form than coherence. Here, the coherentist will accuse her opponent of begging the question, as she denies that there is some alternative mode of justification. It is hard to see what that alternative might be. To use Neurath’s famous metaphor, philosophers, along with everyone else, including experts and “the folk,” are at sea in the same boat, which we must rebuild plank by plank. Timothy Williamson (2007, pp. 244–6) issues a worry along the lines of the latter reading of the intuition. He does not deny that reflective equilibrium is accurate as a description of what philosophers do. His concern is with the epistemic status of one class of propositions that are inputs to the procedure. It is sometimes said that just as scientists strive toward a reflective equilibrium of theoretical propositions and observation statements, so too do philosophers aim at a reflective equilibrium of theoretical claims and “intuitions.” Williamson’s worry is that “one has no basis for an epistemological assessment of the method of reflective equilibrium in philosophy without more information about the epistemological status of the ‘intuitions.’ In particular, it matters what kind of evidence ‘intuitions’ provide” (p. 244). Intuitions often feature as crucial premises in philosophical arguments and, indeed, can function as conversation stoppers. Skeptics of progress in philosophy can cite cases of “intuition-mongering” as evidence that philosophy is little more than an extravagant exercise in questionbegging. If that charge is to be resisted, then getting clear about just what intuitions are and what their function is in philosophical practice is crucial.

5. Intuitions and Experiments It is often said that science and philosophy operate in the same general fashion. While scientists perform experiments which generate data used to test and 29

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 29

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

formulate empirical theories, philosophers appeal to intuitions in the service of conceptual analysis. For scientists and philosophers, the back and forth adjustment between data (or intuitions) and theory is the process of reflective equilibrium at work. As misleadingly simplistic as this surely is in the case of science, it makes substantial distorting assumptions about philosophy—conceptual analysis is no longer the defining project of philosophy, if it ever truly was— even while it fails to raise some crucial questions. First among those questions is, what is the nature of the intuitions with which philosophers are supposed to work? Usually they are taken to be beliefs. But most philosophers who enlist intuitions in service of their arguments take them to be beliefs with some special status that makes those arguments more rationally compelling. Analytic philosophers do not need to be reminded that the word “intuition” carries a number of epistemological and metaphysical connotations that make the very idea highly suspect. The rightly suspect notion of an intuition is that of a truth apprehended by means of a special cognitive faculty. Truths so apprehended admit of no independent justification, nor do they need it, as they are self-evident. Intuitions conceived along these lines serve the same functional role as sense perceptions in classical foundationalist epistemology. They are the unmovable moorings that guarantee safety from the challenges of skepticism. However, this notion of an intuition is by now disreputable for familiar reasons that I shall not canvas here. In its place, a number of different conceptions have been offered. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong characterizes an intuition as “roughly a felt attraction to, or an inclination to believe, a certain claim whose attractiveness does not depend on any conscious inference. Such an attraction or inclination need not issue in a full belief but can remain merely an appearance that is not completely endorsed” (p. 209). Ernest Sosa proposes that “to intuit that p is to be attracted to assent simply through entertaining that representational content. The intuition is rational if and only if it derives from a competence and the content is explicitly or implicitly modal (i.e., attributes necessity or possibility)” (p. 101). Sosa grants that contingent intuitions, which he calls empirical intuitions, might also derive from a competence, but holds that modal propositions seem to be the “proper domain for philosophical uses of intuition” (p. 101). Tersman defines a specifically moral intuition as “a moral judgment that is accepted by someone not merely on the ground that he realizes that it follows from some moral theory or principle that he also accepts” (2008, p. 391). Generalizing the definition of an intuition à la Tersman is straightforward. Often, intuitions, especially those of the “folk,” are taken to be spontaneous and unreflective judgments, in contrast with the “theory-laden” reflective beliefs of the educated (or less neutrally, indoctrinated or partisan) philosopher. Even this small sample of contemporary uses of “intuition” shows too little agreement. Are intuitions beliefs, or not? Are they spontaneous, or can they be the result of some reflective consideration? Must they seem self-evidently true, 30

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 30

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

or just “attractive,” or neither, but nonetheless held “just because”? Can anyone have them, or is some training or competence a (dis)qualification for holding them? Perhaps the lack of agreement among those who spend time thinking about intuitions informs David Lewis’ assertion that “our ‘intuitions’ are simply opinions” (p. x), which would seem to give them no special epistemic status as premises of philosophical arguments. One response to this state of affairs is to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the professed capacity of philosophy to yield new pieces of knowledge. Another is to cultivate modesty about the yields of philosophical labor. Lewis holds that just as intuitions are simply opinions, so too are philosophical theories. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. Our common task is to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest at one or another of them. (p. x) It is unclear from this conception of philosophy whether its deliverances are items of knowledge, or improved justifications for antecedent beliefs and values, or something different still. A third response is to adopt the methods of empirical science as a substitute for the appeal to intuitions. Of course it has always been the case that philosophical theory takes into account our best beliefs outside philosophy; theories of the appreciation and comprehension of music, for example, need to be consistent with our beliefs about the psychology of perception, about the mental mechanisms involved in representing music as having certain structural and affective properties, and the physics of sound, among others. Theories of the appreciation of fiction need to cohere with the best scientific theories about imagination and empathy as these are deemed relevant. But this is just to say that philosophy is not done in a vacuum, or rather, that the philosophical armchair is still an armchair in a house with other furnishings (and occupants), all of which bear on the armchair activity. Philosophy that explicitly makes use of some scientific theory in the course of its arguments isn’t “special” philosophy, and does not abjure intuitions. Jesse Prinz labels such philosophical projects “empirical philosophy.” So-called “experimental philosophers,” by contrast, explicitly aim to minimize or eliminate the appeal to intuitions by substituting the results of direct experimental investigation. In a sense, these philosophers mark a return to philosophy’s past, when for all practical purposes there was not a recognized distinction between the philosopher and the natural scientist. Most of its efforts so far have been concentrated in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics, but aesthetics has already seen work that crosses the (already vague) border 31

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 31

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

between empirical and experimental philosophy. The projects under the banner of experimental philosophy range from modest ones whose practitioners see themselves as bringing new tools to the philosopher’s toolkit, to more radical ones who see their role as reducing philosophical problems to scientific problems per the recommendations of the Churchlands and Gilbert Harman. Even at this early stage it is difficult to assess this diverse program, or predict its effects on philosophical aesthetics. But there is some reason for caution. Most of the experiments conducted make use of either social psychological questionnaires or brain scans, together with the presentation of questions about classical philosophical concepts such as the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief and the Gettier problem, or thought experiments in ethics. Surveys are taken, usually of the “folk” (i.e., those with no philosophical background), or brain activity monitored, and the aim is often the replacement of a philosopher’s “intuition” about what “we all” believe in such cases with something allegedly more robust, informative, and representative. Note that one assumption behind this sort of work is that questions about metaphysics should be recast as questions about concepts. Of course, the concepts that are employed in grasping metaphysical matters are worth studying. But consider some of the “intuitive” claims that aestheticians appeal to: z Artworks are created, not discovered (or the reverse). z Two artists who create perceptually indistinguishable artifacts create (or

do not create) distinct artworks. z Artworks can (or cannot) be lost or destroyed. z The concept “art” is interculturally projectible. z Aesthetic judgments of art are objective (or subjective). z Some artworks are aesthetically better than others. z An artwork could (or could not) have slightly different properties and still

be the same artwork. While it would surely be interesting to know what the common attitudes toward these claims are, it is not clear that that knowledge would help settle the truth or falsity of the claims. The social fact that a certain belief is more prevalent, or the biological fact that some areas of the brain are active when presented with these claims, does not help us come to grips with the metaphysical matters themselves. Moreover, when it comes to claims such as these, the judgments of the “untutored” really do not count. If the facts are constituted in any part by anyone’s beliefs, it is surely by those who engage in the creative and appreciative practices surrounding the arts. The body of these beliefs is contradictory, and so simple appeal to the beliefs of any of the folk, tutored or untutored, will not serve to settle philosophical disputes. The presence of contradiction returns us to the need for a process of reflective equilibrium. 32

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 32

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

The facts about what people value are empirical matters, and can be discovered by experimental methods. The facts about what they ought to value—in other words, what is valuable—are not. Or if they are, we require a philosophical argument to establish that what is valuable is just what is valued. If these are genuinely non-equivalent matters, then the philosopher’s traditional use of reason and reflective equilibrium will not be displaced by experimental methods. Consider, too, that often the goal of a philosophical argument is a metaphysically necessary conclusion. If such a conclusion is to be deduced, then the premises must be more than merely contingent. For example, it is of little use to replace the intuition claim that “artworks are created, rather than discovered” with the empirical discovery that, say, “most people believe that artworks are created rather than discovered.” The former, whatever is epistemic origin, is ordinarily (by philosophers) understood as an a priori, metaphysically necessary proposition. The latter is an a posteriori contingent proposition. The most that the empirical result can do for us here is perhaps to show that what seems intuitively obvious to the philosopher may not so appear to others, and indeed, many experimental philosophers aver that this is one of the disciplinary correctives their program offers. Despite much overheated rhetoric from some philosophical “naturalists,” since so much of what aestheticians (and philosophers generally) are interested in is modal claims, aesthetics cannot be reduced to a purely experimental discipline. Experimental investigation of philosophical problems does have value, but philosophers must think carefully about just what the significance of such investigation is, and how its results fit within the enterprise as a whole. Science commands a great deal of respect as perhaps the most successful knowledge-generating mode of inquiry. Next to the sciences, the persistence of the same philosophical problems may easily lead to resignation and cynicism. Many in philosophy and the humanities generally have responded to the success of and broad respect for science in one of two ways: one involves disputing science’s claim to provide an objective representation of the world (e.g., the sociology of science program), while the other arrogates to the humanities the same kind of epistemic power attributed to the sciences, only engaged in producing incommensurable bodies of knowledge. While there might be some merit in some of the more modest arguments advanced in these disciplinary battles, the extreme positions are surely unhelpful and mistaken. The claim that only the empirical sciences and mathematics yield knowledge is scientism, but the two extreme responses lead to global skepticism and relativism. If any of these three is correct—and I very much doubt this—then we will require much better arguments than have been offered thus far. Those arguments will be philosophical. In the meantime, philosophical aestheticians can safely carry on as usual, though an open-minded attention to the work of experimental philosophers is warranted. 33

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 33

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

6. Philosophical Aesthetics and its Disciplinary Neighbors Philosophy, as the historical “mother of all disciplines,” has always seen disputes about its proper domain. Unquestionably, in recent decades it has been the sciences (including psychology) that are often identified as philosophy’s main competitor, its largest disciplinary threat, and its ideal destination. As a branch of philosophy, aesthetics faces these disputes, but also faces challenges from other disciplines that also engage in theoretical or quasi-theoretical work: history, art history, art criticism, art theory, cultural studies, and art itself, particularly in its more self-conscious and conceptual instances. (None of this is to ignore the fact that aesthetics concerns matters apart from the arts, but there is little if any disciplinary presence of, say, the aesthetics of nature, compared to that of the arts.) All of this gives the appearance that philosophical aesthetics is being squeezed in from all sides, and that appearance might lead one to wonder if there is anything distinctively philosophical left, or whether the already vague borders have been completely overrun. Part of this appearance is due to the fact that philosophy’s problems are (at least) human problems and manifest themselves in all domains of human experience. But that does not mean that the philosopher, the scientist, and the art theorist (if we are talking about art) are equally well situated to grapple with them. In contrasting scientific problems with philosophical ones, Tom Sorrell identifies five symptoms of the philosophical. These symptoms also help distinguish philosophy’s proper domain from the other humanities: (1) they arise from facts that are readily accessible to prephilosophical consciousness, facts that do not require a special training, let alone a scientific training, to recognize; (2) what one learns by working on these problems does not usually lead to their solution; (3) what one learns does not improve anyone’s powers of explaining, predicting, or controlling natural phenomena, though it may add to an understanding of the limits of those powers and of other human powers; (4) what one learns cannot readily be summarized and communicated to someone else who has not engaged with the problem and arrived at some of the thoughts that constitute progress with the problem; and (5) what one learns may make one more interested in new interpretations of the problem than in would-be solutions or dissolutions of the problem. (p. 129) Naturally, there are many philosophical problems that do not display all these symptoms. But, Sorrell argues, the problems that display these symptoms, more than any distinctive method, might serve best to define what philosophy is. It is perhaps tempting to think that, in contrast to other disciplines in the arts and humanities, philosophy is distinguished by its core emphasis on clarity 34

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 34

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics

and rigor, and its use of logical argument. This would be a mistake—the best work in history shows these characteristics. Rather, philosophy seems distinct in that unlike other humanistic disciplines, it is concerned more directly with the limits of human powers (Symptom 3), and unlike the arts, art theory, and criticism, it is concerned with some sort of progress, which may not even be an appropriate aim or value in those other fields. Philosophical aestheticians must, as a matter of professional responsibility, take an active interest in learning about the history and current developments in the many areas bordering aesthetics. This is as much a mark of sound philosophical methodology as the others on which I have tried to shed some light. Given the kinds of creatures we humans are, with our need to make sense of our experiences and our values, the philosopher’s work, happily, will never be finished. Perhaps it is telling that the manner in which I have gestured toward answers to the two fundamental questions—what are the data of aesthetics, and what makes for an acceptable aesthetic theory—has been piecemeal and non-systematic. In trying to establish some conclusions about method in aesthetics, I have at best argued for a few methodological anchor points. (1) The data are not exhausted by artworks and the practices in which they are enmeshed. (2) That being so, determining the domain of aesthetics requires a reference to the nature of aesthetic appreciation, and one contender for a criterion of aesthetic appreciation is disinterested pleasure. (3) The contradictory nature of our thought and talk about aesthetic matters demands that the philosopher exercise some reasoned judgments about which of those pieces of thought and talk are true, and which are false—in other words, philosophical aesthetics has an inescapably normative aspect. (4) One important test of the acceptability of theoretical and non-theoretical beliefs is reflective equilibrium. (5) And although many of those beliefs are empirical, experimental approaches to philosophy can at best contribute to, but not exhaust or replace, the armchair work of a priori reflection that is emblematic of philosophy. Philosophical method is a philosophical problem, or set of problems, and at least as it has been described and practiced here, it displays all five of Sorrell’s symptoms of the philosophical. It is probably inevitable that further philosophical work will recommend additional anchor points or the repositioning of old ones. As that work continues, we can hope that it will seem less naïve to maintain that philosophy has something genuine and distinctive to contribute to our understanding.

35

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 35

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

9781847063700_Ch02_Final_txt_print.indd 36

2/27/2012 10:29:54 AM

3

Defining Art Thomas Adajian

1. Introduction Work on the definition of art in the past several decades has been dominated, it seems fair to say, by views that either defend some sort of broadly institutional definition, or are skeptical about the definitional project.1 Not unrelatedly, perhaps, definitions of the individual art forms have proliferated recently.2 Definitions of the individual art forms are compatible with a variety of different approaches to the definition of art, including non-skeptical and non-institutionalist ones. But most important recent work dealing with the relationship between art and the individual art forms approaches the matter from this dominant institutionalist or skeptical orientation, focusing on the individual art forms in a reductionistic spirit.3 This chapter focuses on the definition of art and its relationship to definitions of the individual art forms, with an eye to clarifying the issues separating dominant institutionalist and skeptical positions from non-skeptical, non-institutional ones. Section 2 indicates some of the key philosophical issues which intersect in discussions of the definition of art, and singles out some important areas of broad agreement and disagreement. Section 3 critically reviews some influential standard versions of institutionalism, and some more recent variations on them. Section 4 discusses some recent reductionistic approaches to definitional questions, which advocate a shift of philosophical focus from the macro- to the micro-level—from art to the individual art forms. Section 5 sketches, against this background, an alternative, non-institutionalist and non-reductionist approach to definitional questions.

2. Key Issues: Agreements and Disagreements There is fairly wide agreement that most works of art are made to be appreciated; that a significant amount of art appreciation is aesthetic; that definitions of art that do not illuminate why art is valued, leave important philosophical work undone; that art has vague boundaries: some things are clearly artworks, some are clearly not, and some are on the borderline; that, if natural kinds are 39

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 39

2/27/2012 10:29:58 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

timeless, sharply demarcated entities, individuated extensionally, then artworks do not constitute a natural kind; and that list-like definitions, lacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the list, and how to project the list, are short on explanatory power.4 There is lack of agreement concerning the following: the nature of the aesthetic, and its precise relation to art; the need to capture the normative character of art and its forms in a definition rather than in a theory of art, and, relatedly, the nature and significance of the definition/theory distinction; the precise role (if any) of artworld institutions in determining art status; the degree and source of the unity (if any) of art and its functions, forms (theater, music, painting, etc.), and history; the definiendum (if any)—art? the word “art”? the concept ART?— that the definitional project does or should concern itself with.5

3. Some Varieties of Institutionalism Institutionalist definitions of art hold that being a work of art consists in standing in the right relation to either art institutions or the history of art. They deny that anything substantive and more fundamental—say, a commitment to aesthetic or creative values—unifies the nature of the art-institution or the history of art. Characteristically, they either include some sort of analysis of the art-institution, where the terms in which the art-institution is analyzed are interdefined, or they define art in terms of its forms, or functions, or the kinds of attitudes that people should or have had, toward artworks. These forms, functions, or attitudes are merely listed: there are, on institutional definitions of art, no deeper facts or principles that explain what gets on the lists of art forms, or art functions, or art-attitudes—no informative explanations of what makes all artists artists, or different art forms all art forms, or the different art functions all art functions. So whether institutionalism’s fundamental appeal to inexplicable lists is philosophically acceptable depends on whether the functions/forms/attitudes that typify art really are so disunified that they can only be enumerated. On George Dickie’s institutionalism, art has an essence, although it is not a natural kind. Artworks form a social kind; they are artifacts of a kind created to be presented by an artist to an artworld public.6 Dickie defines artists in terms of artworlds. Artworlds are defined in terms of artworld systems, which are in turn defined as frameworks for the presentation of works of art by artists to artworld publics. One implausible consequence of Dickie’s definition is that art produced outside the institution is impossible. Moreover, given its uninformative interdefinitions of artists, the artworld, and the artworld public, Dickie’s definition has little to say about the nature of the parties who make up the art circle. For the same reason, it lacks the resources to distinguish art institutions 40

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 40

2/27/2012 10:29:58 AM

Defining Art

from other institutions that share the same abstract relational structure.7 This is a lot to leave unilluminated. Jerrold Levinson defends a purely historical definition of art.8 Artworks, on his historical institutionalism, are all and only those things that are either (1) intended for regard or treatment in some way that past artworks were correctly regarded or treated or (2) are the earliest artworks. So his definition requires some account of the nature of the first artworks, as well as an account of the ways artworks are and will be correctly regarded or treated. Levinson holds that what makes the first artworks artworks is the fact that they are the ultimate cause of, and share aims with, the artworks we take to be paradigms. For something to be art, then, is, for Levinson, for it to stand in the right historical relation to, and to share the same goals as, predecessor artworks. Predecessor artworks are in turn characterized as the artworks that stand in the right historical relation to, and share goals with, artworks we take to be paradigmatic. Hence, for something to be art is for it to stand in the right historical relation to, and share the same goals with, artworks we take to be paradigmatic. But the only account of what it takes for an historical relation to be of the proper sort comes down to an enumeration of ways in which art has been regarded. And the definition’s exclusively historical focus leaves it unable to explain, in particular, why radically new ways of looking at things, which seem to differ in kind from traditional ones, should make it on the list of art regards—as “revolutionary avant-garde” ways of regarding art. Nor is it clear that Levinson’s view can exclude from the list of “correct ways of regarding art” purely pecuniary- or status-focused perspectives, which, though in a straightforward sense correct ways of regarding art, cannot plausibly be regarded as essential. Moreover, the purely historical nature of Levinson’s view leaves it unable to explain what makes either our art tradition or—something that is clearly possible—an historically disconnected alien art tradition, art traditions.9 So it leaves a fair amount unaccounted for. On Robert Stecker’s historical functional definition, something is an artwork at a time just in case (1) it is either in one of the central art forms at that time or in something recognizable as an art form because of its derivation from one of the central art forms, or (2) it is made with the intention of fulfilling a function art has at that time, or else (3) it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling a function art has at that time.10 His view, then, requires an account of the various art forms and art functions. Do the art forms and art functions constitute a mere arbitrary collection, or do they have a degree of unity?11 Well, being in a central art form at a given time consists in being derived from earlier art forms, for Stecker, so for a form or function to be an art form or an art function, it must be historically connected to, or share properties with, logically prior art forms and functions. But this does not explain what makes the central art forms central artforms, or what makes the various art functions all artfunctions. 41

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 41

2/27/2012 10:29:58 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Moreover, although art has a variety of functions at any given time—including, for example, various economic and sociological functions—it is unclear how Stecker’s view distinguishes the essential functions of art from the accidental ones. So, as Dickie’s definition consists of a list of uninformatively interdefined art institutions, and Levinson’s definition rests on a bedrock of ungrounded lists of correct art regards and paradigmatic artworks, Stecker’s definition rests on bedrock of unexplained lists of art functions and art forms. On Kathleen Stock’s recent extension of Noel Carroll’s historical narrativism, something is an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical relations between it and already established artworks; and (2) these relations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that narrative is accepted by the relevant experts.12 For Stock, the unity of art is secured only by the fact that users of the concept inherit their concept from earlier users. Experts, she holds, do not recognize new objects as artworks on the basis of prior apprehension of rules citing certain properties as necessary and sufficient conditions of art. Rather, the experts’ assertion that certain properties are significant in particular cases is constitutive of art, on Stock’s definition. Stock’s nominalistic definition raises three worries, parallel to those raised by the institutionalisms of Dickie, Levinson, and Stecker.13 First, because Stock’s definition, like Levinson’s, offers no informative way of specifying which of the historical relations that hold between later and earlier artworks are the crucial ones, it may overgeneralize. Works of art criticism, works in art history, and works in the philosophy of art stand in internal historical relations to already established artworks, and they are described in accurate narratives, accepted among experts—art critics, art historians, philosophers of art, and sometimes even artists. If so, they qualify as works of art. Second, there could be objects that for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in narratives, even though they stand in relations to established artworks that make them correctly describable in narratives of the appropriate sort. And there could also be objects that were correctly described in narratives which, for purely adventitious reasons the experts don’t accept. It is not clear that it is as plausible to deny such works art status, as Stock forthrightly does, as it is to assert that they are artworks whose status as such is outside the experts’ ken. Third, suppose that the application of the concept of art is not governed by prior apprehension of rules stating necessary and sufficient conditions, as Stock holds. It does not follow that the unity of the concept of art is guaranteed only by the judgments of experts. Perhaps, although no rules determine their content, experts’ judgments have a strong normative force: they are subjectively universal singular judgments that make a claim to be valid for everyone, while lacking a universality based on concepts. Perhaps some other substantive account of what it takes to be an expert, where that requires more than being said to be an 42

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 42

2/27/2012 10:29:58 AM

Defining Art

expert, is correct. Or, perhaps, as Stock seems committed to holding, it is just an inexplicable fact that the list of experts includes certain people but not others. But if nothing whatsoever can be said by way of grounding either the dicta of the experts, or their status as experts, then Stock’s account seems to imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable.14

4. From Art to Art Forms: Reductionism and Skepticism about Definitions The varieties of institutionalism discussed above are neutral on the question of which is more fundamental or deserving of theoretical attention—art or the individual art forms. By contrast, the two reductionistic approaches to the definition of art to be discussed next agree in taking the individual art forms to be theoretically more important than art, and agree that seeking a definition of art even as thin as institutionalism is a mistake. One of the approaches defends a deflationary approach to the definition of art, allowing that art can be defined, albeit minimally and platitudinously. The other takes an eliminativist, or perhaps pluralist, approach to the definition of art and the individual art forms, holding that neither art nor the individual art forms can or should be defined. These views push institutionalism and skepticism in new directions.

4.1 Deflationism A novel deflationist proposal about the definition of art has been defended by Dominic McIver Lopes.15 It has two parts. One is an explanation of the error of those who, failing to grasp the philosophical significance the individual art forms, seek a non-minimal definition of art: they commit a Rylean category mistake. The idea is that wanting a substantive definition of art, provided that one knew all about the individual art forms, would be like wanting to know where the real university is, after one has seen all of the university buildings. The second, positive, part of the proposal is the claim that the problem of analyzing the macro-category of art may be reduced, in the spirit of methodological individualism, to two problems: the problem of analyzing art’s constituent micro-categories, the art forms, and the problem of analyzing what it is to be an art form.16 If those two problems were solved, Lopes holds, then a very thin definition of art—call it the Deflationistic Definition (DD)—would be adequate: (DD) Item x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in activity P, and P is one of the art forms.17 43

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 43

2/27/2012 10:29:58 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Call the thesis about DD the Adequacy of the Deflationist Definition thesis (ADD): (ADD) If we had accounts of the individual art forms, and of what it is to be an art form, then DD would be an adequate definition of art.18 Deflationism has some attractive features. Undeniably, accounts of the individual art forms, and an account of what it is to be an art form, would be great to have. Deflationism encourages such theorizing, and Lopes’s influential work on pictures is exemplary in this regard.19 But why accept ADD? Why think that, given theories of the individual art forms and an account of what it is to be an art form, DD would be adequate? Well, according to Lopes, the deflationist approach can explain revolutionary works like Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which at the time of their creation appear not to be artworks. Here is how: any reason to say that a work belonging to no existing art form is nevertheless an artwork is a reason to say that it pioneers a new art form. Hence, Lopes holds, every artwork belongs to some art form. Hence, if we had an account of what it is to be an art form, together with theories of all the individual art forms, no definition of art more substantive than DD would be needed. But why accept the crucial claim that any reason to say that a (avant-garde) work belonging to no extant art form is an artwork is a reason to say that it pioneers a new art form? On the face of it, an activity might be ruled out as an art form on the grounds that no artworks belong to it. If so, determining whether a new practice is an art form requires determining, first, that its products are artworks. Art, therefore, seems conceptually prior to art forms. So focusing on the individual art forms does not get around the need for an account of art. Alternatively, the philosophical buck can be passed from an account of the macro-category of art to micro-level accounts of the individual art forms, plus an account of what it is to be an art form, only if an account of what it is for an activity to be an art form doesn’t require getting clear both on what it is to be art, and on what it is that makes an activity a form. But that does seem to be required. A second argument offered by Lopes in support of ADD runs as follows: A substantive, non-deflationist definition of art would serve a significant theoretical purpose only if there are serious psychological, anthropological, sociological, or historical hypotheses about the macro-category of art (as opposed to the individual art forms). But no such hypotheses exist. So a definition of art more robust than DD would serve no significant theoretical purpose.20 Consider the principle that drives this argument: a necessary condition for an account of Ф serving a significant theoretical purpose is that there be serious psychological, anthropological, sociological, or historical hypotheses about Ф (as opposed to serious hypotheses about Ф’s micro-categories). Parallel arguments appealing to this principle would show that substantive philosophical theories 44

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 44

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

Defining Art

about the nature of science, mathematics, logic, truth, properties, reductionism, laws, value, and so on, would serve no significant theoretical purpose.21 It may be wondered whether this is rather quick. The principle reminds us, moreover, of an important fact, rightly recognized by Lopes, that is pertinent here: works of art are made to be appreciated.22 Deflationism needs an explanation of that fact, which on its face is a fact about the macro-category of art, and not only a fact about art’s micro-categories. Likewise, reasons are needed for thinking that inquiry into generic principles of art criticism is replaceable, without theoretical remainder, by inquiry into art form-specific principles of criticism. Finally, and relatedly, deflationism seems to bar the road to inquiry into the nature of the connections between the normativity distinctive of art and the aesthetic, and the nature of various other kinds of normativity—the moral, the logical, the legal, and the prudential.23 Finally, a more general worry about the scope of the reductionism should be noted. Suppose that facts about the macro-category of art do actually reduce to facts about art’s micro-categories, the art forms. Do facts about individual art forms reduce, in turn, to facts about their lower-level realizers, so that every fact about literature, for example, is reducible to facts about the novel, the poem, the short story, plus a theory of what it is to be a literary genre? Do genre-level facts about the novel reduce to facts about the novel’s lower-level realizers— the epistolary novel, the historical novel, the novel of ideas, and so on? Lopes’s reductionism may not have these implications, but it is fair to ask why not.

4.2 Eliminativism Call the view that no definition of art or the art forms is possible or desirable eliminativism. Several eliminativist arguments, inspired by Morris Weitz, have been put forward by Aaron Meskin. One, driven by enthusiasm for empirical psychology rather than Wittgenstein, runs as follows: The search for definitions involves submitting proposed sets of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions to the dubious tribunal of philosophers’ intuitions. But empirical psychological theories of categorization suggest that humans categorize things on the basis of their similarity to prototypes, not on the basis of internalized sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. If that is true, efforts aimed at discovering an adequate set of necessary and sufficient conditions by appealing to philosophers’ prototype-driven intuitions will probably fail. So, Meskin thinks, only logical, mathematical, and technical concepts admit of non-arbitrary definition. So ART and many of its subconcepts do not admit of non-arbitrary definition.24 This interesting argument raises at least three issues. First, the technical/nontechnical distinction bears a lot of weight. So the force of the argument will 45

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 45

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

be somewhat reduced if there are reasons for thinking that technical and nontechnical concepts form a continuum. This will be pursued in Section 5. Second, most metaphysicians take themselves to be trying to discover what fundamental kinds of things there are. It is certainly possible that they are wrong about that, and are actually, unwittingly, studying the mind. But this “idealism about the subject matter of philosophy,” to use Timothy Williamson’s phrase, is, at least, quite controversial.25 Third, it is not obvious that something’s being vague precludes its definability. Being black and being a cat are necessary and sufficient for being a black cat, even if black and cat are vague.26 So, arguably, the vagueness of the class of artworks can be accommodated by definitions that employ vague predicates just as well as by a psychological theory of concept-formation like the prototype theory, which construes membership in a concept’s extension as graded, determined by similarity to its best exemplar.27 Still, Meskin’s argument would be more satisfactorily answered if there were independent theoretical reasons to blur the technical/non-technical distinction, and recognizing vague definitions; this is pursued in Section 5.

4.3 Should we define art? There is no philosophical consensus about the definition of art. This, Meskin has suggested, provides some reason to draw an eliminativist, or perhaps eliminativistic pluralist, conclusion: there is no unitary concept of art. Instead, there are several interlocking concepts of art: institutional, historical, aesthetic, neorepresentational, craft/skill, evaluative. These interlocking concepts, Meskin says, are used for different purposes: creative, appreciative, and critical. Not all of those concepts serve all of those purposes equally well. Concepts should be used for the purposes they serve best. So, different art concepts should be used for different purposes. Art should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that serves all of the purposes of art. Hence, we should not define art.28 A response to this argument should begin by pointing out that the relations between the functions of art bear further examination, since, from the fact that art has multiple functions, a number of things might be inferred. Consider the case of numbers. In parallel fashion, one might infer from the fact that numerals have ordinal, cardinal, and symbolic functions that there is no single unitary concept of number. Rather, one might think, there are three different number concepts, to be used for different purposes. A second possibility would be to argue that one of the functions is fundamental. So, following Gottlob Frege and Betrand Russell, one might take cardinal numbers to be basic and hope, by elucidating them, to elucidate the nature of all other numbers as well. Or, following Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor, one might take ordinal numbers as basic. A third possibility would be to argue that there are three facets to our 46

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 46

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

Defining Art

concept of natural number, which cannot be subsumed under any one head. In brief, from the fact that numbers have an ordinal and a cardinal function and an abstract symbolic function, additional argument is needed, before concluding that there are three unordered concepts of number.29 There are parallels elsewhere. Pluralism about biological species does not entail eliminativism about species.30 Deflationism about truth does not follow from the fact that truth can be realized in many domains: a substantive view of truth on which truth is a single, higher-order property—multiply realized in many domains, so that the plurality of truth lies within the bounds of a single type—is a live possibility.31 So the fact that the concept of art is used for a number of purposes does not settle the concept individuation issues. In fact, something more constructive can be said. Virtually everyone, reductionist or not, agrees that artworks are typically made to be appreciated. If appreciation typically involves critical considerations, and conversely, and if artists engaged in the creative process imaginatively adopt critical/appreciative perspectives on that process and its products, and if the experience of art involves a creative contribution on the part of the appreciator, then there is reason to hold that the concept of art has three interrelated normative facets.32 This is, evidently, an extremely quick sketch of an argument. But it is a very familiar sort of argument. If, as Meskin rightly notes, the different concepts (subconcepts? concept facets?) of art “interlock,” there is no pressing theoretical reason to draw an eliminativist conclusion without more attention to the ways in which the concepts—or the concept’s facets—interlock. This emphasis on the normative nature of the concept of art connects with another Weitzian argument offered by Meskin, this one for the conclusion that “thinking normatively rather than descriptively about the issue of definition” may be fruitful when it comes to the individual art forms, and especially when it comes to one particular art form, the comic.33 Meskin, operating on the assumption that works of art are appreciated, evaluated, and interpreted with reference to the art categories in which they are judged to fall, suggests that for art-critical and art-appreciative reasons, certain concepts of comics—and the case generalizes to other art forms—are more “useful” than others. For example, sequential pictorial narrative and narrative with speech balloons are not useful concepts of comics, because they treat aesthetically relevant features of comics as if they were necessary. Meskin’s argument goes as follows: The aesthetic use of atypicality and typicality effects is central in contemporary art, and non-classical concepts of comics allow for maximal typicality and atypicality effects. Non-classical concepts of comics, therefore, allow something whose aesthetic use is central in contemporary art. Moreover, whatever allows something whose aesthetic use is central in contemporary art is critically and appreciatively fruitful because criticism and appreciation have to do with the aesthetic. Only concepts that are 47

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 47

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

critically and appreciatively fruitful should be used. But classical necessary and sufficient concepts of comics do not allow for typicality and atypicality effects. So, classical necessary and sufficient concepts of comics are not critically and appreciatively fruitful. We should, therefore, use non-classical concepts of comics, rather than classical ones (and this holds for the concept of art, and of the other art forms, as well). Consequently, given the intimate connection between classical necessary and sufficient concepts and definition, we should not define comics, or any of the individual art forms or art, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. That would not be fruitful.34 The argument rightly calls attention to the preeminence of aesthetic considerations in our thinking about art. That said, it is natural to wonder whether, in so doing, it concedes something that can be as well accounted for by definitions of art as by psychologistic approaches that eschew them. It was remarked above that atypicality might be as well explained by a definition that employs vague predicates/properties as by a psychological theory of concepts like the prototype theory.35 But this raises a question: How much difference there is between saying that we should use a certain concept of art because it best serves certain normative/critical/ appreciative purposes—which seem fundamentally aesthetic—and defending an aesthetic definition of art? The priority accorded to this sort of “should” seems to suggest that the aesthetic dimension of art is fundamental. If so, then it is natural to wonder whether the aesthetic concept of art is more fundamental than the other concepts of art, with which, according to Meskin, it interlocks. That points away from eliminativism and toward an aesthetic definition of art.

5. New Directions: Art, Natural Kinds, Clusters, and Definitions As noted earlier, there is fairly wide agreement that, on a common conception of natural kinds, art cannot be a natural kind. Meskin puts the challenge clearly: If the orthodox Putnam/Kripke view of natural kinds is correct, then natural kinds have hidden essences and are the subject of scientific investigation by experts, to whose opinions about certain extensional issues the non-experts defer. Therefore, since art lacks a hidden essence, and is not the subject of scientific investigation by experts, art is not a natural kind. Real definitions of Ф require that Ф be a natural kind. Hence, if the orthodox Kripke/Putnam view of natural kinds is correct, then a real definition of art is impossible.36 Stephen Davies has entertained the idea that art is a natural kind in something other than the orthodox sense, suggesting that, although art lacks a real essence, as traditionally construed, it has an essence that is not purely nominal, either; rather, it depends in part on widely shared, biologically conditioned capacities of human beings.37 Of relevance here are cluster definitions of art, 48

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 48

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

Defining Art

which provide an open-ended list of properties, every subset of which is individually sufficient, and none of which is necessary, to make something a work of art. For, while some cluster theorists, like Berys Gaut, are Wittgensteinians, and deny that their views are definitions, other cluster theorists, are attracted to the idea that art is a natural kind.38 One cluster theorist, Julius Moravcsik, has remarked that “consistency in pretheoretical intuitions, widespread dispersal, and similarity of structure allows us to treat art as a natural kind.”39 Another, Denis Dutton, has recently defended what he calls a “naturalistic” cluster definition of art, on which direct pleasure, skill or virtuosity, style, novelty or creativity, criticism, representation, special focus, expressive individuality, emotional saturation, intellectual challenge, connection with art traditions and institutions, and imaginative experience are jointly sufficient for something’s being a work of art. (Dutton claims that it is a virtue of his definition that it recognizes that art has fuzzy boundaries.)40 Unfortunately, all of these cluster accounts seem somewhat explanatorily shallow. Gaut’s Wittgensteinian version does not explain how to go on extending the open-ended list of properties, and provides no rationale for why the list contains what it does. Neither Gaut’s Wittgensteinian cluster definition nor Dutton’s naturalistic cluster definition sheds any light on why art’s definition has a cluster structure. And neither Dutton nor Moravcsik provide an alternative conception of natural kinds that might allow a deeper theoretical explanation of art’s loose clustering structure and its vagueness. Nevertheless, cluster views, taken together with Davies’ suggestive remarks about natural kinds, raise a question that may point in a promising direction. Is there an alternative theory of natural kinds, one with some promise of illuminating features of art that need illumination?

5.1 Homeostatic property-cluster kinds Such a view, a principled liberalization of more traditional ideas of natural kinds, does exist: Richard Boyd’s influential account of natural kinds as homeostatic property clusters.41 Homeostatic property clusters are families of properties that co-occur, where that co-occurrence is literally or metaphorically a sort of homeostasis: either the presence of some of the properties in the family tends to favor the presence of others, or there are underlying mechanisms or processes that tend to maintain the presence of the properties in the families, or both.42 The view finds its natural home in philosophy of biology, where it has long been applied to something that, like art, has a crucial historical dimension—biological species. But it has also been applied in fruitful ways to a variety of topics in political philosophy—race, gender, and social roles generally—epistemology, and ethics.43 49

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 49

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Here is the homeostatic property-cluster view in more detail. First, homeostasis admits of degrees. Things may possess some but not all of the properties in the cluster; some but not all of the underlying homeostatic mechanisms may be present. So, second, the property-cluster view allows cases of in principle unresolvable extensional indeterminacy. Third, the homeostatic property clusters that define natural kind terms are not individuated extensionally, but, instead, in the way that historical objects or processes are: the properties that determine the conditions for falling under natural kind terms may vary over time (or space) while the term continues to have the same definition. Explanatory or propertycluster kinds need not be ahistorical and unchanging. Thus, fourth, not just biological entities like species, but also things like feudal economy, behaviorism, money, and some kinds of tools and ceremonies may be natural kinds. Fifth, a property-cluster kind may be natural from the perspective of some disciplines but not others: to take Boyd’s example, jade may be a natural kind in art history, but not geology. Sixth, inasmuch as the mechanisms that underlie homeostatic property clusters need not be micro-structural, and inasmuch as the properties may be intrinsic or relational, the distinction between natural kinds and kinds generated by human agency is not sharp. Hence, the distinction between technical and non-technical kinds is not sharp.44 Seventh, naturalness itself comes in degrees, because the strength of the homeostatic mechanisms is a matter of degree. (A kind is minimally natural if it is possible to make better than chance predictions about the properties of its instances. At one end of the continuum are arbitrary schemes of classification about which the nominalist claim that the members of a kind share only a name is true. At the other end of the continuum of property-cluster kinds are the kinds of the natural hard sciences. Biological kinds are in between.)45 Definitions have, since Aristotle, been connected with explanations, which are closely connected with essences.46 And homeostatic property clusters correspond, functionally, to the traditional essences of natural kinds, while freeing essences from traditional commitments. As Paul Griffiths puts it, any state of affairs that licenses induction and explanation within a theoretical category is functioning as the essence of that category.47 So Boyd speaks of “explanatory definitions”: in the case of a homeostatic property-cluster kind, an explanatory definition is provided by a (perhaps historically individuated) process of homeostatic property clustering. Hence, as Boyd suggests, the property-cluster view may be applicable not just to the subjects of the natural and social sciences, and not just to “folk” kinds, but also to things like scientific rationality, reference, justification, and others that philosophers have long sought to understand.48 This sketch suggests that Boyd’s view of kinds might illuminate a number of features of art widely acknowledged to need explanation. First, it is commonplace among biologists and philosophers of biology to hold that there are genuine indeterminacies with respect to both the species category and membership, 50

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 50

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

Defining Art

in particular, species taxa. So Boyd’s view is intended, at least, to accommodate kinds that are both vague and historical, and may, therefore, allow a theoretical explanation of the fact that art and the individual art forms have borderline cases, and develop. Second, because the homeostatic property-cluster conception of kinds makes typicality central, it may address worries (discussed in Section 4) about the role of atypicality judgments in appreciation and criticism, and in the search for definitions.49 Third, the homeostatic property-cluster view may provide a theoretical grounding for something that cluster accounts like Gaut’s and Dutton’s leave unexplained: why art has a cluster structure. Fourth, because Boyd’s view is neutral with respect to the nature of the homeostatic mechanisms, it permits recognition both of art’s biological roots and art’s institutional features. Fifth, and finally, the homeostatic property-cluster view of kinds promises to make principled theoretical sense of the fact that while art is made for various purposes (primarily appreciation, as even institutionalists, deflationists, and eliminativists acknowledge), not every artwork need be made for every one of them.

6. Conclusion If the class of artworks is totally fragmented, then the institutionalists’ and deflationists’ ultimate appeals to mere lists—Levinson’s “art regards,” Stecker’s functions of art, Lopes’ art forms—are acceptable. If not, not. Institutionalism and deflationism seem, to the present writer, to overplay art’s disunity. But purely functional definitions of art underplay it. Art and the individual art forms are neither totally unified, nor totally fragmented. Making principled, theoretical sense of this fact is a necessary condition for an adequate approach to definitions of art and the arts. If art and the individual arts are homeostatic property-cluster kinds, then something everyone agrees is desirable would be possible—non-enumerative definitions that account for the vagueness, heterogeneity, and unity of art and the individual art forms. The explanatory virtues of the homeostatic propertycluster view, and the fact that it has fruitful applications elsewhere in philosophy, strongly suggest, at minimum, that it merits further attention from aestheticians interested in alternatives to institutional and skeptical approaches.

Notes 1. The main inspiration for skeptical views is Weitz (1956), and, through Weitz, Wittgenstein. 2. See, for example, Hamilton (2007), Ribeiro (2007), Kulvicki (2006).

51

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 51

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 3. Matravers’ characterization of institutionalism is adopted here: a view is institutionalist if it holds that standing in the right relation to some social entity—either the institutions of art, or a particular history—is necessary and sufficient for being a work of art. See Matravers (2007, p. 251). 4. On natural kinds: Stephen Davies has long suggested that art is some sort of natural kind (see Davies, 1991, ch. 1). Stock, who refers to art as a “nonnatural kind,” thinks that Davies’ suggestion requires further elaboration (Stock, 2003, p. 169); Section 5 provides some of that elaboration. On list-like definitions: to give a prominent example, the enumerative character of Alfred Tarski’s definition of truth, with its list-like specification of truth-conditions for atomic sentences, notoriously makes it unable to capture our translinguistic notion of truth, since it cannot be projected to new notions of truth that might be at work in new sentences or languages. As Simon Blackburn remarks, Tarski’s definition reveals the nature of truth in about the same sense that defining “proper-legal-verdict-on-Wednesday, proper-legalverdict-on-Thursday, etc.” reveals the nature of a proper legal verdict (Blackburn, 1984, pp. 266–7). 5. For the view that being called “art” doesn’t guarantee that something is art, see, for example, Stecker (2005, p. 61) and Walton (1997, p. 98). Contrast Stock (2003) and, perhaps, Meskin (2008). On art’s vagueness, see Davies (1991, 2006), Stecker (2005), Dutton (2009). On the proper definiendum: Meskin (2008) suggests, against Adajian (2005), that most contemporary philosopher of art are interested in defining the concept of art, understood psychologistically, rather than metaphysically. Both of these views may be overstated. There is substantial disagreement—as well, probably, as confusion—among philosophers over whether we should focus on artworks, words, or psychological entities. 6. See Dickie (1984 and 2001). 7. David Davies (2004, p. 249) points out that Dickie’s definition of the artworld is so abstract that it applies equally to financial institutions (the “commerce world”). 8. See Levinson (1991a and 1991b). 9. Stecker (1996) develops this criticism of Levinson. 10. Stecker (1997). 11. Although, like Levinson, Stecker holds that very early art had aesthetic functions, his definition isn’t an aesthetic one. See, for example, Stecker (2005, p. 102). 12. Stock (2003, p. 175). Carroll’s historical narrativism, an historicized descendant of Dickie’s institutionalism, is defended in a number of places, including Carroll (1999). 13. Stephen Davies calls Stock’s view “radical stipulativism” (Davies, 2006, p. 34). 14. Cf. Kenneth Warmbrod, on the implications of nominalistic definitions of the logical constants: “[A]bsent some conscious rationale for the choice of logical terms, a stipulated list is also troubling. If there is no rationale for the choice of logical constants, then there will be no rationale for designating some truths as logical and others as ordinary truths. Ultimately, such arbitrariness calls into question the basis for distinguishing logic from the rest of science” (Warmbrod, 1999, p. 504). Compare the standard objection to the divine command theory: that it implies that morality is arbitrary, since it makes morality depend ultimately on God’s commands, and God lacks reasons for his commands. 15. See Lopes (2008). 16. See, for the characterization of individualism, Sober et al. (2003). 17. Lopes, 2008, p. 109. 18. Lopes, 2008, p. 127. 19. Especially Lopes (1996 and 2005).

52

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 52

2/27/2012 10:29:59 AM

Defining Art 20. Lopes, 2008 p. 127. 21. In a similar spirit, Meskin suggests that a definition of art or the art forms is unnecessary (though we may need theories of the art forms), on the grounds that “warranted evaluation, interpretation, and appreciation have never waited on philosophical definitions of the various arts” (2008, p. 143). But, equally, warranted evaluation, interpretation, and appreciation have never waited on philosophical theories of the various arts either. More generally, in a straightforward sense of “warrant,” and of “doing fine,” virtually everything philosophy deals with (including induction, political authority, mathematics, persons, moral responsibility, time, change, universals, explanation, laws, events, truth, species, logic, causation, the individual art forms, artistic evaluation, interpretation, appreciation, etc.) is such that we have been “doing just fine” without a philosophical account of it. 22. Lopes, 2008 p. 121. 23. Not to mention investigation of the nature of the normativity of the sublime. Besides Kant, it seems to rule out the inquiries into the nature of norms by philosophers as different as Peter Railton and Max Scheler. See, for example, Railton (2003) and Scheler (1973). 24. Meskin, 2008. The subargument about intuitions is inspired by Ramsey (1998). 25. See Williamson (2005). 26. Cf. Earl (2006). 27. Stephen Davies has long noted that vagueness is no bar to definition; see Davies (1991, 2006). Stecker (2005) defends a definition of art, while also recognizing that the concept of art is vague. 28. Meskin, 2008, pp. 138–9. 29. Cf. Lucas, 2000, pp. 90–156, and especially pp. 154–5. I follow Lucas very closely. 30. See Brigandt (2003). 31. For example, Sher (2004, 2005); Lynch, (2000). 32. The last point is argued in Elliot (1967). 33. Meskin, 2008, p. 140. 34. Ibid., pp. 140–2. 35. It is not unusual to oppose the classical view of concepts to the prototype view, as Meskin does. But it is unclear that prototype and classical views of concepts are incompatible. See, for this, and for extensive discussion of both psychological and philosophical views of concepts, Davis (2003, pp. 407–518), on prototype views, and on compatibility, see pp. 513–7. 36. Meskin, 2008, p. 134. 37. Davies (1991 and 2003). 38. See Gaut (2000). 39. Moravcsik, 1993, p. 432. 40. Cluster definitions may date back to the Stoics. See Tatarkiewicz (2005): “In defining art the Stoics also employed the term ‘system’ (systema), meaning a closely knit cluster.” Moravcsik’s remark is from Moravcsik (1993, p. 432); it is quoted in Dutton (2003). Dutton’s most recent defense of his cluster definition is Dutton (2009). 41. The description of Boyd’s view as a principled liberalization of more traditional ideas of natural kinds is from Mallon (2003). 42. The view is defended in a number of papers going back at least as far as Boyd (1988). See also Boyd (1991, 1999a and 1999b). I follow the last-named paper very closely. See also Brigandt (2009), and Wilson et al. (forthcoming). 43. In philosophy of social science, see Mallon (2003 and 2007). In ethics, see, besides the Boyd papers cited earlier, Sturgeon (1985 and 2003), and for a dissenting view, Rubin (2008). In epistemology, see Michaelian (2008).

53

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 53

2/27/2012 10:30:00 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

See Boyd, 1999a, p. 161. Griffiths, 1999, p. 219. “A definition is an account (logos) that signifies the essence” (Topics I.5, 101b38). Griffiths, 1999, p. 215. Boyd, 1997, p. 71. In fact, it seems natural to wonder whether definition is itself a homeostatic property-cluster kind. 49. Wilson, 1999, p. 201.

54

9781847063700_Ch03_Final_txt_print.indd 54

2/27/2012 10:30:00 AM

4

Artworks, Objects, and Structures Sherri Irvin

It is tempting to think that most artworks are simply a subset of the physical objects in the world: there is my bike in the shed out back, the magnolia tree in the yard, and then the small painting by Ruth Ann Borum on my dining room wall. Ruth Ann made the painting by applying paint and ink to canvas stretched over wood. I bought the painting in her studio, carried it home, and hung it on two screws so it would not go out of level. These facts seem compatible with Ruth Ann’s artwork being a physical object. However, there are reasons to resist the idea that the artwork is identical to the painted canvas. In this essay I will present the difficulties faced by the claim that artworks are simple physical objects (or, in the case of non-visual art forms, simple structures of another sort), and will examine alternative proposals regarding their ontological nature. Though my focus in what follows will be on works of visual art, much of the discussion applies to works in other forms as well.

1. Methodology Ontological theorizing about natural objects might aspire to carve nature at its joints, picking out and characterizing groups of objects that share many features and stand in common causal relations to other objects. Though our desire to theorize about natural objects is undoubtedly influenced by the way in which they serve human interests, it seems that the objects themselves exist independently of us, and grasping their natures is, in large part, a matter of ascertaining features whose import is not exhausted by their salience to us.1 Artworks, however, are not like natural objects. An artwork comes to exist as a result of human activity and is understood within the context of social practices that govern appreciation and interpretation. Indeed, it appears that many of an artwork’s features cannot be grasped unless such context is taken into account.2 It is, accordingly, not clear that we can even make sense of the

55

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 55

2/27/2012 10:30:03 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

idea of grasping artworks as they are independently of human activities and concerns. Moreover, even if we restrict our consideration to works in the visual arts, as I do here, inspection of the items in any major museum will reveal a diverse array of objects that are made of very different materials and have very different appearances and histories. Some have more in common with non-art objects than with other art objects: a Martian performing classifications based on physical resemblance would likely group Dan Flavin’s sculptures involving fluorescent light fixtures with items sold in many a hardware store rather than with Donatello’s Abraham and Isaac. The class of artworks, then, cannot be picked out by identifying a set of common intrinsic features possessed by all art objects.3 What they have in common seems, instead, to be a matter of their role in a set of human practices. Determining what sort of thing an artwork is, accordingly, is a matter of examining those practices to see what kind of entity is capable of playing the role in question. Different theorists have expressed this thought in different ways. David Davies describes the “pragmatic constraint” on ontological theorizing, according to which [a]rtworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed “works” in our reflective critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in the way such “works” are or would be individuated[;] and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to “works,” in that practice.4 Amie Thomasson argues, similarly, that the only appropriate method for determining [the] ontological status [of artworks] is to attempt to unearth and make explicit the assumptions about ontological status built into the relevant practices and beliefs of those dealing with works of art, to systematize these, and to put them into philosophical terms.5 An account of the ontological status of artworks that is seriously at odds with the art community’s intuitions about the nature of art, then, should be rejected. Because of the way in which artworks are constituted within human practices, appeals to our intuitions and to common claims about artworks are unavoidable. As many have observed, though, these intuitions and common claims are not all consistent with one another. To do ontology, we must decide which intuitions and claims are to be treated as central and which as marginal; and, predictably, different theorists disagree about these matters. As we will see, 56

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 56

2/27/2012 10:30:03 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

the argument for any ontological theory about art must include assumptions, whether implicit or argued for, about the primacy of a subset of claims commonly made about artworks.

2. Artworks and Physical Objects: The Appeal of the Identity Relation A natural starting point in thinking about the nature of many familiar examples of artworks, such as the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi and the sculptures of Michelangelo, is to see them as identical to certain physical objects: a canvas with paint on it, a piece of carved stone, and so forth.6 Many of the things that we say about them seem to concern their physicality: we may speak of the sculpture’s size and the smoothness of its surface, of the thickness of the application of paint on the surface of a painting, of the fact that one or the other has suffered damage. Encounters with these artworks happen largely through vision, which is a mode of detecting the physical properties of an object; and when a work is to be included in an exhibition, the object may be shipped around the world so that different audiences may have such encounters. The creation of such artworks centrally involves the manipulation of a physical material, and when the integrity of that physical material is sufficiently compromised, or its visible features irretrievably obscured, the artwork is thereby destroyed. In addition, it seems that we have direct ontological intuitions about the nature of artworks: when asked what kind of thing a particular visual artwork is, most people will likely say (or give an answer that implies) that it is a physical object. What is Michelangelo’s Pietà? A piece of stone that Michelangelo carved. Such an answer may well be given by both ordinary people and experts, such as curators and conservators. If the content of our concept is fixed by our ontological intuitions, as Thomasson suggests, then both our implicit and explicit notions about the ontology of art seem to point toward the idea that visual artworks are physical objects. This idea is appealing for other reasons as well. In ontology as elsewhere, it is attractive to start with the simplest theory we can, invoking familiar kinds of objects whose relations are not overly complicated. The physical object is a familiar kind of entity, subject to causal relations of familiar kinds with other physical objects. If artworks turned out to be physical objects, this would allow us to account for them within straightforward ontological categories that are already required to account for other phenomena in the world. Though ontological theorizing about art might turn out to be a pursuit rather lacking in excitement, the parsimony of the resulting theory would be a strong consideration in its favor. 57

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 57

2/27/2012 10:30:03 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

3. Problems with the Identity Relation In this section I discuss a number of challenges to the identity of artworks and physical objects. In Section 4, I will review a number of the alternative ontological positions that have been offered in response to such challenges.

3.1 Problems involving properties One kind of challenge to the identity of artworks with physical objects has appealed to Leibniz’s law, which states that if two entities have different properties, they cannot be identical. This type of challenge involves a claim that artworks possess properties that physical objects do not or cannot possess. An early formulation of such a challenge, discussed by Richard Wollheim (1968), holds that physical objects cannot possess representational or expressive properties (e.g., the property that a yellow patch on the painted surface represents the sun, or the property of expressing the power of a king), whereas artworks do possess such properties. A related worry pertains to the artwork’s aesthetic properties, at least some of which seem to be underdetermined by the object’s intrinsic physical properties. Kendall Walton (1970) argues that one and the same object, seen in relation to two different categories, will yield artworks with different aesthetic properties. It might thus be concluded that the artwork’s aesthetic properties cannot belong to the object alone.7 A further important class of properties we assign to the artwork is that of properties related to the artist’s achievement: the artwork may be innovative, masterly, and so forth.8 However, the mere physical object does not have these properties.9 Had it been deployed in a different context, it might well have manifested very different achievement-related properties: it might have been more or less innovative, for example, depending on what other works had already been created. Since the artist’s achievement is a central aspect of what we appropriately consider when we appreciate an artwork, according to this challenge, the artwork cannot be identical with the physical object.

3.2 Problems involving modality Many of the problems involving properties described in Section 3.1 can be solved by a rather straightforward maneuver. A piece of painted metal, taken on its own, may not possess any representational properties; but when it is placed in a particular context where certain conventions are operative, it may come to represent the curving road ahead. Perhaps, then, physical objects do in fact possess all the properties we appropriately attribute to artworks, by virtue 58

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 58

2/27/2012 10:30:03 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

of the fact that they have been deployed in specific contexts. The expressive, representational, and other properties discussed above would then be thought of as relational properties of the object. Can such a response allow us to see the artwork as identical to the physical object? Unfortunately not. For the artwork possesses the properties in question necessarily, whereas the physical object is deployed in a particular context only contingently and, thus, possesses any properties attributable to its context only contingently. One and the same sign could be hung in one context to indicate that the road curves ahead, but then moved into another context (perhaps where different conventions are operative) and used to indicate that the road surface is slick. An artwork, on the other hand, has its meaning properties necessarily, not contingently: to speak of Michelangelo’s Pietà as representing something other than Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus would be to say something incoherent.10 Indeed, the very property of being an artwork is possessed necessarily by the artwork but contingently, if at all, by the physical object, which could have existed in a world without art.11 A related challenge pertains to the identity conditions of artworks. Given the way we ordinarily identify artworks, it does not seem incoherent to suggest that Leonardo could have created the Mona Lisa—that very artwork, not simply some other work of the same name—by painting on a different piece of canvas and using different tubes of paint.12 If this is indeed a logically possible circumstance, Mona Lisa cannot be identical to the particular painted canvas hanging in the Louvre.13 A final challenge pertains to the persistence conditions of artworks and physical objects.14 Marcel Duchamp created his work In Advance of the Broken Arm by acquiring a manufactured snow shovel, titling it and presenting it for display. The physical object existed before the artwork did. The persistence conditions of the two entities are distinct; thus, they cannot be identical.

3.3 Cases in which there is no one-to-one relation between the artwork and a physical object Most of the above discussion pertains to cases in which the artwork bears a special relation to some particular physical object; it’s just that there are reasons to think this relation must be something other than identity. An additional problem arises in cases where the relation of artwork to physical object is not one to one. The most obvious sort of case is in art forms such as printmaking, photography, and cast sculpture, where one act of artmaking may result in the generation of multiple objects, each of which is (under standard accounts) an instance of the artwork. The problem of multiples has been discussed extensively 59

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 59

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

elsewhere, and I will not recapitulate the discussion here.15 However, even within the singular visual arts, there are cases where no one-to-one relation holds between the artwork and a particular physical object. In such cases, the identity of artwork to physical object is clearly ruled out. Several of the installation works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres involve the display of piles of candy that viewers are permitted to consume. When a particular work is on display, curators top up the pile with new candy from time to time. When the work is not on display, there may be no candy kept in storage; an entirely new batch of candy may be purchased for the next exhibition. However, it doesn’t seem that the work itself goes out of and then back into existence (any more than a musical work exists only when it is being performed). Thus, the work cannot be identical to any particular physical object or assemblage. Something similar is true of many works of contemporary installation art: some or all of the physical objects displayed may be constituted anew for each exhibition and discarded after the exhibition is over.16 John Dilworth (2005) discusses the possibility that two artists, working at different times and without communication on the manipulation of some common physical material, might compose two distinct artworks. Each of them has the option to either accept or reject changes in the object made by the other. If, at some point in the process, both artists come to regard their respective artworks as finished, they will, Dilworth claims, have made two distinct artworks which stand in a symmetrical relation to a single physical object (pp. 133–6). Clearly, that relation cannot be identity, since identity is transitive: on pain of contradiction, two non-identical things (the artworks) cannot both stand in a relation of identity to some third thing. Dominic McIver Lopes (2007) discusses an intriguing sort of case in Japanese architecture. The Shinto shrine Ise Jingu, which is some 1,500 years old, contains a structure known as the goshoden, housing Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess. However, the goshoden is not made up of any 1,500-year-old materials; it is rebuilt approximately every 20 years. The present goshoden is not torn down to accommodate a new construction on the same spot; instead, the structure that will become the goshoden is constructed on the kodenshi, the vacant lot next to the current goshoden. Once the construction of the new structure is complete, the sun goddess is transferred to it in a ritual; at this point the new structure becomes the goshoden, and the earlier structure is dismantled to leave behind only the vacant lot, or kodenshi. In this manner, the goshoden and kodenshi switch places every 20 years. One way of regarding this situation is to think that the goshoden is a single architectural work that has persisted (albeit with a complex history) over a thousand years, and that bears symmetrical relations to many distinct physical objects while being identical to none. Finally, some instances of conceptual art, which grew out of and is normally treated as belonging to the visual art tradition, involve no candidate physical 60

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 60

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

object at all. For Robert Barry’s 1969 Closed Gallery Piece, the artist declared the gallery closed for the duration of the exhibition. The typed card by way of which this declaration was made seems inessential to the work, and clearly is not identical to it. Works such as these demand an ontological account that does not make them out to be identical to physical objects. Of course, they might be thought of as special cases; however, an ontological account that can accommodate both central cases of singular visual artworks and these unusual cases in the same way will, at least to that extent, have parsimony in its favor.

4. Alternatives to Identity If the visual artwork is not identical to a physical object, what might it be? In this section, I describe and assess a variety of alternative theories that have been offered.

4.1 The artwork as an idea Benedetto Croce (1921) and R. G. Collingwood (1938) suggested that the artwork is in fact an idea in the mind of the artist. On this account, the viewer’s task is to use the physical object to reconstruct the artist’s idea. Only when such reconstruction has been accomplished can the viewer be said to apprehend the artwork. Such a view violates the pragmatic constraint invoked by Thomasson (2004) and D. Davies (2004): our practices of interpretation and criticism do not seem typically to have us regard the physical object as a prop for reconstruction of the artist’s idea. Moreover, our ontological intuitions seem clearly at odds with the notion that artworks, in general, are ideas: asked about the nature of Donatello’s Abraham and Isaac, we will not say that it was an idea Donatello had that led him to carve a hunk of stone in a certain way. Finally, as has often been pointed out (e.g., Stephen Davies, 2003), it seems flatly incorrect to suggest that someone can create a work of painting or sculpture simply by having an idea, no matter how complex and refined. Even if we charitably regard the idea in question as one that pertains to the use of a medium and can be fully developed only through manipulation of that medium, it seems incorrect to say that the idea itself, rather than some outward product of the manipulation, is the artwork. Clearly, a theory with such significant drawbacks would need strong independent reasons to motivate it. For the purposes of this essay, we may simply note that it goes much further, in rejecting a relationship between 61

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 61

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the artwork and the physical object, than is warranted by the considerations adduced above.

4.2 The artwork as constituted by the physical object If artworks are not identical to physical objects, they still seem to stand in some significant relation to such objects. Some have proposed that this relation is that the artwork is constituted by a physical object. A constitution relation may be invoked to deal with concerns about identity and persistence conditions. It seems that a lump of clay can maintain its identity through any number of manipulations: one and the same lump of clay may be shaped into a portrait bust or a streamlined abstract form, or it may simply be rolled into a ball and put away to await its owner’s next inspiration. A particular sculpture made from the clay, however, does not survive such major changes in configuration: if I roll the clay into a ball, I will have destroyed your portrait bust. The clay, then, constitutes the sculpture without being identical to it. What exactly is the relation of constitution? Lynne Rudder Baker (2000) discusses Michelangelo’s David and Piece, the block of marble that constitutes it. David, for as long as it exists, shares both the physical properties and the spatial location of Piece. Moreover, “many of David’s aesthetic properties depend on Piece’s physical properties: David’s pent-up energy depends on, among other things, the way that the marble is shaped to distribute the weight” (p. 31). However, David and Piece are not identical: David has causally efficacious properties (such as the power to evoke certain kinds of reactions in people) that Piece alone could not have had, if it had never been placed in the circumstances that brought David into existence. These properties, if they belong to Piece at all, belong to it only contingently, whereas they belong to David necessarily.17 It is important to emphasize that the view that David is constituted by Piece does not rule out the possibility that David itself is a physical object. This sort of account is often given for non-art artifacts: a candle may be a physical object colocated with the lump of wax that constitutes it, though we resist saying that the candle and the lump are identical because they differ in their identity and persistence conditions. David, while not identical to Piece, might nonetheless be a physical object of a different order that shares the spatiotemporal location of Piece. Strictly speaking, then, the constitution account need not be seen as denying that the artwork is identical to some physical object; it denies only that the artwork is identical to a mere physical object like a hunk of stone.18 To claim that artworks are constituted by physical objects is not yet to explain many of their most significant features. The relation between the artwork and its constituting matter may be quite complex (for instance, an artwork may lose part of its constituting matter, as when an arm falls off a sculpture, or gain 62

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 62

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

matter, as when a painting is restored) and may vary from case to case. The constitution view in itself also does not explain the artwork’s possession of essential features like a title and a correct orientation. A fully fleshed out account of artworks would need to supplement the constitution view with an account of the persistence conditions for artworks and of the way in which an artwork gains its significant features by virtue of the sociocultural positioning of the constituting matter. This is not, of course, to deny that the constitution relation may play a role in the correct account of at least some artworks. The constitution view also faces challenges from cases discussed in Section 2.3. The works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres do not seem to go into and out of existence, even though there may be times when the pile of candy has been completely depleted (or, in between exhibitions, when no candy is kept in storage). The work, then, cannot be essentially constituted by a physical object. The same is true, a fortiori, of works of conceptual art like Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece. Perhaps the goshoden at Ise Jingu is always constituted by some physical object; however, the fact that the work leaps from one chunk of constituting matter to another may leave us unsatisfied with the explanatory power of the constitution relation. If the relation can be instantiated so differently, and may fail to hold at all in some cases, we may suspect that there is something further about the nature of the artwork that must be invoked to explain whether and in what circumstances a constitution relation holds.

4.3 The artwork as embodied in the physical object Perhaps, rather than being constituted by a physical object, the artwork is embodied in it. An embodiment relation is less intimate than a constitution relation: it allows that the artwork may have many properties that are not possessed by the embodying object at all, even contingently. Joseph Margolis (1974) describes artworks as “physically embodied and culturally emergent entities.” The embodiment relation invoked by Margolis has two features: the identity of the artwork is “necessary linked to the identity of the physical object,” and “the work of art must possess properties other than those ascribed to the physical object” (p. 189). (The second feature explains why the relation between the artwork and the physical object is one of embodiment rather than identity.) However, the work may also inherit some of the properties of the physical object. An advantage Margolis claims for the embodiment relation is that “whatever convenience of reference and identity may be claimed for a physical object may be claimed for the work of art embodied in it” (pp. 188–9). To locate Artemisia Gentileschi’s work Judith Slaying Holofernes, one locates a particular piece of canvas with paint on it.19 63

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 63

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Of course, merely to invoke a relationship of embodiment is not to explain what extra properties the artwork has or where they come from. Margolis’s notion of cultural emergence is meant to do this part of the explanatory work. The art-related practices of a particular cultural context are what make it the case that we can identify an artwork as being embodied in a particular physical object and appropriately attribute certain emergent properties to it that do not belong to the physical object. And, indeed, in Margolis’s view it appears that all it is to be an artwork is to be an entity that is rightly seen as embodied in a particular physical object according to some art-relevant cultural tradition. The emergent properties of the artwork, in turn, are just whatever properties are rightly attributable to it within that cultural tradition.20 It certainly seems right to suggest that some of the artwork’s properties depend in a robust way on the cultural tradition within which it is identified. But Margolis’s view leaves the nature of this dependence obscure. Just what facts within the cultural tradition determine when an artwork can rightly be said to be embodied in a particular physical object, and what properties, either physical or emergent, can rightly be ascribed to it? A fully elaborated ontology of visual artworks should provide answers to these questions. In addition, if we take seriously Margolis’s claim that the artwork’s identity is necessarily linked to that of the physical object, we may wonder whether this view can allow for the fact that the identity conditions for artworks typically do not require that a work be associated with a particular physical object.

4.4 The artwork as the content of the physical object Dilworth (2005, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, among others) claims that the relation between the artwork and the physical object is one of representation: the painted canvas, rather than being identical with the artwork, in fact represents the artwork, which may in turn represent some subject matter (if the artwork is representational). The artwork, then, is a kind of content possessed by the physical object. Dilworth (2008a) draws an analogy with language. The following is a “concrete linguistic sentence token” (p. 342): The Dude is a cat. The concrete sentence token represents the proposition that the Dude is a cat. It represents this content only contingently: in other circumstances where different linguistic conventions were operative, it might have represented a different proposition, such as that “The Rock is a wrestler.”

64

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 64

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

The proposition that the Dude is a cat, Dilworth suggests, has content of its own: it represents a particular animal, the Dude, and represents him as a cat. The proposition represents this content necessarily, not contingently: a proposition with different content would not have been that proposition. The proposition is not identical to the concrete sentence token, which might have represented some other content or been meaningless. Also, that same proposition can be represented by any number of distinct concrete sentence tokens. The proposition also is not identical to the content it represents: the proposition is an abstract entity with truth-conditions, whereas the Dude is a concrete entity with whiskers. Dilworth proposes that we see the artwork as analogous to the proposition, and the associated physical object as analogous to the concrete sentence token. The connection between the object and the artwork is a purely contingent one, while the connection between the artwork and its representational content is necessary. The artwork, thus, is a form of content contingently represented by the physical object. As Dilworth acknowledges, representation functions differently in the artwork case than in the proposition case. The connection between a sentence token and the proposition it represents is purely conventional (those same marks could have been used to represent a completely different proposition), whereas the connection between a physical object and an artwork involves a form of representation that functions iconically, or through exact resemblance: “an irregularly shaped and textured physical brushstroke on the surface of the paint would express an exactly similar shaped and textured brushstroke content element in the relevant artwork structure” (2007, p. 25). The theory of artworks as representational content of physical objects has notable advantages. It gives the same account of the artwork regardless of art form, and it allows us to give similar accounts of different kinds of objects each of which may bear a special relation to the work, whether the work is singular or multiple. Thus, a photographic print, a negative, and a digital file may all represent the same work of photography; the original score, a copy of the score, a performance, and a recording may all represent the same work of music.21 A consequence of the representational content view, acknowledged by Dilworth, is that any physical object that is not perceptibly different from the object presented by the artist, and that is offered for consideration in relation to the same context in which the artist’s object was presented, represents exactly the same content that the original physical object did. Thus, there is no unique relation between the artwork and any particular physical object; it is merely a contingent matter that we have not yet perfected the ability to make perceptually indistinguishable replicas of paintings and sculptures that would represent exactly the same content.22

65

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 65

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

A limitation of the view emerges in relation to certain works of contemporary art. Kelly Mark’s 1996–97 work Object Carried for One Year, as its title suggests, features a physical object that Mark carried in her pocket every day for a full year. I tend to doubt that we should see the physical object as chiefly a vehicle for the expression of content. But suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we grant this point. Whatever content this object expresses, it does so not only by virtue of its appearance but also by virtue of its historical and relational properties. Mark could not have made the same artwork by presenting a perceptually indistinguishable replica that she had not in fact carried for a year. But when content comes to be a function of historical properties as well as appearance, it is difficult to see how we are to determine precisely what that content consists of. There is no iconic or exact resemblance function we can use to transform historical properties of the object into content properties of the artwork. Nor can the content simply inherit those historical properties: the content itself was not carried for one year. Is there, then, any way to determine the content represented by the object? If not, then Dilworth’s view seems to render the artwork undesirably elusive. The candy works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres present a related problem. The shape, size, and configuration of the pile of candy change whenever an audience member or curator removes candy from or adds candy to the pile. If the content of the pile is determined by an iconic or exact resemblance relation, then that content is constantly shifting. However, it does not seem correct to identify Gonzalez-Torres’s work as constantly changing.23 Is there some other way to translate from the physical features of the object into some expressed content that can be identified with the artwork? Dilworth does not offer any obvious resources here. The modal arguments deployed by Dilworth against the identity of the artwork and the physical object are convincing: Mark might, it seems, have created the same work by carrying a qualitatively identical but numerically distinct object in her pocket for a year. The view of the work as pure content, however, makes the relation between the work and the object too distant; and in some instances it makes the artwork unnecessarily elusive. To avoid these problems, one might propose that the work has the object as a part, along with other parts (such as the title). Dilworth (2007) argues that, since a different object could have played the same role that the actual object in fact plays, the actual object cannot be a part of the artwork (pp. 32–3). This argument relies on the unstated assumption that parthood relations, like identity relations, are necessary if they hold at all. This assumption, however, is clearly false: my bicycle might have had a different wheel (and, indeed, might come to have a different wheel, should the present one be irreparably damaged), but this does not show that its current wheel is not part of the bicycle. Modal arguments of the

66

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 66

2/27/2012 10:30:04 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

sort Dilworth successfully deploys do not rule out a parthood relation between physical objects and artworks in the way they rule out the identity relation.

4.5 The artwork as a structure If the artwork is identical neither to a concrete physical object nor to some abstract representational content, perhaps it is some sort of complex structure picked out by the artist. The structure might have a physical object as its part, as suggested by Arthur Danto (1981, pp. 115–35). Danto holds that an artwork has two fundamental components: a physical object and an interpretation put forward by the artist.24 Qualitatively identical objects, Danto suggests, may become components of very different artworks given the artist’s interpretation; and something that started out as a mere real object, like a snow shovel or urinal, may come to be a component of an artwork through the artist’s interpretive activity. In Danto’s view, then, the artwork may be thought of as a two-part structure including a physical object plus an interpretation. To assuage some of the modal worries expressed above, we may add that the particular physical object is a part of the artwork only contingently; some other qualitatively similar object might have served in that role. The idea that the artist’s interpretation is part of the artwork is not without its difficulties. One might object to the idea that an interpretation is in fact part of the work on the grounds that interpretations are about artworks, not about mere objects. It is difficult to see how an interpretation could both be a component of an artwork and be about that very artwork.25 In addition, it appears that on Danto’s view the interpretation is determined by the artist’s intentions, and one might wish to resist the idea that the artwork’s nature is so closely tied up with the artist’s mental states. An alternative account might give the artist a special role in constituting the artwork, but without suggesting that the artist’s interpretation is itself part of the work. Such an account may be reconstructed from the views of Jerrold Levinson. Levinson (1980) holds that a musical work is an “indicated structure,” or a structure of sounds indicated by a particular artist at a particular time and in a particular musico-historical context. The musical work cannot be identified with a pure sound structure, Levinson suggests, since the same structure deployed in different contexts would have different qualities. In order to individuate musical works adequately, then, we must incorporate within them an account of the context in which they were deployed. Though Levinson himself does not defend such a view, we might suggest, in a similar spirit, that the visual artwork is some sort of structure (construed

67

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 67

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

broadly, as a set of elements positioned in relation to one another) indicated by an artist in a particular historico-artistic context.26 While the structure cannot, it seems, simply be a physical object (given the modal arguments discussed above), it might have a physical object as a part, in the way Danto suggests. Or the nature of the structure might differ from one work to another.27 The notion of the artwork as a contextualized, indicated structure allows for it to possess, necessarily, properties (such as content) that are possessed by the physical object only contingently, if at all. However, it might be complained that the metaphysical nature of the indicated structure remains somewhat obscure. Is an indicated structure a structure plus an action of indication? If so, then we might be led to prefer an account of artworks as actions, as discussed in the following section. Another worry is that the notion of indication is vague: Levinson gives no clear account of what indication consists in and does not adequately distinguish between what an individual indicates in her role as composer and what she indicates in her role as conductor of one of her own works.28 Once clarified, though, the notion of an indicated structure might figure in the correct account of many artworks.

4.6 The artwork as an action The interest in recognizing the role played by context in fixing the artwork’s features has led some to eschew altogether the idea that the artwork is a physical object or any other kind of structure. Gregory Currie (1989) and David Davies (2004) defend the view that the artwork is to be identified not with the artist’s product, but with a particular sort of event: the artist’s activity in producing it.29 Whereas one might regard the Levinsonian maneuver of identifying an artwork with a contextualized, indicated structure as somewhat ad hoc, it does not seem ad hoc to see the artist’s activity as directly responsive to artistic, historical, and sociopolitical context, such that there is in fact no separating the activity from its context. The aspects of the context that really did shape the artist’s activity will thus be regarded quite naturally as essential to the artwork, on this view. Moreover, as Davies argues, the view that the artwork is identical to the artist’s activity can allow for nuance in just which aspects of context are relevant to a given work. Levinson’s view suggests that the entire musico-historical context, which includes “the whole of cultural, social and political history,” is relevant to the artwork, such that even slight differences in context invariably generate (perhaps subtly) different works, even where the structures presented are exactly identical.30 Davies argues that this is a mistake: some works have their identities bound to particular aspects of context, but others do not; whether a change in context is relevant to the work’s identity will vary from case to case. The view that the artist’s activity is the true artwork, Davies 68

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 68

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

suggests, accounts for this fact in a way that the view of artworks as contextualized structures cannot.31 The view of artworks as identical to the artist’s creative activity has the advantage of assigning the artwork to a metaphysically respectable category: namely, that of events. There is nothing obscure or mysterious about events, and it seems clear that any adequate account of what there is in the world will need to appeal to them. Moreover, it is very easy to account for the representational and expressive properties of artworks on this view, since it is uncontroversial to say that people can express and represent things through their actions. The chief disadvantage of this view is that it seems to violate central and deeply held intuitions about the nature of artworks. Just as viewers are unlikely to characterize Donatello’s Abraham and Isaac as an idea in the mind of the artist, they are unlikely to accede in the identification of this sculptural work with a now-unobservable event that happened in the fifteenth century. If there is any truth to Thomasson’s (2004) view that our ontological intuitions fix the referent of our term “artwork,” a view like Currie’s and Davies’s appears to change the subject rather than elucidate what the artwork is. It should also be noted that on the view that artworks are events, the question about the ontological nature of the artist’s product, referred to by Davies as the “focus of appreciation,” does not go away. Is the focus of appreciation of Donatello’s Abraham and Isaac a physical object, an entity embodied in or constituted by or represented by some physical object, or what? Are all foci of appreciation the same sort of thing, or are some different from others?32 For those who believe that the focus of appreciation, rather than the activity of creating it, is the true artwork, the account of artworks as events is ontologically uninformative.

4.7 Artworks as ontologically diverse If we attend chiefly to traditional works in the singular visual arts, such as paintings and carved sculptures, we are likely to be impressed by the intimate relation of each such work to a particular physical object. Thus, we are moved to ask, what is the nature of this relation? A consideration of contemporary art, including works of performance art, installation and conceptual art, forces one to ask different questions: what explains the fact that some works have an intimate relation to a particular physical object whereas others do not? And given this, should we think that there can be a unified account of the artwork’s nature? These questions also arise in relation to genres of visual art that generate multiple artworks on some occasions but singular artworks on others. These include printmaking, which sometimes generates works with multiple instances 69

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 69

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

and sometimes generates single-instance works; cast sculpture, where the mold may be destroyed after the first cast; and even film, where on occasion avantgarde filmmakers have produced an aesthetic effect by scratching directly onto the filmic medium, with the result that a new printing of the film will not be the same work. What accounts for the fact that some works in a medium are singular and others multiple, and the fact that works of traditional painting and sculpture have an intimate relation with a particular physical object while a work of installation art may involve different objects on different occasions? Sherri Irvin (2005, 2008) argues that artists determine the specific relations between their works and the relevant physical objects through the process of sanctioning, which includes both presenting objects for consideration and stipulating parameters that govern how they are to be displayed and conserved. It is open to the artist to stipulate that a particular object is essential to the display, or to allow that different objects may be used on different occasions. The artist may also determine whether a particular feature of the physical object is to be treated as relevant to the work or not: the paint flaking from one painted canvas may count as damage that requires restoration, whereas the paint flaking from another painting may be an aesthetically relevant feature that should be allowed to unfold naturally.33 The relation the artwork bears to a particular physical object or assemblage, then, varies in accordance with the artist’s sanction. The artist may specify that a particular physical object must be present for the work to be exhibited, in which case the work might be partly constituted by that object (or might be a structure that has that object as a part). Or, instead, the artist may specify that the artwork is such that each display must involve some object or other of a given type, in which case the artwork is only contingently connected with some particular object or series of objects. Ultimately, on this view, the artwork is whatever entity satisfies the parameters expressed by the artist in the act of sanctioning (Irvin, 2008). The view of artworks as ontologically diverse can explain why some works in a particular art form (such as printmaking) are singular while others are multiple. It accounts for the intimate relation of the artwork’s characteristics to a generative act by the artist, as emphasized by Currie and D. Davies. It respects the ontological intuitions expressed in the critical practice of the art community, according to which works are thought to have varying kinds and degrees of connection to physical objects. The view will not be satisfying to those who wish to see a common ontological account given of all visual artworks. Someone seeking a unified account might think that the artwork should be identified with the parameters themselves, rather than with some entity that satisfies them. This might be helpful in cases where the parameters are internally contradictory or otherwise unsatisfiable: to identify the artwork with an entity satisfying the parameters seems, 70

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 70

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures

in such cases, to render it non-existent. In my view, though, to identify every artwork with a set of parameters is to ignore the distinction between works that genuinely do seem to consist of parameters (such as Nam June Paik’s Danger Music No. 5, which prescribes that the performer crawl up the vagina of a living whale) with those, like Michelangelo’s David, that do not. By collapsing the distinction, the view of artworks as parameters would fall seriously afoul of critical practice and community intuitions; and this, to my mind, is too high a price to pay to bring all artworks under a common ontological umbrella.

Notes 1. This conception of the ontology of natural objects is controversial; some hold that even natural objects must be understood as socially constructed insofar as we attempt to theorize about them. My aim here is not to argue for the adequacy of this conception but simply to point out that, while intuitively attractive for natural objects, it lacks plausibility with regard to artworks. 2. A seminal argument for this thesis is found in Kendall Walton (1970). 3. See Morris Weitz (1956) for an influential discussion. 4. D. Davies, 2004, p. 18. 5. Thomasson, 2004, pp. 87–8. 6. Curt John Ducasse (1929, 1944) offers such a view. Margaret Macdonald (1952–53, p. 206) identifies visual artworks with physical artifacts. Richard Wollheim considered the view that visual artworks are identical to physical objects of sufficient interest that he added a supplementary essay on the topic to the second edition of Art and Its Objects (1980), without pronouncing on the truth of the view. Jerrold Levinson (1996) defends a sophisticated physical object view that is immune to some of the criticisms discussed below. 7. Levinson (1980) offers several helpful examples of the context-dependence of the aesthetic properties of musical works. 8. This point is discussed extensively by Gregory Currie (1989). 9. This does not show, however, that the properties could not be attributed to some more richly construed physical object. See the discussion of the constitution relation in Section 4.2. 10. John Dilworth (2005) argues at length for the non-identity of artworks and the associated physical objects, on the grounds that artworks have necessary content properties while physical objects cannot. Dilworth does not claim that the artwork has all of its content properties necessarily; thus the argument does not fall afoul of Guy Rohrbaugh’s (2003) observation that artworks exhibit at least some modal flexibility (such that an artwork could have had slightly different content, yet maintained its identity as that very work). 11. See Baker (2000, p. 30). Also, for reasons discussed by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961), it is not viable to say that the artwork is identical to the physical object in this world but not in other worlds; identity relations are necessary relations, and must hold in all worlds if they hold at all. 12. Dilworth, 2005, p. 70. 13. Those persuaded by arguments for the necessity of origin may resist the claim that the Mona Lisa could have been made with a different canvas and different paints. See, for instance, Nathan Salmon (1979).

71

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 71

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 14. Technically speaking, issues of persistence are distinct from issues of modality; I treat them together here because they are closely related and because frequently the same theoretical maneuver will resolve problems of both types. 15. For an excellent overview, see Stephen Davies (2003). I will note, below, instances where theorists are motivated in part by an attempt to give a unified account of singular and multiple artworks. 16. For further discussion of such cases, including an explanation of why I see them as singular rather than multiply instanced works, see Sherri Irvin (2008). 17. For more on the distinction between the identity relation and the constitution relation, see Baker (1997) and Mark Johnston (1992). 18. Baker (2000) endorses the idea of colocation of physical objects of different orders, as do Levinson (1996) and Stecker (2003). 19. If Dilworth (2005) is correct in claiming that one physical object might bear symmetrical relations to two distinct artworks by different artists, the individuation of artworks will not be able to proceed simply by the individuation of the associated physical objects in the way Margolis suggests. 20. Margolis also holds that the work can change over time as the cultural context changes. 21. Dilworth, 2005, p. 76; 2007, p. 29. 22. Currie (1989, esp. ch. 4), holds a similar view, and Jeanne Wacker (1960, p. 224), makes a comment in the same spirit. Dilworth (2005, pp. 78–9; 2007, p. 28) acknowledges that artistic genres such as painting recognize the special status of original representations; his view does not conflict with the idea that there may be a unique original representation in such cases. 23. I am grateful to Martin Montminy for this point. 24. Danto often speaks as though the physical object itself becomes the artwork. Given the arguments advanced above, I charitably interpret his view as claiming that the object becomes part of the artwork. 25. Stecker (1997) makes a related point. 26. Levinson’s (1996) actual view about singular works of visual art is that they are physical objects of a complex and sophisticated sort. As he acknowledges (1985, 1996), the title of a visual artwork may need to be counted as a non-physical component. 27. For further discussion of this possibility, see Section 4.7. 28. For discussion, see S. Davies (2004, pp. 71–2). 29. Currie holds that the artwork is to be identified with an action-type, whereas Davies identifies it with a particular action-token. For Davies’ discussion of the reasons for moving away from the action-type view, see D. Davies (2004, pp. 131–40). 30. Levinson, 1980, p. 10. It should be emphasized that Levinson restricts his account to “fully notated ‘classical’ composition[s] of Western culture” (p. 6), leaving open the possibility that a different account may be required for other sorts of musical works. 31. D. Davies, 2004, pp. 105–20. Carl Matheson and Ben Caplan (2008) call into question Davies’s claim that Levinson’s contextualized structure view cannot account for nuances in the role played by context in shaping the artwork’s identity. 32. Currie holds that the focus of appreciation is an abstract type rather than a concrete object. However, Rohrbaugh (2003) argues that it is impossible to account for the modal flexibility of artworks—the possibility, for instance, that a work of painting might have had one more brushstroke than it in fact had—on such a view. 33. It should be noted that there are limits, determined by the art-historical context, on what can be sanctioned at a given moment. The context also supplies certain defaults, such that particular features of the work are implicitly sanctioned as long as

72

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 72

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

Artworks, Objects, and Structures the artist does nothing to contravene this: for instance, the artist implicitly sanctions that the painted surface of the canvas is relevant to the artwork, and the oil-stained reverse of the canvas irrelevant, unless the artist explicitly sanctions otherwise. To sanction is not merely to intend or to state one’s intention; the artist’s sanction must be communicated in such a way that there is a reasonable expectation of uptake. See Irvin (2005) for further discussion.

73

9781847063700_Ch04_Final_txt_print.indd 73

2/27/2012 10:30:05 AM

5

The Aesthetic Experience Derek Matravers

Belief in a type of mental state worthy of the name “the aesthetic experience” seems to have two sources. First, there is experience: to some, it is apparent that there is some common feature to their experiences of works of art and some pieces of nature (paradigmatically sunsets, landscapes and seascapes) that is not present in other experiences. That is, there is something distinctive that it is like to have these experiences. Second, the aesthetic experience is taken to be valuable (in a sense yet to be explained), and hence taken to be the explanation of value we attribute to the objects of those experiences. That is, our experiences of art and the relevant pieces of nature are thought to be valuable, and the capacity to provide the aesthetic experience is thought to be what explains that value. The primary question is whether there is such an experience as the aesthetic experience. Only if there is such an experience does the second question, concerning value, arise. There are two sorts of boundary: the internal boundary (can the aesthetic experience be distinguished from experiences such as the sublime?) and the external boundary (can the aesthetic experience be distinguished from religious, sexual or other everyday experiences?). As marking the internal boundaries has largely disappeared from common parlance—despite the efforts of a few postmodern theorists—I shall discuss only the external boundaries. Within Anglo-American aesthetics there are two broad approaches to explicating the aesthetic experience. The first approach focuses on what it is like to have such an experience; that is, on whether the experience has a distinctive phenomenology. The second focuses on the content of the experience; that is, what the experience is an experience of (Iseminger, 2003). I shall call these the “phenomenological approach” and “the content approach,” respectively. As they both have their roots in Kant, I shall start with him. Another advantage of starting with Kant is that he defined the terms of the debate, and raised questions that we struggle with to this day. Kant assumes that the experience associated with “the judgement of taste”— “that object is beautiful”—is a pleasurable experience. It contrasts with two other pleasurable experiences: the agreeable and the good. Things are agreeable to us if they gratify our senses: this experience does not involve our rational faculties—that is, it does not involve those mental states such as beliefs and desires. Animals can have experiences of the agreeable: a cat lying in the sun is 74

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 74

2/27/2012 10:30:08 AM

The Aesthetic Experience

having one such. Kant’s view of the good is slightly idiosyncratic, being bound up with his account of ethics: it involves a belief that the goodness of some action or state of affairs binds all rational beings. The experience associated with the judgment of taste needs to be distinguished both from the former (in that it is universal where the agreeable is idiosyncratic) and the latter (in that it is not provable while whether something is good is provable). Kant argued taste differed from the agreeable in being cognitive while the agreeable is noncognitive, and differed from the good in being non-conceptual while the good is conceptual. In short, the experience that gives rise to the judgment of taste—the ancestor of the modern aesthetic experience—is an experience that is both cognitive and non-conceptual. It is the disinterested appreciation (i.e., an appreciation that is not informed by any interest we might have in the object) of the form of an object, which results in the cognitive faculties becoming engaged, yet not in such a way that involves concepts. The challenge of explicating the nature of the experience was picked up by the phenomenological approach, and the challenge of explicating what could be meant by the perception of the object’s form was picked up by the content approach. There is much that Kant seemed to get right. The aesthetic experience, unlike experiences of the agreeable, seems to involve cognitions: in short, there is thinking going on. Second, those cognitions are part of the experience, rather than being externally related to the experience. It is not that the experience causes the beliefs; it is rather that the experience is, in part, an experience of having beliefs. The problem is that Kant’s account seems too irredeemably obscure to be enlightening. It is difficult to know how we would describe a mental state that was cognitive but non-conceptual in modern parlance. It would be something like having beliefs and yet those beliefs having no content (not being about anything) which is not an idea that makes much sense. Furthermore, we can see there are difficulties in providing any account of the integration of beliefs into experiences. First, experiences have duration and beliefs do not. Second, there is “something that it is like” to have an experience, while (we are told by philosophy of mind) there is nothing that it is like to have a belief. Finally, beliefs are thought to possess only instrumental value: we do not value them for their own sake, but for what they can do for us (e.g., result in successful action). In contrast, the aesthetic experience is held to be the paradigm of noninstrumental value. In short, the task is to integrate some instrumentally valuable non-experience into a non-instrumentally valuable experience (Guyer, 2003; Matravers, 2003). Modern work on the phenomenological approach begins with Edward Bullough. Bullough claimed to have identified a particular type of mental state—a sui generis psychological happening—which he used to explain several puzzling phenomena associated with our experience of the arts. This mental state he called “psychical distance” (Bullough, 1995). This is a technical 75

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 75

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

term—that is, Bullough is using it in a distinctive philosophical sense—although it does draw some of its meaning from the connotations of the everyday sense of the term “distance.” Psychical distance has both a negative and a positive characterization. On the negative side, it involves inhibition: “the cutting-out of the practical sides of things and of our practical attitude to them” (p. 299). That is, we perform an action of putting the object in which we are interested “out of gear with our practical, actual self”; our mental state is not directly connected to our motivations (p. 298). The positive side is that distance acts as a kind of filter; we do not lose our highly emotionally colored, personal relations with an object, but it takes on “a peculiar character” (p. 300): we allow the phenomenon “to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends”; we look at it “‘objectively’ . . . by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the ‘objective’ features of the experience, and by interpreting even our ‘subjective’ affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon” (pp. 298–9). Having characterized psychical distance, Bullough goes on to claim that it is an essential characteristic of “aesthetic consciousness”—“that special mental attitude towards, and outlook upon, experience, which finds its most pregnant expression in various forms of art” (p. 299). A more recent account in this tradition is that of Jerome Stolnitz. Stolnitz’ account is subtly different from that of Bullough, in that, for him, the aesthetic experience is not a sui generis psychological happening; rather, it is a distinctive form of attention: “disinterested attention.” Stolnitz defines this as “disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness, for its sake alone.” He borrows the term “disinterestedness” from eighteenth-century aesthetics (on which he had written extensively), defining it as “no concern for any ulterior purpose” (Stolnitz, 1960, pp. 34–5). Stolnitz goes on to distinguish this (“the aesthetic attitude”) from other approaches to art (in particular, from the attitude a critic might take—“the critical attitude”) and claims that these are incompatible with each other. The latter is questioning, probing and critical, while the former involves the “surrender” to the work of art. It is not that the critical attitude is inappropriate; it is rather that, being psychologically incompatible with the aesthetic attitude, it needs to “occur prior to the aesthetic encounter” and be over before aesthetic appreciation can begin (Stolnitz, 1960, p. 380). What Bullough, Stolnitz, and (to an extent) Kant have in common is that they are attempting to define the realm of the aesthetic by appeal to psychology. This approach was subject to sustained criticism in a series of books and articles by George Dickie (Dickie, 1973, 1974, 1997). The arguments are brief and (to my mind) decisive, so they need not detain us long. Against Bullough, Dickie argues that “psychical distance” is best construed as “a psychological blocking of ordinary, practical actions and thoughts which is necessary for the positive side of distance, i.e., the experience of something as the object of aesthetic consciousness” (Dickie, 1974). He then argues that the phenomena purportedly 76

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 76

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Aesthetic Experience

explained by this blocking (e.g., the audience not leaping on the stage to save the heroine) are better explained by something else (the conventions of theater). He concludes, generally, that “there is no reason to think that a psychological force to restrain either action or thoughts occurs or is required in . . . cases of aesthetic experience” (Dickie, 1974, p. 111). The argument against Stolnitz can be stated in a number of ways. My reconstruction is true—I think—to the spirit rather than the letter of Dickie’s original argument. First we need to examine Stolnitz’s claim: that there is a type of mental state, characterized phenomenologically, that is true of our experience of art (and more besides). That is, there is a sense in which our experience of a Beethoven symphony, a Mondrian painting, a Caro sculpture all feel the same. The oddity of this claim is that there is an intuitive pull to accepting it (as can be seen by its widespread acceptance) although a moment’s reflection reveals it to be implausible. How could the experiences of such different objects be phenomenologically similar? The answer to this question is that they are all experiences of the objects “for their own sake”; experiences in which there is no concern for any ulterior purpose. The temptation is to think that an experience of an object for its own sake is a distinctive type of experience—a funny mental state. However, as Dickie points out, this confuses motivations and experiences: [T]he aesthetic-attention theorists claim that there are two ways of attending, namely, disinterestedly and interestedly, but when their definition of “disinterestedness” is substituted for the term into descriptions of particular cases, it seems that “interested attention” means attending with certain motives and “disinterested attention” means attending without those motives. The claim that there is a perceptual or attentional power, the operation of which determines the aesthetic nature of experience, seems to be only the obvious observation that people attend with different motives. (1974, p. 118) Dickie concludes that the aesthetic experience—some distinctive type of mental state—is a myth. Powerful as those two arguments are, they do not rule out (as Dickie realizes) the possibility that, as a matter of fact, our experiences of art do exhibit a phenomenological similarity; they merely show that it does not follow from our accepting that we pay attention to works of art for their own sake. Over many years, from the late 1950s until the early 1980s Monroe Beardsley tried to characterize such an experience. His final contribution opens with a statement that nicely captures the debate: Though some members of each opposing party would impugn so balanced a judgement, it is in my opinion still an open question whether it is 77

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 77

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

possible—or, if possible, worthwhile—to distinguish a peculiarly aesthetic sort of experience. The question of possibility involves the debatability of the claim that there is a common character that is (1) discernible in a wide range of our encounters with the world and (2) justifiably called “aesthetic.” The question of worthwhileness involves the debatability of the further claim that, once distinguished, the character is sufficiently substantial and noteworthy to serve as the ground for important theoretical constructions. (Beardsley, 2004, p. 285) The difficulty for Beardsley is in balancing the desiderata: making the characterization weak enough to cover all that he wants to cover, yet strong enough to do useful work. He provides five “criteria,” the first of which he says is necessary, and any three of the remaining four are sufficient for the experience to qualify as aesthetic. The necessary condition is “object directedness,” which is (roughly) the claim that we are perceptually attending to the object. The others are felt freedom (a sense of release from wordly concerns), detached affect (a sense that the objects are set at a distance from use emotionally), active discovery (a sense of intelligibility), and wholeness (a sense of personal integration), for each of which Beardsley provides an account. George Dickie and others have raised questions as to the value of this conception (Dickie, 1974; Carroll, 1986). The debate, however, does not really stand in need of resolution. Beardsley describes certain threads that he thinks run through a range of experiences. If the reader finds this familiar and enlightening, then so be it. The attempt to use the characterization to “ground important theoretical constructions” must, however, be reckoned a failure if by that Beardsley meant his attempt to provide a definition of art adequate to our modern notion of that concept (Beardsley, 1983). The modern concept of art is simply not grounded in aesthetic considerations. Furthermore, it is not clear that Beardsley’s criteria stand up to much scrutiny; in particular, the discussion of “wholeness” does not escape Dickie’s earlier criticism that the notion is not specific enough to do any useful work (Dickie, 1974, pp. 184–200). Furthermore, the notion of “active discovery” (Beardsley’s attempt to solve the Kantian problem of how to get cognitions into the experience) is a fudge, giving us a feeling (a “sense”) of thinking going on, which does not entail that thinking is going on. Beardsley’s characterization might be sufficient to distinguish an aesthetic experience from experiences such as shock or horror; the legacy of Kantian experiences of the agreeable. At best, however, we are left with an excessively vague description of a peculiar sort of experience that is not able to do much useful work. Dickie’s criticisms dampened the debate on the aesthetic experience for a number of years. Recently, however, this has made something of a return, and a definition in the spirit of Beardsley has been given by Gary Iseminger. Iseminger claims that “A work of art is a good work of art to the extent that it 78

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 78

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Aesthetic Experience

has the capacity to afford appreciation” (2004, p. 23). “Appreciation” counts, for Iseminger, as the “aesthetic state of mind” and he defines it thus: “Appreciation is finding the experiencing of a state of affairs to be valuable in itself” (p. 36). There are a few things to note about this. First, that what is appreciated is a state of affairs: what is appreciated is that something has a certain property, not the thing or the property. The second is that we have to come to know the state of affairs through experience. The third is that what we value is the experience of coming to know that a state of affairs obtains, rather than the state of affairs. So the view is that appreciation (the aesthetic state of mind) is the belief that the experience of a state of affairs obtaining is good. There are two issues that puzzle about this definition. First, there are surely instances of our valuing an experience of a state of affairs obtaining that are not in the vicinity of the aesthetic. Take the case in which, running for a train, I fall headlong down the escalator. Reaching the bottom, I value my experience of the state of affairs that I am in one piece, in part because I am mightily relieved that I am still able to experience. The second is that it appears to make the aesthetic state of mind nonexperiential: my experience that a state of affairs obtains is a matter of learning (by experience) that a certain proposition is true. So the aesthetic state of mind appears to be the belief that it is good that a certain proposition is true, with the constraint that I come to believe it is true by experience. However, this does not seem to be an experience (something that has a duration) at all. Iseminger’s approach has some similarities with that of Kendall Walton. Walton does not claim to provide an account of what anyone has ever meant by “aesthetic.” However, he does identify a distinctive sort of value that might qualify “with little strain” as aesthetic value (Walton, 1993, p. 509). At least some of the pleasure we take in objects is a pleasure in their capacity to engage us. In listening, for example, to a Beethoven String Quartet, we take pleasure in the complexity of the music and the eerie expressive qualities. However, part of the pleasure we take in the work is an admiration of it for these qualities: a pleasure in “the experience of judging the work or the performance highly” (Walton, 1993, p. 504). We may admire a work for the way it soothes us, or excites us or provokes us, for the intellectual pleasures it affords, or the emotional ones, for the insight it provides or the manner in which it does so, for the way it enables us to escape the everyday cares of life, or the way it helps us face life, and so on and on. But none of these grounds itself constitutes the work’s aesthetic value. If we take pleasure in admiring the work for whatever we are admiring it for, then this pleasure is aesthetic. (Walton, 1993, p. 506) Later in his essay, Walton broadens his account such that it is not only pleasure that might be provoked by the objects capacity to engage us, but also attitudes such as awe, wonder, and even annoyance. 79

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 79

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Both Iseminger and Walton hold that the aesthetic experience (or “state of mind”) involves a reflective engagement: in Iseminger’s case, reflecting on the experience of some state of affairs and in Walton’s case, reflecting on the value of the capacity of some object to engage us. The doubts I have about the latter mirror those I had about the former. The first doubt is whether admiration of an object’s capacity to engage us is a necessary part of our aesthetic engagement with an object. Certainly, there is a contrast between our taking pleasure in a hot shower (Walton’s example of a Kantian pleasure of the agreeable) and our admiring its capacity to provide such a pleasure. However, a more usual contrast would be between taking pleasure in a hot shower, and being engrossed in a production of, for instance, Othello. One’s attention is riveted on the events as they unfold on the stage; filled with foreboding as Othello is duped by the unscrupulous Iago, and filled with horror when he eventually smothers his wife. The kind of reflective appreciation of the play’s capacity to engage us is not a necessary aspect of this experience; hence, if it is an instance of the aesthetic experience, Walton’s theory has not captured it. The second source of doubt is that Walton allows that our admiration for a work’s capacity to engage us might take place in the absence of our experience of the work. For example, I might admire the capacity of Duchamp’s Fountain to provide challenges, without my seeing (or indeed having seen) the work. Indeed, the problem is more general than that. Walton holds that we take pleasure in the object’s capacity to engage us. Like Iseminger’s account, this looks as if it would naturally be construed propositionally: taking pleasure in the fact that the object engages us. However, that removes the first-order engagement with the object entirely from the account, which is surely contrary to most people’s conception of the aesthetic (Budd, 2008). Neither of these doubts is likely to worry Walton, as, recall, he did not claim that his account captured everything that anyone had ever meant by the term “aesthetic experience.” They suggest, however, that the source of pleasure that he has identified is sufficiently far away from the core of the traditional concept for the debate to continue. I have focused on the phenomenological approach, as that has been dominant in the tradition. The content approach can be discussed more briefly. Noël Carroll has given a particularly deflationary account of the aesthetic experience. He contrasts the content approach with three others: “the affect-oriented approach” (which is roughly what I have meant by “the phenomenological approach”), “the epistemic approach” (that of Gary Iseminger) and “the axiological approach” (which takes the aesthetic experience to be one valued for its own sake) (Carroll, 2002, 2006). He takes the best argument for the content approach to be the failure of the other three (Carroll, 2006, p. 70). The account is as follows: The content-oriented theorist of aesthetic experience conjectures that if attention is directed with understanding to the form of the artwork, 80

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 80

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Aesthetic Experience

and/or to its expressive or aesthetic properties, and/or to the interaction between these features, and/or to the way in which the aforesaid factors modulate our response to the artwork, then the experience is aesthetic. (Carroll, 2006, p. 89) A disjunctive account is (obviously) not an account of a unified concept; hence, we are entitled to ask what it is that holds all the parts of this definition together. Carroll’s claim is that nothing does—at least, nothing but the contingencies of history: It is this mistaken prejudice [of thinking of aesthetics as a unity of sorts] that led the tradition to lump these things together under the rubric of objects of the aesthetic experience . . . [the content approach] continue[s] to regard them as a package only in the deflationary sense that they are a disjunctive enumeration of sufficient conditions for what has been nominally bequeathed to us under the title of aesthetic experience. (Carroll, 2006, p. 97) The account, then, is that the aesthetic experience is simply the experience of focusing on those things the tradition has bequeathed to us as being artistically important. This seems to me unnecessarily pessimistic, and I shall shortly come to one modest version of the axiological account that escapes Carroll’s criticisms. Before then, however, let us look at one further version of the content approach that is less deflationary. Jerrold Levinson attempts to distinguish the aesthetic pleasure we might take in an object from other sorts of reaction we might have to it. His characterization is as follows: “Pleasure in an object is aesthetic when it derives from apprehension of and reflection on the object’s individual character and content, both for itself and in relation to the structural basis on which it rests” (Levinson, 1996, p. 6). One puzzle with this account is why Levinson favors the conjunction. Surely there are instances of the aesthetic experience in which we do not reflect upon the relation between the content and its structural basis (Budd, 2008). Indeed, the conjunction is puzzling in itself: we apprehend the object’s individual character and content (1) for itself and (2) in relation to the structural basis on which it rests. This certainly includes the cognitive content; however, it is left unclear what it is to apprehend, for example, a political message “for itself,” as opposed to apprehending it to acquire political insight. Later in the essay, it looks less as if Levinson is arguing for a conjunction. Aesthetic pleasure is contrasted with the acquisition of insight, and characterized as “[an] appreciation of the manner in which, the work being viewed in its proper historical context, these are embodied in and communicated by the work’s specific elements and organization” (Levinson, 1996, p. 7). This makes it look as if what is characteristic of aesthetic pleasure is our focusing on the way the cognitions are embodied in 81

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 81

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the work’s elements and organization, regardless of what those contents are. In short, Levinson either owes us more of an account of what it is to apprehend cognitions “for themselves,” or he owes us an account of why our appreciation of the way in which the cognitions (no matter what the content in question) are embodied should be thought distinctively aesthetic. There are good reasons to think we need to be somewhat deflationary. While it is true that the claim that “the aesthetic experience” names some mental type with a distinctive phenomenology is unwarranted, the content account seems to me unduly deflationary. Malcolm Budd has suggested a simple and elegant account, which stands somewhat in the tradition of Kant. I shall give this in two steps, first by focusing on his account of the experience of art, and then more narrowly on aesthetics. Budd holds that “a work of art is valuable as art if it is such that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable” (Budd, 1995, p. 5). “Intrinsic” is here contrasted with “instrumental,” rather than with “extrinsic,” and “the experience a work offers” is to be understood as “the experience of interacting with it in whatever way it demands if it is to be understood” (p. 4). As there are indefinitely many ways in which our experience of works of art could be intrinsically valuable, the “phenomenological approach” is undermined. I shall deal with two criticisms of this approach before moving to the second step. The first is that locating the value in the experience to which the works give rise renders the works instrumentally rather than intrinsically valuable. However, this is a misunderstanding. The claim is that what it is for a work to possess intrinsic value is for it to be of such a nature that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable; it is claim about the value of the work (Budd, 2007, p. 363). The second criticism questions the notion of locating the value of a work of art in an intrinsically valuable experience. That is, we can bring an argument Noël Carroll uses against the axiological approach to see if it applies to Budd. Carroll asks whether, to be valuable, the experience needs to be “objectively valuable for its own sake” or “subjectively valuable for its own sake.” He interprets the first as entailing that the experience “possesses no instrumental value whatsoever,” and, of course, has no problem in casting doubt on there being any such experiences (Carroll, 2006, p. 83). He dismisses the second by considering two people listening to the same piece of music. The only difference between them is that one believes his experience to be valuable for its own sake, and the other believes it to be instrumentally valuable. There are, argues Carroll, no grounds for claiming that the former and not the latter are having an aesthetic experience (2006, pp. 85–6). Clearly, this argument does not damage Budd’s position. His claim is that the work is valuable if it is of such a nature that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable, which is compatible both with the experience also being instrumentally valuable and with someone believing the experience to be instrumentally valuable.

82

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 82

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

The Aesthetic Experience

Budd himself finds the notion of “aesthetic experience” to be “nebulous” and “unclear,” preferring instead to deal with notions such as “aesthetic value” and “aesthetic property” (2008, p. 29). However, the claim that something is valuable if it is of such a nature that the experience it offers (i.e., an experience of interacting with it in such a way it demands if it is to be understood) is intrinsically valuable can be at most a necessary and not sufficient condition for aesthetic value. It would cover, for example, sporting contests. In giving his account of aesthetic pleasure, Budd draws on considerations characteristic of the content approach: First, a minimal conception of aesthetic pleasure: aesthetic pleasure is nonpropositional pleasure taken in the character of an item as experienced in perception and/or imagination. Second, a conception that discriminates against purely sensory pleasure: the minimal conception bolstered by the condition that the pleasure must be taken in the apparent relations among the elements of the item—in a pattern, for example—and/or in the item’s apparent higher-order properties as they are realised in the item. Third, a conception that allows into the aesthetic only those arts that address a specific sensory mode (or a number of such modes): the enhanced conception reinforced by the condition that if the item is a work of art, it must be of a kind that addresses a particular sensory mode (or set of modes). Fourth, a conception that takes on board the distinction between aesthetic and artistic properties of works of art: the enhanced conception strengthened by the condition that if the higher-order properties are properties of a work of art, then they must be directly detectable as realised in the work itself. (2008, p. 26) One further amendment completes the view. As we have seen, Budd does not think pleasure is adequate to the task of providing the grounds for value. Hence, in the above quotation, “pleasure” should be seen as a place holder for “the rewards intrinsic to experiencing a work of art with understanding” (Budd, 2008, p. 28). This, I think, is a defensible account of aesthetic experience.

83

9781847063700_Ch05_Final_txt_print.indd 83

2/27/2012 10:30:09 AM

6

Aesthetic Properties Elisabeth Schellekens

1. Philosophy and Methodology 1.1 Aesthetics or metaphysics? In comparison with philosophical questions such as “What is beauty?” or “Why is aesthetic value important to us?,” the subject of the metaphysics of aesthetic qualities might seem rather peripheral or secondary. For how, one might wonder, could a study of this topic bring us any closer to understanding the aesthetic, what it means to us, and the role it can play in our lives? In this vein, one might think that the way properties such as elegance, garishness, and harmony exist should not be conceived as the concern of philosophers working in aesthetics but rather seen as a fundamental challenge posed in the context of traditional metaphysics. After all, if aesthetic qualities are to be accounted for in dispositional terms, say, or even as mind-independent facts, it is surely the metaphysicians who are the best placed to argue the toss? And indeed, many philosophers principally interested in metaphysics and epistemology have, over the years, dipped their toes into the murky waters surrounding aesthetic properties.1 Among the first questions to arise when we philosophize about the aesthetic, then, is whether a theory of aesthetic qualities is best provided by philosophers of aesthetics or of metaphysics. Clearly, the approach one takes to this question will depend directly on what one understands the aims of aesthetics to be. Interpreted broadly as the study of aesthetic or artistic value in general, philosophical aesthetics sets out to tackle any issue or concern that may derive from undergoing experiences with aesthetic content or of engaging with things (such as artworks) that may induce such experiences. Attempting to come to grips with the kind of quality that lies at the heart of aesthetic experience, and that sets it apart from other kinds of experiences, would seem to be an integral part of such an examination. However, even when understood strictly in terms of the philosophy of art—primarily targeting questions such as the expression of emotion in music, or the content of pictorial representation, or the role of authorial intention in fiction and poetry—aesthetics can neither simply overlook the difficult question of the ontology of artworks themselves (perhaps, particularly of musical pieces and literary works), nor ignore 84

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 84

2/27/2012 10:30:13 AM

Aesthetic Properties

that of the properties in virtue of which we value those works. Whichever way we look at it, then, it seems that the philosophy of aesthetic properties cannot be isolated from the field in which they matter most.

1.2 Two concerns: Ontological and epistemological Aesthetics targets things that matter to us in at least two ways. First, aesthetic and artistic experiences yield pleasure and enjoyment, such as when we look at a painting that we find particularly delightful and beautiful. Second, such experiences mean something to us, something important that can be shared, widely appreciated, capable of withstanding the test of time and of touching us at the very heart of our humanity. Correspondingly, there seem to be two sides to the coin here: facing one way is a highly subject-relative kind of satisfaction based on one’s own associations, memories, or individual psychology; facing the other is a powerful normative force that aspires well beyond the sphere of the purely personal. David Hume captures this dual nature of the aesthetic well when he writes in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” that “[a]mong a thousand different opinions which different men may entertain on the same subject, there is one, and but one, that is just and true.” For “[w]hoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton . . . would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.” Nevertheless, he continues, it is also the case that “a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right; because no sentiment represents what is really in the object.”2 It follows, for Hume, that beauty cannot actually be ascribed to the object that gives rise to the feeling of beauty, for “[t]o seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter.”3 Beauty, then, “is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”4 The philosophical problem highlighted by this passage takes several expressions. In the first place, it suggests that while the normative scope we tend to attribute to aesthetic assessments is not unlike the one we grant ordinary judgments, at least some aesthetic judgments seem to consist in little more than the expression of personal preference and emotional disposition. In the second place, there seems to be a tension between, on the one hand, our individual experiences and natural inclination to ascribe that which those experiences are of to the things around us, and, on the other hand, the claim that aesthetic qualities cannot be said to pertain to these objects themselves. Two principal concerns thus arise. At the ontological level, we may ask exactly how aesthetic properties should be said to exist in the world, and in 85

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 85

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

what relations they stand to other kinds of properties. At the epistemological level, we may query how we should conceive of the scope of aesthetic attributions and judgments and, moreover, how the ontological challenge impacts on the epistemological one. Whereas the doctrine known as “realism” propounds the idea that there is a significant sense in which aesthetic qualities can be said to exist in the world external to our minds, and, generally, that aesthetic judgments can be correct or incorrect (cognitivism), “anti-realism” holds that aesthetic qualities are not “real” in a metaphysically substantial sense, and, again generally, that aesthetic judgments—to be understood as expressions of our emotional responses—cannot aspire to objectivity or correctness (noncognitivism).5 The terms “realism” and “anti-realism” thus are taken to have both ontological and epistemological implications and, as such, present us not merely with a theory about aesthetic properties but, rather, a comprehensive philosophical outlook about aesthetic value in general.

2. Individuation and Categorization Setting out on a study of aesthetic properties would appear to presuppose some conceptual grasp of what the term “aesthetic” properly applies to, and some insight into what distinguishes aesthetic properties from other kinds of properties.6 Obvious though this may seem, it is far from being entirely clear that we always know exactly which properties are straightforwardly aesthetic and which are not. Are there not many different kinds of aesthetic properties and, if so, what unites them all? Prompted by a consideration of the diversity and heterogeneity of aesthetic qualities, several philosophers have put forward suggestions as to how they may be better understood by being grouped in distinct classes. In this way, aesthetic qualities have been described as falling under one of the following headings: emotional qualities (“sad”); behavior qualities (“daring” or “restrained”); evocative or reaction qualities (“moving” or “stirring”); formal qualities (“unified” or “balanced”); and taste qualities (“beautiful”).7 To these, representational properties (“realistic”), second-order perceptual properties (“vivid”), and historically related properties (“original”) have been added.8 Articulating these divisions and introducing a more specialized terminology undoubtedly allows us to make greater sense of the differences that prevail among aesthetic qualities both in terms of content and applicability. For while some aesthetic properties are more closely linked to feelings and emotions (“sad”), others are less so (“original”). Again, while certain aesthetic properties contain a good dose of descriptive content (“vivid”) others seem not to (“moving”). In short, it seems fair to claim that without some sense of how this manifold of aesthetic predicates differ from one another, we can only gain a 86

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 86

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

Aesthetic Properties

relatively impoverished notion of the aesthetic character of the object of appreciation and the relation we hold to it. Having said that, this advance—gained through enhancing our understanding of the diversity of the aesthetic—may come at the price of being able to determine a unified theory. Is there, in fact, anything to unite these different properties, or is the term “aesthetic” simply answerable to nothing more systematic than habitual usage? One common response to this question has been to assume that aesthetic value at its purest is more or less synonymous with beauty—that being beautiful is a hallmark of the aesthetic. Yet this view seems to run aground when we consider the distinctions outlined above. For these suggest that being beautiful is only one kind of aesthetic property, and one which a thing, person, or event can appear to possess without thereby also necessarily having any of the other aesthetic qualities listed above (e.g., vivacity, originality, or restraint). Similarly, it would be wrong to presume that pleasure by itself could serve a similar unifying role, since not all aesthetic qualities are emotional qualities, let alone ones associated with or able to give rise to positive emotions (e.g., “sad” or “melancholy”). These preliminary conclusions thus lead us straight back to where we began. For if we can’t find a common denominator for the various properties we think of as aesthetic, does it really make sense to continue invoking the umbrella term? One way of overcoming this persistent problem is to adopt a philosophical framework by which the common denominator of aesthetic properties is, roughly, the way in which they give rise to a reaction or response in the subjects of aesthetic experience. This strategy rests on shifting the locus of the aesthetic from the object of aesthetic appreciation to the subject of experience, and thus to fundamentally recast the way in which aesthetic character is to be understood—moving away from the things to which we tend to ascribe the properties in question toward the effect they have on us. The ensuing metaphysics, in some ways surprisingly undemanding and uncomplicated, will need no stronger unifying factor than the one afforded by our own responses.

3. The Anti-Realist Argument Aesthetic anti-realism centers around the claim that aesthetic properties are, fundamentally, not external to our minds but intimately connected to the expression of our preferences, emotions, feelings, and convictions. As such, they are not part of the reality of the external world, so to speak, but rooted in the responses and dispositions of the subjects of experience. While some antirealists hold that aesthetic judgments are nothing over and above exclamations of our own affective reactions, others defend more sophisticated versions of 87

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 87

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the doctrine according to which those responses are not mere expressions of a purely personal nature, but can also be subjected to generally applicable normative standards.9 In addition to the problem of the heterogeneity of aesthetic properties, three main concerns motivate aesthetic anti-realism.10

3.1 The relativity of aesthetic taste Picking up on the great variety of taste that Hume describes so aptly in the opening of his seminal essay, anti-realists emphasize not only the relativity of aesthetic taste and the irregularity with which aesthetic character is perceived,11 but also the impossibility of an agreement or conformity sufficiently solid to warrant any genuine claims to objectivity. Echoing Hume’s view that “[o]ne person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty” and that in any case “each mind perceives a different beauty,” Alan Goldman argues that aesthetic judgments are so “seriously relative to tastes” that “even ideally situated viewers” will often “fail to share aesthetic judgments.”12 That is to say, even those particularly well placed to exercise aesthetic discernment and assess aesthetic character (i.e., those of us who have plenty of relevant experience and a duly developed aesthetic sensibility) often fall short of reaching the same conclusion. As John Bender writes, “[s]ome disagreements are fully informed but just as fully irresolvable, as when two expert critics disagree whether a given painting is playful or merely trite, daring in its color treatments or merely gaudy, serious or only self-absorbed, and so forth.”13 Importantly, the concern here is not limited to the observation that aesthetic taste and perception differs from one person or culture to the next, somehow restricting the relativity of aesthetic taste to intersubjective relations. The relativity that challenges realist intuitions and convictions equally affects the same subject at different times, so that a subject may find a painting beautiful or elegant at a time T1 but not at T2 (even where the time-span between T1 and T2 is very short). This point makes room not only for the gradual development of our aesthetic taste, but also for cases where we quite straightforwardly change our mind about something’s aesthetic character, perhaps by having our attention drawn to certain less obvious features that influence our overall assessment of the object of appreciation. This relativity of perception, response, and assessment, together with the accompanying malleable nature of aesthetic matters, lies at the heart of the antirealist position, and is said to impose certain philosophical restrictions on what our aesthetic experiences can truly be said to lay claim to.

88

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 88

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

Aesthetic Properties

3.2 The ontological status of aesthetic properties A closely related source of concern that drives anti-realism has to do with the metaphysical status of aesthetic properties. For if there is considerable aesthetic disagreement and the relativity of taste is indeed pervasive in the aesthetic sphere, it not only follows that aesthetic disagreements are fundamentally insurmountable, but the outcome must also be that, to use Hume’s words again, “[b]eauty . . . exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”14 Aesthetic disagreement, it is held, can only be explained by the fact that aesthetic properties are not objective features and, as such, seem to have a rather questionable ontology. Now if, as anti-realists hold, the best explanation of aesthetic disagreement is that there is no such thing as an aesthetic fact of the matter, or nothing on the basis of which it can be established whether a certain thing really is beautiful, graceful, unbalanced, or moving, what kind of ontology is still available? In other words, once the possibility of realism and objectivity has been discarded, how are we to account for aesthetic properties at all? Many anti-realists endorse an analogy with colors, smells, and tastes, or secondary qualities. Famously, such qualities are to be contrasted with primary qualities (such as size, mass, and shape) in virtue of their dispositional nature. On this analogy, then, an aesthetic property is a disposition (grounded in less controversial subvening properties) to give rise to certain responses in ideal critics. In other words, to say that an object O has an aesthetic property P is to say that “O is such as to elicit a response of kind R in ideal viewers of kind V in virtue of its more basic properties B.”15 Aesthetic properties are thus tied to our responses in so far as what it is for a property to be aesthetic is, precisely, to be such as to give rise to R in V. Aesthetic properties are then also relational properties in so far as their manifestation or realization is dependent upon our responses to them. In this sense, one can say that anti-realism casts the ontology of aesthetic properties in such a way that its remit is necessarily limited to the sphere of the subject. This parsimonious ontology goes hand in hand with an epistemology less than hopeful about any cognitive aspirations that aesthetic judgments may harbor.

3.3 The epistemology of aesthetic attributions The third concern fuelling aesthetic anti-realism has to do with the epistemological ramifications of the subjectivist framework and the philosophical reach, so to speak, of aesthetic descriptions. On this position, aesthetic ascriptions or aesthetic property attributions refer to affective states rather than belief states.

89

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 89

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

As Roger Scruton puts it, aesthetic descriptions don’t assert that a certain state of mind is justified but, rather, give direct expression to that state of mind itself.16 In other words, aesthetic judgments don’t aim to make claims about states of affairs in the world so much as to reflect some of our reactions to (other) features of that world. Obviously, this conception of aesthetic attributions fits neatly into the alternative ontology outlined above: if aesthetic disagreement is insuperable and aesthetic properties are not external to our minds, the scope and applicability of aesthetic descriptions is, at best, severely reduced. How, then, are we to conceive of aesthetic judgments, and what kind of truth-conditions do they allow for, if indeed any?17 First, anti-realist accounts of aesthetic attributions assume that the affective nature of the responses involved in aesthetic descriptions rule out any substantial truth-conditions of the kind that descriptions statable in belief terms can uphold. That is to say, since aesthetic judgments are to be understood in terms of non-doxastic responses and such responses don’t set out to capture or map out something in the external world (as most ordinary beliefs do), aesthetic judgments cannot aspire to truth or correctness (in the way that most ordinary judgments can).18 To capture this weaker mandate in philosophical terms, anti-realists tend to replace talk of truth-conditions by that of acceptability-conditions. This maneuver seeks to sidestep any difficulties that might arise from allowing aesthetic judgments to be epistemologically too demanding for the metaphysics to follow suit. Secondly, and on the more sophisticated anti-realist approach alluded to above, aesthetic attributions can be said to express a non-doxastic response itself held accountable to a normative standard. On this kind of view one is, to use John Bender’s words, not “seeing how the work is as much as one is seeing the work under a certain aspect, and responding appropriately.”19 It is the affective or emotional response in terms of which the aesthetic judgment is to be explained, then, that must be held accountable to certain measures of suitability. These measures, although falling short of the criteria for ordinary truth or falsity, are nonetheless said to have a normative authority sufficiently strong to present a viable alternative to realism and cognitivism. These three themes constitute the backbone of aesthetic anti-realist doctrine. How, if at all, can these concerns be addressed? Before examining the realist rejoinder, it will be helpful to bear in mind that realists don’t actively set out to reject all aspects of aesthetic experience that pose the problems outlined above, namely, the relativity of aesthetic taste, the problematic ontology of aesthetic properties, and the limited epistemological authority of aesthetic judgments. Rather, in general, it is argued that these worries don’t have quite such pervasive or devastating ontological and epistemological implications as their opponents assume.

90

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 90

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

Aesthetic Properties

4. The Realist Argument Aesthetic realism encompasses a host of theories united by their commitment to the claim that aesthetic properties are part of the external world and that aesthetic judgments can aspire to a substantial form of objectivity. To use Nick Zangwill’s words, “[t]he ‘minimal’ claim of aesthetic realism is that there are mind-independent aesthetic facts or states of affairs—where a mind-independent aesthetic fact or state of affairs is a structured entity, consisting of an object or event which possesses a mind-independent aesthetic property”20 (2000, p. 595). While the majority of realists defend the view that aesthetic properties are “in the world” in a way that doesn’t rule out the active participation of our responses,21 others underline the ontological similarities that prevail between aesthetic properties and less puzzling qualities (such as primary qualities or the theoretical properties that figure in the natural sciences22).

4.1 Demystifying the aesthetic The conviction that aesthetic matters are considerably less problematic than anti-realists would have us believe is the starting point of realist strategy. First, the relativity of taste is held to be neither as insidious nor as fatal to the possibility of realism, objectivism, and cognitivism as one might think. For even if we exaggerate the rate of discord in aesthetic matters (there is, after all, a considerable degree of agreement about which artworks are considered excellent, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or which landscapes are thought particularly beautiful, such as the view from the Mont Blanc), it doesn’t follow from that disagreement that there is not in all cases something to agree upon in actual fact. In other words, the mere occurrence of discrepancy of opinion doesn’t in and of itself settle that concurrence isn’t possible by virtue of there being something external to perceivers that they can agree upon. Moreover, many aesthetic disagreements are shown to rest on idiosyncrasies less concerned with establishing something’s aesthetic character than with reflecting one’s own attachments and past experiences.23 Second, a realist ontology of aesthetic properties need be neither enigmatic nor awkward. Aesthetic properties—be they more or less mind-independent or more or less value-laden—are, fundamentally, perceptual properties. As such, they operate in roughly the same way as other perceptual properties: by depending on intricate relations with our perceptual responses, aesthetic properties are relational or response-dependent by nature. Helping himself to an analogy frequently used by anti-realists, Frank Sibley compares aesthetic qualities to color properties in this respect and develops an argument to the

91

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 91

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

effect that if we don’t worry about being objectivists and cognitivists about the latter, there is no need to trouble ourselves on this score over the former either.24 On this line, then, and as we shall soon see in greater detail, something like a dispositional account of aesthetic properties is actually available to realists and anti-realists alike.

4.2 Accepting the phenomenal nature of aesthetic properties Contrary to what one might expect, then, most realist accounts grant that responses, perceptions and phenomenal impressions play an important role in the ontology and epistemology of aesthetic properties and judgments. Aesthetic properties are alternatively described as “essentially perceptual,”25 fundamentally dependent on sensory responses,26 and even to be conceived as “higher-order ways of appearing.”27 Rather than letting this aspect of the aesthetic single-handedly settle the overarching debate in favor of anti-realism, realists thus hold that admitting these dependence-relations leaves the metaphysical question wide open. Although beauty may to this limited extent be said “in part [to] be in the eye of the beholder”—in so far as “‘beauty’ refers in part to the experience of some subjects”—beauty is certainly not “simply in the eye of the beholder.”28 In other words, they are decidedly not to be accounted for in anti-realist terms. According to a particularly influential realist theory developed by Jerrold Levinson, the content of aesthetic properties and the predicates we use to ascribe them can be divided into two parts: one descriptive and one evaluative.29 Whereas the first affords phenomenal or perceptual impressions that arise in normal perceivers under normal circumstances and can be shared by all, the second is more closely connected to our axiological commitments and affective reactions and, as such, allows for the variety and relativity of aesthetics tastes and sensibilities that may seem so threatening to the realist cause. By accepting the phenomenal nature of aesthetic properties and using it as the cornerstone of their account, realists thus not only make room for some anti-realist intuitions and charges at the level of the ontology of aesthetic properties, but also with regards to aesthetic appreciation and judgment-making.

4.3 Strengthening the epistemic authority of aesthetic judgments The ramifications of this modernized realist metaphysics are both wide-ranging and profound. Perhaps most importantly, the suggestion that realism can make room for the response-dependent nature of aesthetic properties revives the idea that aesthetic judgments can be correct or incorrect or, to use Mary Mothersill’s words, can be “genuine judgements”30 capable of truth or falsity. Although the 92

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 92

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

Aesthetic Properties

ontology of such properties may not be quite as robust as that of primary qualities, say, they depend upon non-aesthetic features in a way that strengthens the realist’s case by enabling appeal to all sorts of (less controversial) properties in support of our aesthetic assessments. And these appeals, it is held, form a perfectly respectable base for justifying aesthetic judgments.31 So, just as the elegance of a portrait by Modigliani depends upon the curve of the lines tracing the face, the palette of colors used to draw it, and the shapes formed by the contrasting tones, so the judgment that this portrait is elegant is grounded on those lines, colors, and shapes, and can lay claim to correctness in virtue of them.32 There are, then, ways of adjudicating disputes about whether a certain aesthetic attribution can rightly be made of some object of appreciation even though the tools available to us in this process call for more than mere reports of individual pleasures (or pains).33 To use Nick Zangwill’s words, realists “are not in danger of losing the idea of correctness in aesthetic judgment, given that correctness is relativized to sensory experiences.”34

5. The Current State of the Debate It is instructive to note that neither realism nor anti-realism in aesthetics are currently understood as purely metaphysical theories concerned solely with the ontological status and character of aesthetic properties. As we have seen, the debate impinges upon a wealth of epistemological and psychological concerns that have to do with the processes leading up to and proceeding from the perception, experience, and ascription of aesthetic properties. If only for this reason, our answer to the initial question about the kind of philosophical inquiry best suited to an examination of aesthetic properties should now be clear: matters of meta-aesthetics are firmly lodged within our discipline partly in virtue of encompassing such a multitude of issues centered around the broader notions of aesthetic value and experience. It is also the case that something of a rapprochement may be observed to have taken place between both sides of the debate of late.35 Whichever way one’s inclinations fall, it is fair to say that anti-realists have become more demanding with regard to the cognitivist ambitions of aesthetic judgments, and realists have, as we have seen, become more accommodating with regards to the response-dependent nature of aesthetic properties. Indeed, even for anti-realists wedded to the view that aesthetic judgments must be explained in terms of projections of our emotions and feelings onto the world, there can be normative requirements aiming to get, in the words of Cain Todd, “other people to look at, and then hopefully experience, the object in the same or relevantly similar way to oneself and vice versa” where “such experiences will not be arbitrary or whimsical.”36 93

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 93

2/27/2012 10:30:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

In many respects, then, the opposition between realism and anti-realism is considerably less polarized than one might assume. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the most significant bones of contention between the two camps pertain to the wider ramifications of some of the tenets crucially adhered to by both parties rather than those tenets themselves. The overwhelmingly mutual commitment to the notions of response-dependence or supervenience, for example, is noticeably less controversial than what realists and anti-realists respectively take those notions to imply. What is in question, in other words, is not so much certain particular ways of describing and characterizing the perception and ascription of aesthetic qualities, as the degree to which we should genuinely commit ourselves to them and, moreover, precisely what we should take those commitments to mean. The realism advocated by Levinson has it that aesthetic properties are “higher-order ways of appearing, dependent in a systematic fashion on lowerorder ways of appearing but not conceptually tied to them or deducible from them.” It follows that a sculpture, say, is delicate “in virtue of its dimensions and contours.”37 And this, as we have already touched on, enables a realism like Levinson’s to make sense of the one aspect of Hume’s dilemma—by incorporating grounding features that can be appealed to in aesthetic justification (despite not standing in inferential relations to aesthetic features), the cognitivist commitment is strengthened without abandoning the independence of aesthetic perception and judgment. What is more, such a realism demystifies the aesthetic by actually taking on board some of its most problematic features (rather than ignoring or denying them). Finally, by allowing for both a descriptive and an evaluative component, Levinson’s account of aesthetic properties renders them capable of reaching out to both conflicting intuitions—that is, the relativity of aesthetic taste and the normative force of aesthetic judgments—that we started off with, thereby offering an inclusive resolution of our paradox. Despite the progress made on the realist front, it seems to me that three charges in particular would need to be answered in greater detail if those sympathetic to aesthetic anti-realism are to be swayed. In a first instance, a more comprehensive picture will have to be painted of the proposed partition into the evaluative aspects of aesthetic properties and predicates on the one hand, and the descriptive on the other. For not only do questions arise about exactly how this division is to be drawn, there is also the more general issue of whether aesthetic properties can, as a matter of principle, be composed of two distinct elements the precise relation between which is not always entirely transparent.38 A second possible charge consists in the claim that what appear to be significant concessions to anti-realism on the part of Levinson are such that one might wonder why it remains necessary to retain both the label “realism”

94

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 94

2/27/2012 10:30:15 AM

Aesthetic Properties

and its concomitant nomenclature of aesthetic properties at all. As Derek Matravers writes: “there seem insufficient grounds to postulate aesthetic properties, above and beyond what is admitted by almost all parties to the debate, namely, justifiable aesthetic descriptions, on the one hand, and manifest aesthetic responses, on the other. For non-aesthetic perceptible properties [it could be argued] . . . is all we need to explain satisfactorily the phenomena of aesthetic life.”39 In other words, the connotations of aesthetic realism might well be superfluous to the actual content of the theory. Levinson defends himself against this charge by maintaining that, as outlined above, the “higher-order ways of appearing” in terms of which aesthetic properties are to be analyzed are not reducible to “lower-order ways of appearing,” and, therefore, require a separate conceptual analysis. Nonetheless, in order to convince anti-realists who value an economical ontology over the more complex one proffered by realists such as Levinson, the theory would appear to require some further fleshing out. A third, perhaps more overarching, worry lies in the kind of notion that Levinson’s realism relies upon to yield a shareable impression in which the objectivity of aesthetic experience and judgment can be grounded. For the descriptive element that, according to Levinson, we can all partake in and agree upon is exactly the kind of notion—namely, a phenomenal impression— that anti-realists single out as necessitating a subjectivist epistemology and an anti-realist metaphysics. According to an anti-realist like Alan Goldman, “[a] property is real in the relevant sense if the truth of its ascription is independent of the subject’s evidence and system of beliefs. It is possible for one to make an error about the presence of a real property despite its appearing to be present and despite one’s beliefs in its presence cohering with other beliefs. If aesthetic qualities are real properties of objects, then there must be some distinction between how they appear and how they are.”40 It is this latter charge, perhaps, that might sound the most daunting to the ears of aesthetic realists.41 While many advances have been made on the topic of aesthetic properties in the last decade or so, many questions remain to be further explored, such as the ones raised above. Clearly, our discussion will continue to be influenced by work being done in other areas of philosophy on properties in general, that is to say, on how different kinds of properties are linked to another, what relations they hold to concepts, and how we are to categorize properties, if indeed at all, and so on. In any case, if it is true that the accounts of aesthetic realists and anti-realists alike are beginning to converge, there seem to be genuine grounds for optimism in respect of aligning our understanding of aesthetic properties and their problematic ontology and epistemology with our rich but often conflicting intuitions about the aesthetic sphere more generally.

95

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 95

2/27/2012 10:30:15 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

See, for example, Ayer (1936), Hampshire (1954), McDowell (1983). Hume, 1965. Hume, 1965, p. 6. Hume, 1965, p. 7. It is important to note that realism does not necessarily imply cognitivism, nor antirealism non-cognitivism. For more on the interrelationships between these doctrines, see Schellekens (2008). There is also the question of how, if at all, one can distinguish between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. Frank Sibley has famously suggested that aesthetic qualities are those that require the exercise of taste or aesthetic sensibility. However, as Ted Cohen and others have pointed out, “for every purportedly aesthetic term it is possible to find applications that require no particularly aesthetic aptitude” (1973, and see also Bender (2001)). A more unusual line is that taken by Marcia Muelder Eaton (1994). For Eaton, any physical property (such as being yellow) can also be an aesthetic property, “provided only that it is an intrinsic property of an object . . . and is culturally identified as a property worthy of attention” (in Bender, 2001, p. 81). Hermerén, 1988. Goldman, 1995. See McDowell (1985), Wiggins (1998). To be precise, it’s not the diversity in itself that fuels anti-realism, but, rather, what it suggests about the possibility of the significant meaning of aesthetic qualities. Hume, 1965. Goldman, 1995, pp. 36–9. Preceded by: “Among the many and variously caused types of aesthetic disagreement, there are some at least which cannot be explained by citing a lack of attention, care, knowledge, sensitivity, openness, or taste on the part of at least one of the disputants” (Bender, 1996, p. 371). Hume, 1965, p. 7. Goldman, 1995, p. 21. Scruton, 1982, p. 48. Wright, 1980. Some anti-realists claim to be able to have both. See, for example, Todd (2004). Bender, 2001, p. 86. Zangwill, 2000, p. 595. Levinson, 1994, 2001, and 2005. Zemach, 1991 and 1997. It can, at least at times, be easy to conflate one’s own personal preferences (such as liking a certain artist or artistic theme because one associates it with positive events in the past) with more general assessments of aesthetic character (such as gaining pleasure from the work of a specific artist because of its overall aesthetic worth). For more on the distinction between the merely agreeable and aesthetic pleasure, see Kant (2000). Sibley, 1968. See also Pettit (1983). Pettit, 1983. Zangwill, 2000, p. 618. To be precise, Zangwill argues that aesthetic properties are “non-rigidly response-dependent” on sensory responses (rather than on pleasures or displeasures). Levinson, 2001 and 2005. Eaton, 1994. Levinson, 1994, 2001, and 2005.

96

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 96

2/27/2012 10:30:15 AM

Aesthetic Properties 30. See Mothersill, 1989. 31. See Schellekens, 2006. 32. Zangwill, 2001, p. 341: “[T]here are good reasons to accept a realist account according to which aesthetic properties are mind-independent properties that are realized in ordinary non-aesthetic properties of things. So, for example, the beauty of a rose is realized in the specific arrangement and colors of its petals, leaves, stem, and so on. And our aesthetic judgments are true when they ascribe to things the mindindependent aesthetic properties that they do in fact have.” 33. See Eaton, 1994. 34. Zangwill, 2000, p. 617. 35. For more on this, see Schellekens (2008). 36. Todd, 2004, p. 288. 37. Levinson, 2005, pp. 342–3. 38. For more on a similar point, see Bender (2001, pp. 93–4). 39. Matravers, 2005. 40. Goldman, 1995, pp. 26–7. 41. For a good discussion of some further difficulties for Levinson’s realism, see Matravers (2005) and Levinson (2005).

97

9781847063700_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 97

2/27/2012 10:30:15 AM

7

Aesthetic and Artistic Value Sondra Bacharach and James Harold

1. Introduction What makes artworks valuable? Most philosophers have offered two general sorts of answers to this question. Either they have tried to explicate the value of art in terms of its moral and political value, or they have attempted to describe a sui generis mode of evaluation—aesthetic evaluation—for judging the value of artworks. Recent developments have complicated matters somewhat, but these central ways of thinking remain dominant. Throughout this article, we will focus our discussion on one well-known and controversial work of art: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rally sponsored by the Nazis. It is just as well known for Riefenstahl’s pioneering and innovative artistic film techniques, for which the film won numerous awards (including the gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale), as it is for the disturbing glorification of Hitler, the Nazi party, and all of the immoral values for which the party stood. As a result, there is a tension in our assessment of the film: on the one hand, this film is crafted with careful attention to artistic qualities—the film’s structure, the formal visual representations, and the aesthetic features. It is one of the first films to exploit film’s formal qualities, by alternating different images—of light and dark, of the army and women and children, of the masses and crowds and the one leader. For these reasons, it is taken to be one of the most aesthetically important films. On the other hand, the film is immoral in its flagrantly positive portrayal of Hitler and the Nazi regime, and notorious for its endorsement of the cult of Hitler and the passive obedience of the masses. For these reasons, it is also a paradigmatically immoral work—a work that embodies both the actual evil of Hitler and the Nazi regime, as well as the grandiose and positive image endorsed by the movie of Hitler and the Nazi regime. One question for any theory of the value of art is how well it can handle a case like this. (For a more detailed philosophical discussion of this case, see Deveraux (1998).)

98

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 98

2/27/2012 10:30:18 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

2. What Sort of Value Does Art Have? Like any artifact, works of art can have various kinds of value. They can have economic value, historical value, instrumental value, sentimental value, and many other kinds. Sculptures make good doorstops and paintings can be sound financial investments. But our philosophical interest in art’s value is especially focused on the types of evaluation that have to do with something’s being an artwork, not a doorstop or an investment. Three candidates for art-specific values are moral, aesthetic, and cognitive.

2.1 Art’s moral and political value The idea that we can measure the value of art using moral standards was widespread in the ancient world; for example, in the ancient Chinese philosophical tradition, it was widely accepted that music should be judged by moral criteria (Mozi, 2001/fifth century BCE; Xunzi, 1994/third century BCE). Plato is the best-known Western thinker taking up this view (Plato, 2004/~380 BCE). Though Plato lacked a concept corresponding to our concept of art, he did discuss mimesis (imitative practices) at length, and he was particularly concerned about poetry. Some of Plato’s arguments against poetry in the Republic presuppose that if poetry makes people vicious, then poetry is bad. Plato attempts to demonstrate that poetry may have deleterious effects on the listener’s moral character, and that these effects of poetry are the primary measure of its value. Thus, Plato endorses not just a moral standard for evaluating poetry, but a consequentialist moral standard (a topic we will return to below). However, there are contrary strands in Plato as well. Some of Plato’s arguments against poetry and other imitative practices depend not on a moral standard but an epistemic one. That painting is of objects, which themselves are mere imitations of true “forms,” shows that painting cannot be a reliable source of knowledge. While this has moral consequences, it is also independently important: paintings lack cognitive value, and this reduces their worth. Another contrary strand in Plato is his discussion of the beautiful or the noble (kalon) in dialogues like the Symposium and the Hippias Major. Plato argues that there is a “form” of Beauty, and that this form is not reducible to any other form (except in the sense in which all forms depend on the form of the Good). So Plato holds that beauty is a distinct and valuable kind, not to be identified with any moral virtue. However, this view has little application to his views about poetry and painting, since kalon is used to describe human life more often than it is used to describe artifacts. (See Nehamas (1998) for more details.)

99

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 99

2/27/2012 10:30:18 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

In aesthetics, Plato is remembered primarily for his evaluation of poetry in strictly moral terms, and so is seen as the forerunner of a tradition that seeks to reduce the value of art to moral value. The idea of reduction is important: if one has a complete account of a work’s moral value, then there is nothing left to say about the artwork’s value. This view is sometimes called “strong moralism” (Carroll, 1996). The first advantage of moral evaluation is its simplicity. If this view is right, there is no need to spell out some sui generis realm of value and to explain whence it arises and how it differs from moral value. Morality is mysterious enough; a realm of values distinct from moral ones and yet opaque to scientific scrutiny would raise serious metaphysical and epistemological difficulties. The second advantage of the moral view is that it explains the natural affinity between the attitudes and language that we use in evaluating art, and the attitudes and language involved in evaluating actions and people. It is no accident, according to the moral view, that we sometimes speak of an admirable person as having a “beautiful soul”—terms of praise and blame in art and in life overlap considerably (Gaut, 2007, pp. 114–27). For many years, however, the moral tradition was neglected, discussed mainly by opponents looking to distance themselves from a view they take to be antediluvian. This is perhaps because of the very strong intuition shared by most philosophers and most people that a single artwork can have at least two differing valences: Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is often thought to be aesthetically good but morally bad. The question is how the moralist might explain this intuition. She might attempt to explain away the apparently “aesthetic” goodness or badness in terms of some underlying moral feature. For example, she could claim that insofar as it developed new filmmaking techniques which afforded pleasure to viewers, the film is morally praiseworthy, but insofar as its glorification of Hitler perpetuates morally reprehensible attitudes, it was morally bad. However, it is unclear whether such a strategy can really do justice to the original intuition. This problem is the topic of Section 4. The final challenge for the moral evaluation of art is specifying the ground of that value. This is the topic of Section 3.

2.2 Art’s aesthetic value The central idea of the aesthetic tradition, namely, that there is a special kind of judgment that is employed in the appreciation of natural scenes and artworks, developed in the eighteenth century. Alexander Baumgarten was the first to use the term “aesthetic” in this way, but it was Immanuel Kant’s view of aesthetic judgment that has had the greatest influence on later thinkers (Kant, 1987/1790). Kant spelled out a special form of aesthetic evaluation and distinguished it from 100

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 100

2/27/2012 10:30:18 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

moral evaluation. Despite the fact that few contemporary thinkers make use of the particulars of Kant’s theory, Kant’s idea that there is a form of evaluation that is completely separate from morality and politics, and which is aesthetic in character, is still quite influential. Kant’s view, in rough outline, is that judgments of morality as well as ordinary descriptive judgments involve placing the object being judged under a definite concept, whereas aesthetic judgments do not. To see that some act is morally right, or to see that a poem is written in English, is to see it as falling under a rule, and to grasp it in a particular way. However, to see that the poem is beautiful is for the experience of the poem to elude one’s cognitive grasp almost completely. Apprehension of beautiful things generates a “free play” between one’s understanding and one’s imagination, in which the understanding fails to place the object under a definite concept. Therefore, to judge that something is aesthetically beautiful is to say something about one’s experience (in fact, about everyone’s experience) of that thing, while to judge that something is morally good or written in English is to say something about the object. Aesthetic judgments are subjective in the sense that they are judgments about the experience of the subject. At the same time, this subjective experience has a universal character, because that experience arises from universal characteristics of our psychology. So judgments of beauty are not mere likings. While the details of Kant’s view remain contentious, his claim that an aesthetic judgment is a different kind of judgment from a moral judgment has gained wide acceptance, and the specifically Kantian ideas that aesthetic judgment is importantly subjective and at the same time disinterested remain influential (see Guyer (1979)). Since Kant, many philosophers have assumed that there is some way of judging art that is distinctly aesthetic, and that art and other objects can be evaluated on that basis. Perhaps the best-known contemporary view descending from Kant is formalism, according to which aesthetic judgments are caused by, and are about, the “formal” properties of an artwork: in the case of painting, these are line, color, texture, and shape (Bell, 2008/1914). Clive Bell’s formalism offers a distinctly aesthetic form of evaluation. The idea is that aesthetic evaluation attends to features that do not have narrative meaning or cognitive content; these features awaken distinct pleasures that are themselves intrinsically valuable. However, Bell’s formalism faces some serious problems (Carroll, 1989). It seems to imply that conceptual art (like Duchamp’s Fountain) has no aesthetic value, and so seems to miss a lot of the value that art has. The very idea of a “formal” property has not been made clear, and some doubt that it can be. And most important, the theory seems circular: it defines significant formal features in terms of aesthetic emotion, but the idea of aesthetic emotion itself was to be explained by reference to form. 101

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 101

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

More sophisticated theories of aesthetic value followed. Monroe Beardsley (1958), Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (1994), and Nick Zangwill (2001), for example, all offer variants on the formalist idea. Each of these approaches seeks to preserve a special sense of aesthetic evaluation as both perceptually based and linked to distinctive experiences and pleasures not reducible to moral, political, or epistemic qualities. The central advantage of a theory of aesthetic evaluation is phenomenological: many of us have an experience of great art or of nature that is difficult to describe in moral or cognitive terms, yet that seems valuable or important. When viewing Triumph of the Will, one can have one’s breath taken away by the visual contrasts when the shadow of Hitler’s plane passes over the crowds massed below. This kind of experience is familiar to many of us, and it does not seem to be easily explicable in moral terms, for example. If this experience is valuable, then its value is, one might think, distinctively aesthetic. Despite its appeal, the notion of a distinctively aesthetic evaluation faces some problems. First, there is the tension, noticed by Kant, between the primacy of aesthetic feeling or experience in aesthetic evaluation, and the idea that the object itself possesses value. Many attempts to ground a distinctly aesthetic form of evaluation focus on characteristics of the judger, such as disinterestedness or aesthetic distance (e.g., Bullough, 1912). But this idea of an aesthetic attitude has been subjected to deep and serious criticisms: it seems either too strong, in that it picks out an attitude that omits too much from the experience of art, or vacuous, in that it merely amounts to attending closely (Dickie, 1964). On the other hand, if one attempts to focus not on the attitude taken toward the work but on the work itself, one has to specify what kinds of features of the work make it valuable aesthetically (Beardsley, 1958), a project that invites counterexamples and challenges. The second problem is that many people believe that no proper and complete determination of an object’s aesthetic value can be made without consideration of that object’s moral value. This objection is the topic of Section 4. In a way, the aesthetic evaluation of art is like the moral evaluation of art. Some story must be told about the ground of the evaluation—on what aspects of the work or of the experience of the work is the evaluation based? We return to this problem in Section 3.

2.3 Cognitive value These two ideas—that art is valuable because of its moral or political worth, and that it is valuable because of some kind of distinctive aesthetic worth—are the two primary players in contemporary discussions of the value of art. But there may be a third possibility: cognitive value. 102

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 102

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

It’s not clear whether cognitive value represents a genuine alternative to moral and aesthetic value. Aristotle (1987/fourth century BCE) is generally considered to be the first philosophical proponent of the view that poetry and music have cognitive value, but he can be understood as responding to Plato. Plato believed that poets were not possessed of any wisdom or knowledge, and thus that poetry was not a sound means for learning. Aristotle, on the other hand, did think that we learn from poems and music, and that part of what makes poetry and music valuable is its cognitive value—indeed, he thought that part of what makes one poem better than another is how much can be learned from it. The most influential examples of knowledge gained from art are examples of moral knowledge. For example, Martha Nussbaum’s (1990) well-known work on the value of literature defends a view that is both cognitive and moral. Literature, she says, is valuable because of what we learn, and that learning is first and foremost moral learning. If something like Nussbaum’s view is right, then the cognitive view is merely a variant of the moral view. On the other hand, one might argue that art has cognitive value while also arguing that this value is aesthetic—that the insight art provides is part of an aesthetic experience of art. The success of such a view depends on unpacking the notion of aesthetic value in such a way as to divorce it from the more traditional emphasis on raw feeling as the core of an aesthetic response. The most influential critics of the cognitive view of art are Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (1994), who have argued that insofar as literature (the focus of their discussion) does provide knowledge, that knowledge is not what makes the works valuable as literature. Rather, insofar as one late Ibsen play gives one a better conceptual understanding of the tension between art and society, so does another, and so two very different plays turn out to have the same value. A further challenge for cognitivism is whether one can locate cognitive value in art in such a way as to give it a sense that is neither merely moral nor purely aesthetic; for example, Jenefer Robinson (1995) has argued that art can convey knowledge about the nature of emotions, though whether such knowledge is morally or aesthetically valuable is up for debate.

3. What is the Focus of Our Evaluation of Art? Whether the value of a work of art is moral, aesthetic, or something else, there is a question of the ground of that value. To what aspect(s) of the work are we to attend in making our evaluation? What precisely are the criteria for holding an artwork to be more or less valuable? There seem to be four sorts of answers to these questions: the consequences of the work for the audience, the character and intentions of the artist, the attitudes manifested by the work, and the work’s intrinsic qualities. (See Harold (2006) for a discussion.) 103

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 103

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

3.1 Consequences of the work on its audience The idea that a work’s value lies in its consequences has a checkered history, particularly, among those who take art’s value to be moral. Plato (2004/~380 BCE) and Tolstoy (1960/1896), for example, emphasize art’s potential to have morally corrupting effects on its audience. Some theories of aesthetic value—for example, reader-response criticism—place the value of art in the experience it gives rise to in audiences as well. But the approach is not very popular now, primarily because proving that works do have particular measurable effects on audiences has been so difficult, and social scientific research on the topic is conflicting and inconclusive (for a skeptical view, see Posner, 1997). There is also a further problem. If the consequences of the work on its audience do make a work good or bad, then it seems obvious that works themselves will only be good or bad in a particular context—if Alice is made vicious by watching Triumph of the Will but Bart is not, then whether or not The Triumph of the Will is morally bad depends on whether Alice or Bart is watching it.

3.2 Character and aims of the artist A second criterion for evaluating work is to look to the artist, her intentions in creating that work, or even her overall character. As a basis for criticism, this approach was famously attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946). However, not everyone is persuaded by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s arguments, and many argue that at least some actual or hypothetical artists’ intentions are always relevant to a work’s meaning and hence its value (e.g., Iseminger, 1992). Evaluating the character or intentions of the artist raises a set of complex questions. If two Wagners write musically and lyrically identical Parsifals, one with racist intentions, and one without, do the two otherwise identical pieces differ in value? It would seem so. But this view is at odds with at least some intuitions about what makes a work good or bad.

3.3 Attitudes manifested by the work Another view is that artworks themselves manifest attitudes, and that these attitudes can serve as the basis for our evaluation. Berys Gaut (1998, 2007) is the best-known contemporary proponent of this view; he analogizes the attitudes of artworks to the psychological attitudes in people’s heads, which might never emerge in action: for example, a desire to molest children is morally bad, 104

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 104

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

regardless of whether or not one acts on it. A work, then is good (pro tanto) if the attitudes it manifests are good, and these attitudes can be evaluated morally or cognitively. However, this view too faces difficulties, for it is not universally accepted that mere attitudes by themselves are proper objects of moral evaluation. But even if psychological attitudes should be judged good or bad in themselves, it is not clear that the same is true for the “attitudes” manifested by artworks. When we speak of an artwork’s attitudes, we do not speak of literal psychological states, but of properties of inert objects that are metaphorically attitudinal. The differences between artworks, which have no feelings, beliefs, or minds, and people, who do, are important.

3.4 Intrinsic properties of the work Formalists insist that arrangements of pitches in particular order and particular rhythms, or of lines and colors, can yield immediate aesthetic value. The idea that artworks can have intrinsic moral properties was defended by G. E. Moore (1988/1902), but the intuitionism on which this theory depends has few adherents. Nonetheless, the idea that an artwork’s value lies not in its effects, its consequences, or its “attitudes,” but in its intrinsic properties, is an old and powerful one. The problems with such a view are many. First, it is hard to decide which of an artwork’s properties to count as “intrinsic”; much that we think of as intrinsic can be shown to be relational or contextual. Second, of those properties that are plausibly intrinsic, many have little relevance to the work’s value, and those that do, matter in different kinds of ways (Walton, 1970). Third, such a view seems to commit one to a rather strong metaphysical thesis about value: that the value of the work is mind-independent and strongly objective. This is a kind of value realism with which few philosophers are comfortable. (For classic arguments against such realism, see Mackie (1977).)

4. Interaction Between Moral and Aesthetic Value So far, we have considered three main approaches to locating the value of art—in terms of moral value, in terms of aesthetic value, and in terms of cognitive value. Cognitive value, however, has in contemporary discussion mostly been considered part of aesthetic value, so our focus is on the moral and the aesthetic. The moral view and the aesthetic view each assert an all-or-nothing relationship between moral and aesthetic value: the moral tradition suggests that artistic value is nothing more than its moral value, while the aesthetic tradition 105

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 105

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

suggests that it is inappropriate to evaluate artworks using anything other than its aesthetic value (which itself has nothing to do with moral value). In both cases, art is evaluated only with respect to a single value. Recently, much of the debate over the value of art has focused on trying to find a middle ground between these two extremes. Pluralism is such a position, and distinguishes itself from the extremes by acknowledging that art seems to have many values. In this section, we examine the possible relationships among these different values and how they affect our overall assessment of art’s aesthetic and artistic value. Pluralists all grant that an artwork may possess both aesthetic and moral value. But, this leaves us with an important question: what is the relationship between an artwork’s aesthetic value, and its moral value? There are three possibilities: (1) they never interact; (2) they always interact; or (3) they sometimes interact. Since the only pluralist position that denies any interaction at all is the autonomist, let us consider that view first.

4.1 Autonomism Autonomism (defended mainly by Anderson and Dean (1998) and Dickie (2005)) grants that artworks can possess a variety of types of values, but argues that these different values are autonomous and never influence each other. (Sometimes this view is called moderate autonomism, to distinguish it from the stronger view that moral artworks are not properly judged morally at all. See Section 1.1.) So, although artworks may well possess different values and may be evaluated in terms of these different values, an artwork’s moral blemishes do not affect its aesthetic worth, and vice versa. Autonomism seems to be able to accommodate two intuitions that we have about aesthetically good, but morally bad, art. First, many artworks like Triumph of the Will seem nonetheless praiseworthy for their aesthetic value. Autonomism’s treatment of these different values as equally legitimate but separate aspects of an artwork can explain how we might acknowledge the aesthetic success of this film all the while admitting the film’s deep moral repugnance. Second, we also frequently seem to be conflicted by aesthetically good but morally bad works (as well as by aesthetically bad but morally good works). The divergent moral and aesthetic considerations pull us in different directions. Autonomism, which grants that these values are separate and unable to be combined into a single, all-things-considered judgment, can make sense of, and can explain why, we feel so torn. Autonomism faces one major problem: intuitively, there seem to be many situations in which an artwork’s different values do interact. Propaganda art,

106

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 106

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

racist jokes, and pornography all seem aesthetically problematic in different ways because of their ethical and moral values.

4.2 Universal interaction: Ethicism Once we allow that an artwork’s different values interact, positions can be further refined depending on whether the values always interact (ethicism), or only sometimes interact (moderate moralism and immoralism), and on the nature of that interaction (the anti-theoretical view denies that the interaction need be consistent or systematic). Ethicism, defended most prominently by Gaut (1998 and 2007) and in Kieran’s earlier writings (1996), holds that an artwork’s moral virtues always count as aesthetic virtues, and that an artwork’s moral defects always count as aesthetic defects. Ethicism endorses two central claims—that the interaction is universal, and that the valence remains consistent (positive moral features result in positive aesthetic features, while negative moral features result in negative aesthetic features).

4.3 Occasional interaction: Moderate moralism Moderate moralism is a slightly weaker position (defended most prominently by Carroll (1996, 1998)) according to which an artwork’s moral defect can sometimes count as an aesthetic defect and that an artwork’s moral virtue can sometimes count as an aesthetic virtue. Moderate moralists differ from ethicists with respect to the scope of their claim: the moderate moralist’s claims are limited in scope to certain domains (e.g., narrative art) whereas the ethicist’s claim is generalized to all domains of art where moral values are present. Ethicism and moderate moralism both make sense of the intuition that the morality of a work cannot be separated from, and indeed impacts, the aesthetic value of the work; these views all grant that it happens, but disagree on whether it happens universally or just occasionally. Indeed, it is a common experience to find that we fail to be moved appropriately by a work that contains an immoral perspective, and that as a result, we judge the work to be aesthetically worse for this failure. (Hume, toward the end of his “Of the Standard of Taste,” is the first to consider problems that arise when a work of art contains a moral perspective that deviates from our own; however, it is unclear exactly what puzzle Hume is considering here. For an excellent discussion of the many different puzzles that Hume might be considering, see Walton (2006) and Weatherson (2004).) The ethicist and moderate moralist can explain why this happens—sometimes a work is aesthetically worse because of its moral failings.

107

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 107

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

5. The Interaction Question The predominance of artworks possessing different kinds of values that clearly do interact has led many to reject autonomism in favor of ethicism or moderate moralism. Recently, however, these two views have come under fire for assuming a particular kind of interaction—namely, that moral virtues must positively impact aesthetic features, while moral defects must negatively impact aesthetic features. The current debate challenges this, focusing their arguments around clarifying how exactly these values interact.

5.1 The consistency of valence: Immoralism The immoralist criticism of ethicism and moderate moralism is that some moral defects actually seem to enhance an artwork’s aesthetic virtues, and some moral virtues actually seem to enhance an artwork’s aesthetic defects (Jacobson, 1997; Kieran, 2003). Sentimental art, racist jokes, Marquis de Sade’s Juliette, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will have all been taken to be cases where the immorality of the work seems to increase, rather than decrease, the work’s aesthetic value. Likewise, kitsch art is the more aesthetically successful the more it depicts simplistic, one-dimensional moral views—that is, the more it endorses a morally defective perspective; Quentin Tarantino movies are aesthetically successful in large part because of the immoral attitudes toward violence represented in them. By the same token, some artworks seem to be aesthetically worse because of their moral virtues. For example, overtly pedagogical and morally virtuous artworks tend to be sufficiently forced that they become less aesthetically successful. Consider, for instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Albert Speer’s architecture for Hitler, or many recent mainstream Hollywood war movies (which glorify and romanticize war to the point of rendering the films aesthetically shallow and flat). Immoralism is predominantly motivated by the intuition that some kinds of artworks are aesthetically better in part because of their immoral features, or aesthetically worse in part because of their morally virtuous features. Immoralism was advanced as an account that makes sense of such work. Immoralists allow that a positive moral feature may in some cases increase a work’s aesthetic features and that sometimes an artwork’s moral defect may count as an aesthetic virtue. They take the counterexamples to ethicism and moderate moralism to show that the valence constraint does not hold: moral virtues can impact aesthetic values negatively, and moral defects can impact aesthetic values positively. Immoralists think that there is still a systematic relationship between moral and aesthetic features, but suggest that the valence constraint imposed by ethicists and moderate moralists is mistaken. Once we 108

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 108

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

eliminate the valence constraint, however, we are still left with systematic relations between aesthetic and moral features, but they are not ones that the ethicists and moderate moralists endorse. Instead of the positive-positive and negative-negative relationship between aesthetic and moral values defended by moderate moralists and ethicists, immoralists allow for a positive-negative and negative-positive relationship between moral and aesthetic values.

5.2 Systematicity of relations between aesthetic and moral values: The anti-theoretical view Immoralism makes sense of the counterexamples facing ethicism and moderate moralism; however, it’s not the only way of responding to these difficult cases of aesthetically successful immoral art, and aesthetically unsuccessful moral art. The anti-theoretical view (Jacobson, 2006) develops an alternate response to these cases. Recall that these cases prompted immoralists to believe that the problem with moderate moralism and ethicism was the valence of the interaction. But, the anti-theorist sees a different lesson to take from these cases: that it is a mistake to think we can establish systematic or essential relations between aesthetic and moral values (no matter what relationship holds between aesthetic and moral values). The fact that an artwork’s aesthetic values seem tied in different ways to moral values just shows that it is a mistake to try to find any invariant or systematic relationship between moral and aesthetic value, contra ethicism, moderate moralism, and immoralism. This is the anti-theoretical position.1 Recent writings on immoralism and the anti-theoretical view have centered, in part, around understanding where these two views stand in relation to one another, and in relation to other views. Carroll, for example, has suggested that moderate moralism allows for moral defects to be aesthetically positive: Another complaint about moderate moralism is that . . . [it] like ethicism, does not allow that a moral defect in an artwork might sometimes contribute to the positive aesthetic value of an artwork. It is not clear that the moderate moralist has explicitly made such a claim, nor that he is committed to it.2 If this is right, then it is not clear whether, and if so how, the moderate moralist position differs from the immoralist one. In a similar vein, Stecker (2008, p. 145) has recently suggested that “if immoralism is wrong, the anti-theoretical view at best devolves into moderate moralism—the idea that moral defects sometimes, but not always, are responsible for artistic defects.” Obviously, more work needs to be done to explain how immoralism and the anti-theoretical view are related to ethicism, autonomism, and moderate moralism. 109

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 109

2/27/2012 10:30:19 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Setting aside these ambiguities, however, immoralism and the anti-theoretical view have also been subject to much criticism. Stecker (2008) and Harold (2008) have engaged in the most sustained criticism of immoralism. Stecker argues that the sorts of qualities that actually make works aesthetically better are not, as immoralists think, morally bad. Moreover, even if the works are morally bad, their moral badness is not what makes them aesthetically good. Harold argues that epistemic value is a common basis for both moral and aesthetic value, and so when a work offers real cognitive insight, that will be both morally and aesthetically positive. These objections raise again the question of the relationship of cognitive value to moral and aesthetic value.

5.3 When aesthetic and moral values interact, what influences what? Other options Most of the positions so far discussed are defined in terms of claims about when and how moral values impact aesthetic value, and most consider as their central examples cases where moral values seem to impact aesthetic value. However, when we think about the interaction between aesthetic and moral values, there is no reason why we shouldn’t consider how an artwork’s aesthetic value impacts its moral value. For example, might we not judge some works so aesthetically disastrous that they are morally repugnant? (This is at least one assessment of kitsch and sentimental art.) To make sense of such art, we might imagine a new version of ethicism, say, ethicism2, according to which an artwork’s aesthetic virtues always count as ethical virtues, and that an artwork’s aesthetic defects always count as ethical defects. Or, we could defend the moderate moralist2 position, according to which sometimes an artwork’s aesthetic value makes that work morally valuable. Likewise, we can imagine alternate positions for moderate autonomism, immoralism, and the anti-theoretical view. Indeed, Stecker (2005) and Bonzon (2003) have both pointed out that the interaction between moral and aesthetic evaluation can run both ways—the moral influencing the aesthetic, and the aesthetic influencing the moral.

6. Conclusion It is not easy to understand how moral and aesthetic values interact, and there are a variety of positions on offer, and even more positions that have yet to be formulated. As the debate has evolved, it has become clear that there is no single question about interaction that defines all these competing views. Rather, there are a variety of different questions to ask about the nature of the interaction between values. For this reason, the positions surveyed so far are defined 110

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 110

2/27/2012 10:30:20 AM

Aesthetic and Artistic Value

as much by the question they take themselves to be answering as they are by the account they advance. Some positions are focused on understanding the direction of influence between the moral and the aesthetic (Bonzon, 2003; Stecker, 2005); others on the frequency of interaction (ethicism); some on the systematicity of interaction (the anti-theoretical view), as opposed to the valence (moderate moralism and immoralism). Since different accounts are answering different questions, it should come as no surprise that our taxonomy of positions is incomplete, and we should be prepared for the debate to continue.

Notes 1. Strictly speaking, it is not completely clear whether moderate moralists and immoralists must endorse the systematicity claim. Since moderate moralists simply believe that sometimes, ethical virtues are aesthetic virtues, the position leaves open whether this occurs invariably, or irregularly; traditionally, the assumption is that moderate moralists believe it is invariant for certain domains (and hence moderate moralists and ethicists disagree on the scope of invariance—for ethicists, invariance occurs across the boards, while for moderate moralists, it is simply domain specific). However, if moderate moralists believe that it is not invariable for certain genres, then their view runs the risk of collapsing into immoralism (if it is not invariable for certain genres, then it would be possible that within, say, the domain of narrative, sometimes ethical virtues enhanced aesthetic features and sometimes it did not, which comes remarkably close to immoralism). 2. Carroll, 2000, p. 379. Carroll makes a similar statement in a related footnote: “The thesis that a work might be aesthetically good because it is morally defective is obviously not an autonomist viewpoint, moderate or otherwise, and so it introduces a new issue that requires moderate moralism to explore heretofore unexamined options. But I’m not convinced that a moderate moralist must be antecedently committed one way or another on this issue on the basis of what the moderate moralist has said so far” (2000, p. 379, n. 32).

111

9781847063700_Ch07_Final_txt_print.indd 111

2/27/2012 10:30:20 AM

8

Music Jeanette Bicknell

Music has been a subject of philosophical and scientific enquiry at least since the sixth century BCE, when Pythagoras connected certain musical intervals with definite numerical ratios. During the medieval period music was studied together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as part of the quadrivium— the “exact” portion of the seven liberal arts. It was not until the eighteenth century that music gradually dropped out of the mainstream of what was then considered science (Cohen, 1984). Philosophers as varied in their commitments and approaches as Socrates, René Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein have reflected on music, and they have been motivated by a wide variety of concerns. Plato and Aristotle write about music in the context of reflections on political matters: the education appropriate for those who will be rulers, and the nature and obligations of citizenship more generally. Descartes, in his Compendium of Music (1961/1618) is most concerned with psychological issues such as the effects of music on listeners. Immanuel Kant (1951/1790) considers music in the context of his work on aesthetic judgment, but does not take music to be a very significant art form. In contrast to all of these, Schopenhauer’s discussion of music (1966/1819) is at the very heart of his work, bound up with his views on metaphysics, aesthetic experience, and the essential character of human life. Different philosophers’ treatment of music have ranged from brief, incidental remarks (yet often extremely penetrating and suggestive) to sustained and elaborate discussions. Philosophers who have written about music have possessed various levels of musical competence. At one extreme are those such as Descartes and Kant who seem to have had little feeling for music. (Descartes once confessed in a letter that he could not distinguish between a fifth and an octave.) At the other extreme are those such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton, who have enough musical skill to be composers. Together with the “card-carrying” philosophers who have written on music, there have also been contributions of philosophical interest by critics, musicians, and composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Aaron Copland. While music has long been an object of philosophical speculation, the past 30 years or so have seen a great increase in the interest paid to music by analytic philosophers. Articles on music are now found regularly in the major journals 112

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 112

2/27/2012 3:51:32 PM

Music

of philosophical aesthetics—the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, and the Journal of Aesthetic Education. A number of accessible introductory monographs on the philosophy of music are now available (Kivy, 2002; Ridley, 2004; Sharpe, 2004), as are collections of essays (Alperson, 1994, 1998). Much of the interest now paid to music by aestheticians can be traced to the influence of a number of works by Peter Kivy (1980, 1984, 1989, 1990), and responses to them, especially by Jerrold Levinson (1990, 1996) and Stephen Davies (1994). As interest in the philosophy of music has grown, so too has the range of problems addressed and the perspectives defended. Philosophical writing on music in the analytic tradition has developed past its initial focus on Western art (or “classical”) music, to include consideration of jazz (Brown, 1991, 1999, 2000a), rock (Gracyk, 1996, 2001, 2007), rap (Shusterman, 1995, 2003), and the music of non-Western cultures (Davies, 2001; Feagin, 2007). This chapter has four sections. The first section covers those topics that have been of greatest interest to analytic philosophers and seem likely to continue generating notice. The remaining three sections address problems that have only just begun to provoke the attention that they merit.

1. Music and Analytic Philosophy While music has been a topic of philosophical speculation since earliest times, philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have turned their attention to it comparatively recently. Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1968) has been the inspiration for much recent work on three topics in particular: Music’s possible capacity to represent non-auditory phenomena; the problem of musical expression; and the ontological status of music and musical works. Of these three “traditional” topics, it is the latter two that have aroused the most interest recently and seem likely to continue to be widely debated.

1.1 Expression People readily describe music in emotional terms: A work may be said to be sad, joyful, yearning, or wistful, to name only a few possibilities. What is it to hear music as expressive of emotion? Do we mean that music is literally sad, in the way that a person is sad? Or is this a metaphorical or figurative use of sadness, in the way that juries are said to “weigh the evidence” in their deliberations? Much of the philosophical writing on musical expression has been a response to the account laid out by Kivy in his The Corded Shell (1980), later reissued as Sound Sentiment (1989). Kivy defends what he calls the “cognitive theory” of musical expression, whereby we recognize emotion in music as a perceptual 113

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 113

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

property. Kivy’s main target was the arousal theory of musical expression; on this account claims such as “this music is sad” entail that the music makes suitably prepared and engaged listeners feel sadness. Kivy vigorously defended the claim that music does not customarily arouse “garden variety” emotions like sadness, fear, happiness, or anger in listeners in ordinary aesthetic contexts. Rather, music is expressive in virtue of its resemblance to expressive human utterance and behavior. For example, certain vocal and bodily patterns are typical of sad people—they tend to speak slowly, in low tones, and move as though under strain. Music expressive of sadness will resemble these features—it will likely be slow and in a low register. One of the most surprising developments in response to Kivy’s work has been a revival of arousalism. These recent developments are sufficiently different from the philosophical predecessors that Kivy attacked to be called “neoarousalism.” Colin Radford (1991b) argued that, just as certain colors (primrose yellow) have a tendency to cheer, and others (ice blue) have a tendency to calm, so too will certain music tend to arouse the emotions it expresses. Derek Matravers, in Art and Emotion (2001) has offered the most fully worked-out version of neo-arousalism, and he qualifies his view in a number of important ways to make it more plausible than its predecessors. First, music is said to arouse “feelings” in listeners, rather than full-blown and cognitively complex emotions. Second, when listeners hear, say, sad music, their response is the arousal of pity—the same feeling that would be appropriate in response to the expression of sadness by a human being. Although the view that music expresses the emotions or feelings it arouses may have some intuitive appeal, it has not withstood philosophical attacks on a number of crucial points (Kingsbury, 2002; Kivy, 2001). In his most recent thoughts on the subject (2007), Matravers recognizes that neo-arousalism has not been widely adopted. The main philosophical rivals to Kivy’s account of musical expression are those of Davies (2006) and Levinson (2006). Davies calls his view “appearance emotionalism” and it is a resemblance-based account. Claims such as “the music is sad” are meant to be taken literally rather than metaphorically. Sadness is an objective property of the music, not a subjective feeling in listeners. However, the sadness of the music is a response-dependent property. This is to say, sad music is music with the power to create a certain characteristic response in suitably prepared and engaged listeners. Absent the possibility of such listeners, it would make little sense to say that the music was “sad.” But all of this raises a question: What does the sadness of sad music resemble? It seems odd to say that sad music resembles a sad person, or even that it resembles the sounds that a sad person might make. A more promising reply is that the music calls to mind the movements, comportment, and posture of a sad person. According to Levinson, to hear music as expressive is to hear it as an instance of personal expression, specifically, an expression of a mental state. Whose 114

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 114

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

Music

mental state? Not necessarily that of performers or composers, but the mental state of the music’s “persona”—an indefinite agent, minimally characterized by the emotion listeners hear expressed in the music. Although Levinson’s account has been subject to criticism (Boghossian, 2007; Davies, 2006; Scruton, 1997), it has the advantage of anchoring musical expression firmly in human psychological states.

1.2 Ontology While musical works can be encountered only through scores or performances, it seems clear that musical works should not be identified with their scores or with individual performances. Musical works are not concrete particulars like chairs or lamps. Goodman (1968), in keeping with his nominalism, denied that musical works existed as entities beyond the class of their performances. Most philosophers of art have found the implications of his position to be unpalatable, and nominalism about musical works does not have many adherents. Broadly speaking, there have been two main answers to the question of what, exactly, a musical work is. On the first account, musical works are universals or types. Although many philosophers hold slightly (or even radically) different versions of such a position, they share the idea that musical works are abstract structures. On more broadly “Platonic” accounts (e.g., Kivy, 1993b; Dodd, 2000, 2007) musical works are eternal types that are discovered by their composers. Yet one can hold that musical works are abstract structures without accepting that they exist eternally. Levinson (1980) is well known for arguing that musical works are indicated structures and that their identity is historically sensitive. (See also Trivedi, 2002, 2008). Another view is that musical works are abstract particulars or individuals (most recently, Rohrbaugh, 2003). Philosophers of art have tended, for the most part, to limit their discussions of musical ontology to art music in the Western tradition, written in standard notation, and intended for live performance. Their main interest has been the masterworks of the classical and romantic periods. Such a relatively limited perspective was understandable and perhaps even necessary at first. Attention to other musical traditions and to a wider historical framework complicates the picture. For example, improvisation plays an important role in some musical traditions, including jazz and classical Indian music. Lee Brown (1996, 2000a) has argued that improvisational music is marginalized by mainstream views that treat musical works as reidentifiable entities. Some works are written for playback, rather than performance. Many major works of rock and popular music rely on recording studio technology and could not be performed live without significant alterations. (For a comprehensive discussion of these complications, see Davies (2001, ch. 1).) Ted Gracyk (2001) 115

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 115

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

has argued that in the rock tradition, the primary work of art is the recording itself, rather than a song or other sound structure that is then embodied in particular performances. (Brown (2000b) defends a similar view; see also Fisher (1998a).) Davies argues that Gracyk has not paid adequate attention to the importance of live performance in the rock tradition. After all, almost every rock group starts out by playing live, and before the advent of inexpensive recording technology and do-it-yourself promotion and distribution over the internet, relatively few groups could make professional quality sound recordings. Davies proposes that works in the rock tradition fall into a different ontological category: works for studio performance. See also Kania (2006) for an overview and alternative account. The most radical proposal about the ontology of music is from Aaron Ridley (2003), who suggests that the whole enterprise is misguided and would be better discontinued. In fact, he claims that serious engagement with music may be hindered by the pursuit of ontological issues; for a critique, see Kania (2008). Given the fruitfulness of this area for the philosophy of art in general and for music in particular, Ridley’s proposals are unlikely to be followed.

2. Music and Mind—Understanding and Appreciation To understand music is to hear it as music rather than as a sequence of sounds; that is, to hear it as beginning and ending rather than starting and stopping, to hear tones in relation to one another rather than as discrete units, and to hear it (where appropriate) as expressive. Musical understanding is thus both a cognitive activity, drawing on mechanisms of auditory perception and organization, and a cultural activity, informed by general cultural knowledge and immersion in musical traditions (Kimmel, 1992). Basic understanding is foundational to any more sophisticated appreciation of music, including hearing musical works as belonging to distinct genres, styles, or historical eras. (See Levinson (1996, pp. 27–41) for a discussion of the basic background knowledge necessary for musical literacy.) What difference, if any, does formal music education and training in music theory make to listeners’ understanding and appreciation of music, and even to their internal cognitive organization? Someone without musical training might listen to a musical work or performance and feel that it has a particularly cohesive quality, without being able to say why this is the case. Another listener, with musical auditory training, may be able to say quite a lot about the tonal relations and rhythmic patterns in the work that give it the particular character that it has. Similar questions can be asked of the musical training, formal and informal, specific to different cultures. Do African listeners, for example, perceive rhythm differently from European or Asian listeners? There has been very 116

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 116

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

Music

little research on such questions. In one striking investigation, Western listeners were shown to experience difficulty identifying the tactus in some music from Bolivia. (The tactus is the regular and periodic level of temporal organization in music—regular points where one would tap one’s foot or clap along.) Western listeners felt it “natural” to clap along with the longer or louder notes, while the musicians themselves tapped their feet together with the short, nearly inaudible notes that alternated with the long notes (Cross, 2001). There is a range of opinion among philosophers regarding the effects of specialized training on musical understanding. On one side of the debate are thinkers such as Benjamin Boretz (1970), who has argued that non-technical terms applied to music (“this melody is sad”) can be compared to prescientific attributions of anthropomorphic characteristics to natural phenomenon (“the skies are angry”). Such non-technical language, he claims, is symptomatic of an underprivileged stage of cognition. Similarly, for Michael Tanner (1985), understanding music is a matter of grasping why the music is as it is, and each level of musical understanding requires the grasp of an ever more technical vocabulary. Malcolm Budd (1985) maintains that a listener need not master technical terminology in order to understand music, and that what counts as “understanding” will vary from work to work. Like Budd, Kivy (1990) and Levinson (1997) reject the notion that only listeners with formal training can truly be said to understand music. Kivy has argued that understanding how music is put together and why it has the characteristics that it does is not necessary for understanding it. As long as listeners can describe what they hear, and this description corresponds to what is going on in the music, they can be said to understand. Levinson (1997) defends “concatenationism”—the view, derived from nineteenth-century psychologist Edmund Gurney (1880), that musical understanding is centrally a matter of apprehending individual bits of music and the immediate progression from one bit to the next. Levinson doubts that formal musical training will help most listeners recognize the variation and repetition of musical themes that constitute large-scale form in music, and doubts the importance of such apprehension. The question of how musical understanding is achieved by listeners is complex and multilayered, and best approached through a variety of perspectives. Contributions have been made by researchers drawing on philosophical aesthetics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, auditory psychology, the cognitive science of music, musicology, and even linguistics. Fred Lehrdahl and Ray Jackendoff’s highly influential book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) was inspired by Chomskian transformational grammar and the work of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker. The authors argue that what experienced listeners hear in music is informed by the underlying musical structures that they infer. In a similar vein is Charles Nussbaum’s The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (2007). This recent book by a philosopher brings 117

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 117

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

together a number of sources to address the question of how musical experience arises from the audition of organized sounds. (For additional studies of musical cognition, see Benzon (2001), Levitin (2006), Peretz and Zatorre (2003).) Some of the debates about musical understanding hinge on the role and nature of mental representations of music. Musical cognition can take a variety of forms. A single musical object, say, a short melodic sequence, could be represented in the mind as a sound sequence, as written notation, or as a physical pattern to be executed by an instrumentalist (Torff and Gardner, 1999). To what extent are mental representations of music properly understood as conceptual? That is, to what extent is musical understanding informed by theoretical concepts such as “diminished third” or “in the key of c minor”? Presumably listeners without formal training hear music as being in a minor key even if they cannot apply the relevant conceptual labels. DeBellis (1995) argues that their hearing represents the world non-conceptually. Musical training is, in part, the acquisition of theoretical concepts, and listeners who come to hear music informed by such concepts have an enriched perceptual experience. Michael Luntley (2003) reaches a similar conclusion about the role of non-conceptual content in music understanding, but supports it with different arguments. Also of note is Diana Raffman’s Language, Music, and Mind (1993), in which she offers a cognitivist account of musical ineffability. Raffman draws on Lehrdahl and Jackendoff, as well as on Jerry Fodor’s computational and modular theory of mind. Her main interest is “nuance” ineffability; this is a listener’s inability to provide linguistic labels for the small shadings of differences in pitch, for example, that give expressive texture to musical performances. Our perception and discrimination of such small differences is more fine-grained than our linguistic and psychological categories. Although we can recognize very fine differences, we cannot reliably recognize them or remember them. Our structural representations of sound are necessarily rough-grained; if they were not, then ordinary auditory experience would be unmanageably detailed and complex.

3. Music and Morality Long intellectual and cultural traditions in both the East and the West insist on the connection between music and morality. The concept of harmony has been prevalent in discussions of ethics since at least the writings of Heraclitus, and is invoked by both Plato and Aristotle (Zink, 1944). In Book 3 of Plato’s Republic Socrates discusses the influence of music on the soul and argues that only certain musical modes—those which support courage and “manly” behavior—should be permitted in the ideal city. Aristotle ends his Politics with a discussion of musical education and the role of music-making in a complete life. Christian and Islamic moralists alike found the use of music during worship 118

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 118

2/27/2012 3:51:33 PM

Music

to be morally problematic. While music might help focus worshippers’ attention on the words of holy texts, there was also a danger that music might be so sensually pleasing that it would draw the listeners’ thoughts away from God. While listeners, composers, critics, and musicians continued to discuss music in moral terms, a number of intellectual and cultural developments in the early modern period have worked to draw philosophers’ attention away from the moral considerations related to art in general and music in particular. These developments included the consolidation of the “Modern System of the Arts,” whereby the “fine” arts came to be seen as fundamentally different from other kinds of skilled activities.1 Another important change was the increasing importance of “pure” or “absolute” music—music, that is, without a text or program. For more information on this historical background, see Alperson and Carroll (2008) and Wolterstorff (2003). Kathleen Higgins’ book The Music of Our Lives (1991) has been instrumental in drawing philosophers’ attention back to the moral, social, and political aspects of music and music performance. This has become a lively area of discussion. Some working in this area have taken up broadly “platonic” positions, accepting Socrates’ claim that music expresses and may in turn elicit certain emotions and responses, all of which are proper objects of moral judgment. Radford (1991a) compares the music of Mozart to that of Tchaikovsky and finds the former morally superior for its more nuanced and restrained expression of negative emotions. Scruton (1997) argues that our responses to music are sympathetic responses to the subjectivity inherent in the music. Through such responses our emotions may become educated or corrupted. Art and music can also be morally suspect when they invite an interest that is itself morally problematic. Like Radford, he suggests music expressive of overwrought sadness as an example of music that is morally problematic. See Bicknell (2001) for a critique of both. Donald Walhout (1995) also links the moral worth of music to its expressive potential; the joy inspired by music may have a latent influence on “moral fortitude,” helping one to fulfill arduous moral duties. Others have focused on musical performance and on the various ethical and aesthetic obligations which performing musicians might have toward composers, audiences, other performers, and even to themselves. Kivy’s position (1993a) is that composers’ intentions should play a substantial role in performers’ decisions regarding how a particular work should sound. He defends this view on moral grounds: performers’ obligations to composers are a subset of more general obligations to respect the wishes of the dead. Rudinow (1994) takes a broader perspective in his discussion of race, ethnicity, and the blues. The performer’s duties here are not to individual composers but more generally to the musical and cultural tradition that has informed the musical idiom. Performers show their respect for this tradition through genuine understanding of and engagement with it. This can be discerned in a performer’s recognition 119

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 119

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

and acknowledgment that he or she is in debt to sources of inspiration and technique. See Brown (1999) for further discussion of some of these issues and Taylor (1995) for a response. The moral significance of musical performance can be approached from a number of perspectives. Jane O’Dea (1993) has developed the view that education in musical performance is a form of moral education, and that musical performance aids in the development and exercise of desirable character traits. Morris Grossman (1994) sees performers as having a double obligation: both to the music they perform and to themselves as creative artists. Performers’ obligations can vary with time and circumstance and are complicated ethical tasks in a particular interpersonal setting. There has been comparatively little written on performers’ obligations to audiences and on the moral propriety of performing different works at different times and places. James Schmidt (2005) provides a sensitive discussion of one such morally charged event—the performance by the Vienna Philharmonic in May 2000 of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the site of the former concentration camp Mauthausen. The issue of morality in music can also be understood from the perspective of the broader social and cultural forces that inform musical traditions. Albert Mosley (2007) takes such a perspective in his discussion of the moral significance of the music of the Black Atlantic. He argues that Black Atlantic forms of music have remained oral and performance-based, while “white” classical music maintains a hierarchy of composer—performer—listener that mirrors the separation of producers, owner, and consumers of wealth in a modern society. The spontaneity and inclusivity of Black Atlantic music, with its comparative lack of separation between performers and listeners, provide an icon of how to live a moral life. In a similar vein, Gracyk sees some of the music of Led Zeppelin as embodying the ideals of multiculturalism, and challenging the presupposition that one musical tradition (and by extension, one way of life) is inherently superior to all others (2007).

4. Biomusicality The study of music as a biological function that humans may share with other animals is recent. The Institute for Biomusicality was founded in 1995, and held their first international meeting in May 1997. The volume based on the proceedings of that workshop (Wallin et al., 2000) is an important source in this new area of study, as are The Biological Foundations of Music (Zatorre and Peretz, 2001) and the special issue of the journal Cognition (100:1), devoted to the biology of music published in 2006. There are several reasons why consideration of music as a biological function might be significant for philosophers. Philosophy strives for a “synoptic view” of its objects; a broader perspective 120

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 120

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

Music

allows researchers to integrate findings from psychology, animal biology, cognitive neuroscience, and musicology (Peretz, 2006). Consideration of the possible evolutionary origins and development of music might help illuminate the evolutionary history of language. A better understanding of the nature of music could have implications for the role of music in early childhood education, and for the diagnosis and care of patients with brain injuries or auditory defects (Peretz, 2006). Philosophers have a role in discussing the implications of this new research, as well as in providing critical perspectives where they might be needed.

4.1 Music as a biological capacity in humans There is now a significant body of research suggesting that human infants are born with the cognitive capacities to understand and appreciate music. Even before one year of age, infants have musical abilities that are surprisingly similar to those of adults (Trehub, 2000). Infants and adults appear to perceive novel melodies in fundamentally similar ways (Trehub et al., 1997b). Six- to nine-month-old infants process consonant (small-integer) intervals better than dissonant (large integer) intervals (Schellenberg and Trehub, 1996). Indeed, this bias in favor of consonant intervals is seen in infants, children, and adults, all of whom retain more information from sequences whose component tones are related by small-integer relations (Trehub, 2000). The fact that small-integer intervals are important in all known musical cultures is thus likely not to be a coincidence; rather different musical traditions all exploit natural human processing capabilities. Infants are also biased toward perceiving regularity and metricality, and able to perceive slight disruptions of these (Drake, 1998). Indeed, it is surprising how little difference there seems to be between adult and infant music processing capacities. Despite the great increases in cognitive capacity from babyhood to adulthood, and the cumulative exposure of years of hearing music, researchers have not found corresponding qualitative leaps in music perception. The differences they have found between adults and babies are on the order of subtle quantitative changes (Trehub et al., 1997b). Just as all cognitively normal human beings have an innate capacity to learn the language in which they are raised, all cognitively normal humans are able to understand the music of their own cultures. Only a few cannot, due to either congenital defects (“tone deafness”) or brain injury (see Sacks (2007) for an overview and discussion). Levels of musical sophistication vary across the population, from those who comprehend music but cannot sing or play an instrument, to professional musicians with expert abilities. While most people probably fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum, it should be noted that levels of musical competence may depend more on cultural expectations than on innate 121

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 121

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

“talent.” Some members of the society will be better singers or instrumentalists than others, just as some native speakers of a language are more eloquent than others. Yet in societies in which everyone is expected to sing or play an instrument, such skills will be more widely distributed.

4.2 Animal “music” Is music best understood as a strictly human phenomenon? Should the sound productions of various animals—from birds to apes to whales—be considered “music”? The sounds and songs of birds have inspired musical compositions in both aboriginal and technologically advanced societies (Baptista and Keister, 2005). Some cultures have grouped the music-like sounds found in nature and the sounds made by various animals together with human music-making activities; however, usage in this case does not settle the issue. By the same token, we must not beg the question against the possibility of animal music by starting with an overly restrictive definition. As well as opening up avenues for scientific investigation, treating the sound productions of various animals as music has an important ethical dimension. Nature becomes a place of creative exchange, rather than a puzzle to be decoded or a resource to be exploited (Rothenberg, 2006). For a discussion of some important differences between listening to natural sounds and listening to music, see Fisher (1998b). For, perhaps, obvious reasons, the songs of birds have had the greatest claim to being considered music. Birdsong has been studied intensively for about 50 years, and a great deal is now known about its mechanisms, function, and ontogeny (Fitch, 2006). Birdsong is complex, and it is learned rather than innate. These features, which are shared by the vocalizations of some marine mammals, but not by the calls of frogs, crickets, and other insects, give birdsong a claim to be an analog of human music in the animal world (Fitch, 2006). Also relevant here is that the standard functional explanations of birdsong are inadequate. While some birds sing to establish territories and attract mates, their songs are excessively complex and beautiful for these purposes. Hence we must not discount the possibility that some species of birds sing for their own enjoyment and have evolved the ability to appreciate melody (Hartshorne, 1973; Rothenberg, 2006). Even if it is the case that birdsong developed for evolutionary reasons, it does not follow that birds now sing only because of evolutionary programming (Hartshorne, 1973). Whale song was discovered only in the 1960s and remains fundamentally mysterious. The songs of humpback whales seem to have a hierarchical phrase structure, and show geographical variations—songs in different areas sound very different (Fitch, 2006). Standard functional explanations—that the singing may be a way of maintaining contact with other whales or of attracting mates—have 122

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 122

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

Music

not so far been well supported by the empirical evidence. Rothenberg (2008) suggests that whale song has an aesthetic dimension for the whales and may be a means of expressing emotion.

4.3 Music and evolution Steven Pinker’s (1997) widely read characterization of music as “auditory cheesecake” having no adaptive value galvanized researchers who sought to show that music might indeed have had survival value for our ancestors. Pinker assumed in his discussion that language evolved before music, and suggested that brain circuits that evolved in service of language might have been “borrowed” for music. However, there is little reason to believe that language evolved before music, and no way to determine a priori which came first. The earliest musical instruments we have date to the Paleolithic period (Kunej and Turk, 2000). If ontogeny is a guide to phylogeny in this instance, then it is likely that communication based on melodic contours developed before verbal communication. Human infants become capable of modifying melodic elements in vocal sounds for communicative purposes before they use phonetic articulations, syllables, and words (Papousek and Papousek, 1995). If music is an adaptation, then what functions did it evolve to fulfill? The earliest answer, suggested by Darwin (1882) and recently put forward again by Miller (2000), points to the role of music in courtship and mate attraction. There are several other possibilities. Music supports muscular control and coordination; singing, like speaking, requires control of the larynx, tongue, and lips. Various ways of keeping time—stomping, banging a rock against a tree, and so on—require control of bodily movements, including those of the hands. More specifically, music and related activities such as dance demand and develop rhythmic coordination, which in turn would have had significant importance in the construction of speech rhythms and syllable formation (Molino, 2000). Music helps coordinate individuals into groups. Among our early hominid ancestors, well coordinated vocalizations may have made for a more effective display than an uncoordinated jumble of voices, providing a deterrent to potential attackers. It is also likely that groups that were able to sing together would have been able to cooperate and coordinate in other ways as well (Geissmann, 2000). The social cohesion and bonding functions of music are also significant when we consider the use of music in the care of infants. Mothers singing to children may have been one of the earliest human forms of musical interaction and may have contributed to infant-caregiver bonding and thus to infant survival (Dissanayake, 2000). Parents the world over speak in a characteristic and musical manner to babies—more slowly, rhythmically, and repetitively, with elevated pitch, simplified pitch contours, and an expanded pitch range. This 123

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 123

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

way of speaking has been documented in numerous languages and cultures, among mothers, fathers, children, and even those with no childcare experience (Trehub et al., 1997). Infants show more positive affect in response to infantdirected rather than adult-directed speech and singing (Trehub, 2000). Finally, music likely played a role in the development of human communication. Presumably early humans vocalized before their vocalizations acquired fixed referents. Richman (2000) and Brown (2000) suggest that musical dimensions of language, including regular expectancy based on repetition and a regular beat, would have been crucial in crafting sequences of sound that all members of the group could agree upon, recognize, and use automatically. Music, one of the earliest subjects of philosophical and scientific enquiry, will continue to be a rich area for aesthetics. The perception and understanding of music are topics with much potential for interdisciplinary effort and debate. Changing technology and the potentials it creates, including the digitalization of music, the popularity of mp3 players, the use of music in video games, and the place of music in internet communications, bring novel philosophical questions with them. If anything, the range of problems needing to be addressed is likely to expand even beyond that indicated in this chapter, as is the range of musical genres up for examination.

Note 1. The historical and conceptual background in which the modern system of the arts was consolidated is laid out by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951 and 1952). A recent critique is offered in Porter (2009), and a defense by Shiner (2009), with further discussion by Carroll (2009) and Currie (2009).

124

9781847063700_Ch08_Final_txt_print.indd 124

2/27/2012 3:51:34 PM

9

Literature Anna Christina Ribeiro

Contemporary philosophical discussions about literature typically occur within the context of two presuppositions: one, that literature is something written down, and consisting of works with fixed texts; and two, that literature is a subset of art.1 These two assumptions have clear consequences for how we even begin to think philosophically about literature—the kinds of questions we ask, and the options available to us in answering them. In what follows I will offer what are mainly historical—indeed, prehistorical—reasons to reconsider both of these assumptions, and to think differently about literature with respect to at least two questions: the question of definition (what makes something literature?) and the question of ontology (what sort of entity is a literary work?). Insofar as oral traditions precede the invention of writing, and the earliest recorded literary works we have (such as those from the ancient Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations) date back to around 2,700 BCE, the most conservative estimate would put the beginnings of literary production at 5,000 years ago at the latest. However, literary output of the level we find at that time does not emerge overnight, and some scholars speculate that the roots of literature go all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic, that is, to as early as 70,000–40,000 years before the present (BP)—if not earlier.2 This is the period of the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” the presumed cognitive and cultural revolution of the human species that gave us the cave paintings of Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira, and some think that storytelling may have been concurrent with, or perhaps accompanied, those arresting visual depictions of animals.3 Unlikely as it is that we could ever find material evidence for this speculative claim about our evolutionary history, we do know nevertheless that by 40,000 BP we had the physiological wherewithal to speak,4 and indeed it beggars belief that the cooperative activity of such complex cave painting would have gone on without an equally complex form of communication among its participants. We can be confident, moreover, that by the time we have forms of “proto-writing,” that is, signs that are not yet “a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought” (such as the Middle East clay tokens dating back 10,000 years),5 we must have had very sophisticated narrative and non-narrative forms, possibly very similar to the ones that, 5,000 years later, would finally be recorded for posterity in full-fledged writing of various sorts.6 125

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 125

2/27/2012 10:30:27 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Certainly the origins of language and literature are deeply intertwined, and the circumstances that facilitated or constrained the evolution of one were inherited by the other. For instance, our capacity for vocal imitation, unmatched by any other species, is thought to be at the very origin of speech. (Darwin himself already thought so: “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures.”7) The ability to imitate the sounds we hear gave us an incredibly efficient and fine-tuned means to indicate that we belong within a given group, and the auditory capacity that enables this imitation also allows us to recognize members and outsiders immediately and almost unfailingly (think of foreign accents). This same aptitude enables us to imitate the sounds made by other animals: a skill especially apposite when we are able to imitate the sounds made by animals larger than ourselves. Some think this ability to “size-exaggerate” by vocal imitation is not only a keen defense strategy, but also a courtship one. Insofar as “vocal tract length is correlated positively with body size in humans”8 and human males are further enabled to exaggerate their size vocally by a second descent of the larynx that occurs in puberty (a change that does not occur in women), a taller human male will, in principle, be better able to protect those around him—not only by being already tall, but also by being capable of giving the vocal impression of being even larger.9 Our striking capacity for vocal imitation is altogether in excess of what would be needed for successful communication.10 This embarrassment of riches, if recent scholarship on the origins of language is correct, is amply evident in the phonetic richness of contemporary Southwestern African languages11 and in the musical language of a tribe such as the Amazonian Pirahã.12 So, if communication alone does not explain our capacity for phonetically complex, expressive, and often musical speech, then perhaps, besides indicating group membership and serving as a defense strategy against other animals, this capacity also served as a fitness indicator in those particularly adept at it, and we can see here the beginnings of an evolutionary rationale for the origins of peculiarly literary skills. Darwin speculated that sexual selection alone accounted for the origins of music and literature: [P]rimeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widelyspread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.13 126

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 126

2/27/2012 10:30:28 AM

Literature

This sexual selection model is, evidently, a competitive one. The extrapolation here from the early, more purely “musical” model is that, as language developed, those better adept at using it would be more successful on the romantic market, and push further linguistic development along the same lines of phonetic rhythm and expressiveness, semantic expressiveness, novelty, and insight, syntactic ingenuity, and so on. The explanatory value (if any) of the competition model notwithstanding, if the claims above regarding group membership and defense strategies are correct, then cooperation, and thus natural selection, are part of this story also, and we need not choose one model over another to explain the origins of expressive speech and its descendants, poetic and narrative ones. Let us designate as “beautiful speech” the phonetically expressive and semantically inventive and significant speech that goes beyond what is needed for the practical purposes of imitative vocalization. Perhaps “beautiful speech” was what set some of us apart, even if its survival-promoting basis benefited the group as a whole. It is more “costly,” in evolutionary terms, to produce a sentence that rhymes, or alliterates, or involves an interesting metaphor, than one that is mere plain, everyday talk. So the ability to produce speech of this sort can be seen as a sign of (1) greater attunement to sounds, which we have seen was important in imitative vocalization; and (2) greater attunement to connections between things not obviously connected: a sign of general intelligence—or, as Aristotle noted long ago in his Poetics, even of “genius.”14 The analysis so far would account for what today we would call lyric poetry or poetic uses of language. But a similar cooperation-and-competition model might account for the origin of stories in particular—which is naturally not to say that one practice developed independently of the other. It may be claimed that knowledge about our conspecifics’ behavior was, as it still is, a necessity in deciding whom to trust, and, therefore, that being able to tell sufficiently convincing stories about their behavior spurred our ability to tell ever more complex stories, since, the more complex the story, the less likely it was that it was concocted for self-serving purposes.15 Such a “gossip-system” account of the origins of our capacity for narrative clearly works on the competition model. The telling of stories, however, may also be understood via the cooperation model. In early epic and drama, we see the telling and retelling of the same stories—stories about gods, heroes, and important families. People joined together to hear these stories told and see these stories enacted. If these ancient practices of which we do have evidence may serve as possible clues to even earlier practices of which we do not (and it is surely a question whether they may thus serve, since we must hypothesize a continuity for which we have no evidence), we may see these gatherings as fostering group cohesion, both in coming together for the event and in learning the ethos of one’s tribe—“the values, beliefs, examples, commitments, emotions, desires, behaviors, myths, morals, manners, ideals, feelings, and so on.”16 Narrative in such cases is reinforcing 127

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 127

2/27/2012 10:30:28 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

one’s belonging in a group, rather than serving the aims of individual learning about whom to trust within one’s group. A similarly cooperative idea would trace the origins of lyric poetry in particular to the soothing effect of lullabies and humming, in turn (so the claim goes) a development of sounds made while food gathering in groups, when sudden silence would indicate that one might have noticed a predator.17 While it is evident one must exercise some circumspection in both developing and subscribing to such evolutionary hypotheses, we may nevertheless charitably admit that they are not inconsistent with the history of the lyric, a history of personal, intimate, subject matter matched by a personal and intimate performance setting clearly in contrast with the public epic and drama. Interestingly, besides mapping onto the epic/drama versus lyric distinction, the public/private also maps onto the male/female realms. If early cultures (such as the Classical Greek one) and contemporary bardic practices (such as those of the Griots of Central and West Africa, the Bertsolari of the Basque Country, the nomadic bards of Central Asia, the epic bards of the Balkans, and the repentistas of northeastern Brazil) are anything to go by, the epic and the drama were the exclusive realm of male bards (the public), whereas women’s preserve was the lullaby and the lyric (the private). Indeed, though we have famous ancient lyric male poets (a man could cross lines), we have no famous ancient epic or dramatic female poets. We have thus gone from imitative vocalization, to phonetically complex and musical vocalization, to chanted and expressive speech, or “beautiful speech.” Darwin claimed that poetry “may be considered as the offspring of song”;18 we may say, in his spirit, that literature in general may be considered the offspring of poetry, or, more accurately, of versified language. In other words, that all literature began with phonetically significant patterning, whether it was in genres that today we would recognize as the lyric (personal expression), the epic (storytelling), or the dramatic (enactment). Phonetic patterning was not merely useful for us as a mnemonic device, although it certainly was that also: it was, before serving that purpose, a naturally developing manner of expressing ourselves vocally in virtue of our imitating sounds in our environment for practical purposes (group membership, defense strategies, fitness indicator). Or so I claim. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from patterned speech ultimately traces back to the skill necessary for it being an indicator of something desirable, namely, fitness, in turn explained by indicating group membership and ability to defend oneself and others by “size-exaggerating.” Whether we speak of this speculative proto-literature, or of “early” literature in general, it is often noted that it served primarily religious, funerary, didactic, biographical, or other typically occasional purposes. This points to two fundamental aspects of what literature has been for nearly all of its history. First, it has mostly been an activity, involving temporal events, often public, whose occasional recording in writing was principally a function of the socioeconomic 128

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 128

2/27/2012 10:30:28 AM

Literature

status of its participants and of the nature of the event. Second, literature was not primarily made for the sake of what we today would consider artistic expression (or for the sake of fulfilling some other exclusively or primarily artistic function). That is, for most of its history, most of literature was made with some goal other than what we, today, might consider an artistic goal. While the first aspect clearly raises the issue of the ontology of literary works (or activities) in a new manner, the second raises the question of what makes a given text or linguistic activity a literary one. The issues are closely intertwined, most obviously by our generally being more inclined to confer the title of “art” on more or less stable entities that we might call “works” than on activities that may never be repeated, or that may even be, in principle, unrepeatable. Let us consider the relationship of literature to art and the issue of how to define literature before dealing with the ontological question. Must something be art in order for it to be literature? Both terms, in the sense in which they are understood today, are of recent vintage; indeed, their emergence is more or less concurrent, and it is only with their emergence that this can be a question at all. It is generally thought that the various contemporary approaches to the definition of art, indeed the very idea that the various arts are susceptible of a general definition, can be traced back to the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, a time when, after a couple of centuries of revolutionary scientific innovation, the urge to classify and compile human knowledge took hold (not for the first time, to be sure). It is to this period that we owe the modern encyclopedias (Chambers, 1728; Diderot and D’Alembert, 1751–72; Britannica, 1768–71), modern dictionaries (Robert Cawdrey, 1604; Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1694; Samuel Johnson, 1755), and, nearer to our concerns, Abbé Charles Batteux’s now much cited Les beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746) [The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle]. Batteux not only proposed the imitation of beautiful nature as the principle unifying all the arts, but also placed poetry (the then used name for literature in general) under that umbrella, as the imitation of beautiful nature by means of measured discourse (i.e., metrical language).19 This view of the history of aesthetic thought was first proposed by Paul Oskar Kristeller in 1951–5220 and, although it has not gone unchallenged,21 it is largely accepted, or presupposed, by contemporary philosophers of art, some of whom have recently argued that we should reject Batteux’s legacy.22 The term “literature,” for its part, is said to derive from a person’s being literate, that is, well educated and well read; in other words, a person of letters, and is thought to have emerged at about the same time when changes in academic education were taking place in Europe.23 Now, one must be mindful of the fact that the recent vintage of a term or concept does not, of itself, make it illegitimate. Placing “art” in its historical context does not entail that its emergence did not answer to a felt need to set certain practices and objects apart. Indeed, with all due respect to saddle-makers, it 129

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 129

2/27/2012 10:30:28 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

is hard to see, today, what reason we might have to group their work with paintings.24 Both activities, it is true, require technē or ars, that is, skill whose development requires training, but while saddle making remained a “useful” art (even when the saddle is painted), painting has moved on to new directions indeed—perhaps even partly as a result of the emergence of the modern notion of art. That said, the lines drawn by Batteux and subscribed to by most thinkers since him were perhaps based on too narrow a notion of the practices he set apart, and above, those he left behind. The idea that art involved the imitation of beautiful nature not only divested carpentry, medicine, archery, rhetoric, statesmanship, and other practices of the title “art”; it also contributed to an aestheticism about art that ultimately divested the new arts of their broader human significance—at least in theory, if not necessarily in practice. Literature in particular is not, and never was, merely the imitation of beautiful nature by means of measured discourse, as Batteux would have it. First, nature is not always beautiful, and neither is that part of nature “imitated” by authors;25 second, nature is not always “imitated” in literature; third, literature is not always metrical. But not all writers have agreed with the prevalent aestheticizing of art or literature: If literature were just a subspecies of the category art, and if art were something that is only properly understood and appreciated under aesthetic principles [e.g., “the disinterested contemplation of beauty”26], then our literary and cultural lives would be much impoverished.27 For E. D. Hirsch, “to regard literature as primarily and essentially aesthetic is not only a mistake; it is also a very unfortunate narrowing of our responses to literature, and our perceptions of its breadth and possibilities.”28 While Hirsch sought to acknowledge art and literature’s various functions besides that of providing us with aesthetic pleasure, other writers advocate a deflationary view of art, a return to its origins as one humble technē among others: [P]hilosophical inquiry today would profit by starting to treat the various practices and genres corralled under the rubric of Art with a capital A as ars with a small a in the Latin sense (which, in turn, derives from the Greek notion of technē). That is, rather than asking “What is art?” we might ask, like Aristotle, “What is tragedy?” or “What is comedy?” as well as attending to the special features and problems of the specific practices under examination.29 There is virtue in both Hirsch’s “inflationary” humanistic approach, and Noël Carroll’s “deflationary” genre-by-genre technē approach. Not only are these 130

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 130

2/27/2012 10:30:28 AM

Literature

approaches to art consistent with one another, they are particularly well combined when it comes to literature. So, adapting Carroll’s suggestion, philosophical inquiry about literature today would benefit by focusing both on the broader human significance of literary practices (i.e., their significance beyond the confines of what we might consider “art” today) and on the narrower, medium-specific aspects of the craft (i.e., linguistic manipulation, structure, etc.). In other words, the philosophy of literature would do better by moving away from the top-down approach that starts from a preconceived notion of “art” and then looks at candidates for the label “literature” from that perch, and toward a bottom-up approach that considers the long history and varied manifestations of cultural practices involving the linguistic medium. A look at the history of literary practices, and how they might have evolved, such as the one offered here, naturally points us in both directions. That is, insofar as literature evolved from prior uses of phonetic, syntactic, and semantic manipulation and innovation, and insofar as it began as mainly occasional activity, that is, language used in a special manner for a specific occasion, be it ritual prayer, a wedding song, storytelling, or a funeral oration, we would do well to understand how the manipulation of the linguistic medium affects both our understanding of a given work and its aesthetic qualities and effects upon us,30 and we would do well to investigate the practices in which these literary activities were, and are, embedded. This may not be easily done nor culminate in a set of literary works neatly divided from non-literature, and it may turn out that “art” is dispensable as an organizing concept. But the neat division was never made possible by an art concept at any rate, so this is no relative disadvantage of the “bottom-up” approach. Indeed, dispensing with “art” we dispense with the need to clarify two concepts or practices (not to mention how they are related) rather than one. If literature need not be art, then, what might a definition of the practice look like? Indeed, once we have dispensed with “art,” ought we not do the same with “literature”? Note how, in the passage quoted earlier, Carroll proposes that we ask not “What is literature?” but “What is tragedy?” and “What is comedy?” in lieu of the art question. This is even more narrowly conceived than the question “What is drama?,” which would encompass both those practices. Traditionally, literature—poetry, to be more accurate—has been divided under three headings: drama, epic, and lyric (but Aristotle, in his Poetics, also mentioned other types of literary practices, such as the dithyramb, and mimes—practices that may be dead for us today). Today we have an array of literary categories that might replace the “What is literature?” question: 1. What is the novel? 2. What is the novella? 3. What is the short story? 131

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 131

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

What is a biography? What is an autobiography? What is a memoir? What is poetry? What is narrative poetry? What is epic poetry? What is dramatic poetry? What is the play? What is lyric poetry? What is the poetic duel? What is the (literary) essay? What is the speech or oration? What is the literary diary? What is the literary letter?

The categories in 1–6 and in 8–9 all involve narrative storytelling, so these questions are best not understood as completely independent of one another. Insofar as these are all practices that (1) have describable formal and/or intentional properties and (2) involve manipulation of the linguistic medium (orally or in writing), then why not speak of literature as the set of such practices? The practices may evolve, generating sub- or new, related practices (e.g., from epic poetry to prose novel), so we need not think of them as static and rigid. We may thus conceive of literary practices as practices that either fit into a longstanding literary practice category or one evolved from it. The long-standing literary practice categories themselves may be arranged into those that (1) tell a story—a practice, we have speculated, that emerged in our evolutionary history as a means to learn about our conspecifics in both cooperative and competitive situations; (2) express thoughts and/or feelings in the first person—the suggestion in this case involving cooperation and fitness indicators; and (3) enact a story—and here we have a variation on the first kind. This division, as should be obvious, maps onto the traditional narrative-lyric-drama division. One may reasonably ask at which point in our evolutionary history the activities we call “literary” today acquired that distinctive label. In other words, when does gossip become storytelling? When does imitative speech become poetry? When does imitative child play become drama? One reasonable general answer to this question is, when they come to be self-consciously done for their own sakes. However, having broken “literature” down into its various categories, we may find that we need an answer particular to each of them, and should not presuppose in advance that a general answer will fit all these practices equally. Moreover, the notion of being done for its own sake would require further clarification or it could not count as a necessary condition, since,

132

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 132

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

Literature

as has been noted here, most literary activity throughout the millennia has not been done for its own sake, but for a particular occasion or purpose. Another question concerns stories and expressions of thoughts and feelings we would not assign to any of the literary categories listed earlier, such as news articles and, say, therapy sessions or journal entries. Regarding the former, it must be noted that ancient as well as contemporary bards are often also newscasters. That said, we should not conflate the person with the practice: while the person who conveys the news and recites a poem may be the same, the practice under which each activity is performed need not be the same. Still, the story of the Trojan war was, at least at the beginning, also news, and sometimes news articles, speeches, and journals stand the test of the time and continue to be read long after their practical purpose is gone. The reason can only be that they are appreciated for their stylistic and humanistic value, values that emerge over and above the original practical goals to which they were put: pieces where language calls attention to itself, sometimes to the extent that it may distract us from what is being said, and where the particularities of the subject may lose interest while the message being conveyed retains its hold on our attention and reflection. To say this is not to say that such survival beyond original purpose will be predictable in advance. Moreover, and in part for that reason, it may not be wise to draw too strict a line between one practice and the other. As noted above, literary practices have and will continue to evolve, and the same goes for the non-literary practices whose medium is language. The newsman of Roman times is not the news reporter of today, and even in modern times the manner in which the news is conveyed has undergone major changes. The same goes for the scientific and the philosophical paper. The emergence of the term “literature” in academic circles and in a writing culture also led to a focus on the literary work as a stable entity with a stable text that is written down; as something that is produced only by those with literacy; as something that is read, rather than heard. This, too, is an unfortunate (and in practice elitist) narrowing of what literature is and of its breadth and possibilities. Addressing now the ontology of literature, it is clear that recent work in the philosophy of literature has relied too heavily upon the written text to establish the identity conditions of literary works, often arguing that textual changes must always result in a different work. Even when philosophers have challenged this view, they have done so by envisioning new types of relationship between a textual inscription and the abstract entity that is presumably the literary work. For instance, Paisley Livingston (2005) proposes a “locutionary” approach to individuating texts in response to syntactical accounts such as the one offered by Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin (1986) and speech-theoretic accounts of the kind proposed by William Tolhurst and Samuel Wheeler III (1979). First Livingston shows the syntactical approach to textual identity defended by

133

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 133

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Goodman and Elgin to be unsound for several reasons. Sameness of spelling falls short of a necessary condition for two inscriptions to count as instances of the same text because editors not only frequently correct misspellings, they also modernize archaic spellings. So we may have two inscriptions of the same text, which nevertheless have divergent spellings. Sameness of spelling is not sufficient either because sometimes differences beyond spelling also count as part of the text. In certain kinds of poetry, for example, differences in font size, shape, or type, and in the positioning of words on the page, can also be part of the text and of the work. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes are a prime example of this phenomenon: in “Il pleut,” the letters and words are positioned almost vertically on the page, so as to look like raindrops. Although he does not directly address this, it is in keeping with Livingston’s view that origin matters: if my cat hits the keyboard while I’m writing, those letters are not necessarily part of my text. Livingston then shows why Tolhurst and Wheeler’s account will not do, either. For Tolhurst and Wheeler a text is a speech-act, “an object that has those [i.e., observable] properties in virtue of having been produced in a certain way.”31 This leads them to individuate both texts and works in one stroke, “as historically and causally determined utterance types.”32 The consequence of this is that two authors such as the fictitious Pierre Menard and the real Miguel de Cervantes, in Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story,33 did not produce the same text—since not the same utterance—and hence not the same work, either. One problem Livingston notes with this view is that Tolhurst and Wheeler do not provide a suitable analysis of the “replica” relation between inscriptions. An utterance type is grounded historically, and so determines the primary token of a text, but a replica of it may obtain in various ways. Intentional copying is a central way, but not the only one, and Tolhurst and Wheeler allow for “mistakenly introduce[d] deviations”34 that nevertheless (they claim) preserve the replica relation. This immediately raises the question of how much a copy may stray from the original before it goes astray, that is, is no longer a copy; Livingston rightly contends that “not even a moderately determinate text-type can be established by an indeterminate series of past and future inept attempts at copying the words of the primary token.”35 Livingston also notes a different kind of problem (one raised by Gregory Currie), namely, that if an author intends to be concurrently literal and ironic to two distinct audiences by means of the same string of words, she would on this account have produced two texts. While we might be prepared to accept that she thereby produced two works, it seems more reasonable to contend that she did so by means of the same text. This is not a possible analysis if we identify texts with works. Livingston offers instead a locution-based ontology, according to which a text—not a work—is a series of syntactic strings as they are intended by an 134

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 134

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

Literature

author; these syntactic strings may have specific “font, formatting, and rubrication,” whenever these are relevant to the meaning intended by the author.36 Those inscriptions whose characters were meant to be grouped together by the author will form the text of a work: Given a primary token comprised of intended and grouped characters in a notation scheme used in a target language or languages, other tokens instantiating all and only the same intended characters in that scheme and language count as tokens of the same locutionary text-type. Whether such tokens are produced intentionally or not, or are based on or copied from the author’s primary token, is irrelevant.37 On this view, two identical inscriptions may nevertheless not correspond to the same text, in which case it would naturally follow that they do not correspond to the same work, either. On the other hand, two inscriptions that do correspond to the same text may yet not correspond to the same work. The reason for this is that “an utterance’s illocutionary force and generic affiliation are not determined by the locutionary act alone”; that force and that affiliation bear on what an author intends to accomplish and on the success of that intention.38 For instance, I may, by means of the same string of words as you, intend to create a serious poem, while you intend to create a sarcastic aphorism. Or I may be a Pierre Menard and “recompose” the entire Don Quixote text and nevertheless produce a different work from that of Cervantes. Livingston does not explicitly tell us what he thinks constitutes a work, but one may surmise from his views on texts and versions that a work will comprise a text as defined together with illocutionary intentions, including intentions involving genres. His account constitutes progress in relation to those of Goodman and Elgin, and Tolhurst and Wheeler. It is not, however, without its own difficulties—difficulties that arise for an ontological account written from the perspective of a writing, or inscription, culture. If I follow Livingston, we could have a situation where a syntactic string S as intended by Peter corresponds to text A, and an identical syntactic string S as intended by Paul corresponds to text B, where these are both primary tokens, that is, final-edit inscriptions. A copy of S as it was intended by Peter will be a copy of A—call it A*. A copy of S as it was intended by Paul will be a copy of B; call it B*. But since it is irrelevant how those copies come to be, it seems that we must accept that inscription A* is identical to inscription B* and, by transitivity of identity, A will also be identical to B, which on this view should not be the case. So Livingston’s “locution-as-intended” approach still seems to leave us with some of the same difficulties we saw in Tolhurst and Wheeler’s pragmatic account— namely, those involving the status of the copies of a primary token—even while it solves some of the textualist’s problems. 135

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 135

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Livingston addresses some similar situations in his section on intentions and versions. We have versions of some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, for instance, because we do not have definitive primary tokens, with the consequence that editors often pass the “build your own Shakespeare” buck to readers by providing footnotes with alternative readings. On the list of Pierre Menard’s literary accomplishments we find a symbolist sonnet “that appeared twice (with variants),”39 and we are left to speculate on whether the second edition was a correction of the first, or an improvement upon it, or whether the two editions are to be considered two independent versions. For Livingston, it is best to see them as “provisional sonnets,” works that, grouped together, are meant to evoke the “über-work” that is the actual object of appreciation and which “is meant to be absent from the pages of La Conque,” Menard’s literary magazine of choice.40 As Livingston acknowledges, we can only speculate as to what Borges intended for Menard to mean with his two symbolist sonnets. But I take it that Livingston’s point is that, whenever such situations arise, we should see the variations as pointing to some other possible “work,” that somehow combines the two, though only in some counterfactual sense, since that work does not as a matter of fact exist. This strikes me as an unnecessary multiplication of entities and, besides, the non-existing work was not intended by anybody—a problem for an intentionalist ontology. It is perhaps more parsimonious to see them as what they seem, perhaps intuitively, to be: two versions of a sonnet, both of them foci of appreciation, in which case we can compare and contrast them, rather than attempt, somehow, to unify them into a single ideal poem that nowhere exists. The Shakespeare version problem should already raise some red flags about trying to fit a work from an oral tradition into an inscription-based ontology. Whereas considering the ontology of literature from the perspective of written works will give rise to issues such as whether different works can share the same text, if we think instead of oral traditions we will quickly see that the more pressing question is how different texts (conceived rigidly as they gradually came to be since the invention of the press) can be of the same work. The notion of a “definitive text” would have been anathema to the rhapsodes of antiquity—the very point of poetic contests was precisely to assess who would most creatively fit the theme and meter of Homer’s Iliad, for instance, not who would remember a text verbatim. The rhapsode’s job was precisely to embellish a story passed down through the generations. (Indeed, it is a question whether a performance of the Iliad that copied a prior one verbatim would have counted as a well-formed instance, as a “proper” performance, or whether the rhapsode would have been booed off stage as a copycat.) So there were literary works, in some sense, long before there were literary texts, in the inscription and the abstract senses of that word—researching and deciding upon a “definitive” text is what keeps scholars of ancient literature up at night and arguing 136

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 136

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

Literature

among themselves. They do so because they are working within a writing culture, a culture that requires printed works and consequently stable, in this case “ideal,” texts. Arbitrary choices are inevitable: compare choosing the definitive version of a jazz tune from one of its myriad performances. Could a text-based ontology accommodate this textually fluid aspect characteristic of much of the world’s literature? Livingston’s “locution-as-intended” account of texts really is an “inscription-as-intended” account: his ontological criteria center around “intended and grouped characters in a notation scheme used in a target language.” But in the case of many literary works, the inscription is non-existent, as in the case of traditional oral poetry. Moreover, works that are only performed—only uttered—would seem to lack a “primary token” on this account; in which case, it seems, they could never be copied! On the other hand, if a poet creates and performs a poem simultaneously—think of poetic duels such as exemplified by today’s rappers—someone else with a good enough ear and memory could repeat her very words. That is a case of “copying” a poem, it seems, and yet there need be no characters or notation schemes at work in the mind of the copier: the person could be illiterate, or not a speaker of the language (sometimes actors learn how to sound out sentences perfectly, without knowing what they are saying).41 About three decades ago, J. O. Urmson argued that, “contrary to first appearances, literature is a performing art,” and he suggested that we view literary works as “a recipe or set of performing instructions for the executant artist.”42 This approach fits well with oral literary traditions; as we have seen, in these the important thing was typically to learn the themes and meter of a work, specific words being secondary to that goal. Similarly and more recently, Peter Kivy (2006) defended the idea that “All of the many copies of Pride and Prejudice are tokens of a type, but that type is not the work: it is the notation of the work”; the work is instead instantiated by its readings, which in turn are to be construed as performances.43 Indeed, why should our ontology give priority to the written text, when that seems to be no more than a convenience, an aid to memory, a means to make the work accessible to more people, more times? Literature, as we have seen, did not begin with the written text; it is an ars of speech, not of writing. Urmson and Kivy both endeavor to take this important oral dimension of literature into account in their ontologies; however, they both still hang on to the written copy as the recipe, the score, the medium that makes possible the instantiation (though they differ in how they construe that instantiation). But oral poets have no need for that. They learn directly from more experienced poets by listening to and practicing with them. If we are to retain the type/token ontology—another important question—it may be more accurate to call the instances of literary works their “enunciations” (whether audible to others or silently to oneself), so as to remove any dependence on an inscription or annotation. Moreover, such enunciations need not be construed 137

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 137

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

as “performances,” as this would demand more of them (especially in Kivy’s conception of performance) than our practices demonstrate.44 Urmson acknowledges that his account will not accommodate literary works whose graphic aspect is relevant for aesthetic appreciation, such as the rainpoem by Apollinaire mentioned earlier. If we agree that, for its part, the inherently oral aspect of literature constitutes a challenge to an inscription-based ontology, even if that is an “inscription-as-intended” ontology, can we perhaps combine the insights of these two types of accounts into a more encompassing theory, one that will be responsive to both the oral and the written facets of the literary ars, as well as to the fact that sometimes one of these facets is important, but not the other? We could start by noting that we are now speaking not only of works, but also of practices. A literary activity or event need not result in a stable and repeatable “work” in order to be literary. Consider the Iliad. In antiquity, the Iliad was a different kind of literary work. The work itself was a gradually, historically developed set of constraints for instantiations, or guidelines for performance, each distinct from the next in some way. What made them all performances of the Iliad? I suggest two conditions: (1) whether the performer intended to perform that work; and (2) whether the performer followed the story theme, formula, and metrical structure associated with that work in the existing cultural practice. Today, the Iliad is associated with a set of texts— the surviving ancient inscriptions. There no longer are performances of it in the ancient sense. (Could there be? Only in some artificial sense, I suppose.) Tokens of the Iliad today are rather its enunciations (silent or not), which typically proceed from readings of one of its texts, or from memorization of one of its texts, whether in the original or in translation. So the advent of printing has altered the ontology of such works. We are forced to conclude that the Iliad no longer exists in the manner in which it originally did; what exists today are texts causally related to its original performances and thus to the original, gradually developed set of constraints (“instructions,” in Urmson’s sense) that guided them. The constraints for performance then are causally related to the constraints for enunciations now, but only in the sense that those unique performances are the basis for the stable texts we have today. We are not, as Kivy would have it, silent Ions when we read Homer to ourselves, because we are not creatively following his story’s theme, formulae, and metrical structure in the production of a novel performance. We are merely reciting a set of words that have been selected for us on the basis of surviving inscriptions. We may do it well or badly; but we do it differently. We may thus propose that literary works sometimes are performances causally held together by cultural practices, and sometimes are enunciations causally held together by an intended text-type, the difference corresponding to whether the work emerged from an oral or a writing culture. 138

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 138

2/27/2012 10:30:29 AM

Literature

If evolutionary theory and speculation are right, we have some 40,000 years of oral literature, and a mere 5,000 years of recorded literature, which, however, was not widely available until the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, that is, some 600 years ago. Oral literary traditions still exist in various parts of the globe, and indeed have resurfaced in modern urban culture, in such practices as rap contests and spoken poetry, often among groups that are undereducated or even illiterate. Philosophers of literature today would do well to extend their vistas beyond the confines of written literature, and open their theories to popular oral practices that are, at the end of the day, what was there at the very beginning, and that inform everything literary done since.45

Notes 1. Thus David Davies: “to be literature . . . is to be a literary artwork” (2007, p. 2), and Peter Lamarque: “There is a conceptual connection between literature and art such that it would be paradoxical to speak of appreciating a work as literature but not as art” (2009, p. 16), to cite two recent works. That philosophers focus on works in writing traditions is clear from their examples (nearly all of Lamarque’s sixty-plus examples, for instance, are from the Anglophone canon since the sixteenth century; all are from the Western canon) and from how they treat their subject, for example, “While a text needs to be perceived (by sight or by touch) to be read” (Lamarque, 2009, p. 19). 2. See Currie, 2009, pp. 5–6. 3. Ibid. It should be noted that not all scholars believe in a sudden cognitive and cultural revolution, claiming, perhaps more sensibly, that our development was gradual. See Currie, 2004, p. 228. 4. These include a lowered larynx, a loss of the laryngeal air sacs, and a consequent greater freedom of movement for the tongue (which enabled us to produce a much greater variety of sounds), and an increased ability to imitate novel sounds. See Fitch, 2000, pp. 258–67. 5. Robinson, 1995, p. 53. 6. This view is shared by John L. Foster, who writes of Egyptian poetry that “When the first connected specimens of writing appear (in tomb biographies and Pyramid Texts), the language is already highly developed, indicating centuries of prior development.” See his 1993, p. 318. 7. Darwin, 1874, Part I, ch. III, p. 87. 8. Fitch, 2000, p. 263. 9. Ibid., pp. 264, 260. Echoes of this evolutionary adaptation are ubiquitous in child play, where the “threatening monster” always has a deep, low, powerful voice, and in drama, where the same is typically the case for powerful characters and especially villains. 10. Ibid., p. 265. 11. See Atkinson (2011). 12. “Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations” (Colapinto, 2007, p. 120).

139

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 139

2/27/2012 10:30:30 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 13. Darwin, 1874, p. 87. 14. “But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars” (Aristotle, 1954, 1459a, p. 255). 15. See Currie (2010), esp. Appendices to chs 2, 5, and 11. 16. Thus the function of art as outlined by Carroll (2009, p. 174). 17. See Jordania (2009). 18. Darwin, 1874, p. 570. 19. “Ainsi la peinture imite la belle nature par les couleurs, la sculpture par les reliefs, la danse par les mouvemens et par les attitudes du corps. La musique l’imite par les sons inarticulés, et la poësie enfin par la parole mesurée. Voilà les caracteres distinctifs des arts principaux” (pp. 38–9) and “On définira la peinture, la sculpture, la danse, une imitation de la belle nature exprimée par les couleurs, par le relief, par les attitudes. & la musique & la poësie, l’imitation de la belle nature exprimée par les sons, ou par le discours mesuré” (p. 42). 20. See Kristeller (1951, 1952). 21. See Porter (2009). 22. Thus Carroll (2009, 2010, Introduction), Kivy (1997), and Lopes (2008). 23. See Hirsch, 2004, p. 50. 24. See Carroll, 2009, p. 159. 25. It ought to be acknowledged that Batteux did not simply mean “copy” by “imitate”: “Sur ce principe, il faut conclure que si les Arts sont imitateurs de la Nature; ce doit être une imitation sage & éclairée, qui ne la copie pas servilement; mais qui choisissant les objets & les traits, les présente avec toute la perfection dont ils sont susceptibles. En un mot, une imitation, où on voye la Nature, non telle qu’elle est en elle-même, mais telle qu’elle peut être, & qu’on peut la concevoir par l’esprit” (1746, p. 24). So, for Batteux, imitation involved an idealization of its object. Even so, without further clarification the characterization is misleading, since “belle nature,” that is, nature as “imitated,” suggests a nature that is better than the real one (“with all the perfection to which [its objects and features] are amenable”), and even in Aristotle’s time what was imitated was often far from beaux, as he himself notes. 26. As Hirsch points out, this view is attributed to Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment (1790) remains perhaps the most influential work in the history of modern aesthetics. 27. Hirsch, 2004, p. 48. 28. Ibid. 29. Carroll, 2009, p. 158. 30. This is in marked contrast to the Hegelian approach championed by Lamarque (2009). According to Hegel, poetry, “though it employs sound to express [ideas], yet treats it solely as a symbol without value or import” (Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, as cited on p. 13). In line with this idea, Lamarque writes that “While a text needs to be perceived (by sight or touch) to be read, no intrinsic quality of this perceptual experience is integral to literary value. As Hegel notes, poetry moves beyond its sensuous medium . . . perception is only incidental to literature, the art of language” (p. 19). Perhaps conceiving of literature as the art of language rather than the art of speech is partly to blame for this idea, from which possibly all poets would beg to differ. It should not come as a surprise that Schopenhauer held a different view from Hegel’s: “Rhythm and rhyme are quite special aids to poetry. I can give no other explanation of their incredibly powerful effect than that our powers of representation have received from time, to which they are essentially bound, some special characteristic, by virtue of which we inwardly follow and, as it were, consent to each regularly recurring sound. In this way rhythm and rhyme become a means

140

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 140

2/27/2012 10:30:30 AM

Literature

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

partly of holding our attention, since we more willingly follow the poem when read; and partly through them there arises in us a blind consent to what is read, prior to any judgment, and this gives the poem a certain emphatic power of conviction, independent of all reason or argument” (1969, Vol. I, §51, pp. 243–4). Wittgenstein, too, thinks otherwise: “Can anything be more remarkable than this, that the rhythm of a sentence should be important for exact understanding of it?” (1980, Vol. 1, p. 378). Livingston, 2005, p. 116, as cited. Ibid., p. 117. Borges, 1964, pp. 36–44. Livingston, 2005, p. 117. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., pp. 130–1, my emphasis. One could argue that native and fluent speakers of a language have an internal, implicit, notational scheme, one that includes the division into words, phrases, and sentences, plus the grammatical rules governing how words can be sequenced. Indeed, part of learning a language, native or foreign, is learning how to segment what at first sounds like an unsegmented string of meaningless sounds, and the various ways in which the segmented parts can be put together. That is one reason why nursery rhymes are pedagogically important, for they teach children to recognize the semantic importance of differences between similar sounding words (cat/ bat/mat), by learning to segment down to the phoneme. However, as the example of actors performing in a foreign language should show, this is not necessary for successful (oral) copying; actors in such situations would be analogous to any mechanical copying method of an inscription, where the copying mechanism cannot be said to know what is being written. Urmson (1977/2004). Kivy, 2006, pp. 4 and 63 respectively. See also Attridge (2010). Kivy argues that “in silent reading of fictional works, I am a performer, my reading a performance of the work. It is a silent performance, in the head. I am enacting, silently, the part of the storyteller. I am a silent Ion. . . . It is not a movie or a play in the mind’s eye: it is a story telling in the mind’s ear” (2006, p. 63); he acknowledges that this may be “a minimal performance, but a real performance for all that” (p. 12). For reviews of Kivy’s book challenging his conception of performance, see Davies (2008), Feagin (2008), and Ribeiro (2009). Certainly other questions of a philosophical nature arise in connection with literature that are not treated here. These include questions about the relationship between form and content; about whether literature conveys truths, and truths that could not have been conveyed by other means; about the nature of fiction; about the role of authorial intention in ascertaining the meaning of a literary work; about metaphor and other tropes; about literary value; and many others. Discussion of these important questions is easily found in the principal aesthetics journals, and in other general aesthetics readers, bibliographical references for which may be found in Chapter 20, “Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art.”

141

9781847063700_Ch09_Final_txt_print.indd 141

2/27/2012 10:30:30 AM

10

Theater David Osipovich

1. Introduction Until recently, analytic philosophy of theater1 was a sparsely populated and badly underdeveloped field. In the past 50 years, analytic philosophers of art have explored film, literature, painting, music, environmental art, and even television; but for many years there was near silence with respect to theater.2 The main reason for this neglect was the widely held belief that theater was merely an extension of literature and that any philosophically interesting questions about theater could be answered by analyzing written plays with the same basic conceptual tools that one would use to analyze other literary works.3 Another reason may have been the fact that analytic philosophy of art grew up during the age of cinema, and analytic aestheticians were just too preoccupied with this uniquely twentieth-century art form to spend any time on theater, whose demise seems to be regularly (and erroneously) foretold every few decades. Over the past fifteen years, however—and particularly the last five— there has been something of an explosion in the field. The explosion has been modest by most standards—a handful of books and articles, several conferences and conference presentations—but it is significant when compared to the near silence that preceded it. This flurry of activity has been primarily concerned with the ontology of theater. More specifically, a growing number of philosophers have begun to push back against the very notion that has stifled serious exploration of the field: that theater is a mere extension of literature. That notion is commonly referred to as the Literary Model of theater. In this chapter, I first discuss the various versions of the Literary Model. I then present the recent alternatives to the Literary Model. Along the way, I will point out several other pressing issues in the current work on the philosophy of theater, such as: (1) What is the epistemological relationship between a theatrical performance, its script, and the story or fiction at the heart of both? (2) What is the role of pretense in theatrical

142

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 142

2/27/2012 10:30:33 AM

Theater

performance? (3) Do theatrical performances have essential features and, if so, what are they?

2. The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Traditional Literary Model Until very recently, most scholars, following in Aristotle’s footsteps, viewed theater as primarily a form of literature.4 Theatrical performances were considered to be a kind of interpretation of the written play, and were dismissed as either wholly exhausted in the philosophy of literature or of minor aesthetic significance (or both), and, therefore, not really worth thinking about. This view is known as the Literary Model of theater. The Literary Model is not without its appeal, and should not be dismissed out of hand. It accommodates some of our most basic intuitions, not only about theater but also about art generally. Consider: Theatrical performances are transitory. One cannot ever get hold of one; it happens, and then it is gone. There may be another one tomorrow night, but that one is at least quantitatively different from this one, and is just as transitory as this one was. At any rate, the production to which all the performances belong will ultimately run its course, and only the blocking notes,5 design plots, critical reviews, and fading memories will remain. But the written play is ontologically stable. It survives the destruction of any physical copy. And, as a writing, it is a form of literature. The Literary Model of theater makes it possible for theatrical art, in the figure of the written play, to have the same ontological endurance as novels, paintings, or musical scores. It appeals to a desire that our art objects be present to us. And it seems to accommodate the most common kind of Western theater—performances that are in some sense of written scripts. Critics of the Literary Model begin their attack by noting that the model has trouble accommodating all the phenomena that go under the name of “theater.” Many works, such as improvisational works of theater, avant-garde theater, and works of “guerilla” theater, have no obvious relationship to a written text. Faced with such works, the Literary Model has only two options. It can either deny that these works are examples of theater, or it can posit that these works are at least scriptable in principle: a work of improvised theater may not start out as an interpretation of a written script, but it could itself serve as a kind of writing that generates a written script. Thus, on the Literary Model, all theatrical performances either (1) interpret already written play scripts, (2) are themselves the generation of written play scripts, or (3) are scriptable-but-never-scripted works for performance that cease to exist as soon as the performance is over.

143

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 143

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

3. The Recipe Model: A Modified, Moderate Literary Model The first serious departure from the traditional Literary Model did not abandon that model entirely. Rather, the idea was to modify and moderate that model such that theatrical performances could be recognized as artworks in their own right without displacing the ontological primacy of written scripts that is at the heart of the Literary Model. One such modified model is known as the Recipe Model.6 This view characterizes play scripts as types and performances as tokens of those types. An act of interpretation creates each token, in the way that following a recipe for a meal creates a token of that meal.7 Each token is an artwork in its own right to the extent that carrying out the theatrical recipe—casting and blocking the play, constructing the sets, scoring the music, designing the lights, embodying the characters, putting all these ingredients together—involves a high degree of artistic perception and ability. Nonetheless, the play script/recipe remains ontologically primary on this view: one cannot cook without it. On this view, even if the recipe is not written down before the act of cooking, the cooks always have a recipe in mind. “Haphazardly throw together a bunch of ingredients” may not be a very good recipe, but even this simple directive is a recipe, argue proponents of the Recipe Model.

4. The Performance Model The alternative to the Literary Model, in both its strong and its modified “Recipe Model” forms, I will call the Performance Model. This is the view that theater as an art form is primarily (on some versions, essentially) action shared between someone who shows (an actor) and someone who watches (an audience). There are several different versions of the Performance Model, but all versions conceive of play scripts as important to understanding the ontological, epistemological, and axiological dimensions of some theatrical performances even as they reject the notion that scripts are essential to theatrical performances per se. As I noted in the Introduction to this chapter, the most important and contentious recent debates in the analytic philosophy of theater concern the proper formulation of the Performance Model.

5. The Production Model What I call the Production Model takes the Recipe Model as its point of departure.8 This view appropriates the Recipe Model’s type/token structure, except 144

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 144

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

Theater

it designates productions as the types rather than the play scripts. The view proceeds by arguing that even when a theatrical performance is of a written play script, there are aspects of the performance that are not only in excess of that play script but are completely divorced from any consideration of it. These aspects, therefore, cannot be characterized as interpretations of the play script. A production may make choices about casting based on the pool of actors who show up for auditions. It may make choices about set design based upon the materials in the designer’s shop, or based on the designer’s desire to, this time around, design a set that uses large, free standing black and white panels instead of realistic-looking walls. Many of the production’s aesthetic properties will depend on whether the space the production is staged in is configured as a proscenium (the traditional configuration, with audience and actors directly facing each other and the actors playing out to the audience), a thrust (the stage thrusts out into the house, the audience sits directly in front of the stage but also on either side of it), or an arena (the stage is surrounded by audience members on all sides). While some of the choices a production makes may be properly characterized as interpretations of the play script, others simply reflect a particular company’s physical conditions of production, whereas others may be a function of an aesthetic purpose over and against anything found in the script. A script may simply provide the “occasion” for the production, but it need not have any ontological primacy with respect to that production.9

6. The Ingredients Model A somewhat more developed version of the Performance Model is the “Ingredients Model.”10 On this view, “texts used in theatrical performances [are] just so many ingredients, sources of words and other ideas for theatrical performances, alongside other ingredients that are available from a variety of sources.”11 Proponents of this view see both an epistemological and an ontological advantage to the Ingredients Model over other conceptions of the relationship between text and performance.

6.1 Epistemological advantages of the Ingredients Model When an audience witnesses a theatrical performance, how do they know what it is exactly that they have seen—have they seen a production, a text, or something else entirely? Proponents of the Ingredients Model claim that audiences identify the performance “with reference to the performance itself,” and not to any written text.12 145

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 145

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

We can expand on this claim, as does one theorist, in terms of the fiction of the performance. A theatrical performance does not comprise a fictional world that facilitates the audience seeing through to some reality that the fiction stands for or signifies; rather, theatrical performance is a real event. A view that privileges text over performance tells the following story about how audiences perceive performances: [T]he events that actually transpire in the theatre assume significance only insofar as they apprise the audience of some other event, often fictional, always absent. The audience looks at the stage in order to look beyond the stage. In performance, actors cease to exist as or for themselves, and become instead the stand-in for an absent and perhaps nonexistent other.13 There is also a weaker version of this story that conceives the fictional and performative aspects of a performance as existing side by side, but in such a way that an audience member can only focus on one or the other at any given moment: either I am conscious of Lawrence Olivier playing Hamlet, or I am conscious of Hamlet, but I cannot be conscious of both at the same time. The Ingredients Model, on the other hand, holds that, rather than a theatrical performance signifying or existing side by side with the fictional story of its script, the fictional story structures the real event of performance. A leading proponent of the Ingredients Model calls this the “infiction” of a performance— “the fictional schema that structures the performance event.” A theatrical performance also has “outfiction,” which is the “narrative content that we extract from the performance event” through an act of interpretation.14 So performances do not interpret scripts—they use scripts to structure the performance event for both actors and audience, and thus make the performance intelligible. Audiences may interpret the performance in such a way that the story of the script is derived. However, “the infiction alone is often sufficient to render a moment meaningful in the theatre.”15

6.2 Ontological aspects of the Ingredients Model Proponents of the Ingredients Model believe that it gets rid of the notion, embedded in both the strong Literary Model and the modified Recipe Model, that “theatrical performances are of something extraneous to performance”; namely, the play script.16 This notion assumes a stable and coherent standard for determining whether a theatrical performance is sufficiently faithful to a written text in order to count as a performance of that text (or a token of that type). The Ingredients Model, however, defies anyone to find such a stable and coherent standard. 146

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 146

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

Theater

It is true that many, perhaps most, theatrical performances will be readily recognizable as performances of some written text. In such performances, the dialogue spoken on stage will more or less match the dialogue written in the script, the written stage directions will be more or less accurately reflected in the actors’ blocking, and the playwright’s meaning will be more or less adequately conveyed. Even if some elements are changed—the Capulets are Palestinians and the Montagues are Israelis, or Willy Loman’s house is a prison cell, and Biff and Happy are dressed as guards—we can still recognize the performance as being of a written text, albeit with a bit of commentary or parody thrown into the interpretive mix. But there is a point at which one changes so many elements that the theatrical performance is no longer recognizable as a performance of any particular script. James Hamilton (2007), writing in defense of the Ingredients Model, imagines a production that takes Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler as a starting point.17 The production appropriates the lines and stage directions from Ibsen’s script, but dispenses with characters or narrative structure. The lines from Ibsen’s script are rearranged according to an interpretive process whereby the members of the company pick out the lines they believe express, or exhibit an appropriate reaction to, “deep social problems of contemporary life.”18 Then images from the story are chosen as “essential to the new text they are crafting out of Ibsen’s script.”19 These images (I imagine that by “images” Hamilton means stage pictures, some still and others in motion, composed of actors, sets, props, and lit in a certain way) are sequenced and combined with the new text to create the performance. The point of such a performance is not only to enlist Ibsen’s words and stage images as a commentary on “deep social problems of contemporary life” but also to comment on Ibsen’s work by selecting only those images/lines that are relevant to those problems.20 It seems very strange to claim that the production described above is in any way of Hedda Gabbler. And yet the Literary Model demands that every theatrical performance should be understood as ontologically dependent on a text. The Ingredients Model offers a much more plausible explanation of the ontology of the Hedda Gabbler-based production described above. Ibsen’s written text is one element of that production among others. The production’s meaning is not guided by an interpretation of that written text; rather, the text is recruited into the service of a meaning that the theater artists have decided on independently of Ibsen’s work. There is also the problem of identifying the authoritative text that a theatrical performance is supposed to be of. Many plays exist in several different versions, since the plays were “originally written as scripts for performance and only later edited, almost never by the author, as works for reading.”21 This point is often made with respect to Shakespeare’s plays. The point applies equally well, however, to many new plays that undergo substantial 147

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 147

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

revision and even rewriting during the process of staging. Certain theaters, like the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky,22 actually specialize in helping authors develop new plays and to this end employ a staff of dramaturges and a company of actors whose task it is to stage the play as a way of developing it. These theaters are patronized by audiences who know that they are participating in the development of a new play, and who respond to performances accordingly. Sometimes, audiences are even invited to participate in a “talk back” session with the playwright and the cast to discuss what worked and what didn’t. It is at best awkward to say that performances at such theaters are of a written text, since the performances are explicitly designed to improve upon the performed text, that is, to generate a new (if similar) text, rather than to serve as faithful vehicles for, or interpretations of, an established text. Once again, an Ingredients Model seems more plausible—the original written text is one of the elements that go into the creation of the revised written text. The revised text may or may not closely resemble the original, but whether it does or not depends at least as much on how the staging of the original works out and how an audience responds to this staging.

6.3 Limitations of the Ingredients Model One can take issue with the Ingredients Model for not going far enough in its efforts to ontologically decouple theatrical performances from written texts. The Ingredients Model attempts to show that many theatrical performances—those that significantly alter the elements of a written script because of the conditions of production or to make some independent aesthetic statement, those that rely on a script with no single, authoritative version, those that are deployed with the express purpose of developing a new script, and script-less improvisations—should not be viewed as ontologically dependent on written scripts. Many other theatrical performances, however (arguably, the vast majority of theatrical performances), are faithful renditions of stable, established texts. Productions based on such scripts mostly make choices in service of some interpretation of that text. The success of these productions is often measured, by the audience and by the theater artists themselves, by comparing the theatrical performance to the text. Perhaps this is not the most exciting theater. It certainly is not today’s avant-garde theater. But does not this theatrical practice exist? And does not the Literary Model, or at least the moderate recipe theory, explain the ontology of this practice? Put another way: are not theatrical performances that arise out of this practice ontologically dependent on the written text that the production is of?

148

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 148

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

Theater

7. The Liveness Model The Liveness Model of theatrical performance holds that no version of the Literary Model is correct, not even with respect to the conventional theater practice described above, because all theatrical performances are ontologically unscriptable.23 The Liveness Model proceeds from what it considers to be the basic, essential structure of every theatrical performance: someone shows, someone watches, in the same place, at the same time. Proponents of this view place great emphasis on the real time, copresent interaction between the showers and the watchers. Because every performance of every production takes place in its own, unique moment of time, the liveness model denies the possibility that any performance of any production can ever be wholly scripted—hence, the view concludes that theatrical performances are essentially unscriptable.

7.1 Objections to and defenses of the Liveness Model Critics of the Liveness Model cast doubt on the necessity of the features it picks out: (A) a puppet theater, or a theater of robots, does not really involve anyone showing;24 (B) a play could proceed in exactly the same way whether or not anyone is in the audience; (C) there is no difference between a play seen from the place of performance and a play seen via some televisual medium a thousand miles away; (D) that same televisual medium can record a performance for later viewing. Proponents of the liveness model have the following responses to these criticisms: (A) A puppet or a robot “performer” that is controlled by a human being in real time during the course of a performance is merely a type of mask or prop employed by that human being. Therefore, someone—the human puppeteer/ controller—is the real performer who is showing something to the audience. If the “performance” is entirely conducted by an automaton that is running a preprogrammed set of movements, we have an art form much more akin to a dynamic installation than to theater. Any attempt to equate an automaton’s performance with that of a human being, no matter how wooden or “mechanical” the human being’s performance, conflates axiology with ontology: a human being’s mechanical performance is probably not very good, but the human being is still, in principle, capable of responding to her audience; the automaton is not. (B) Two identical performances are run. One is performed for a copresent, cotemporal audience. The other is performed for an empty house. The on-stage

149

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 149

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

components of the two performances are a precise match for each other. Does this example not illustrate that an audience is not necessary in order for a theatrical performance to occur? The argument against this conclusion begins with the need to distinguish theatrical performance from other, similar types of phenomena. The “stuff” of theatrical performance is, at bottom, human action.25 Human action, however, is an incredibly broad category. How do we distinguish theatrical action from all other types? Proponents of the Liveness Model contend that the only difference between theatrical action and other types of action is that the former is intended to be shown to someone watching: What if I claim that vacuuming my apartment constitutes a theatrical performance? Is there any way to falsify the claim? It seems that, at the very least, one needs to intend for one’s actions to constitute theatrical performance in order for those actions to count as such. Otherwise, we have no way of distinguishing between theatrical performance and ordinary action and the concept loses all meaning. So let us say that on two separate occasions I vacuum my apartment. On the first occasion, I only intend to vacuum. On the second, I intend the vacuuming to count as a theatrical performance. What could this possibly mean? It could only mean that on the second occasion, I am self-conscious of my vacuuming—I watch myself vacuuming.26 Showing and watching are functions, and they can be performed by the same person. So in one sense, the Liveness Model’s critics are correct that the presence of an audience is irrelevant to the ontology of theatrical performance, if by audience we mean people other than the performers themselves. However, someone must fulfill the watching function in order for any human action to count as theatrical. And someone always does: no actor, no matter how much she is caught up in her role, ever forgets that the actions she is performing are meant to be watched, even if she is the only one watching. (C), (D) Just as theatrical human action needs to be distinguished from other types of human action, so must we distinguish theatrical watching and showing from other types of showing and watching, since other art forms— film, television—also are at bottom of the art of showing and watching. On the Liveness Model, the distinguishing feature is not just that theater, unlike film or television, takes places with the audience copresent with the performers in real time. This fact is merely the condition for the possibility of theater’s truly distinguishing feature: theatrical performers, since they share the same space at the same time with their audience, must contend with their audience members. At the same time, the audience must contend with the fact that they are in the presence of the performers. This contention is not an impediment to

150

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 150

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

Theater

the performance. On the contrary, it is, according to the Liveness Model, the ontological foundation of every theatrical performance. So “the very fact that a theatrical performance occurs in real time and in the physical presence of its audience means that the possibility exists for the unexpected—for spontaneous creation on the part of the actors and spontaneous happenstance on the part of the world.”27 Of course most performances of any given production turn out to be largely indistinguishable from one another. The point is that, because the performance is live, it is impossible to tell—unlike with successive viewings of a film—whether the next performance will be like all the previous others. [E]very time one [performs live] one has to decide, based on the audience’s responses, whether this time a particular set of tactics will work. But the fact that this decision has to be made during the course of every performance . . . means that every performance has a unique set of circumstances. Because this set of aesthetically significant circumstances is based on the interaction of a particular audience with a particular cast on a given night, it is unscriptable, either beforehand or afterward, since every night the actors will have to decide if the way they have been “doing” it will work for this particular house.28 But why describe this interaction between actors and audience as “contention”? In order to contend with someone, one must pay attention to their every move; one must watch them carefully and think about what their actions and reactions and appearance mean on visible levels and on hidden levels.29 Contending with someone also implies that the person contended with is, at least to some extent, your adversary and that you must be wary. There is danger in contention. There is the thought that just as you are contending with them, they are contending with you—and that means you must protect yourself. Actors on a stage are extremely vulnerable to the people in the house. Not only do they open themselves up emotionally to the rigors of the role and the gaze of the audience, they also run the risk of being misidentified as their characters. Audiences are equally vulnerable. They are addressed by the performance, and its existence and quality depends on their reactions. Particular audience members need not be aware of this fact, but they will feel it acutely if an actor suddenly jumps off the stage or addresses them directly. And in live theater, whatever the acting style or production style of the performance, whatever has happened in rehearsal and in performance before now, this is always possible. This is just to say that both parties are subject to the dangers inherent in any live interaction between people in a room together. The playwright and director (and painter and composer, for that matter) never meet their public in this way.

151

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 151

2/27/2012 10:30:34 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

7.2 The Liveness Model and enactment/pretense On the Liveness Model, there are two necessary conditions for theatrical performance: liveness and enactment. “Liveness,” discussed above, refers to actors and audience members sharing the same space at the same time. Thus “liveness” is shorthand for three separate necessary conditions: (1) someone showing, (2) someone watching, and (3) the copresence and cotemporality of the two. “Enactment” refers to a pretense, engaged in by both performers and audience, that the performance is somehow other than itself. Why is enactment or pretense necessary for theatrical performance? Just as it was necessary to distinguish theatrical action from human action and theatrical showing/watching from cinematic and televisual showing/watching, so it is necessary to distinguish theatrical liveness from other types of live performances, such as lecturing, speech-making, news reporting, and storytelling. On the Liveness Model, the difference between theatrical performance and these other types of live performance is that the former involves a kind of pretense. The pretense may be that the actors are not themselves but characters; or that the action is something other than what it actually is; or that the action is taking place in a location other than where it is actually taking place; or that the audience is not there; or that the audience is something other than an audience watching a performance. “Enactment” is, therefore, shorthand not only for the various ways in which the pretense might unfold but also for the fact that both performers and audience must be aware of and must (at least tacitly) consent to the pretense. An illustrative example: [S]uppose a married couple stages a scene in an actual restaurant about a married couple—themselves—having dinner at this actual restaurant . . . If (at least some of) the other restaurant patrons know there is a performance going on, then the pretense consists in the fact that the married couple do not acknowledge during the course of the performance that they are both eating a meal and showing others how they are eating a meal—they pretend that only the former is the case. If none of the other patrons know that there is a performance going on, then our two actors are their own, and their entire, audience. In this case, the pretense then lies in the fact that they do not acknowledge to each other that they are both eating and performing while the performance is occurring . . . Without this pretense, there is no way to distinguish the performance from an ordinary meal. [T]he audience must be aware of the pretense in order to count as an audience: pretending for an audience that is not aware of the pretense would count as deception.30

152

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 152

2/27/2012 10:30:35 AM

Theater

8. The Role of Pretense in Theatrical Performance The role of pretense in theatrical performance is a hotly debated issue at the intersection of philosophy of theater, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Some accounts of theatrical pretense, like that of the Liveness Model, use the concept of pretense to identify the necessary conditions for theatrical performance as such. Other accounts are more concerned with examining the status of on-stage speech and action.31 At stake in accounts of the latter type are such questions as: (1) What is the illocutionary status of on-stage speech acts? (2) What kinds of intentions do actors have when performing on-stage actions? (3) Are there some actions that actors actually perform and some that they only pretend to perform, or are all on-stage actions performances? The difference between the two types of accounts is that regardless of the taxonomy of theatrical action—which actions are to be pretended (e.g., killing oneself), which to be actually done (standing in place)—it may be that the very nature of theatrical performance requires theatrical performers to pretend.

9. Conclusion Recent work in analytic philosophy of theater has revolved primarily around rejecting the traditional Literary Model of Theater, which conceives of theater as divided into written plays—a form of literature—and staged interpretations of those plays, whose ontology and epistemology is wholly dependent on those written plays. The alternative to the Literary Model is the Performance Model, which conceives of theater as primarily a kind of interaction between performers and audience members that may, but need not, include an interpretation of a written text as one of its components. Different versions of the Performance Model (such as the Ingredients Model and the Liveness Model), though united in their rejection of primacy of text, differ with respect to the proper characterization of the relationship between performers and audience members.

Notes 1. Although some of the issues discussed in this chapter are explored by practitioners in the fields of theater studies and semiotics, this article only focuses on recent work in analytic philosophy of theater. 2. “[V]ery few professional philosophers have focused in depth on questions pertaining to the phenomena of theatre or performance” (Krasner D. and Saltz, 2006, p. 1). 3. “In a now familiar history of the rise of the concept of the ‘fine arts’ in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries (Kristeller, 1951, 1952), theatre as an art form was almost always discussed as a form of dramatic poetry or literature. Simply put, any

153

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 153

2/27/2012 10:30:35 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

values of the theatrical performance worth talking about were taken to be those of dramatic literature. If there were features of the performance that merited comment, such as the delivery or persona of the actress, these were evaluated primarily in terms of their contribution to the audience’s grasp or appreciation of the literary work being presented. . . . This traditional view is still with us” (Hamilton, 2001, p. 557). “The [theatrical performance], though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has the least to do with the art of poetry. The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the getting-up of the [performance] is more a matter for the costumier than the poet” (Aristotle, 1984, pp. 232–3). “Blocking” is the process of physically arranging the movement of actors on stage. “Blocking notes” are notations made by actors during the staging process, for example, “say next line at center stage, then cross left.” When working on their scenes with the director, actors typically make these notations right onto their scripts. The stage manager usually keeps a master script containing every actor’s blocking notes. Noël Carroll is the author and chief proponent of the Recipe Model. His articulation of this view may be found in Carroll (1998, pp. 212–13). See also Carroll (2001, pp. 313–16). Richard Wollheim has a similar view of the role of interpretation. See Wollheim (1968, pp. 64–75). David Saltz articulates the Production Model in Saltz (2001, pp. 299–306). Ibid. The Ingredients Model is developed by James Hamilton in Hamilton (2007). Hamilton, 2007, p. 31. Ibid., p. 33. Saltz, 2006, p. 204. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 216. Hamilton, 2007, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 41–50. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 25. The Actors Theatre is home to the well-known Humana Festival of New Plays—an annual showcase featuring new work by both well-established and novice playwrights. Osipovich, 2006. Paul Woodruff, although he does not put the point in terms of liveness or unscriptability, holds a similar view to the extent that he believes theater is essentially a matter of someone showing and someone watching or, as he calls it, “The Art of Watching and Being Watched.” See Woodruff (2008). James Hamilton discusses puppet theater in this context in Hamilton (2007, p. 58). Philip Auslander examines the robot example in Auslander (2007, pp. 87–103). Even the most avant-garde plays still contain human action. Samuel Beckett’s “Breath” consists entirely of recordings of various types of breathing played on a stage strewn with rubbish. At no point does an actor appear on stage. Nevertheless, the action of breathing—even disembodied and canned—is still human action. Osipovich, 2006, pp. 465–6. Ibid., p. 463.

154

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 154

2/27/2012 10:30:35 AM

Theater 28. Ibid., p. 464. 29. James Hamilton would agree with this much, given his concept of “attending to another,” which he calls “the fundamental interaction that takes place in theater” (2007, p. 59). 30. Osipovich, 2006, p. 468. 31. See, for example: Searle, 1979; Saltz, 1991, pp. 32–45; Alward, 2009, pp. 321–31.

155

9781847063700_Ch10_Final_txt_print.indd 155

2/27/2012 10:30:35 AM

11

Dance Renee M. Conroy

Many philosophical discussions about dance begin by lamenting the lack of attention this art form has received relative to others in the canon of aesthetics. It has been postulated that the dearth of philosophical writing on dance may be attributable to a variety of causes: the brevity of its history as an autonomous fine art; a Western European attitude of wariness about the aesthetic relevance of the body; the fact that, in practice, dance is not a notational art form but is one that relies on an oral-kinesthetic tradition; and the fact that many philosophers may not feel qualified to reflect with due sensitivity on the idiosyncrasies of dance practice (Levin, 1977; Sparshott, 1983; Van Camp, 1982). It has also been suggested that dance qua fine art has received scant treatment because there may be nothing about it that is of unique philosophical interest (Sparshott, 1983). Whatever the reason for which aestheticians have not yet given the subject of dance the same attention they have devoted to other art forms, two things are clear. First, there is, in fact, more substantive published material on this topic than might be suggested by the repeated claim that dance is a marginalized area of aesthetics. Although the corpus of extant publications does, at times, have a rather “here and there” quality—and although dance has not yet been embraced as a core topic of concern in the philosophy of art—many profitable ideas about the distinctive philosophical problems related to dance have been made public. Second, the writing that has been done shows that there are many aspects of dance art that provide grist for the philosophical mill. And, I submit, a number of the issues this body of literature reveals as topics of philosophical concern are, if not wholly unique to dance, most salient in the context of considering the particularities of this art form given its unusual status as one that is essentially embodied and one that is also, according to its practitioners, essentially ephemeral. In what follows, I direct my attention to but one aspect of dance art. As a result, some topics that have been well treated by others, and that deserve continued attention, will not be discussed here. For example, I do not take up the question of what, generally speaking, distinguishes occasions of moving that are dances from movement events that are not, nor do I address the subject of how dance qua fine art is marked off from social, ritual, or liturgical dance 156

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 156

2/27/2012 10:30:38 AM

Dance

(Beardsley, 1982; Carroll, 2003, pp. 583–93; Carroll and Banes, 1982; McFee, 1992, pp. 67–87; Sparshott, 1988, pp. 264–96; 1995, pp. 11–53). I also leave aside the issue of how education in dance can uniquely contribute to the socialintellectual development of today’s youth and the concomitant question of how dance’s developmental potential might be realized most fully in the context of general education (H’Doubler, 1940, pp. 59–68; McFee, 2004). Finally, I do not address the subject of style, nor do I take up the question of how important dance-related aesthetic properties are best understood (Cohen, 1982, pp. 45–57; Sparshott, 1995, pp. 325–34). These are important issues, ones with which any person interested in dance aesthetics should become acquainted. For now, however, I would like to broach a new topic in the philosophy of dance—that of dance’s purported claim to be an ephemeral art form.

1. Dance as an Ephemeral Art? Ask any dancer what she thinks is special about her art, and she is likely to respond without pause: dance is an art of the moment. It is remarkably common for dancers and choreographers to declare that artworks created in the medium of dance are more fleeting than are those created in the artistic traditions of music and drama. The general sentiment among practitioners seems to be that “capturing” or “holding onto” dance art is futile because it is in the moment of a dance performance that a dancework achieves physical existence, and every performance moment—not to mention every dancing body—is ineluctably unique. As noted dance critic and scholar Marcia Siegel famously put it: dance “exists at a perpetual vanishing point” (Siegel, 1972, p. 1). It is interesting—and, I contend, philosophically important—that Siegel’s provocative assertion has achieved something akin to the status of a mantra within the dance community. But what does the claim that dance “exists at a perpetual vanishing point” really mean? A first thought might be that Siegel’s sentiment is just a fancy way of expressing the uncontroversial descriptive claim that dance is a temporal performing art (McFee, 2001, p. 546). When dancers say with pride and conviction that it is a fundamental feature of their art form that it is ephemeral, they might simply mean that their particular performances of dance art are constantly disappearing as their personal dancing moments recede into the past. Although danceworks are not typically created through the composition of a text that serves as a recipe for future performances—and most danceworks are not transcribed into any kind of systematic text once completed—there are a number of powerful symbolic systems available for notating works of dance art that can be used to produce a set of performance instructions comparable to a composer’s score or a playwright’s script. (The most popular of these are Labanotation for 157

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 157

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

contemporary danceworks and Benesh notation for classical ballets.) In light of this fact, “dance is an ephemeral art” might be best taken to mean that dance performances, like musical and dramatic performances, are transient. This is a philosophically safe reading of Siegel’s claim, to be sure. It is, however, too safe to capture the gravamen of dance artists’ repeated declarations that their art is (essentially) ephemeral. After all, most who appeal to some version of “Seigel’s mantra” take themselves to be thereby distinguishing dance from the other performing arts. It would, therefore, appear that what dance artists mean by their impassioned utterances is that artworks created in this particular medium are somehow more temporary—or are transient in a different kind of way—than are works of art created by composers or playwrights. Hence, in the context of dance practice, “dance is an ephemeral art” must imply something more than the obvious claim that it is a performing art. Another possibility might be that Siegel’s statement expresses an implicit ontological commitment, one according to which artworks created within danceworld traditions exist only in the moment of performance. Since it is prima facie plausible to presume that musical works and plays endure between performances (and even across centuries), perhaps the dancer means to differentiate her art form from these performing art traditions by maintaining that danceworks do not similarly persist. Some contemporary dance writers do, in fact, appear to embrace this ontological view on the basis of commitments they have inherited from literary theory. To this end, noted dance theorists sometimes contend that when a dancemaker creates choreography, she produces an endlessly open “text” that serves as the catalyst for the creation and experience of dance art but that is not, itself, a work of dance art. On this broadly post-structuralist view, the artwork is either the dancer’s performance, the audience member’s response to her performance, or the interaction between the dancer and the viewer in the moment of performance. This theoretical approach is, admittedly, at odds with the common opinion that Paul Taylor’s Esplanade—like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings or Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea—is an (abstract) art object that can be wholly present on many different occasions. If, however, one is committed to a view of this kind (which is often found, albeit sometimes indirectly expressed, in contemporary dance theory), then the metaphysical situation is clear: the dancework is an event and, as such, is unrepeatable. Hence, the claim that dance art is essentially ephemeral. While the suggestion that “dance is an ephemeral art” means “dance is a performing art” is too weak to capture the shared commitments of dance practitioners, the claim that “dance is an ephemeral art” means “danceworks do not endure” is too strong to make good sense of dance practice. (It may also be philosophically unsustainable on other grounds.) First, on this view, the common understanding that rehearsals are occasions in which a particular work of dance art is prepared for public performance by being (repeatedly!) imperfectly 158

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 158

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

Dance

danced in the practice hall would have to be rejected or, at least, radically redescribed. If those who take danceworks to be on an ontological par with events are correct, then it is just plain false to say that what I did in the dance studio yesterday was rehearse Martha Graham’s artwork Lamentation. But, of course, this is the most natural way to describe what I was up to when I repetitively executed a certain sequence of movements in a seated position while wearing a long, stretchy swath of fabric.1 And not only is this locution natural from the point of view of those who do not support the view that danceworks are ephemeral in virtue of the fact that they are unrepeatable “goings on” that unfold in the context of public dance performance, but those dance writers who claim to advocate this ontological view often belie their commitment to its metaphysical consequences by talking about “rehearsals of Graham’s Lamentation” and “performances of Graham’s Lamentation” as though works of dance art can, indeed, be wholly present on a number of different occasions. Such writers also undermine their professed theoretical commitments by making critical comparisons between dance performances that presuppose that two or more dance events are instances of the same dancework. For example, many say without hesitation things such as, “Mark Dendy Dance and Theatre’s performance of Beat was technically and artistically superior to the recent performance by the University of Washington Chamber Dance Company” without qualifying such sentences to render them consistent with their underlying ontology. In addition, defenders of this brand of post-structuralist metaphysics are hard-pressed to give an account of dance notation that is consistent with the role scores actually play in the danceworld. After all, what is the notation specialist dutifully transcribing into symbolic language if not the dancework itself? If what she scores is not a particular work of dance art but is only something that happened during some occasion of dancing, then why should anyone care about—let alone dedicate hours to—assiduous translation of her score in the hope of producing a performance that complies with it as fully as possible? In short, standard danceworld understandings about rehearsal, notation, and dance criticism would need to be dramatically altered if the ontological situation is as the person who thinks “dance is an ephemeral art” means “danceworks do not endure” suggests. But—in practice—such adjustments are not made. More importantly, they are not made even by self-proclaimed defenders of the metaphysical picture sketched here. Furthermore, it is not at all clear what kind of post-structuralist redescription could satisfy the danceworld’s implicit commitment to repeatability given that it is manifested in different ways in the activities of rehearsal, notation, and critical comparison between performances. As a result, we are well advised not to interpret the claim that dance is a (uniquely) ephemeral art form as an expression of the belief that, unlike musical works or plays, artworks created in the medium of dance do not persist. 159

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 159

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Perhaps the right balance between a reading that is “too weak” and one that is “too strong” can be achieved if we construe the sentiment that dance is an ephemeral art as expressing a special kind of axiological commitment. This remark might, for instance, bespeak a communal attitude of tolerance for change with respect to choreography that has been previously performed. After all, in the danceworld there does seem to be a widespread and deepseated allegiance to the idea that a relatively high degree of flexibility in terms of the movements that are danced in the performance of, say, Mark Dendy’s Beat is acceptable (Sparshott, 1995, pp. 397–419; Van Camp, 1982, ch. 4). Such flexibility is, in fact, generally heralded as aesthetically desirable given that it is taken to contribute positively to the vitality of the relevant dancework as it unfolds on stage. Although some works are admittedly more flexible in terms of movement sequences than others, many choreographers are committed to the idea that “performance authenticity” can be achieved only when dancers are permitted to “own” the works they dance, that is, when they are given the artistic right to make choreographic adjustments as these are required by their individual body-types or by divergent performance conditions. So the claim “dance is an ephemeral art” might really mean that the choreography typically associated with any given work of dance art is transitory insofar as it may be altered to achieve its best effect in light of the particular talents and needs of the dancers who perform it. The statement that dance art is ephemeral might also be taken to convey the belief that, while danceworks do endure across (or can be instantiated in) multiple performances, they—like totem poles, persons, or works of land art— eventually suffer natural decline and, finally, irreversible death. In virtue of the oral-kinesthetic nature of the art form, many dance practitioners maintain that works of dance art have performance lifespans characterized by continual growth and development. It is also widely maintained that the only way to keep danceworks artistically alive is to pass them from dancing body to dancing body. This is why, even in those cases where a score is available to assist in the transmission of a particular dancework from cast to cast, it is often a condition of setting a performance of this work from the score that new dancers are coached by a “style expert.” These individuals are not authorities with respect to dance notation, but are dancers intimately familiar with the original choreographer’s aesthetic values, that is, persons who know the relevant choreography from “the inside out.” Without the kind of training that only a person who understands what it feels like to dance a particular work can provide, newer performances of older danceworks often lack the specific movement qualities—and, hence, the particular artistic features—their choreographers carefully crafted them to have. As a result, the claim that “dance is an ephemeral art” might express a basic danceworld norm according to which respecting the artistic achievements of dancemakers means treating works of dance art as 160

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 160

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

Dance

aesthetically deceased when they have not been performed for so long that they are all but lost to the kinesthetic memory of community members. To summarize: dance is often claimed by practitioners of the art form to have a distinctively ephemeral character, and I have suggested that the best way to understand this pervasive—but puzzling—claim is as the articulation of an institutionally basic set of dance values. This raises the question: where does the danceworld’s commitment to ephemerality come from?

2. Danceworld Bases of Ephemerality as a Normative Notion The idea that dance art “exists at a perpetual vanishing point” plausibly emerges from several different aspects of dance practice. First, it is imperative for the dancer to have her mind completely focused on the present moment during performance. Congratulating oneself for having just pulled off a perfect triple pirouette is certain to result in a wobbly penché and fretting over a bungled entrance is almost sure to undermine one’s partnering abilities. Although it is important for all performing artists to adopt a “past is past” attitude, the need to have one’s attentions fully “in the now” acquires a different kind of urgency in dance in virtue of the wholly physical nature of the art form. It is, after all, artistically acceptable for Glenn Gould to focus his performance attentions on only the sounds he produces by depressing clustered sequences of ivory keys. As a musician, he is permitted to let his natural physical predilections take hold in performance and, thus, to sway, hum, and frown as he plays the Goldberg Variations for a live audience. Dancers, however, do not have any such luxury. It might be objected that music is not the most apt performance example here. After all, the actress must also attend to how she looks on stage. Indeed, the job of the dramatic performer is prima facie more complex than that of the dancer given that the actress must focus on the bodily postures she adopts, the facial expressions she makes as she delivers her lines, and on her vocal inflections and the rhythm of her speech patterns. In light of the nature of her artistic task, it would seem that the actress is likely to be at least as physically engaged in the moment of her performance as the dancer is. While this may be true, it is also plausible that the way the dancer must inhabit her performance moments is importantly different from the way in which the actress is present in hers. First, most danceworks do not utilize vocalization or the recitation of text to help audiences grasp the relevant narrative or emotional ideas. As a result, the dancer’s focus must be on both the technical aspects of her physical appearance (“Am I making a ‘pretty picture’ when I pique into this arabesque?”) and on the subtle physical changes that mark the difference between an arabesque that expresses grief and one that expresses joy. Second, 161

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 161

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

in many cases, performing a dancework is simply more demanding and dangerous—and, hence, a more serious performance risk in the face of potential failure—than playing Blanche DuBois. The dancer may be required to sustain difficult balances en pointe, to execute athletic sequences of lifts, or to gracefully chasse and jete in a prohibitively heavy costume that drags on the floor while also being effectively blinded by bright sidelights and traveling spots. Thus, to do her job safely and with even a modicum of artistic aplomb, the dancer must be constantly sensitive to the internal factors that affect the quality of her own movements (e.g., the activation of appropriate muscles to maintain balance) and to the external relations her movements bear to those of the other bodies on stage (e.g., the need to maintain synchronicity with other dancers and to keep paths of locomotion clear). Third, it is a shared understanding among dancers that accessing the artistic power of dance requires a unique kind of focus on the body as it is consciously directed through the minefield of performance conditions. “That time you did all the steps right, now this time really dance it!!” is an injunction often heard in dance rehearsals. Dancers are frequently chastised for merely “going through the motions,” that is, for failing to be “wholly present” in their bodies as they execute prescribed movement sequences. This criticism is clearly not metaphysical; the dancer is “all there” in any sense that might matter to philosophers such as Derek Parfit or David Wiggins. What is meant by the critique is that the dancer has failed to attend to the kinesthetic aspect of her moving in the particular kind of way that charges her movements with “presence” (Cooper Albright, 1997, pp. 15–18). To be artistically successful, dancers must be highly attuned to the moment-to-moment sensation of what it feels like to dance a particular piece of choreography because awareness of how postures, poses, and specific movement sequences resonate in one’s own body is a precondition for making their emotional, symbolic, and other aesthetic features manifest to audiences. For the sake of brevity, I put aside the nice question of what it means to move with a specifically “dance presence” (although I hope philosophers of dance will take up this intriguing subject in their work). The basic point I aim to make is just this: since heightened awareness of a very complex sort is both a practical and an aesthetic necessity for successful dance performance, many rehearsal hours are dedicated to fostering in dancers a mental habit of “presentness.” As a result, many dance practitioners are devoted to the idea that “being in the now” is a critical part of their art and are deeply committed to the belief that full appreciation of their work involves immersion in, and delectation of, the immediate sensory experience of the dance. This generates the widespread sense among dancers and choreographers that dance is an art of the moment, a sense that is often expressed by the assertion that dance is an ephemeral art. 162

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 162

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

Dance

A second reason for which the dance community is drawn to the notion of ephemerality as a core dance value is that dance history has contributed to the prevailing opinion that works of dance art are neither static nor permanent. The idea of the dancework as a stable, enduring art object is a distinctly twentieth-century notion, one that is plausibly the product of analogizing dance to other art forms in an attempt to improve its artistic status. In the 1800s, when dance first emerged as an autonomous art,2 there was no assumption that choreographers produced fixed artworks that would be performed without significant emendation year after year. Instead, dances were made—and radically altered—to accommodate the technical demands of the theater, the cultural concerns of the day, and the artistic talents of the dancers. From our current vantage point, it is shocking to read about the extreme differences between the ballets mounted under the title Swan Lake between 1877 and 1895 (Cohen, 1982, pp. 3–15). While the idea that two versions of the same ballet might have little in common upsets contemporary sensibilities, the danceworld has maintained the legacy of this idea in its general endorsement of the sentiment that danceworks should be allowed to grow and change as the times—and the dancers— require. The dancer is, after all, neither a tuba nor a canvas. She is an embodied artist, one whose medium is her own very particular muscles, joints, and limbs. Recognition of the fact that every dancing body—not to mention every dancing person—is importantly different from every other underwrites the accepted view that a dancer’s need to perform “authentically” may trump choreographic command. And this generates the sense that works of dance art are ephemeral insofar as they may (to some imprecise extent) be remade by the dancer in the moment of performance without violating any artistic norm. The recognition that dance is an embodied art and that, as Francis Sparshott has noted, the dancer’s body is not simply an instrument she plays but is also the physical manifestation of her unique values, concerns, idiosyncrasies, and life experiences points to a third reason for which the danceworld is committed to ephemerality, namely, art dance has grown out of a long history of understanding the human body in motion as a domain of both cosmic power and as the expression of personal freedom (Sparshott, 2004, pp. 280–4).3 And it is a historical fact that ballet and modern dance have not emerged from a cultural vacuum. Instead, their roots are firmly planted in the world of sacred ritual and communal celebration, a world in which the recognition and active exploration of the human condition of embodiment is routinely taken to affect the physical world beyond the dancer’s immediate environment (as in fertility or rain dances) and to cement social bonds (as in marriage or ceremonial dances). Given that the body is no mere machine but is the corporeal aspect of a living, thinking, feeling person, who is both part of the natural world and part of social communities, it has long been believed that to truly dance in any context— whether to bring on the rains, to celebrate a marriage, or to play Giselle’s “mad 163

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 163

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

scene”—one must move truly. That is, one must inhabit one’s body thoroughly and completely in the moment of the dance. And, from a sociocultural point of view, the distinctive power of dance has been widely taken to consist in the dual nature of this activity. The dancer celebrates—and draws on the transformative potential of—human freedom by moving in special ways that are immediately responsive to, that resonate in, and that directly affect the character of his local environment. But, he simultaneously confirms the limitations of all corporeal beings by, for example, making manifest our inescapable condition as creatures subject to the force of gravity. In short, it is important to remember that dance art is not just one more cultural gimmick like the hula-hoop or the pet rock, a mere aesthetic pleasantry designed to keep us amused. Instead, the world of contemporary dance art is founded upon long-standing cultural traditions that reflect substantive aspects of non-dance life: communal hierarchies, the conditions requisite for social acceptance, the joy of birth, the inevitability of death, and the painful process of growing up, among other things. In light of this, dance art cannot be aesthetically appreciated in the way one might delight in the skilled work of the master bricklayer—savoring only its demonstration of technical prowess and its formal features. Instead, dance calls both dancer and audience member to attend kinesthetically to his status as an embodied cultural entity and to, thereby, realize in his own physical being the special kind of power and freedom that is the natural endowment of every human being. The artistic potency of this awareness is what many dancers maintain elevates their art above the level of the merely aesthetically interesting to the level of the aesthetically profound. And this heady train of thought conduces to the view that dance is an ephemeral art in that, by their very nature, all such moments of heightened bodily awareness and embodied artistic power are fleeting. Although this review of certain aspects of dance practice may help explain why dancers and choreographers often speak of their art as essentially ephemeral, it does not yet tell us how this ubiquitous acknowledgment of the importance of ephemerality affects the aesthetic norms of the danceworld. Nor does it indicate how the danceworld’s commitment to ephemerality may have implications for topics of concern among philosophers of dance. I now turn to a brief exploration of these issues.

3. Some Consequences of Ephemerality as a Normative Notion When noted dance critic Arlene Croce reflects on the status of dancework revivals and the use of film to preserve dance art, she demonstrates how the

164

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 164

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

Dance

danceworld’s belief that ephemerality is an essential aspect of dance art can substantively affect its values. She writes: Magnetic tape [and other forms of dancework preservation] is making us indifferent to the actual moment of an event; it’s destroying “the art of the moment.” Dance archivists are turning the loss to advantage, but how long will it be before the frozen moment acquires that pre-frozen look? Commemorative performances are all around us. We who hand our moment to posterity have become posterity ourselves. (1982, p. 103) In this dense but rich passage, Croce expresses several concerns that illustrate the axiological consequences of taking dance to be an ephemeral art. First, Croce maintains that we cannot save the moment of a dance performance on video without considerable aesthetic loss. When we try to capture dance on film, we unwittingly compromise the artwork we aim to preserve by failing to do it artistic justice. Implicit in Croce’s critique is the claim that dance, as an “art of the moment,” is fully artistically accessible only in the kinesthetic interaction between an animate dancing body and an animate watching body. Thus, since most danceworks have not been designed to be appreciated on screen but to be enjoyed in the context of live performance, when we observe a trace of a dance concert on our televisions or our computer monitors, we lack the materials necessary to fully grasp the aesthetic essence of the artworks we mean to appreciate. I suppose Croce might agree that viewing a flat, 24-inch, pixilated representation of Mary Wigman’s Seraphic Song could afford audiences historical context for, and improved technical understanding of, certain aspects of contemporary dance art. Nonetheless, I imagine she would also say that publicly exhibiting old dance footage is ultimately injurious to the danceworks captured on “magnetic tape” because their artistic power can be realized only in the audience members’ immediate experience of the dancer qua embodied artist. She might also claim that preserving works of dance art on film bespeaks an attitude of artistic disrespect toward their creators, given that many choreographers intend their works to be experienced specifically in live performance. In short, the connection suggested earlier between ephemerality and embodiment looms large in Croce’s comments, and it seems to follow from this connection that dance qua fine art can (in most cases) be fully understood and appreciated only in the context of the theater, since it is only here that the audience member’s kinesthetic reactions to the dancer’s movements can be fully realized. In one way, what Croce’s reflections suggest seems right: it is at least prima facie plausible that the distinctive power of dance is best accessed in live performance and that in even the very best dance films something aesthetically

165

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 165

2/27/2012 10:30:39 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

substantial is absent. But in another way, Croce’s suggestion is less than compelling because it is somewhat mysterious. What, exactly, is the aesthetically important “something” that is lost when we watch a dance on screen? A natural response might be that what is missing is some kind of kinesthetic intensity on the part of the viewers. But this intuitive answer raises the crucial philosophical question: in what way, if any, do our bodily reactions to dance performance contribute to our aesthetic understanding and appreciation of works of dance art? This is a question that deserves more thorough treatment by aestheticians than it has yet received. It has been argued by some philosophers that while our kinesthetic responses to dance art may be a source of private delectation, they cannot contribute to our understanding or appreciation of danceworks qua art objects because our bodily reactions are simply too subjective to serve as the basis for objective critical judgments and fruitful community discussion (Best, 1974, pp. 141–52; McFee, 1992, pp. 263–73). Others have argued that our empathetic physical responses to live bodies in motion are, in fact, central to our understanding of dance art (Martin, 1995, pp. 17–25) or, more cautiously, that they contribute positively to our ability to identify fundamental aesthetic properties of danceworks (Montero, 2006). The chasm between these two philosophical camps is wide, and it is not obvious how to bridge it. It is, however, clear that any philosophically acceptable attempt to respond to the “theoretical gap” that is present in current discussions about the relevance of kinesthetic responses to dance appreciation will have to be both conceptually credible and fully responsive to the danceworld’s commitment to the idea that part of dance’s ephemeral character emerges from the fact that danceworks are designed to effect—and to be appreciated for how they effect—a shared, but fleeting, experience of the power and limits of human embodiment. While I cannot pursue the details of an account that satisfies both desiderata here, the discussion of ephemerality conducted thus far has shown that to dismiss the idea that our bodily response to dance art is deeply relevant to our appreciation and understanding of danceworks is to blatantly flout a danceworld value that has “strong legs,” so to speak. Moreover, if the danceworld is taken to be constituted by the collection of shared artistic values that define the parameters of dance art practice, then any philosophically satisfactory treatment of the aesthetic relevance of kinesthetic responses to live dance performance cannot ignore this basic axiological commitment and still claim to be talking about dance art. And this is just to say that considerations about the “distinctively” ephemeral character of dance art will not only raise important new discussions in the philosophy of dance, but that they must also be given due consideration in future analyses of issues related to dance appreciation that have already been addressed by aestheticians interested in dance as an art form.

166

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 166

2/27/2012 10:30:40 AM

Dance

A second concern that emerges from Croce’s acceptance of ephemerality as a basic danceworld norm is that commemorative performances—such as the performance of a revival of a very old dancework or a reconstruction of a lost one—may run roughshod over this norm. If respecting the ephemeral nature of dance requires resignation to the fact that all danceworks have natural artistic lifespans, then appropriate deference for the art form and its creative contributors may seem to require the dancer to eschew the temptation to hold on to danceworks that have effectively died. Despite the natural inclination to think that dancers and dance enthusiasts would be well served by revivals and reconstructions of past “masterworks” insofar as they might provide at least an imperfect sense of the artistic importance of older works, Croce seems to suggest that works of dance art simply ought not be subjected to “aesthetic artificial respiration” once they have not been performed for so long that they have suffered artistic demise. She writes: I watched Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries (1931) die this season in what seemed, for the most part, to be scrupulous performances. The twelve girls looked carefully rehearsed. Sophie Maslow, who had supervised the previous revival, in the season of 1964–65, was again in charge. Everybody danced with devotion. Yet a piece that I would have ranked as a landmark in American dance was reduced to a tendentious outline; the power I had remembered was no longer there . . . We know that Graham’s own performances are past recapturing, and we know, too, that the earlier Graham works, which were made on bodies that hadn’t been prestretched and refined by ballet technique, are impossible to reconstruct without compromise . . . Perhaps there’s a statute of limitations on how long a work can be depended upon to force itself through the bodies who dance it. (1982, pp. 28–9) On one way of reading this passage, Croce is suggesting that commemorative performances (such as the revival of Graham’s Primitive Mysteries after it was not performed for many years) may unfortunately turn out to be aesthetically injurious attempts to bring artistically deceased danceworks back to life by jolting them with the electricity of today’s dancing bodies. While the intention to keep these works going may be, in some sense, laudable, the danceworld reality to which Croce seems to be pointing is this: as times change, dancing bodies also change. For one thing, there are substantive differences between the training received by, for example, original Graham dancers and the training typical of today’s dance students. While many of today’s performing artists are trained in a wide variety of styles (classical ballet, Horton technique, hip-hop, Fosse-style jazz, etc.), the dance artists of yesteryear typically studied only a single dance style in great depth (usually that of the choreographer for whom

167

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 167

2/27/2012 10:30:40 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

they worked). Although having a varied dance education prepares today’s dancers to perform contemporary works with artistic aplomb given that the choreography of many such works is a hybrid of different dance styles, it also attenuates the power with which today’s dancers are able to perform works that require a high degree of technical and artistic skill in a single (older) dance style. For another thing, twenty-first-century dancers are—by and large—taller, faster, leaner, and more flexible than were their artistic predecessors. This has the practical result that even if they could execute perfectly the same sequence of movements originally performed more than half a century ago by those who danced for Graham or Humphrey, these choreographers’ works will look very different on contemporary stages than they did in their artistic heyday. Since many of a dancework’s essential aesthetic properties are manifest in how the choreography appears to us, twenty-first-century dancers may be simply incapable of dancing in ways that fully exemplify important aesthetic features of well-regarded older works. In short, Croce seems to be suggesting that, because dance is an essentially embodied art form, there may be no going back to old masterworks in a way that does them artistic justice. As a result, respect for the ephemeral nature of dance would seem to require us to recognize when dancing bodies have changed to such a degree that the artistic achievements of past dancemakers can no longer be honored in performance but will, instead, be reduced to nothing but “tendentious outlines” of their former selves. This raises another question for the philosopher of dance: does active return to our dance past flout a basic danceworld norm? Is it really an abuse of the ephemeral character of the art, and a failure to respect the artistic mores of past dancemakers, to reconstruct an Isadora Duncan dance? It seems rather implausible to think that attempting to offer today’s dance artists and audiences a live “experiential hit” of dance history deserves the kind of aesthetic censure it often receives from dance practitioners. It is evident, however, that when we consider the depth of the danceworld’s commitment to ephemerality qua value—and become aware of the different implications of this value in dance art practice—arguments in defense of things like reconstructions and revivals will have to be made. This will, of course, mean that clear cases against such “re” activities will also need to be made in order to do philosophical justice to the issues at hand. To date, no such project has been undertaken by philosophers of dance.4 Exploration of the various ways of “returning to our dance past,” however, appears to be a rich and fruitful subject for aestheticians to take upand to take seriously—since addressing this topic requires us to grapple with some of the most fundamental aspects of dance art: its history, its identity, and its status as a unique art form. In addition, careful consideration of the nature and value of reconstruction in the danceworld will lead naturally to further discussions about the status and merit of art restoration in general, as well as to new ideas about aesthetic credibility of reconstructions in the domain of theater 168

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 168

2/27/2012 10:30:40 AM

Dance

and, potentially, to new thoughts about “authenticity” as the guiding value in the historically informed performance movement in classical music. As a result, careful scrutiny of the claim that dance is an ephemeral art opens the door to many new directions for the philosophy of dance and also provides an opportunity for aestheticians to enrich extant debates in the discipline of aesthetics more generally.

Notes 1. A word of caution is in order about this example, which may suggest to the reader that I presume costumes to be necessary features of works of dance art. This, however, is not my view: given the vast number of things that may be important in one dancework but irrelevant in another, I follow Selma Jeanne Cohen (Next Week, Swan Lake, pp. vii–viii) in thinking that the identity-constitutive features of danceworks may differ in kind depending on the particular artwork under consideration and the facts about its history of production. My view is that any theory of dancework identity that is faithful to deep-seated distinctions—and grounds for critical judgment—within the dance community must be able to allow that, in some cases, the work just is a particular series of step sequences (and nothing more); in other cases, the work is constituted by both a determinate choreographic sequence and the way this is highlighted or obscured by the use of costumes, lighting, sets, and other theatrical elements; and, in still other cases, the work is constituted by a general constellation of dance values or understandings that do not involve any particular sequences of movement or any specific set of theatrical trappings. In the case I consider as an example here, there is a widespread intuition in favor of the claim that the stretchy, swath of fabric that constitutes the original costume for Lamentation is an essential feature of the work precisely because the costume directly affects how Graham’s choreographed movements appear to audiences, and there is a strong case in favor of the claim that it is the appearance of the dancer’s motions through the fabric that is, in this case, Graham’s work of dance art. 2. It is generally acknowledged by dance historians that dance began to emerge as an autonomous performing art in the late eighteenth century when—after a century of attempting to become more than mere decoration for royal spectacles, plays, or operas—dancemakers such as Jean Dauberval and Jean Georges Noverre began to create choreography that was meant to be viewed for its own sake. In fact, the historical moment at which dance is first recognized as an independent art form is most often associated with the rise of the Romantic ballet in the 1830s, and is frequently linked to Filippo Taglioni’s masterpiece La Sylphide. Until that time, choreography was either subservient to other theatrical demands or was nothing more than illogically connected sequences of physical “tricks.” It was with Taglioni that dance technique, dance “instruments” (such as the pointe shoe), and the potential for human movement to serve as a forum for human expression were first united to create a “pure dance” theatrical event worthy to be considered an art form in its own right. For more detailed information on the rise of dance as an art see: Susan Au, Ballet and Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 29–60 and Lincoln Kirstein, Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing: Anniversary Edition (Pennington, NJ: Princeton, 1987), pp. 229–63. 3. Sparshott’s claims may, on first blush, appear philosophically out-of-date and/or conceptually puzzling. I take it, however, that Sparshott is pointing to dance-related

169

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 169

2/27/2012 10:30:40 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics phenomena with which we are all well familiar, phenomena that do not—in themselves—pose any particular kind of philosophical problem. With respect to the claim that the basis for this approach to seeing dance as uniquely ephemeral is the fact that the dancer’s body is her own instrument, Sparshott is simply noting the uncontroversial—and inevitable—fact that, unlike the flautist or cellist, the dancer’s artistic medium is not distinct from her as a person because our bodily postures, muscular habits, rhythmic tics, and so on, tell stories about us as individuals. As a result, the movements of every dancing body are ineluctably (and sometimes, to professional dancers, frustratingly) infused with facts about our personal histories. The obvious fact that a dancer does not play her body in the manner of an independent instrument but, instead, uses the very same physical structure she inhabits during times of emergency, happy holidays with her family, or shopping for groceries in her acts of dancing means that there is an unusually close connection between the perceptible features she produces for aesthetic delectation and a wide variety of basic facts about who she is. It is the very intimacy of the relation between the dancer (qua person) and the dance she performs that underwrites the long-standing view that dancing is a way of accessing an individual’s (internal) power in a way that can both substantively affect the natural world around her (e.g., by promoting procreative capacities in other persons or in fallow fields) and can forge or destroy social bonds. And it is in producing such effects through her moving that the dancer comes to experience a kind of “personal freedom” that is not generally accessible in other ways: it is her particular way of moving in the moment that is responsible for whatever changes she affects upon the world or upon other persons. While the idea that when a mover attends to her body as a part of the natural world—and, simultaneously, as the source of her individual personhood—she may make a practical difference to the world around her may sound esoteric to twenty-first-century ears, two things must be kept in mind. First, there is a long-standing cultural-historical tradition according to which it is through dancing that we do make a special kind of contact with, and thereby, affect the world beyond our immediate communities (consider, for example, rain dances, war dances, fertility dances, trance dances). The belief in the “power of dance,” whether it is logically defensible or remains a simple case of shamanism, runs deep in many cultures. The strength of the history of this belief is, therefore, appropriately part of the description of why contemporary dancers see their artform as having an ephemeral character. Second, many practicing dance professionals continue to see their art form as having a “mystical” quality because they are committed to the idea that—unlike expressions of self through language—bodies in motion “do not lie:” dance reveals facts about a person that might otherwise be hidden from everyone (including the dancer herself) and, therefore, can serve as a forum in which the person’s true nature or character may be freely revealed. 4. To my knowledge, at the time of this publication there is only one exception to this claim, namely, “The Art of Re-Making Dances: A Philosophical Analysis of Dancework Reconstruction,” R. Conroy, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2009. In this work, I offer structured cases for and against dancework reconstruction based on the arguments prevalent in contemporary dance writing; provide a taxonomy of dance-related “re” activities that distinguishes reconstructions from revivals, reinventions, and recreations; defend a new, continuity-based approach to theories of dancework identity; and argue, on the basis of the taxonomic results and my preferred approach to identity, that the critic’s case against reconstruction fails because it is founded upon important metaphysical and aesthetic misapprehensions about the art of remaking (lost) danceworks.

170

9781847063700_Ch11_Final_txt_print.indd 170

2/27/2012 10:30:40 AM

12

Visual Arts John Kulvicki

1. Introduction The visual arts include works whose artistic and aesthetic value depends, at least in significant measure, on how they look. Paintings have masses and material constitutions, they make sounds when thwacked, and many of them will burn well, but none of these features seem particularly relevant to paintings’ value as works of art or to their aesthetic value. Musical performances, by contrast, usually involve visible elements, such as performers on stage, but audible aspects are central to such performances’ artistic and aesthetic quality. A shabbily dressed orchestra might distract one from a fine performance, but state of dress is peripheral to the performance’s quality. Typography and text layout might well be arts, and if so they are visual arts, but the art of the novel is not a visual art. Even if a novel’s value is found in the way it excites the visual imagination, the way a novel looks, if there is any way a novel looks, has no relevance to its value. Non-visual aspects of visual artworks can contribute significantly to their value. In early fifteenth-century Italy, not just color but material was highly prized in paintings, with the prices paid for pigments often specified in commissions (Baxandall, 1988, p. 11). It is a matter of no small significance that Marc Quinn’s self-portrait bust is carved out of his own frozen blood. Films are works of visual art but nowadays almost always include soundtracks, theater is rarely a purely visual phenomenon, and sculptures, not to mention some paintings and dance performances, often engage one’s haptic and kinesthetic sensibilities. The visual arts thus form a diverse lot, tied together by the fact that visual appearance plays a significant but not exclusive role in their artistic and aesthetic value. Why would philosophers concern themselves with such a heterogeneous category of artifice? Two issues keep the visual arts within philosophers’ sights. First, and most generally, how should we understand the artifacts constitutive of the visual arts? Most work in this area concerns pictorial representation and how it differs from other kinds of representation. Second, how do features characteristic of such artifacts contribute, perhaps distinctively, to the aesthetic appreciation of them? There is significant range to the specific topics covered 171

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 171

2/27/2012 10:30:43 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

under the latter category, but what follows focuses on pictorial realism. That topic dovetails nicely with the discussion in Section 2 and it is for a number of reasons a very confusing and particularly visual phenomenon.

2. Pictorial Representation Ernst Gombrich, the famous art historian, sparked much philosophical interest in artifacts with the publication of his Art and Illusion. That book investigates the role that conventions play in making pictures the way that they are. This is a curious topic, because, on the one hand, pictures are artifacts, so it seems as though our cultural conventions should play a decisive and almost complete role in determining their nature. On the other hand, pictures can seem so easy to understand—just look and you see what the picture is about!—that one might think they depend less on conventions and more on inbuilt perceptual capacities. We shouldn’t think interpreting pictures involves conventions more than seeing things in mirrors does. How do we sort out the nature and the cultural nurture of pictorial representation? For example, marks on paper, paint on canvas, low-relief sculpture, and wood carvings can all depict landscapes. Artificers are free to choose their media. But surely not any pattern on any surface could depict a landscape. Facts about how perceivers are built, on how light travels, and so on, must constrain the possibilities, but it is unclear how. Pictures seem distinctively visual for two reasons. First, the intrinsic properties of pictures responsible for them depicting what they do are visible properties. Makers’ intentions and society’s norms play some role in determining representational content, but the properties intrinsic to pictures that are relevant to what they depict are all visible properties. Their masses, material constitutions, and so on, are not relevant. And second, pictures are usually understood to depict visible things. This combination is not unique to pictures. Most written languages satisfy the first condition, and sentences in such languages that concern visibilia, as such, satisfy both. What seems to make pictures distinctive, and to explain these two facts about them, is that visual experiences of pictures relate in a distinctive manner to visual experiences of their contents. The nature of this relation is the focus of much theorizing about depiction. According to Richard Wollheim (1980, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2003a), the relation is what we can call “inflected inclusion.” The typical experience of a representational picture as such—what he called “seeing-in”—is a visual experience of both the surface and the content that is not reducible to a mere combination of the two experiences. This special state is not one in which an experience of the surface trades places with an experience of the content in time: first one, and then the other, as Gombrich (1961) suggested. And these contemporaneous aspects of such a twofold experience each affect the other. The experience of 172

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 172

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

Visual Arts

the content is inflected by the experience of the surface, and vice versa. Michael Podro’s work (1998) also emphasizes the mutual effects these aspects of experience have on one another. Wollheim thought that what one sees-in a picture is determined in significant measure by one’s knowledge of art and other matters, one’s past experiences looking at pictures, and so on. We are innately capable of having such experiences, but the character of them is not set in stone by hardwired perceptual capacities. Wollheim’s most striking and controversial example of seeing-in’s plasticity is that while one can see the famous Madonna depicted by Parmigianino as having a long neck, one ought not to see it that way, and with the proper exposure and training, one would not see a long-necked Madonna in the painting (Wollheim, 2003b). Wollheim has been criticized for failing to explicate seeing-in in sufficient detail (e.g., Walton, 2002; Hopkins, 2003b), though he consistently denied this and rejected others’ proposals for how to do so (e.g., Wollheim, 2003a, 2003b). Seeing-in also excludes trompe l’oeil from the realm of depiction because such artifacts do not engender twofold experiences. Some agree (Feagin, 1998, p. 236; Hopkins, 1998, pp. 15–17) but many find this claim too counterintuitive to accept (Lopes, 1996, p. 49; Levinson, 1998, p. 229; Kulvicki, 2006, p. 173). Recognition theories of depiction envision a different kind of relation between experiences of pictures and experiences of their contents: recognitional similarity (Schier, 1986; Lopes, 1996). Experiences of pictures cause, or are partly constituted by, the deployment of many of the same visual recognitional capacities that are caused by or constitute experiences of pictures’ contents. We clearly recognize many things on the basis of seeing them: qualities like redness and squareness, kinds of things like bicycles and maple trees, and individual, particular things like the boss’ car, the Evangeline oak, one’s best friend, and so on. Depicting an X, for the recognition theorist, essentially involves making an artifact that elicits deployment of one’s visual recognitional capacity for Xs, and perhaps other recognitional capacities as well. By contrast, there is no interesting connection between the recognitional abilities evoked by inscribed words and those involved in perceiving what such inscriptions represent. Onomatopoeia might, however, engender a quasi-pictorial, albeit auditory, grasp of content: buzzing bees, for example, and the chirping of chickadees and bobolinks. The recognition theorist does not insist we are fooled by pictures into thinking we are looking at what they depict. Experiences of pictures are not recognitionally identical to experiences of their contents, but they are similar in the important respect that the picture provokes the visual recognitional ability for something other than a colored plane, and that thing is usually the picture’s content. The range of things that can depict an X depends on how plastic human recognitional abilities are. Dominic Lopes (1996, 2003) suggests that the development of picture-making techniques has expanded perceivers’ recognitional 173

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 173

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

capacities. These capacities are not set in stone as some natural endowment so much as they are capacities that, within heretofore unknown limits, are subject to change. It is a platitude that pictures resemble what they depict (see Walton, 1973, p. 284), even though it is highly controversial just what makes it true. For the recognition theorist, pictures resemble their objects just insofar as experiences of pictures are recognitionally similar to experiences of those objects. The view does not require that pictures share any interesting properties with what they depict. “The recognition theory allows that we can identify objects in pictures even when there is limited similarity between picture and object” (Lopes, 2003, p. 644). And the recognition view does not require that pictures are generally experienced as resembling what they depict. Many pictures might share rather salient, visible properties with their objects, and this fact might sometimes explain recognitional similarity. But recognitional similarity is the only important relation between visual experiences of pictures and visual experiences of their contents. Experienced resemblance accounts of pictorial representation agree that experiences of pictures are recognitionally similar to experiences of their objects, but they also insist that an account of depiction ought to explain recognitional similarity. Robert Hopkins (1995, 1998, 2003a), who has the most detailed and carefully elaborated experienced resemblance account, explains recognitional similarity in terms of experienced resemblance in outline shape. What makes a representation pictorial is that it represents what appropriate observers experience it as resembling in outline shape. Christopher Peacocke (1987), Malcolm Budd (1993), and Catharine Abell (2009) present other versions of the experienced resemblance view. Outline shape is a relational, spatial property that two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional objects can share. Leon Battista Alberti (1435/1991), in the earliest surviving Western treatise on depiction, described an object’s outline shape. Consider projecting rays from a point out in all directions. Some strike the object, some miss it altogether, and some just touch it tangent to its surface. The collection of those latter, “extrinsic rays” trace a solid angle from that point into which the object fits without remainder. Any number of patterns traced on a plane surface can share the outline shape of that object, as long as those patterns fit into that solid angle without remainder. Most objects have indefinitely many outline shapes, corresponding to the many perspectives from which they can be viewed, and objects can be depicted from many viewpoints by mimicking their outline shapes from those different points on a plane surface. While the notion of outline shape makes sense, it is difficult to characterize with complete clarity and show that it does the work required of it. For example, Abell (2005b) criticizes Hopkins explication of outline shape and his use of it to explain depiction. 174

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 174

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

Visual Arts

It is not essential for Hopkins that pictures actually resemble their objects in outline shape, but that they are experienced as doing so. A plane surface that resembles some object in outline shape, but is not experienced as doing so by appropriate observers, does not depict that object. And a plane surface that does not resemble some object in outline shape, but is experienced as doing so by appropriate observers, can succeed in depicting that object. Many pictures, and almost all pictures in certain styles, will in fact resemble their objects in outline shape, and this resemblance will no doubt play a role in explaining the experienced resemblance characteristic of pictorial experience. Indeed, this is partly why John Hyman (2006) suggests that genuine resemblance in outline shape, or what he calls “occlusion shape,” is the basis upon which an account of depiction can build. Caricature and other pictorial styles that do not cleave closely to replication of outline shape still manage to depict objects, however. Such pictures are often experienced as resembling distorted versions of their objects. So, a caricature of Barak Obama resembles an Obama with exaggerated proportions in outline shape (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 94–7). The recognition view has traded some objections with the experienced resemblance view over the years. Lopes (2003) asks us to consider a situation in which experiences of a picture are recognitionally similar to experiences of some object, but in which one does not experience the picture as resembling the object in outline shape. Assume further that this object was made with the intention that it elicits such a recognitional response. We would be tempted to call such an artifact a pictorial representation, even though it is not experienced as resembling its object in outline shape. In addition, outline shape is often a poor guide to how one should interpret a picture. “A politician once complained of some public art that ‘our ancestors did not have rectangular heads.’ . . . the politician mistakenly believed rectilinear shapes must misrepresent ovoid objects” (Lopes, 2003, pp. 639–40). Wollheim lines up with Lopes on this point. His suggestion that it is incorrect to see a longnecked Madonna in Parmigianino’s portrait is directed at Hopkins’ stress on the importance of outline shape (Wollheim, 2003b, p. 145). Katerina Bantinaki (2008) agrees with Wollheim. Hopkins has a compelling retort to these worries: outline shape constrains the interpretation of pictures more significantly than these objections acknowledge (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 147–58, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). Parmigianino’s Madonna does seem to have a long neck, and this impression is not dispelled by knowledge of the artist’s aims and the history of picture-making. Similarly, Lopes’ imagined abstraction might very well depict subjects as square-headed, even if it is not the artist’s intention to instill the belief that those subjects have square heads. It is difficult not to interpret many Picasso’s as depicting oddly proportioned subjects, even if that does not exhaust the interpretation of such pictures (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 147–58). These issues are important for demarcating 175

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 175

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the extent of pictorial representation. It might be that Parmigianino’s portrait is about an ordinary Madonna, in some general sense of aboutness, even though it pictorially represents a long-necked woman. Aboutness is multifarious, and it is wrong to think that everything a picture is about is something that it pictorially represents. Though I have a rather different account of depiction, I have come out in favor of Hopkins’ take on these matters (Kulvicki, 2006, ch. 11, and 2010). Hopkins suggests, in a way much like Wollheim, that a special kind of experience characterizes our interactions with pictures, and that we can understand pictorial representation by appeal to it. Lopes thinks there is an important relationship between experiences of pictures and experiences of what they depict, but the former are not especially peculiar according to Lopes. Neither Wollheim nor Hopkins thinks that their preferred experiences are unique to pictures, but they do think that pictures exploit and foster such experiences. The pretense account of depiction, pioneered and exemplified by Kendall Walton’s work (1973, 1990), envisions a different relationship between experiences of pictures and experiences of their contents. Experiences of pictures make them apt for use as props in visual games of make-believe. In particular, one can imagine of one’s seeing a picture that it is seeing something else: what the picture depicts. This contrasts sharply with other kinds of representation, like written language. Encounters with literature can certainly inspire one’s visual imagination, but not as pictures do. One does not imagine of one’s seeing the printed page that it is seeing what it represents, no matter how able the prose. When playing games with props we remain fully cognizant of the fact that we are playing a game and using props, even though we are also aware of the prop in the imaginative context as something else. In this sense, Walton thinks his proposal accommodates Wollheim’s twofoldness, and he thinks that being a good prop for certain visual games of make-believe can explain the platitude that pictures resemble what they depict. Indeed, for Walton, “No theory of depiction can be fully convincing . . . unless it in some way accommodates or explains the urge to suppose that pictures do, and must, look like what they picture” (1973, p. 284). We can imagine our visual search of a canvas to be a visual search of a depicted scene. The order in which one acquires information about a depicted scene resembles the order in which one acquires such information when seeing the scene face to face. The kinds of information one gleans resemble the kinds of information one gets when looking at the scene face to face (Walton, 1984, pp. 270–1; 1990, p. 305). Should Walton agree with Hopkins and Lopes that pictures are recognitionally similar to what they depict? He needn’t do so. Strictly speaking, all that matters is that a surface is a good prop for certain visual games of make-believe. Perhaps eliciting recognitional responses is one way for a surface to be an apt 176

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 176

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

Visual Arts

prop, but there is no a priori reason for thinking it is the only way. Indeed, imagining one’s seeing of a surface to be a seeing of something else does not require recognizing the surface to be that object in any interesting sense of the word. It would be nice if one could pry apart these two conditions, perhaps even experimentally, and see whether one proposal is more or less plausible than the other in light of such separation, but no one has done this. Similarly, it might be that experiencing a surface as resembling objects in outline shape makes it a good prop for such games, but one need not think this is generally the case. Generally speaking, no one has worked out in detail how the pretense proposal relates to the others mentioned above. Structural accounts of depiction identify pictures in terms of syntactic and semantic relations that they bear to one another. To be a picture is to be a member of a representational system that has certain syntactic and semantic features. Such accounts do not deny that pictures evoke special experiences, or that experiences of pictures are related in interesting ways to experiences of their contents. They do not deny that pictures are props. They just suggest that these things are true of some or all of the representational systems that have such a structure. Ideally, the structural facts in question will help to explain features of pictorial experience and of aesthetic engagement with pictures. Nelson Goodman (1976) was the first to propose a detailed structural account of depiction. All pictures are members of relatively replete, syntactically dense, and semantically dense representational systems. Repleteness concerns how many features of a representation matter for it to be the representation that it is. In a graph of temperature over time, for example, the shape of the line matters, as does its position with respect to the vertical and horizontal axes. But the color of the line, its thickness, and the background color, for example, are irrelevant to the identity of the graph. That is to say, they are irrelevant to its syntactic and semantic identity. By contrast, more properties are typically relevant to pictures, including typically the color, shape, and even texture of each and every region of their surfaces. Pictorial systems can themselves differ with respect to repleteness—black and white photos are less replete than color photos, for example—but among representations, pictures are relatively replete. Syntactic and semantic density are somewhat complicated. In a syntactically dense system, there is no way to order the representations except such that between each two there is a third. Consider a class of pictures in terms of the shapes and shades of color that characterize their surfaces, and pick any two of them. Goodman’s claim is that regardless of your choice, you could always find a third picture that is intermediate between the two, in the sense that it is more similar to each of those two than the two are to one another. This is not true of language, for example. We could list all of the possible types of inscriptions, and the ordering would not have to be dense. 177

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 177

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Semantic density is just like syntactic density, but it is defined over the compliance classes of pictures—their referents—not their surface features. One cannot order the set of things pictures can be about except in such a way that between each two there is a third. Find two scenes one can depict, and one will always be able to find another scene more similar to each of the two than the two are to one another. Combining syntactic and semantic density yields an analog system of representation. (Others—Lewis (1971) and Haugeland (1981)—have criticized this way of understanding analogicity.) Pictures are relatively replete, analogue representations. Goodman says little about the perception of pictures. His account does not suggest that pictures are all visual. Nor does it distinguish many things we ordinarily take to be pictures from many things we would usually regard as non-pictorial representations. Peacocke (1987), for example, suggests taking any colored plane and making the hue, brightness, and saturation of each point correspond to some other quantity, say temperature, length, and density, of some other objects. Such an odd and difficult to decipher representation would be pictorial according to Goodman’s view of things. Moreover, Goodman’s view insists that pictures are analog representations, which is moderately implausible in this, digital age. Objections to Goodman’s approach are thus relatively easy to find, and interestingly enough the implausibility of his claims has led to a general abandonment of the structural approach. This reaction was perhaps a bit extreme (see Kulvicki, 2006a, ch. 1, and 2006c). Goodman’s account isolates features of pictures that no other account was even in a position to notice. It then suggests that the rest of an explanation of depiction should be made by an investigation into our habits and practices that have evolved over the centuries. This proposal is thus rather conventionalist. The profoundly conventionalist aspects of Goodman’s view obscure the significant and distinctive non-conventional features he understood pictures to have, however. Goodman understood pictures as being akin to language in the following sense. While it is often arbitrary which word stands for which thing—“dog” could have meant cats—we notice an impressive syntactic and semantic regularity within language. Speakers of a language need not be cognizant of this structure to use language, but that structure forms the bounds within which the rather conventional aspects of language function. The same is true of pictures, graphs, diagrams, and the like. By attending to structure, we find an impressive regularity in our practice that is not beholden merely to the habits of beholders. Goodman thought that his approach sheds light on our aesthetic appreciation of pictures and other kinds of things. Syntactic density, semantic density, and relative repleteness are “symptoms of the aesthetic” (1976, ch. 6;

178

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 178

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

Visual Arts

1978, pp. 67–8). When something is syntactically dense, one can investigate the object in an open-ended, indefinitely fine-grained fashion, and never be completely sure as to which syntactic object it is. The same is true of the contents of representations in semantically dense systems. Such things can hold one’s attention precisely as one tries to figure out what they are and what they are about. Repleteness only adds to the dimensions along which such open-ended investigation can take place. For Goodman, the aesthetic appeal of pictures is beholden in part to the fact that they have such theoretically recherché features. It’s not explicit recognition of such features that matters for the aesthetic appreciation of a painting, but the explication of these features is supposed to help explain why such objects are so aesthetically compelling. Kulvicki (2006a) offers a structural account of depiction inspired by Goodman’s. One set of conditions—relative syntactic sensitivity, semantic richness, and a modified version of relative repleteness (Kulvicki, 2006a, ch. 2)—is meant to capture the intuitive force behind Goodman’s density and repleteness, while avoiding their least palatable consequences. In particular, these conditions do not insist that all pictures are analog representations and they avoid some technical problems with Goodman’s version of repleteness. What sets my account most clearly apart from Goodman’s is transparency (2006a, ch. 3). Transparency is a rather difficult condition for a representational system to meet. In a transparent system, representations of representations within that system are syntactically identical to their objects. The most straightforward example of this is when one makes a clear focused photograph of another clear focused photo, head on and without remainder (i.e., without including anything in the photo but the other photo). The result should be just like its object with respect to the shapes and colors of the regions of its surface. Things are, of course, a little more complicated than all of this suggests, but this gives one the flavor of the condition. Transparency narrows the class of representational systems quite substantially and those that remain are quite plausibly pictorial representations. This proposal thus does a better job of accommodating intuitions concerning what is pictorial than Goodman’s does. In addition, this proposal sheds some light on how representations within other modalities, including tactile and auditory, can also be pictures, though this is a bit beside the point in an entry on the visual arts! With so many proposals for explaining depiction, one might get the sense that a number of them are right, and that the proper approach to the area is an account with many facets. This is precisely the suggestion made by Alberto Voltolini (forthcoming), who offers a “syncretist” account of depiction that draws on a number of features of the accounts described here.

179

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 179

2/27/2012 10:30:44 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

3. Pictorial Realism The term “realism” has been used in a number of ways within the arts, and a few of these notions help elucidate what makes visual art per se so aesthetically interesting. In one sense, novels can be realistic in the way that paintings can be (see Nochlin, 1972, for example), but there are varieties of realism that seem peculiar to representational visual art. As Plato suggests (Republic, Bk 10), we delight in imitation. Pictorial realism somehow involves comparing what is depicted with the artifact that depicts it, or at least comparing experiences of the former with experiences of the latter. Realism also tends to be comparative in another sense. It tends to compare individual representations, systems of representation, or styles of representation. A cubist still life is less realistic than the typical Chardin. Cubism tends to be less realistic than genre painting. Ordinary photographs are more realistic than fisheye photos or colorinverted photos. Individual representations can be compared with respect to realism either when they are members of the same system or style, as when one compares two color photographs, or when they are not, as when one compares a color photograph to a cubist portrait. There might be different notions of realism corresponding to the intra-systemic or intra-stylistic judgments, on the one hand, and the intersystemic notions on the other. It would help to have an account of representational systems and styles on hand, but that is a controversial topic in its own right. One obvious approach to realism is that pictures are realistic to the extent that they resemble their objects. Pictures that really resemble their objects are very realistic while those that only slightly resemble their objects are less so. This claim can almost seem like a platitude, akin to the claim that pictures resemble what they depict. In that sense, however, this claim is structurally useful but substantively uninformative. All of the action will be in how one unpacks the relevant notion of resemblance at work here. Presumably, the resemblance in question will be the same as the notion involved in the theories of depiction in the first place. This fact foregrounds, first, how an account of depiction is tied up with an account of pictorial realism, even if one does not determine the other. And second, it shows that there will be a tendency to regard realism as, in a sense, a degree of depictiveness. Pictures that only slightly resemble their objects are not very realistic, but they might also be only slightly pictorial if resemblance is a central feature of pictorial representation. Some pictures, like ordinary photographs, say a lot about their objects, while some, like stick figures, say very little. How much a picture conveys about its object is a decent candidate for being at least one dimension of pictorial realism. The more informative a picture, the more realistic it is. To be a bit more specific, the more informative a picture is, insofar as the things and qualities it depicts are concerned, the more realistic it is. If depicting a certain quality or thing requires 180

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 180

2/27/2012 10:30:45 AM

Visual Arts

resembling that thing, or even if it has the consequence that the picture will seem to resemble that thing, then this proposal does justice to the platitude that the more realistic a picture, the more it resembles what it depicts. Flint Schier (1986, p. 176) suggested that such informativeness was one out of two important aspects of pictorial realism, the other being accuracy. Dominic Lopes (1995) has a subtler account according to which a system of depiction is realistic to the extent that it provides information relevant to a certain context in which such representations are being used. So if one needs to discern minute spatial detail, then clear, focused photographs are the most realistic options. If, however, one needs to discern certain features of objects that might be difficult to discern amidst a fully detailed photograph, then some other kind of illustration might be the most realistic in question. Lopes’ (2009) paper on lithic illustration is a nice example of this at work. John Hyman (2004) suggests that rather than the amount of information a picture carries, we should focus on the range of questions one can ask of a picture’s object, given the picture of it. Some pictures support questions about the surface detail of objects, but not about their relative locations or sizes, for example, while others support all such kinds of question. Catharine Abell (2007, §V) finds fault with each of the foregoing proposals and suggests that pictures are realistic to the extent that they provide relevant information about how their objects would look were they to be seen. Her point is that pictorial realism seems to involve what a picture says about objects’ visual appearances. We can learn a lot from pictures, but not all of what we can learn contributes to realism. She thinks that some notion of relevance is important, as Lopes does, so that the uses to which pictures are put will affect one’s assessment of their realism. Abell also provides worthwhile objections to both Schier and Lopes. Kulvicki (2006a; 2006b, ch. 11) independently made a similar suggestion. Pictures are realistic to the extent that they are true to our perceptual conceptions of the objects they depict. Perceptual conceptions are conceptions involving how an object would seem perceptually. One difference between Abell and me is that she takes realism to depend on truth to the objects depicted while I suggest that it depends on truth to our perceptual conceptions of such objects. This has consequences for how each of us deals with intersubjective disagreement concerning pictures’ realism. Abell appeals to differing standards of relevance while I appeal to differing perceptual conceptions of objects. Once one has given an account of realism, one might still have to say something about irrealism. I suggest that we need to think of irrealism in positive terms—representing some object in a way that conflicts with our perceptual conception of it—rather than merely as a lack of realism. Abell has the resources for making such a claim as well, though she doesn’t notice that this complicates judgments of pictorial realism. One picture can be both more realistic than and 181

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 181

2/27/2012 10:30:45 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

more irrealistic than another. This fact about realism can help account both for our aesthetic engagement with pictures and for the sense we have of realism involving awareness of the picture as such as well as awareness of the depicted scene. Sometimes, objects can be depicted as having features that fit poorly with our perceptual conceptions of them, even though they fit quite well with our perceptual conceptions of painted canvases. One reason pictorial realism seems so aesthetically interesting is because it can, in that sense, encourage a comparison between and dual awareness of the painted canvas and depicted scene (Kulvicki, 2006b, ch. 11). As mentioned above, there is a sense in which judgments of pictorial realism might track judgments of just how pictorial a representation is. Alon Chasid (2007) presents just such an account, of what he calls “content-free” pictorial realism. The main idea is that we distinguish pictures sometimes in terms of how many of their surface features are relevant to them being the pictures that they are. In Goodman’s terms, some pictures are members of more “replete” systems than others are. Line drawings, for example, often make no use of color, and thus color plays no role in determining the contents of such drawings. Some make use of chiaroscuro techniques while others do not. Color photographs are examples of highly realistic pictures in this sense because their contents depend in some maximal sense on their surface features. This kind of realism seems logically independent of the ones that depend on informativeness, which is what makes them content-free in Chasid’s sense. An account of depiction might show a connection between the content-free kind of realism and the kind of realism that depends on informativeness and accuracy, as the two platitudes concerning realism and depiction suggest. In fact, independently of Chasid I suggested that these two kinds of realism are related (Kulvicki, 2006b, pp. 237–9), and that this relationship stems from my account of depiction. Pictures, on my account, will tend to go into great detail concerning visible features of their contents, and the complexity of a picture’s content is closely related to how replete it is. For this reason, pictures that are rather uninformative tend to seem like peripheral and not central examples of pictures. This way of doing things neatly ties together the two platitudes mentioned at the beginning of this section. Pictures resemble what they depict and realistic pictures really resemble what they depict. Nelson Goodman famously said that “realistic representation, in brief, depends not on imitation, or illusion, or information, but upon inculcation” (1976, p. 38). Goodman’s idea was that the pictures we consider to be realistic are the pictures that are produced within systems of representation with which we are familiar. To say that something is a realistic representation is to suggest that it represents things in a familiar way. Goodmanian realism is most naturally thought of as characterizing systems, and only derivatively individual representations. Pictures in linear perspective, for example, are particularly 182

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 182

2/27/2012 10:30:45 AM

Visual Arts

realistic because we have developed a well entrenched habit of using such representations. Any given picture, interpreted as a member of such a system, will therefore seem rather realistic. Lopes (1995) points out that Goodman’s view makes it difficult to explain revelatory realism. Sometimes artistic practice results in pictures that are more realistic than anything that had hitherto been seen. By hypothesis, such pictures are new, and thus not the kinds of things we habitually use. Goodman needs to explain how such a phenomenon could arise, or why there is no such phenomenon, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. For example, one popular thing to say about Giotto, Lopes (1995) points out, is that he made paintings that were breathtakingly realistic compared to those of his forebears who were nevertheless habituated to the less realistic paintings that came before him. Goodman seems to leave no room for this phenomenon. Another worry about Goodman’s view is that it is misleading. Goodman thought that what seems to resemble another thing is a matter of habit. What counts as a good illusion is a matter of habit, at least in large measure. So, imitation and illusion are themselves practices beholden to habits. It makes sense to ask, therefore, whether they play a role in realism. This would not contradict the claim that realism is a matter of habit. Realism, for Goodman, depends on our habits, but Goodman hasn’t given an account of realism merely by claiming that it depends on habits. He needs to say some more (Kulvicki, 2006a, p. 352; 2006b, pp. 246–7).

183

9781847063700_Ch12_Final_txt_print.indd 183

2/27/2012 10:30:45 AM

13

Film Amy Coplan

1. Introduction Attempts to understand film have taken a variety of theoretical approaches and addressed a wide range of issues, including the nature of film, whether or not film is art, the criteria for evaluating film, film authorship, narration, whether or not film is like a language, spectatorial engagement, film style, film music, ideological dimensions of the viewing experience, film’s ideological effects, viewer reception, and many more. It would be impossible to discuss all of these issues in the space allowed, so this chapter will instead provide a brief survey of a few of the most philosophically important issues in the study of film and then explore three recent developments in philosophy of film—the debate over whether or not film can do philosophy, the rise of cognitive film theory, and empirically driven research on viewers’ affective experiences of film.1

2. The History of Film Theory: Some Key Philosophical Issues Philosophy of film is a relatively new research area within philosophical aesthetics, but philosophical questions have been at the center of film theory since its inception. Much of early film theory was devoted to issues surrounding the status of film as an independent art form. Typically, those who denied that film was a legitimate art form did so because film is a photographic medium and thus is produced through a mechanical process that putatively does nothing more than record reality.2 In response to this view, many early and classical film theorists sought to demonstrate that film is art. Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), for example, developed a highly influential account of montage (film editing) as the defining feature of film (1942, 1949). In its broadest sense, montage is a series of ideas or impressions that emerge from a particular combination and order of individual film shots. Eisenstein distinguished five types of montage, all of which he regarded as capable of artistic expression. On his view, through montage, a filmmaker could do far more than record reality; 184

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 184

2/27/2012 10:30:48 AM

Film

she could express abstract ideas by suggesting conceptual relationships among individual shots.3 If Eisenstein is right, it follows that film is capable of expressing artistic intentions.4 Closely related to the question of whether or not film is art is the question of what film is, which is often referred to as the problem of medium specificity. In the history of film theory, arguments regarding the artistic potential of film have often relied on arguments about the nature of the medium. Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) maintained that film’s uniqueness and expressive power as an art form come from its mode of presentation, which is based on a variety of techniques such as flashbacks and close-ups. These techniques distinguish film from other art forms, such as theater, and also make it possible for film to express and communicate human experience in new and varied ways (1916). As was discussed above, Eisenstein considered montage to be the essential feature of film, for montage enables filmmakers to express their artistic intentions and thus move beyond the mere documenting of reality, and because montage is also a technique unique to film. In contrast to Eisenstein, theorists such as André Bazin (1918–58) defined film in terms of its capacity for realism. As a result, Bazin was far less interested in montage than in formal techniques such as extended shots (long takes) and deep focus, which contribute greatly to film’s realistic character (1967, 1971). Philosopher Noël Carroll denies that there is a single medium of film that “mandates anything about what should or should not be made by a filmmaker either in terms of style or content.”5 In other words, nothing about the definition of the medium provides criteria for evaluating the artistic success or quality of a film.6 Carroll argues for a functionalist definition of film, which means expanding the objects under consideration beyond celluloid based cinematography and focusing on the category of “moving images,” rather than film (or cinema) (2008). If the function of cinema is to impart the impression of movement, then any medium that can implement this function will qualify as cinema, including celluloid based film, video, broadcast TV, handmade cartoon flipbooks, CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery), and other media that have yet to be invented. According to Carroll, something will count as an instance of the moving image if and only if it meets the following conditions: 1. It is a detailed display or a series thereof. 2. It belongs to the class of things from which the production of the impression of movement is technically possible. 3. Performance tokens of it are generated by templates, which are tokens. 4. Performance tokens of it are not artworks in their own right. 5. It is a two-dimensional array.

185

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 185

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

There are ongoing debates in philosophy about the nature of cinematic specificity and the conditions for cinematic art; however, these two issues are less controversial than they once were.7 Another philosophically important feature of film theory, and an admirable one, is the emphasis it has placed on social and political questions, particularly those relating to race, class, and gender. Such questions are among the most important that academics address in any field, and yet, too often they are minimized and those interested in them, marginalized. This has not been the case with film studies.8 Much of the feminist research on film has been done through the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. This is in large part due to the work of feminist theorist Laura Mulvey, whose seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” helped to place feminist approaches to film at the center of film studies and to highlight the social and political implications of spectatorship, particularly those relevant to gender issues. Mulvey attempted to uncover the sources of viewers’ pleasure in watching films and to analyze its implications. To do this, she complicated the account of spectatorial identification offered by apparatus theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, employing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis from a feminist perspective to reveal how film fosters processes of identification that perpetuate oppressive patriarchal ideals. Mulvey identified a pattern in the cinematic conventions, including the narratives, of classical Hollywood films, which comprised (1) the assumption of a male spectator, (2) the establishment and coding of a male protagonist as an active subject who controls the meaning of the narrative and of the female characters by being the “bearer of the look,” and (3) the establishment and coding of female characters as passive, weak objects of erotic desire, there to be “looked at” by the male characters and the male spectators (1975). This pattern exemplifies what has been termed the “male gaze,” a way of seeing, thinking about, and acting in the world that takes women as passive, weak objects to be looked at and controlled by male subjects (Devereaux, 1990). Due to this pattern, according to Mulvey’s view, when a male spectator watches a standard Hollywood film, he identifies with the male protagonist who represents his ego-ideal. Through this identification with the active controlling agent on screen, the spectator controls the unfolding of the narrative events and takes pleasure in looking voyeuristically at the female characters or fetishizing some part of their bodies. This gives him the feeling of omnipotence and the pleasure associated with looking. Mulvey’s analysis aimed to show that identification with male protagonists exploits unconscious desires and capitalizes on institutionalized sexism to generate pleasure. If Mulvey is right, then certain forms of character engagement,

186

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 186

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

Film

perhaps those that are most common, play an essential role in making film an instrument of oppressive ideological values. Since the publication of her account of spectatorial identification, Mulvey’s view has come under attack from all sides: feminist theory, psychoanalytic film theory, queer theory, and cognitive film theory. Feminist and queer theorists have charged that she exhibits covert heterosexism through her claim that the assumed spectator is a straight male, and that she fails to address the female spectator, the role of race in representation, and the position of transgender spectators (Creed, 1998; Friedberg, 1990). Many have also taken issue with Mulvey’s characterization of the relationship between spectators and characters as static and thus not subject to resistance or to subversive viewing practices.9 Finally, she is criticized for failing to explore alternative cinematic forms and effects. However one evaluates Mulvey’s particular account of character identification, her influence within film theory is undeniable.

3. Recent Developments 3.1 Film as philosophy In the past decade, a number of philosophers and film theorists have addressed the issue of whether or not and to what extent films can be said to do philosophy. Debate on this issue has led to questions about what counts as philosophy and what sorts of criteria should be used in interpreting film. It is relatively uncontroversial to claim that films can explore philosophical themes, raise philosophical questions, or provide clear and persuasive illustrations of philosophical ideas. Many of the proponents of the view that films can do philosophy are, however, committed to a much stronger claim; they contend that films as films can make philosophical points and further philosophical argument. In other words, films are doing philosophy in an unconventional way. Paisley Livingston explains that, according to this view, “films can make independent, innovative and significant contributions to philosophy by means unique to the cinematic medium (such as montage and sound image relations)” (2008, p. 592). In his book On Film, Stephen Mulhall defends one of the strongest versions of the “film as philosophy” thesis, arguing that the four films in the Alien series are “not philosophy’s raw material, not a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing” (2001, p. 2). Mulhall interprets Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) together with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), both by the same director and made only a few years apart. The two films, he argues, are both studies by Scott on the “embodiedment” of

187

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 187

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

human beings and their attempts to repress its conditions and consequences. He further argues that the study is held together by a Nietzschean vision of human existence that moves from the conception of life as a devouring will to power to a conception of what a flourishing human life might look like in a certain kind of cosmos (2001, p. 47). In addition, Mulhall takes Alien and Blade Runner to be explorations of the impact of technology on human forms of life; he says that Heidegger would recognize the world of Blade Runner as an exemplification of the “age of technology,” which treats the natural world as nothing more than a source of resources for human purposes (2001, p. 48). In his analyses of these films, Mulhall emphasizes not just narrative content but also various ways in which formal dimensions of the films provoke philosophical thoughts and responses that lead to philosophical reflection. For example, he argues that Blade Runner reveals the humanity of the replicants (genetically manufactured beings) by evoking our sympathy and empathy as the replicants are repeatedly shown being attacked by the film’s human characters. The replicants express their pain through their embodiment, just as we would, and we cannot help but respond to these expressions as we perceive them directly. Therefore, through our experience of watching the film, we come to understand that the replicants’ embodiment makes them human. There is no soul or mind hidden behind the replicants’ human bodies; the bodies themselves are the source of humanity. Thomas Wartenberg is another proponent of the “film as philosophy” thesis, though his version of the thesis is more moderate than Mulhall’s. In his recent book Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Wartenberg explores multiple ways in which film can philosophize, including by illustrating philosophical claims in illuminating ways, making arguments through the presentation of thought experiments, making arguments by presenting counterexamples, and advancing novel philosophical theses. Wartenberg contends that, because of film’s ability to philosophize in these ways, “philosophy can be screened.” Two of Wartenberg’s strongest arguments reveal how films can function as illustrations and how they can function as thought experiments. To make the case that a film can do philosophy by illustrating a previously articulated theory, Wartenberg explores the notion of illustration. He begins with an analysis of pictorial illustration and distinguishes between what he calls “mere illustrations,” which simply provide one way to imagine the ideas presented in a text, and what he calls “iconic illustrations,” which are essential to understanding a work and its ideas and thus are constitutive of the work. He offers John Tunniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the illustrations that appear in birding books as examples of iconic illustrations. Wartenberg does not go on to argue that films function in the same way as these iconic illustrations, for the goal of his argument is to reveal that illustrations can

188

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 188

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

Film

be highly significant and “need not be subordinated to that of which they are an illustration” (2007, p. 44). To show how this works, Wartenberg develops a persuasive analysis of Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), which he interprets as an insightful exploration of Marx’s theory of alienation and exploitation of workers in a capitalist society. One way in which it does this is by providing a specific interpretation of Marx’s metaphor of a person being turned into a machine. Wartenberg explains: This is achieved by showing Charlie’s arms continuing to rotate in the tightening motion he is required to perform even when the assembly line has been shut down. One example occurs at lunchtime. Charlie nearly sits on a bowl of soup that Big Bill has poured and, so, has to pass the soup to him. But his arms and entire upper body continue to twitch in that tightening motion, causing him to spill the soup on his massive co-worker. (2007, p. 50) Wartenberg considers this scene to be philosophically significant because it helps to make clear things that Marx’s theory does not, namely how it is that workers’ bodies become machines, how factories cause this, and the ways in which mechanization is “registered by the human body and the human mind” (Wartenberg, 2007, p. 50).10 The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) has received an enormous amount of attention from philosophers and is perhaps the film most often associated with the “film as philosophy” thesis.11 Wartenberg interprets The Matrix as presenting an updated version of Descartes’ “deception hypothesis.” The film creates a relationship between the computer-generated matrix in the story world of the film and its characters that is analogous to the relationship between the film itself and the viewers. As the narrative of the film unfolds, viewers are encouraged to undergo a thought experiment about the nature of reality, knowledge, and certainty. But the film does more than present ideas for viewers to contemplate; it enables viewers to experience the possibility that what they see is not what it seems and that they could be deceived about the nature of reality at any time. Although many philosophers of film have embraced the claim that films can do philosophy, the thesis has not gone unchallenged. Murray Smith, Paisley Livingston, and Bruce Russell have all raised serious objections to the types of arguments put forth by Mulhall and Wartenberg. Smith concurs that in some very broad sense, films can be philosophical, but he says that arguing for the stronger and more specific thesis that films can do philosophy requires philosophers to employ an “expansive strategy,” which relies on such a loose and vague notion of what counts as philosophy that all sorts of activities will start to 189

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 189

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

count (2006, p. 34). A problem with views like Mulhall’s, according to Smith, is that narratives are not arguments and so even though they may carry messages, morals, and themes, they do not function as arguments. They do not put forth premises and then reason to conclusions. If one takes philosophy to be based on argument, then Mulhall’s conclusion is in trouble. What about more moderate claims, such as Wartenberg’s, that film can do philosophy by presenting thought experiments? Smith challenges these as well on the grounds that thought experiments serve different functions in narrative fiction films than they do in philosophy. In philosophy the primary role of the thought experiment is epistemic, but in narrative fiction films, its role is to aid the artistic storytelling or to entertain. While Smith does not deny that thought experiments can serve artistic functions in philosophy or epistemic ones in film, he points out that these two types of work—narrative fiction films and philosophy—will rank artistic and epistemic purposes differently (2006). He still wants us to take narrative fiction films seriously, but as works of art rather than as works of philosophy. A key issue underlying Smith’s view is his understanding of what counts as philosophy and of what counts as narrative. Philosophy, Smith suggests, requires argument, which is to say premises, patterns of inference, and conclusions. Narratives are not, strictly speaking, arguments, and Smith points out that the precise relationship between narrative and argument “remains impressionistic and undertheorized” (2006, p. 34). Moreover, Smith insists that characterizing the complexity of typical narrative fiction films in terms of philosophy is a mistake. Philosophy tends to be abstract and conceptual, while narratives are concrete and are of sufficient complexity and indirection that they resist restatement or paraphrasing in clear and unequivocal terms (Smith, 2006, p. 40). Paisley Livingston (2008, 2009) shares Smith’s skepticism regarding the film as philosophy thesis, at least in its bold form. There are a number of problems surrounding the notion of film authorship, which is central to claims that films can do philosophy since often such claims are really stating that a film’s author is doing philosophy. Not everyone agrees that films have authors since film is such a collaborative art form and sometimes a film results from the work of many different artists working independently of one another without any common goals (2008, pp. 593–4). For instance, in many cases where films are created by a director, writer, or producer without a great deal of power, studios interfere with the filmmaking and significantly influence the final product. Livingston points out that even when there is a clear author of a film, it will often still be impossible to determine what sort of philosophizing the author was doing or if she was doing any at all (2008, p. 594). Some advocates of the film as philosophy thesis have addressed this type of objection by talking about philosophical theories or ideas that an author “could have been” acquainted 190

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 190

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

Film

with, but this is too weak to support serious interpretations, according to Livingston.12 He explains: The audio-visual evidence underdetermines the initial choice of philosophical positions, so the interpreter’s selection of philosophical background is insufficiently motivated in the absence of additional evidence pertaining to the filmmaker’s actual sources and attitudes. (2008, p. 595) Another problem Livingston identifies with claims that films can do philosophy is that many such claims rely on problematic views regarding the principles of interpretation (2008, p. 596). Interpretive projects can differ significantly; they can have different goals and different methodologies. An interpretation can aim at explaining what an actual author actually meant or can attempt to determine what an author “could have meant.” And some interpretations are unconcerned with an author’s intentions. An interpreter may use a film in order to illustrate or elaborate his own philosophical views such that his interpretation functions not to reveal the meaning in a given film but to advance or communicate the significance of the interpreter’s own philosophical theory or position (2008, p. 596). With this type of interpretive project, which Livingston characterizes as an imaginative “as if” interpretation, philosophers are free to apply any philosophical theory or framework that they choose. But this undermines the claims that the interpretations is about the philosophizing of a filmmaker (2008, p. 599). What about interpretive projects that focus on an actual filmmaker’s philosophizing, rather than some possible philosophizing? These projects will be better able to support a thesis about a particular film doing philosophy, but they are subject to much stricter evidentiary constraints. But suppose, however, that an interpreter has a great deal of evidence about a particular filmmaker’s artistic and philosophical intentions. There may still be serious problems, if Bruce Russell is right. Russell grants that fictional narratives may help guide us toward counterexamples, but maintains that they cannot provide the type of evidence necessary for advancing a philosophical theory (2006). Livingston discusses another difficulty with the film as philosophy thesis that is perhaps the most important one, despite its not having been accorded much attention thus far. Interpreting films as philosophy means analyzing and evaluating them from the perspective of philosophy. This type of interpretive project stands in stark contrast to appreciative interpretations, which concentrate on film as an art form, not as a tool for proposing and arguing for philosophical theses, presenting thought experiments, or helping guide us toward or through counterexamples (2008). Murray Smith’s point about the distinctive goals of narrative fiction films and thought experiments touches on the same issue. By treating films as philosophy, we risk failing to understand them in the 191

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 191

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

way that they were intended, and distorting them in order to make them serve a philosophical, rather than an artistic purpose. It may be possible to avoid doing this if an interpreter attends to both the artistic and philosophical dimensions of a film, or perhaps we should just accept that films can serve multiple purposes and that interpretations need not take account of all of them.

4. Cognitive Film Theory A more general research trend in the study of film that has helped shape the trajectory of philosophy of film is the rise of cognitive film theory, or “cognitivism,” as it is often referred to in film studies. Cognitive film theory addresses a variety of issues; one of the most philosophically important is the nature of viewers’ experience, both because it is interesting in and of itself and because understanding what spectators experience is a necessary first step to answering a series of related philosophically important questions, such as what the influence of film is, how and why film affects us, and how much control we have over these effects. Many of the explorations of viewer experience in cognitive film theory have concentrated on viewers’ emotional and affective responses, and the topic of viewer emotion is currently one of the most important within the study of film, and yet for decades it was of minor interest within film studies. In the 1970s and the 1980s, prior to the emergence of cognitive film theory, the prevailing theoretical approaches to viewer experience in film theory were based on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and various forms of Marxism. Researchers employing these approaches typically analyzed viewers’ experience in terms of the concepts of pleasure, desire, and fantasy and made little mention of the kinds of basic emotions at the center of the philosophy and psychology of emotion (Plantinga and Smith, 1999; Plantinga, 2009a, 2009b).13 Film theorist David Bordwell and philosopher Noël Carroll, the pioneers of cognitive film theory, were both highly critical of this research due to their skepticism regarding its theoretical underpinnings. They also had problems with its methodology. Carroll attacked the tendency of these researchers to engage in “grand theorizing,” his label for research that proceeds in a top-down fashion, beginning with a theory such as Lacanian psychoanalysis and then using that theory to characterize all aspects of film and our experience of it. As a response to “grand theorizing,” Carroll proposed an alternative methodology, which he termed “piece-meal theorizing”; it came to be one of the defining features of cognitive film theory. Detailing this approach in his 1985 essay “The Power of Movies,” Carroll explained that piece-meal theorizing targets specific issues and problems and makes no attempt to construct comprehensive accounts of our experience of film. He then raised several questions about the power of film that were characteristic of his new approach and which 192

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 192

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

Film

remain the sorts of questions most often pursued today in mainstream philosophy of film. Why do films elicit intense responses in so many viewers? How can they do so cross-culturally? What sorts of psychological processes do films activate? And how do filmmaking techniques factor into our experience of film? During the same year that Carroll’s essay was published, David Bordwell’s book Narration in Fiction Film was released. As the first book to take an explicitly cognitive approach to traditional questions in aesthetics, it represented a watershed. Bordwell combined research in narratology and cognitive science to argue that predictable patterns found in film narration were designed to activate certain perceptual and inferential mechanisms that had already been identified in cognitive psychology. He explained that narration mobilizes reasoning shortcuts like prototype thinking, and primacy and recency effects. According to Bordwell, in most cases spectators are best understood as information seekers who frame their expectations of what will happen, conceptualize on-screen events in terms of larger frameworks, and apply schemas derived from both ordinary knowledge and standard cinematic traditions (1985).14 Due to the work of Carroll and Bordwell in the 1980s and their continued development of their interdisciplinary framework, cognitive film theory grew considerably in the 1990s and today is a well-established theoretical perspective. It is a minority view in film studies, but this is not the case in analytic philosophy, where, arguably, it is one of the dominant frameworks for studying film. Today, most cognitive film theorists share some or all of the same operating assumptions, and theoretical and methodological commitments. Perhaps most important is their naturalistic orientation; cognitive film theorists typically draw on and incorporate research in cognitive psychology, social, and developmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, as well as work in philosophy of mind and philosophical aesthetics, much of which shares the same naturalistic orientation. Underlying this naturalistic orientation is the assumption that our cognitive and perceptual experiences while viewing film closely resemble our cognitive and perceptual experiences in everyday life, which is to say that our experience of film is based on our natural perceptual processes and our ordinary capacities for making inferences and judgments. Not surprisingly, then, most cognitive film theorists attempt to construct explanations grounded in or consistent with the current empirical understanding of the mind. In a recent post to his blog, Bordwell details several more specific features characteristic of cognitive film theory (2009b). He contrasts the primary goals of cognitive film theory with those of both psychoanalytic film theory and cultural studies. While researchers in the latter two groups tend to produce interpretations of films, those in cognitive film theory focus on functional and causal explanations, many of which concern features of viewer experience that are cross-cultural. Most cognitivists accept the findings of empirical science that show that, in spite of the fact that culture exerts influence over us, we still 193

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 193

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

possess certain innate tendencies and propensities. These innate processes play a major role in our experience of film (Bordwell, 2009a, 2009b).15

5. Emotional Responses to Film A thriving line of research within cognitive film theory centers on the nature and significance of viewers’ emotional responses to mainstream narrative fiction films. This research is among the most philosophically important in the study of film not only because of what it reveals about the nature of the film medium and our relationship to it, but because of what it tells us about emotion and imagination more generally. Much of the early work in cognitive film theory concentrated on how film narration organizes and influences spectators’ experience. Carroll, Bordwell, Ed Tan, and Edward Branigan, just to name a few, investigated how narration and various narrative techniques appeal to viewers; capture and manage their attention; prompt them to ask questions and seek answers to questions; encourage them to make inferences; and evoke emotional responses. Although some of this work addressed emotion, the emphasis was on more cognitive processes. By the mid-1990s, several cognitive film theorists interested in viewer response shifted their attention from narration to character engagement, which came to be viewed by many as the feature of viewer experience most significant for emotional response. One of the most common ways to explain our relationship to characters in fictional narratives is through the concept of identification, which gets used both within academic discussions and in ordinary language, and yet in spite of its popularity, the notion of engagement through identification has been frequently criticized in the film literature (Carroll, 1998, 2001, 2008; Allen, 2003; Smith, 1995; Plantinga, 2009b). Mindful of this criticism, Berys Gaut nevertheless endorses an identification model of character engagement (1999). Gaut’s model specifies four distinct types of identification: perceptual, affective, motivational, and epistemic. To say that we identify with a character can mean that we imagine seeing what the character sees, feeling what the character feels, wanting what the character wants, or believing what the character believes (Gaut, 1999, p. 205). It is possible for us to identify with only one aspect of a character’s situation or with all aspects; it simply depends on the film. By clarifying the aspectual nature of identification, Gaut hopes to show that identifying with a character does not mean we imagine being identical to the character, a view that many have assumed. Rather, we imagine being in the character’s situation—in one or more aspects. Gaut favors conceptualizing character engagement in terms of identification for two reasons. First, he insists that the concept is less confused than its 194

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 194

2/27/2012 10:30:49 AM

Film

critics have claimed and that it simply needs the type of clarification his model provides. Second, it is the term ordinary filmgoers most often use to describe their experience, and most filmgoers report that a film either fails or succeeds depending on whether or not it encourages identification with its characters. Gaut wants to avoid creating a new technical vocabulary to explain character engagement, which he thinks most viewers already understand fairly well. Murray Smith acknowledges that something like a process of identification occurs when we watch films, but argues that we need a more precise set of concepts to capture the complexity of spectators’ engagement with characters (1995). Smith presents a model of character engagement that he labels “the structure of sympathy”; it comprises three distinct but related levels of engagement and thus allows for multiple types of character-spectator experience. Smith utilizes Richard Wollheim’s distinction between central and acentral imagining. Central imagining refers to imaging a situation “from the inside,” that is, from a particular point of view. Acentral imagining, however, refers to imagining that some situation is occurring but without doing so from within the situation. Standard accounts of character engagement, such as Gaut’s, emphasize central imagining, but Smith disagrees and argues that acentral imagination plays the more important role in character engagement and that all three levels of engagement that make up the structure of sympathy are more associated with acentral imagining. What are the three levels of sympathetic engagement? Smith labels them recognition, alignment, and allegiance. Through recognition, spectators experience characters as individuated and as continuous human agents. Alignment refers to the ways in which a film narrative communicates information, giving viewers access to characters’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. Allegiance is Smith’s term for the process by which film creates sympathies for or against characters, and it is this concept that comes closest to the ordinary use of the term identification. Smith also discusses empathic processes, but they are separate from the structure of sympathy and can work either within it or against it. According to Smith’s model, most viewers experience plural identification while viewing a film, sometimes engaging with a character on one level but not another, sometimes engaging with a character at different levels throughout a film, and sometimes engaging with different characters at different levels. For example, in the opening sequence of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), we are briefly aligned—perceptually—with the shark, as it looks up from deep in the water at the legs of a young woman. In spite of our alignment with the shark, we don’t experience allegiance to it; we don’t begin to root for it or hope it enjoys attacking its victim. In this case, we see what the shark sees without feeling what it feels or wanting what it wants. While Smith highlights the importance of sympathy in character engagement, many others prefer to emphasize empathy, a psychological process that 195

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 195

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

has become increasingly important since the 1990s because of its significance for multiple domains of human experience, its role in important debates in philosophy and psychology, and the discovery of mirror neurons.16 Mirror neurons are a special class of neurons that fire both when one performs a certain type of action and when one simply observes another individual performing the action.17 It is in part due to the discovery of mirror neurons that, in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, empathy is increasingly being viewed as a principal way in which we emotionally engage with one another’s experiences in our ordinary lives. This view, along with features of the film viewing experience, have led a number of theorists studying narratives to conclude that when we emotionally engage with characters, we do so—at least some of the time—through empathy (see, for example, Feagin, 1996; Neill, 1996; Currie, 2004; Coplan, 2004, 2009). Although empathy accounts of character engagement resemble identification accounts such as Gaut’s, they have certain advantages over identification accounts. Empathy is a psychological process that has been and continues to be studied by empirical scientists. This enables theorists to draw on concrete empirical findings and to revise and refine their accounts as more is learned. To be clear, I am not suggesting that all philosophical or aesthetic problems can be solved by empirical data but rather that, when possible, it is useful for researchers to learn from and sometimes incorporate empirical findings. By the same token, empirical scientists stand to gain by bringing research in the humanities to bear on their projects. A significant way that philosophers can contribute to research programs in a variety of disciplines is through the clarification of central concepts. Conceptual clarification would certainly benefit research on or involving the concept of empathy, as there currently exist numerous competing conceptualizations of empathy that refer to distinct psychological processes that differ in function, phenomenology, and effect18 (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b; Coplan and Goldie 2011; Battaly, 2011; Batson, 2009; Eisenberg, 2000). Elsewhere, I argue that a more precise conceptualization of empathy is needed for the concept to do any useful explanatory work (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b). I conceptualize empathy as a complex imaginative process through which one simulates a target individual’s situated psychological states, including the individual’s relevant beliefs, emotions, and desires, by imaginatively experiencing the individual’s experiences from his or her point of view, while simultaneously maintaining self-other differentiation. My account of empathy emphasizes the role of self-other differentiation and makes it a necessary condition for empathy. In many cases, the presence of self-other differentiation is what clearly distinguishes empathy from processes that resemble it but during which it is possible for the boundaries between an observer and a target individual to break down. In such cases, 196

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 196

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

Film

the observer makes no distinction between her representation of her own experience and sense of self and her representation of the target individual’s experience. Thus the observer becomes psychologically fused with the target individual, becoming confused about the cause and appropriateness of her own experience. Under my conceptualization of empathy, fusion experiences of this type do not qualify as cases of empathy. They may have some characteristics in common with empathy, but they are nevertheless distinct. When we become psychologically fused with another, we distort reality and lose sight of the fact that, no matter how similar or close to a target individual we are, we are separate individuals. In the absence of clear self-other differentiation, we are likely to misunderstand who the target individual is and what her experiences are like. In addition, psychological fusion often leads to actions and behaviors on the part of the observer that are inappropriate and self-directed.19 In addition to preventing observers from confusing their own experience with the experience of target individuals, self-other differentiation also makes it possible for empathic observers to have thoughts and emotions beyond those of the target individual, since the observer can have these as part of her own separate experience. In other words, empathy with a target individual does not require that the empathizer experience only those thoughts and feelings experienced by the target individual and no others.20 Many of the objections to the view that spectators often engage with characters in narrative fiction films through empathy are based on the association of empathy with the concept of identification. This association has led many to conclude that empathy entails that a spectator imagine being identical to the relevant character and that it requires total replication of a character’s mental states. Therefore, the reasoning goes, if a spectator’s thoughts, affective states, or desires differ in any way or at any time from a character’s, then the spectator cannot be experiencing empathy. Any asymmetry between the experience of the spectator and the character is taken to be evidence that the character engagement occurring is not based on empathy (see, for example, Carroll, 2008, and Plantinga, 2009b). Asymmetry objections present no problem for empathy accounts of character engagement, as long as we have a precise conceptualization of empathy that includes self-other differentiation as an essential feature. For a spectator to empathize with a character, she must accurately represent the character’s situated psychological states to a greater or lesser degree, but she may also experience additional states as part of her own separate experience. Empathy involves a deep connection to another’s experience, but not one that is so deep that it compromises our awareness of having a separate identity, and thus while imaginatively experiencing another’s experience from the other’s point of view, we can at the same time have our own separate feelings and experiences that 197

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 197

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

are not part of the imaginative project of empathy (Coplan, 2004, pp. 147–9, 2011a, 2011b).

6. Mirroring Responses Thus far, my discussion of character engagement has covered emotional responses that involve high-level cognitive processing. Although these types of responses have received the most attention in cognitive film theory, there are other less cognitively sophisticated ways of responding to characters that play an equally, if not more, important role in viewers’ experience. I refer to one type as mirroring responses since they all result from some sort of automatic mimicry or mirroring process, but theorists refer to them using a variety of labels: motor mimicry, affective mimicry, low-level simulation, mirror reflexes, and emotional contagion (Smith, 1995; Plantinga, 1999, 2006, 2009a, 2009b; Coplan, 2006, 2009; Carroll, 2006, 2008). Mirroring processes are a set of innate mechanisms and feedback systems that, under certain conditions, cause us to have experiences that match or mirror those of a person whom we observe. They are automatic and involuntary, occurring as a result of direct sensory perception. They involve neither the imagination nor high-level cognitive processing and thus are a more primitive mode of emotional engagement than the processes normally associated with fictional engagement, such as empathy and sympathy. Aestheticians have been some of the first researchers to identify and examine mirroring processes, which until very recently have been largely neglected in other branches of philosophy.21 Interest in mirror neurons, however, has quickly changed things. As I explained above, mirror neurons fire both when we observe another performing an action and when we perform the action ourselves. They constitute a mechanism for shared experience through which the mere perception of another’s experience activates much of the same experience in an observer. Early work on mirror neurons focused on motor action, but clinical data and brain imaging studies now show that there is a mirror system for emotion as well (see, for example, Iacoboni, 2008; Goldman, 2005, 2006, 2011; and Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2008). The strongest evidence is for fear and disgust and indicates a common neural substrate for the experience and the perception of these emotions. Much of this recent work and debate on our ability to understand and relate to one another has significant implications for philosophy of film, and for character engagement in particular, since film is a medium that works through direct sensory stimulation and thus activates many of the same psychological mechanisms and systems at work in our everyday lives. Mirroring responses work very differently from empathy, sympathy, and emotional responses based on high-level processing, both in ordinary life and 198

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 198

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

Film

in response to characters in narrative fiction films. In certain respects, they more closely resemble automatic affective responses such as startle, which can be triggered solely by cinematic images and sounds and are not character oriented.22 Like startle, mirroring responses are activated by direct sensory perception. They are nevertheless character oriented; mirroring is the mechanism through which a relevant character’s experience is transmitted to the spectator and typically only occurs in response to characters.

7. Conclusion I have made no attempt in this chapter to provide a comprehensive survey of all of the many topics and subtopics that make up the philosophy of film, and much more could be said about each of the topics that I have discussed. Nevertheless, I hope that this chapter makes clear that the topic of film is one of significant philosophical and aesthetic importance. This holds true regardless of whether or not we agree with the proponents of the thesis that film can do philosophy. Contrary to the intuitions of far too many philosophers, film raises myriad issues that are not only philosophically interesting on their own but are also relevant to many other areas of aesthetics and of philosophy more generally, as well as to other disciplines. This is perhaps one reason that philosophy of film is one of the most interdisciplinary areas of aesthetics and why it continues to grow in breadth and depth.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

It should be noted that the philosophy of film is a rich and diverse area of study that includes research from numerous theoretical traditions. My discussion in this chapter is in no way comprehensive and neglects much of this research, especially that done in the Continental tradition by important figures such as Thedor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Max Horkheimer, Douglas Kellner, Vivian Sobchak, and Slavoj Zizek. Roger Scruton (1983) has famously defended this view more recently. Cook (1996, pp. 169–80) and Bordwell (2005, 2009b). There are numerous alternative arguments for the view that film can be art. For recent discussions of this topic, see Stecker (2009), Carroll (2008), Smith (2001), Thomson-Jones (2008), and Gaut (2003). Carroll, 2006, p. 161. Carroll, 2008, pp. 35–52. For recent discussions of these two issues, see Gaut (2010) and Carroll (2008, pp. 5–79). See, for example, Kaplan (1997), Diawara (1988), Dyer (1997), Haskell (1974), Ryan and Kellner (1997), Flory (2008), Curran and Donelan (2009), and essays in Kaplan (2000), Diawara (1993), and Erens (1991). See, for example, Friedberg (1990) and Smith (1995).

199

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 199

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 10. Elsewhere in the book, Wartenberg argues that all that is necessary for an interpretation of a film to be prima facie plausible is that it’s possible that a filmmaker could have been familiar with the philosophical ideas being attributed to the film. This does not mean that the filmmaker has to have been familiar with the philosophical text itself but only that it’s possible that the filmmaker could have been acquainted with the issues the relevant philosophical theory raises, which can become part of the culture at large. Regarding Modern Times in particular, Wartenberg explains in a footnote that due to the publication of some of Marx’s work, it’s possible that Chaplin would have been familiar with the ideas. An even stronger argument in favor of thinking that Chaplin could have been familiar with Marx’s view of capitalism and its effect on workers is the fact that Chaplin was good friends with several socialists and a supporter of Russia. 11. See, for example, essays in Grau (2005) and Irwin (2002, 2005). 12. See note 7 above. The issue of film authorship has been much debated by philosophers. See, for example, Gaut (1997), Carroll (2008), Meskin (2009), Livingston (1997), and Sarris (2005). 13. Overviews of psychoanalytically based research in film studies can be found in Creed (1998) and Allen (2009). See, also, Creed (1993), and essays in Kaplan (1990), and Bergstrom (1999). 14. See, also, Bordwell (2009a). 15. For an overview of cognitive film theory and its development, see Bordwell (1996, 2009a, 2009b), and Buckland (2007). For in-depth discussions of cognitive film theory and the differences between cognitive film theory and psychoanalytic (or “screen”) theory, see Bordwell and Carroll (1996), Allen and Smith (1997), Carroll (1992, 1996a, 1996b), Plantinga and Smith (1997), Smith (1995), and Plantinga (2009a). 16. See Eisenberg and Strayer (1987), Wispé (1987), Batson (2009), and Coplan and Goldie (2011) for discussions of the varied uses of empathy and its relevance to philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. 17. For more on mirror neurons, see discussions in Iacoboni (2008) and Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008), and essays in Braten (2007), Stamenov and Gallese (2002), and Pineda (2009). 18. Coplan (2011a, 2011b), Battaly (2011), Batson (2009), and Eisenberg (2000). 19. The phenomenon that psychologists refer to as “personal distress” or “contagious distress” is one example of the type of psychological fusion I’m describing. For more on how personal distress differs from empathy, see Toi and Batson (1982), Batson et al. (1983), Batson et al. (1987), Eisenberg et al. (1988), Eisenberg et al. (1989), Eisenberg and Eggum (2009), Singer and Lamm (2009), and Coplan (2011a, 2011b). 20. I discuss this issue in greater depth, along with other issues regarding the nature of empathy, elsewhere (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b). 21. Jenefer Robinson (2005) and Stephen Davies (2011), for example, have both discussed mirroring (or contagion) responses to music, which can occur in response to film music and which share much in common with other types of mirroring responses to film. Both Robinson and Davies also contrast responses that result from mirroring and those that are more cognitive. 22. For a useful discussion of startle, its automatic and involuntary nature, and its relevance for understanding the way emotion works, see Robinson (1995). For more on non-cognitive affects in general, see Robinson (2005), Prinz (2004, 2007), and Coplan (2011a, 2011b). On non-cognitive affective responses to film, see Choi (2003), Carroll (2003), Coplan (2006, 2009), and Plantinga (2009b).

200

9781847063700_Ch13_Final_txt_print.indd 200

2/27/2012 10:30:50 AM

14

Architecture Rafael De Clercq

1. Introduction There is a tradition of reflection on architecture that goes back more than 2,000 years. Most of the works that belong to this tradition are prescriptive in that they commend a particular way of building. Sometimes, the way to build is stated in very precise terms, as when rules of proportion are given. Sometimes, the way to build is specified in vague terms, as when one architectural style (classical, Gothic, modern, postmodern, . . .) is judged more appropriate than another style. To the first category belong Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture (ca. 25 BCE), Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570), and Le Corbusier’s The Modulor (1948), among others. To the second category belong Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843), Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923), and Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), among many others. No doubt some works could be reckoned in both categories. However, the kind of reflection one expects from philosophical aesthetics is not prescriptive, but descriptive. Just as philosophers in general are not expected to teach us what to do, so philosophers of architecture are not expected to tell us how to build. (As we shall see, this is not to deny that philosophers may have something important to contribute to debates about what to do or how to build.) Thus, given the prescriptive character of most actual theorizing about architecture, there is little in the aforementioned tradition that we would be inclined to call “architectural aesthetics” or “philosophy of architecture.” Moreover, if we equate philosophy with analytic philosophy—roughly, with philosophy practiced in the style of Frege, Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein—then the situation looks even worse. For in the analytic strand in the philosophy of architecture, only one work seems to merit the status of a genuine classic: Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Architecture, published in 1979. Fortunately, the book is so rich in ideas that it does not leave the philosophy of architecture in a pitiful state. In what follows, four issues in architectural aesthetics will be addressed: architectural design (§2), architectural style (§3), the justification of “optical

201

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 201

2/27/2012 10:30:54 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

correction” (§4), and the metaphysics of reconstruction (§5). The first three issues have been selected because they are fundamental, because they bring out some of architecture’s distinctive features, and because they can be expected to be found interesting by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The fourth issue is less likely to be found interesting outside philosophy, but it is representative of recent discussions in the analytic philosophy of architecture. Those interested in the unselected topics—for example, the ways in which buildings can mean something—are referred to other survey articles and books, in particular, to Scruton (1979), Haldane (1998), Graham (2005), and Winters (2005, 2007).

2. Design In general, buildings are designed before they are built. The distinction between design and construction is most clear in contemporary Western society, where building plans have to receive formal approval before they can be carried out. However, there can be design where there is no physical plan or even a prior mental conception of what the result should look like. The process of design need not precede the process of construction, and in actual cases often overlaps it to a considerable extent. If such overlap raises philosophical questions, then these are better dealt with in metaphysics or in action theory than in the philosophy of architecture. In the latter domain, the philosophical question of interest is: what do people do when they design a building? In other words, what does the act of designing a building consist in? According to Roger Scruton (1979), designing a building is essentially a form of practical deliberation, that is, a matter of finding out what to do.1 Consequently, it involves what philosophers call “practical reason.” To understand why Scruton’s is a philosophically significant answer to the question it is necessary to contrast it with an alternative one. The view expressed by the alternative answer has probably never been held in a pure form, but it is attractive to the extent that one conceives of architecture as engineering. On this view, designing a building is trying to find a solution to an “optimization problem.”2 An optimization problem is a computational problem that is solved by finding a “best” solution in a larger set of possible solutions, where “best” means that the value of a certain function is maximized. Clearly, if this view is correct, then designing involves not practical but “theoretical reason.” To understand why Scruton objects to such a rationalistic picture of design, it is necessary to grasp what it implies. Let us therefore look, first, at what solving an optimization problem generally amounts to. Next, we can evaluate the idea that designing a building is such a form of problem-solving.

202

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 202

2/27/2012 10:30:54 AM

Architecture

In general, solving an optimization problem takes four steps (see, for example, Papalambros and Wilde, 2000, pp. 11–12): 1. The selection of a set of key-variables to describe the alternatives. 2. The selection of an objective function, expressed in terms of the key-variables, whose value is to be minimized or maximized. 3. The determination of a set of constraints, expressed in terms of the keyvariables, which must be satisfied by any acceptable solution (e.g., any acceptable design). 4. The determination of a set of values for the key-variables, which minimize (or maximize) the objective function, while satisfying all the constraints. Most research in “optimization theory” seems to focus on the fourth step. In particular, most effort seems to be put in finding algorithms that generate best solutions as fast as possible. However, this is not where Scruton locates the problem with the optimization-theoretic model of architectural design. According to him, the problem is to be found already in the second step. Applying the model to architecture, the first step involves seeking out the key-variables that determine architectural success and that lie within the architect’s control. This does not seem too difficult. One immediately thinks of such variables as orientation, size, shape, compartmenting, properties of materials, to name just a few. Identifying the limits within which these variables can take values does not seem difficult either. There are obvious physical, biological, legal, financial, etcetera, constraints that have to be taken into account. For example, a certain height may be incompatible with building regulations and certain materials may be unaffordable. The real difficulty lies with the “objective function,” the function whose value expresses architectural success. For it seems fair to say that we do not have the faintest idea of how the value of the function might be computed. In particular, there seems to be no rule for mapping each possible design—as specified by the key-variables—to a degree of architectural success. The reason, according to Scruton, is twofold. First, architectural success is at least partially constituted by moral and aesthetic values such as decency, dignity, civility, harmony, elegance, and beauty. Since there is no rule for mapping designs to such values, there is no rule for measuring architectural success either. (As Scruton says, there are no “laws of taste.”) Second, even if moral and aesthetic values are left out of consideration and architectural success is defined entirely in terms of practicality or functionality, there are problems arising from the “multiplicity and intangibility of non-aesthetic aims” (p. 26). The problem posed by multiplicity itself is a problem of incommensurability: roughly speaking, there is no standard by which the value of the various non-aesthetic aims can be compared (pp. 28–9). Put otherwise, the value these aims have relative

203

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 203

2/27/2012 10:30:54 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

to one another cannot be stated by a general principle. For example, there is no principle stating when an increase in privacy properly compensates for a decrease in natural illumination. Consequently, there is no notion of what, in general, constitutes a best trade-off, and so there is no rule for measuring architectural success even when this is defined in purely functional terms. Of course, the problem of incommensurability becomes all the more pressing if, in addition to functionality, moral and aesthetic aims are taken into consideration. In comparison, the problem of the intangibility of non-aesthetic aims seems less important. According to Scruton, it consists in the fact that we may not be able to state all our aims in advance of any concrete attempt at realizing them. In other words, there may be ends to our building project of which we are not immediately aware. This problem is further increased by our having to take into account functions that the building may be expected to fulfill in the future.3 However, conceived in this way, the problem of intangibility seems to be a practical problem, even if it is inevitable. In other words, it does not seem to make the optimization-theoretic model inappropriate. All it implies, it seems to me, is that there is no certainty with regard to what the best solutions are; what now looks optimal may later turn out to be suboptimal. So be it. By now, it should have become clear why, in Scruton’s view, the optimization-theoretic model of architectural design is simplistic at best. As noted earlier, his own model pictures the act of designing a building as a form of practical deliberation.4 More specifically, it is pictured as a form of practical deliberation in which the aesthetic sense (taste) plays a crucial part. This sense replaces the need for rules by informing us directly about the aesthetic qualities of the design. On the basis of such information, we are more likely to arrive at a design that is, all things considered, appropriate, than were we to rely solely on information about functionality. Indeed, appropriateness is what, according to Scruton, all good design aims for. It is equal to architectural success. As such, it is a synthesis of moral, aesthetic, and functional components. However, because of the reasons given earlier, such a synthesis should not be expected to be the outcome of an algorithmic optimization procedure. It requires a “sense of the appropriate.” Of course, to say that good design involves an aesthetic sensibility and a sense of the appropriate is not to say very much, except that the algorithmic view is incorrect. More important are the reasons adduced for this view.

3. Style Suppose Scruton is right and designing a building essentially involves a form of practical deliberation. Then, surely, among the questions to be resolved in this manner is: in what style to build? The history of architecture seems to offer 204

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 204

2/27/2012 10:30:54 AM

Architecture

a wide palette of possible answers: classical, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, art nouveau, art deco, arts and crafts, modern, postmodern, to name just a few styles that have shaped the history of Western architecture. However, it is widely believed, by architects and theoreticians alike, that one is not entirely free to choose from this palette; that the answer to the question, “In what style to build?,” is dictated by the historical and cultural circumstances in which one lives. There is disagreement, though, about how these circumstances determine the correct answer. According to one school of thought, sometimes called historicism, the correct answer is determined by the “spirit of the age” (Zeitgeist), which expresses itself in many cultural products, successful architecture being only one of them. Incidentally, the spirit of the age is usually supposed to favor only one particular style of architecture. According to another school of thought, one that might be called vernacularism, the correct answer is provided by the building traditions that exist at a certain time and place. Of course, these traditions may exhibit stylistic variety, so there does not have to be a unique correct style on this view. To the first, historicist camp belong architect Mies van der Rohe, architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, and theoretician Sigfried Giedion, among others.5 To the second, vernacularist camp belong philosopher Roger Scruton, architectural historian David Watkin, and architect Léon Krier, among others. The two schools of thought need not contradict one another in their recommendations. It is perfectly conceivable that they come up with the same answer to the question, “In what style to build?” However, as a matter of fact, they have adopted a totally different attitude toward modern architecture. Whereas historicists tend to favor modern architecture because it expresses the spirit of the modern age, vernacularists tend to despise it because it breaks with existing building traditions (at least when it is practiced in certain places). Who is right, then? It is natural to feel a pull in both directions. On the one hand, working today in some earlier style such as classical or Gothic may be felt to result in something fake, anachronistic, or out-of-place. On the other hand, working in the modern style has produced so much ugliness that it is difficult to suppress a longing for the revival of earlier styles. Even theorists who have committed themselves to historicism or vernacularism may recognize the dilemma. What distinguishes them from the uncommitted may simply be the belief that one of the evils is greater than the other; for example, that fake classicist architecture is worse than ugly modern architecture. (This could be believed for a variety of reasons. For example, it might be believed that fake classicist architecture is an unavoidable evil while ugly modern architecture is just a temporary drawback due to an incomplete mastery of the modern style. Architectural historian William Curtis seems to have believed something to that effect; see, for example, Curtis, 1987, p. 388.) As said in the introduction to this chapter, philosophers are not expected to answer practical questions about how to build. It seems to follow that they are 205

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 205

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

not expected to take a position in the debate between historicists and vernacularists concerning the desirability of modern architecture. However, differences about what ought to be the case sometimes reduce to differences about what is the case. In other words, it is possible that one of the parties in the debate is negligent about a certain descriptive fact, and that this negligence explains his or her position. If this is the case, then it may certainly be expected from a philosopher to bring this out. According to Scruton, the historicist misses out on the fact that one can only form a conception of the spirit of an age, if indeed there is such a thing, when one has progressed far enough into that age or even entered a new age: But such spurious determinism loses its force, just as soon as we realize that the “style of an age” is not a critical datum, not something that can be identified in advance of the individual intentions of individual architects. Historicism has no real method whereby to associate works of a given period with its ruling spirit. All it can do is to reflect on their association after the event, and try to derive, from a critical understanding of individual buildings, a suitable formula with which to summarize their worth. It follows that it can say nothing in advance of observation, and set no dogmatic limit either to the architect’s choice of style or to his expressive aim. (1979, p. 55; italics in original) Hence, if historicism is true, then the correct answer to the question, “In what style to build?” is beyond the ken of those who have to act on the answer. This is paradoxical, because it implies that we cannot knowingly do the right thing in architecture. To be sure, this objection only helps to undermine historicism in so far as it is a theory of what an architect ought to do. In principle, the historicist could retreat to a somewhat weaker position, and claim that the spirit of the age sets the norm by which we are to judge architecture in retrospect. However, if this were to become her position, then it would be fitting to ask why expressing the spirit of the age is such a big deal: why is it regarded as a necessary condition for architectural success? As Scruton writes, “[n]othing . . . stands in the way of the suggestion that a work might succeed, just occasionally, in expressing something other than its historical reality, and derive its success from that” (p. 54). Moreover, a methodological concern can be raised about the way historicists have actually appealed to the spirit of the age in looking back at the architecture of a certain period (pp. 55–6). Their selection of age-appropriate works often seems arbitrary or to betray a bias in favor of a particular style. In this connection, Scruton mentions the classicist architect Edwin Lutyens, who was ignored by Giedion in his highly influential Space, Time and Architecture (first published in 1941).

206

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 206

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

Architecture

In light of these (and no doubt other) considerations, historicism looks unattractive as a philosophical position. It does not follow, of course, that vernacularism is true or that the practice of modern architecture is without justification. Nonetheless, Scruton (1979, 1994) has some important arguments to draw his further conclusion. His arguments are all based on two undeniable facts about architecture that serve to distinguish it from at least some of the other arts. The first fact is that buildings are highly localized entities, which means that they belong to an environment in which they either fit or do not fit.6 The second fact is that buildings are public objects, which means that they cannot be ignored, for example by those who happen to have a different taste in art. The first fact implies that the architect has to pay special attention to how his design fits into an existing environment. The second fact implies that the intended manner of fit has to be in accordance with accepted standards of taste. In other words, the architect cannot afford to seek a radical reinterpretation of what a successful fit is, but must rely on previous examples of how such a fit was realized. (See Matravers (1999) on how much room the architect has left for contradicting existing visual preferences.) It does not follow, as one might expect, that a common style is an absolute necessity; in other words, that the architect is forced to adopt the style of the existing structure or the adjacent buildings. Scruton explicitly states that harmony need not result from stylistic unity.7 Nonetheless, to the extent that there is stylistic diversity, harmony will be an achievement that not all architects may be capable of. So a common style at least increases our chances of success in architecture. These chances are further increased, Scruton believes, if the common style possesses something like a grammar, that is, a set of rules for the combination and application of elements. The classical style is a clear example of such a style. Its grammar has been laid down in several Renaissance books on the so-called Orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite), and has been successfully applied throughout the history of Western architecture. On the other hand, the modern style is a clear example of a style that lacks a grammar (Scruton, 2000). It, too, has its recognizable elements (if you like, vocabulary): pilotis, sharp angles, flat roofs, horizontal windows, curtain walls, and so on. But there are no rules for the combination of these elements. As a result, architectural success is highly dependent on the individual architect’s talent, which explains the many failures in this tradition of architecture. There is irony in this observation inasmuch as early modern architects tended to think of themselves as clearing the way for a scientific approach to architecture in which artistic talent becomes superfluous. Two important qualifications are in order. First, just as Scruton does not regard stylistic unity—a common style—as a precondition of architectural success, he

207

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 207

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

does not regard strict obedience to the grammar of a (vernacular) style as such a precondition. The rules of the grammar need not be respected at all times. However, they have to be respected on a sufficient number of occasions so that a meaningful, “rule-guided” order can emerge, which is a precondition of successful law-breaking. Second, and related to the first qualification, Scruton is not recommending a mechanical application of rules. In line with his account of architectural design, he argues that a fitting deployment of stylistic elements always requires an “aesthetic sense” and a “sense of the appropriate,” even where rules are followed. However, such senses can be educated, and in rule-governed practices an underdeveloped sense will do less harm than where no rules exist. Assuming that Scruton’s diagnosis is correct, one naturally wonders whether there could be an architecture that is modern in outlook and whose success does not depend on genius or artistic talent. In particular, the question arises whether modern architecture might be enriched, not just with a grammar, but with a grammar that opens up a vast range of interesting, adaptable possibilities that can be explored by anyone endowed with a minimum of aesthetic sensibility and practical reason. It seems difficult to reason about this question in an a priori manner. Perhaps the future will bear out that the answer is yes. In the meantime, the question is what policy to adopt as an architect, an urban planner, or a client. Assuming that Scruton is right, should one, at least temporarily, refrain from working in the modern style? No such radical policy is really called for. The most reasonable policy, it seems to me, is to let one’s choice of style depend on the neighborhood: roughly speaking, where modern architecture is clearly dominant, the modern style is preferential; where traditional architecture is clearly dominant, traditional architecture is preferential. This policy has been called “true pluralism” by architect and theoretician Léon Krier, who opposes it to the “false pluralism” of the hotchpotch city or town we are all familiar with (the city center of Brussels being just one tragic example). As an individual architect it may be difficult to adopt this policy, but larger firms have already adopted it to great success. Robert A. M. Stern and Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge Architects are probably the best-known examples. Of course, true pluralism does not add a grammar to modern architecture, so failures in this style would continue to occur even if the segregation policy were adopted. However, the failures would no longer result from a clash of styles, and older neighborhoods would no longer be forced to be the victims of them.

4. Optical Correction Whether modern or classical, a building has visual parts: parts that we can distinguish visually and which we can experience either as well proportioned

208

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 208

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

Architecture

(balanced) or as disproportioned (imbalanced) in view of the whole they compose. Presumably, when all of a building’s visual parts are experienced as well proportioned, the building itself is experienced as well proportioned. But does that imply that the building is well proportioned? If not, should a building be well proportioned or merely give the impression of being so? For example, should architects adjust certain ratios (e.g., ratios determining window spacing or column width) to compensate for visual “distortions”—a distorted view of the true ratios—that may result from the building’s height and our position at ground level? Such adjustments have been made in both ancient (the Parthenon) and modern times (the Fagus Factory), but whether they can be justified is a long-debated issue. For example, Plato was against optical correction, just as, presumably, was Palladio. In contrast, Vitruvius, Barbaro, Vignola, and Lomazzo all thought that optical correction might be necessary (see Mitrovic, 1998, pp. 669–73; 1999, pp. 119–20; Suppes, 1991, pp. 356–8). Perhaps we cannot carry on the discussion in their—metaphysical—terms, but there is an issue, and a philosophical argument is needed to resolve it. For historical reasons, let us call “platonism” the view that only the true proportions of a building matter and “antiplatonism” the view that only its apparent proportions matter.8 Both views seem to be too extreme or one-sided: platonism because it disregards our interest in visual pleasure, antiplatonism because it disregards our interest in what is truly valuable (e.g., true beauty). A more reasonable view, it seems to me, accords importance both to real and to apparent proportions. On such a view, our concept of architectural success imposes a limit on how far both proportions can deviate from rightness.9 Perhaps the limit can be stated as follows: either the real or the apparent proportions have to be definitely right, and neither can be allowed to be definitely wrong. In any case, this is just a proposal. It might be asked how we can make sense of proportions being really right when they do not appear right, and vice versa. Does that not presuppose the implausible theory that rightness of proportion can be judged a priori, that is, on non-perceptual (e.g., mathematical) grounds? No: it merely presupposes that we have a concept of visual illusion. With that concept in hand we can alter the perceptual conditions—either in reality or in our imagination—so that we are in a position to judge the proportions as they really are. For example, we could look at the building from a greater distance; or we could turn to a small-scale model, or a drawing, or a photo (perhaps effacing certain details); or maybe our visual imagination succeeds in correcting the distorted view of ordinary perception. In all these cases, the real proportions of the building are being revealed to us and we can judge them a posteriori using our sense of the appropriate (in Scruton’s sense of the word).

209

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 209

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

5. Reconstruction Buildings are capable of surviving many and profound changes, from a mere repainting of their walls through “adaptive reuse” to the addition and demolishing of major structural parts. Philosophers like to take such possibilities to the extreme in order to discover metaphysical truths, for example about “criteria of identity.” What is interesting about the case of architecture is that the extreme cases are not just found in thought experiments. The history and current practice of architecture offer a wealth of examples where the identity of a building becomes questionable in light of the changes it has undergone. Robert Wicks (1994) considers one type of case: the case where a building is demolished and then, later, rebuilt on the basis of the original plans, but using different materials. A clear instance is the Goethe House in Frankfurt, which was faithfully reconstructed after its destruction in World War II. Common sense seems to hesitate between calling such reconstructions authentic and calling them replicas of the original building. According to Wicks, the hesitation is to be explained by the fact that we have two ways of conceiving of the “architectural work”: The above considerations together indicate that we can variously judge the authenticity of architectural refabrications by applying criteria of identity from either the realms of painting and sculpture or from the realm of music. In the former case, the architectural refabrication emerges as an unauthentic copy or replica; in the latter case, it emerges as authentic re-instantiation (or “resurrection”) of the architectural work. (1994, p. 165) In other words, we can either identify the architectural work with a concrete object, a particular building, in which case only one building can be called authentic; or we can identify it with an abstract object, a type of building, in which case many buildings can be called authentic (as instances of that type). However, note that, in the second case, the instances of an architectural work are different buildings, so that “resurrection” is a slightly inappropriate term to relate one instance to another. A genuine case of resurrection would be a case where one and the same concrete object—for example, a building—comes into existence again. In metaphysics, this possibility, if it is one, is known as “intermittent existence.” Some authors accept it as a genuine possibility, others do not. But Wicks ignores it altogether. Instead, he seeks evidence for the view that architectural works might be compared to musical works, which are abstract objects. In particular, he compares construction workers to musical performers, building plans to musical scores, and, finally, architectural works to musical works. The basis of the comparison, however, seems weak. For

210

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 210

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

Architecture

Wicks, the fact that we often choose to restore buildings to their original state “suggests” that the architectural work resides in a certain look or appearance, so that, when this look or appearance is recreated, the work is again instantiated (p. 168). Of course, as Wicks realizes, the conclusion does not follow logically. What is more, the cited fact about restoration is not even good evidence for the conclusion. To see this, consider, first, that we adopt exactly the same restoration policy in the case of (important or significant) paintings and sculptures, which, according to Wicks, are not abstract objects; second, that we have an alternative, and more straightforward, explanation of why we adopt such a restoration policy with regard to objects that are considered to be of artistic or historical value. The explanation is that we aim to return to such objects their original appearance because that is how they were intended to be viewed, understood, and judged.10 Moreover, it goes without saying that the original state of a work of art is often superior to the state it is in when questions about its restoration arise. The above considerations do not contradict the fact that architectural plans are like musical scores in that they determine an abstract structure. But this is still far from saying that the architectural work is to be identified with this structure. As has just been pointed out, Wicks has not given us good reasons for making the identification. Moreover, there is evidence that the identification would be mistaken, at least in the vast majority of cases. For the names we associate with architectural works (e.g., “the Seagram Building” or “the Panthéon”) refer to concrete buildings, not to abstract designs. In this respect, architecture is unlike music, where the well-known names (e.g., “Beethoven’s Fifth”) refer to abstract works rather than to particular performances of these works. Wicks is not the only philosopher who has drawn startling conclusions from the possibility (and practice) of rebuilding. In a recent article, Lopes (2007) considers the case of a Japanese sanctuary building on the site of Ise Jingu. The building has been rebuilt almost every 20 years since the eighth century. As in the case envisaged by Wicks, the materials used for the rebuilding are different from the ones that constituted the original building. Moreover, the rebuilding does not take place exactly “on the spot,” but on some adjacent vacant lot. According to Lopes, this practice presents a problem for the standard, Western ontology of architecture, which identifies buildings with material objects. The reason is that, if the sanctuary is a material object, then it is a different object every 20 years: Ise Jingu [i.e., the sanctuary] is made of parts that were joined together no more than twenty years ago. Although it sits next to the spot where a different building stood, it is not the survivor of that building. The reason is that no building survives the simultaneous replacement of all its parts. Indeed, there

211

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 211

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

was a time when both buildings stood side-by-side, and a material object cannot stand beside itself. (Lopes, 2007, p. 81) Hence, on the assumption that the sanctuary is a material object, there is a straightforward answer to the question “How old is it?”: at most 20 years. However, the Japanese themselves are (allegedly) not able to give such a straightforward answer. Instead, they hesitate between calling the sanctuary “old” and calling it “new.” For Lopes, this suggests that they are not always referring to the same entity. On the interpretation he seems to prefer, the Japanese sometimes refer to an event—when they call the sanctuary “old”— sometimes to a temporal part of that event—when they call the sanctuary “new.” This interpretation seems bizarre, because events are usually characterized in terms of duration, not age. In any case, the interpretation can be avoided because there is, in my view, a much more plausible explanation of why the Japanese are ambiguous about the age of the sanctuary. The explanation locates the source of the ambiguity not in the reference of “the sanctuary at Ise Jingu” but in the question concerning its age. For the question, “How old is the sanctuary at Ise Jingu?” can be interpreted in at least two ways. It can be interpreted as asking how long the current referent of “the sanctuary at Ise Jingu” exists. But it can also be interpreted as asking how long there has been a referent of “the sanctuary at Ise Jingu.” Given that there is a new building on the site of Ise Jingu every 20 years, the question will not receive the same answer under both interpretations. However, both interpretations are clearly compatible with the assumption, made by the standard ontology, that the sanctuary is a material object (see further De Clercq, 2008, and for a response, Lopes, 2008).

6. Conclusion This chapter has dealt with four issues in the philosophy of architecture: design, style, optical correction, and reconstruction. As noted in the introduction, at least the first three issues are fundamental, which explains why they also bear on issues that have not been explicitly addressed, such as the experience, understanding, and evaluation of architecture. For example, if Scruton is right about architectural design, then a building’s design is to be experienced as the outcome of a practical deliberation process rather than an optimization procedure, although optimization may of course be involved in the process. Similarly, if Scruton is right about architectural style, then the chances of success of the deliberative process will be determined to a considerable extent by what style gets chosen. Finally, if my own suggestion concerning architectural

212

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 212

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

Architecture

proportion is correct, then the evaluation of a building will have to take into account both real and apparent proportions. However that may be, the selection of the issues was certainly not based on their being hotly debated in the literature. The reason is that the philosophy of architecture has been a somewhat dormant discipline over the past two decades, compared to, for example, the philosophy of music. It is difficult to predict whether this will change any time soon, but there are signs of a growing interest in art forms that do not enjoy the status of, say, music and literature, either because they are relatively new (film, comics, digital art) or because they are “applied” (architecture, fashion, and design). Moreover, some of the issues that traditionally belonged to the philosophy of architecture can now be retrieved in the emerging field of “environmental aesthetics,” which does not just concern itself with the natural environment but also, according to one of its advocates, with “cityscapes, neighbourhoods, amusement parks, shopping centres . . ., our offices, our living spaces” (Carlson, 2005, p. 551).

Notes 1. Here, as elsewhere in the text, my interpretation of Scruton is somewhat creative. For example, although Scruton clearly believes that the process of designing a building is necessarily shot through with practical deliberation—that is, whatever practical reason does—he never (clearly) identifies the two. 2. In spite of his claim that, strictly speaking, a “design problem is not an optimization problem” (p. 99), Christopher Alexander (1964) comes at least close to recommending exactly such an approach. 3. This requirement is also stressed by Addis (2007, p. 610). 4. Scruton’s conception of practical deliberation is very much like the one found in Wiggins (1998, ch. 6), which was originally published in 1975–76 and which, according to a footnote in the text, had circulated before for “more than a decade.” 5. The historicist camp has been well documented by Watkin (2001). Novitz (1994) questions the claim that Giedion is to be reckoned in the historicist camp. However, he construes historicism as a descriptive thesis about the way architectural practices succeed one another rather than as a normative thesis about how to build. In the latter sense, Giedion seems to be a historicist indeed, for example, when he writes that “the great architectural masterpieces . . . are true monuments of their epochs; with the overlay of recurrent human weaknesses removed, the central drives of the time of their creation show plainly ” (1967, p. 20). 6. For more on architectural “fitting,” see Edwards (1946) and Carlson (1994, esp. pp. 146–52). 7. This should have been emphasized in De Clercq (2004), although I was relying there on Scruton (1994). 8. Of course, how the parts of a building appear to be proportioned depends on one’s point of view. So the antiplatonist should at least specify what the relevant point of view is. There is of course no reason to think that this cannot be done. It can even be done in a less than (completely) arbitrary way, for example (in a utilitarian spirit), by specifying that the crucial point of view is the one that is adopted by the greatest number of people for the greatest amount of time.

213

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 213

2/27/2012 10:30:55 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics 9. The proportions of a building are right if, and only if, they contribute to the overall aesthetic and/or architectural value of the building. 10. Evidently, the suggested explanation only captures why we choose to restore objects of high artistic or historical value to their original state. In the other cases, there is usually no reason why we should care about how the object was intended to be viewed, understood, and judged. But this limitation is not a shortcoming: insignificant buildings are rarely restored. They are repaired or refurbished, but with no special regard for how they once looked.

214

9781847063700_Ch14_Final_txt_print.indd 214

2/27/2012 10:30:56 AM

15

Popular Art Aaron Smuts

1. Introduction It is widely assumed that there is an important difference between the music of Mozart and that of Michael Jackson, or between the films of Ingmar Bergman and those of Michael Bay. Mozart’s symphonies are high art, whereas Michael Jackson’s songs are works of popular art, if they are art at all. The label “popular art” carries strong negative connotations. It is often applied with a sneer. The common assumption is that works of popular art are less serious, less artistically valuable. Popular art is driven by a profit motive; real art, high art, is produced for loftier goals, such as aesthetic appreciation. Further, popular art is formulaic and gravitates toward the lowest common denominator. High art is innovative. It enriches, elevates, and inspires; popular art just entertains. Worse, popular art inculcates cultural biases. It is a corporate tool of ideological indoctrination, making contingent social and economic arrangements seem necessary. Or so the common view holds. In light of these common assumptions, we must ask just what marks the distinction between high art and popular art? Is there really any important difference at all? Is there reason to think that popular art is by its very nature aesthetically inferior to high art? In what follows, I will consider some of the prominent answers to these questions. The discussion is organized around questions concerning two general topics: (1) the nature of popular art, and (2) the putative aesthetic deficiencies of popular art.1

2. Question 1: Is There a Difference? Although it may seem obvious that there are essential differences between works of high art and works of popular art, a clear distinction is very hard to draw. Indeed it is so difficult that we might be tempted to think that there is no real difference after all, at least not any intrinsic difference. Before we consider the skeptical position, we should consider a few ways in which one might try to mark the divide. I will consider three options: popularity, profit, and entertainment. 215

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 215

2/27/2012 10:30:58 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

2.1 Popularity, profit, and entertainment The very name “popular art” immediately suggests a characterizing distinction, namely, popular art is popular. What marks the distinction, according to this suggestion, is the sheer number of people who like the work. Consider the difference between the films of Ingmar Bergman and those of Michael Bay: Bergman enjoys far fewer fans. “Transformers” (Bay, 2007) is a work of popular art because it has far more fans than does “The Passion of Anna” (Bergman, 1969). That is why we call “Transformers” a work of popular art and not “The Passion of Anna.” Bay’s movies are popular; Bergman’s are not. Although this method of drawing the distinction is implied in the label, it clearly will not do. Mere popularity does not suffice to make a work an instance of popular art. This is because there are indisputable works of high art that have extremely wide appeal, such as: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Michelangelo’s “David,” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” As the preceding list makes clear, there are widely adored works in nearly every art form, works that are decidedly not popular art, at least not in the sense at issue. Conversely, there are works of popular art that are flops. These works fail to secure large audiences. Hence, although works of popular art tend to be more popular than works of high art, mere popularity will not do to mark the divide. Accordingly, it is fair to conclude that the name “popular art” is misleading. For this reason, some reject the label in favor of derisive terms such as “kitsch” and “mass art.”2 I will evaluate some alternative labels in the next section, but for now, let us consider a few alternative ways of drawing the distinction. As we have seen, mere popularity cannot draw the appropriate distinction. Part of the problem is that popularity is purely an extrinsic feature. It seems that nearly any work can become popular. But we want to know if there is any intrinsic difference between the works that we call “popular art” and those of high art. Why do works of popular art tend to be so much more popular? Although it is unclear if the intentions of artists are intrinsic features of their works, it might be more profitable to draw the distinction between popular art and high art based on the goals of the artist. What is it that the makers of popular art intend to achieve? Why did Michael Bay make “Armageddon” (1988)? What was his ultimate goal? It seems clear: He was out to make money. We thus have an obvious second candidate for the distinction: profit. Real art, high art, is made to afford aesthetic experience; in contrast, popular art is made with an eye toward generating profit. Mozart, we like to think, did not compose the “Marriage of Figaro” to make a few bucks. No, he created the opera with aesthetic goals in mind. He wanted to make a beautiful work of art. His goals were aesthetic, not economic. Following this line of thought, the second candidate holds that the difference between high art and popular art is that

216

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 216

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

Popular Art

the production of high art has nothing to do with money, whereas, popular art has everything to do with making money. The second candidate certainly tracks a widely shared view that popular art is a purely commercial enterprise. But the suggestion that an eye toward profit is sufficient to make a work an instance of popular art is far too crude. To return to the previous example, one should not forget that Mozart worked as a court composer. He produced dozens of works on commission. Similarly, the history of Western portrait painting is largely one of work-for-pay. The suggestion that any considerations of profit make a work one of popular art has the absurd consequence that most of what we think of as high art is in fact popular art. Hence, the profit motive will not work as a plausible criterion of popular art either. In reply, the defender of the profit motive distinction might try to refine the view. The difference cannot be drawn by a miniscule amount of for-profit considerations, but when the profit motive is primary, or perhaps just prominent, then the work is one of popular art. The revised suggestion holds that high art can be produced with profit in mind, but if profit is a significant motivating factor, then the work is one of popular art. Unfortunately, this fuzzy revision fares no better. If Mozart was primarily concerned with paying his bills when we composed “The Clemency of Titus,” this would not make the opera an instance of popular art. Primary or incidental, it does not matter. The strength of the profit motive does not help make the distinction between high art and popular art. Once again, the defender of the profit motive distinction might make a refinement. Merely being concerned with making money from a work is not enough to make a work an instance of popular art. This is clear. But when considerations of profit enter into decisions of how the artwork should be made, when artistic choices are governed by profit considerations, then the work is one of popular art. Mozart may have composed “The Clemency of Titus” in order to put food on the table, but this had nothing to do with his aesthetic choices. Sure, one must compose a work to fit an occasion, or produce a painting that will fit in a normal size room, but apart from such generic considerations, the aesthetic choices in the production of high art are not made with an eye toward profit. When they are, the defender of the refined profit distinction holds, the work is an instance of popular art. This revised version of the profit distinction fares better, but like its predecessors it too has fatal problems. For starters, it is hopelessly naïve. The distinction reflects a silly romantic ideal of the starving artist working to create a genuine expression of his or her passion. But few artworks are created in flurries of uncompromising expressivity. Put aside these teenage fantasies and consider portrait painters once again: a successful portrait painter must flatter her patron, else she will quickly go out of business. Surely a portrait painter must make some important aesthetic considerations with an eye toward getting

217

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 217

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

paid. The patron must look dignified and attractive. But aesthetically relevant for-profit considerations could not make Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa a work of popular art. In view of these difficulties, it is safe to conclude that there is no clean distinction to be found here; we will have to find another way to mark the divide between popular and high art. The preceding discussion of the problems with the profit motive distinction suggests yet a third way to draw the contrast. Rather than the profit motive cutting a sharp divide, perhaps we can appeal to a related goal: entertainment. Popular art seeks to entertain. High art does more. The defender of the entertainment distinction cannot say that merely intending to entertain makes a work one of popular art. This is too crude. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Shakespeare did not intend to entertain his audiences with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” So the claim has to be that high art does more than merely entertain. Works of high art are also about matters of importance. For instance, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not merely entertaining; it also contains profound reflections on the nature of romantic love. Works of popular art do nothing more than merely entertain. Once again, this distinction fails to mark the desired division. It is too permissive. It allows far too much into the category of high art. Indisputable works of popular art, such as the “screwball” comedies of the 1930s, contain profound reflections on romantic love (Cavell, 1981). “Bringing up Baby” (Hawks, 1932) is not a mere vehicle of entertainment, whatever that might mean. Nor are popular television shows, such as “Mad Men” (ABC). But Hollywood comedies and ABC miniseries are popular art if anything is. The entertainment criterion is also too restrictive. It rules out absolute music—music without words. Although absolute music can be profoundly moving, profoundly sad, or profoundly uplifting, it cannot be profound. Pure non-linguistic sonic structures cannot be about anything. And a work cannot be profound unless it is about something. Hence, absolute music can do little more than provide aesthetic experiences.3 But works that merely afford aesthetic experience are mere vehicles of entertainment, albeit of an aesthetic sort. Hence, the entertainment criterion entails an absurdity—it suggests that absolute music is popular art. Since this is clearly false, we should reject the criterion. Further, the criterion gets the distinction backwards. The majority of popular music is in the form of song, which contain words. Not just random words, songs often tell small stories. Hence, any given popular love song is likely to provide more commentary on the nature of love than the entire tradition of symphonic music. Sad songs do not try to entertain audiences, if by entertain we mean provide an enjoyable experience. No, sad songs can be emotionally devastating, a far cry from entertainment (Smuts, 2010). Hence, sad pop songs would be excluded and absolute music would be included in the category “popular art” according 218

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 218

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

Popular Art

to the third way of drawing the distinction. But that gets things backwards. The entertainment criterion appears to offer no help at all. Difficulties such as these have lead some to think that there is no clear way to differentiate between high art and popular art based on intrinsic features of the works. Instead, the difference between high art and popular art must come from outside.4 What is the most likely candidate? Consider the audiences: Who goes to the symphony? Who goes to avant-garde dance performances? It is not Joe the Plumber; it is the educated and the well-to-do. Accordingly, one might argue that the distinction is merely marked by social class.5 Works of popular art are those enjoyed by the masses, whereas high art is that which is enjoyed by the upper classes. There is no intrinsic difference between the two kinds of art, only an extrinsic class association.6 Although the suggestion that there is no intrinsic difference between popular art and high art is prima facie plausible, it runs into two serious problems. The first problem for any class-based distinction is that artistic tastes do not cleanly track economic and social class. For instance, in America there appears to be nearly universal preference for popular art. Perhaps only the well-to-do can afford tickets to the opera, but among this class only a few prefer opera to other forms of popular music. George Bush, for instance, preferred country to classical music. The second problem is more serious. If there is only an extrinsic class-based distinction, how is it that members of the relevant classes can pick out the appropriate works? Without any intrinsic differences, it is something of a mystery how we can classify various works into the appropriate categories. There must be some intrinsic differences, else the works could not be sorted by the appropriate social classes. The class associations must be dependent on some intrinsic differences, not the other way around.

2.2 Mass art I have been discussing popular art as if it were synonymous with “low” art, contrasting it with “high” art. But perhaps the most illuminating contrast is not with high art, but with avant-garde art. Rather than attempting to account for all of what falls under the crude concept of popular art, some argue that it is more instructive to think of a subspecies of the popular, a species that has become increasingly prominent in the last century, that of mass art. Prior to the twentieth century, the question of interest was what differentiated folk art from high art. Folk art includes various crafts as well as local traditions of music and dance. But with the rise of mass communication technologies, folk art has been eclipsed by music on the radio, films in theaters, and shows on television. Local traditions have been replaced by works enjoyed across nations and the globe— works with mass appeal. 219

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 219

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Accordingly, Noël Carroll argues that the bulk of contemporary popular art is what he calls mass art (1998). He argues that many TV shows, films, songs, comic books, video games, and other kinds of popular art share a couple of important features. First, they are mass-produced and can be delivered to multiple reception sites simultaneously. Second, they are designed so that they will be readily comprehensible to the largest number of people possible. They are mass-produced for the masses. Hence, we should call them “mass art,” in a non-pejorative, purely descriptive sense. The second feature of mass art, that it be designed for near universal accessibility, is most important. It helps mark a clear distinction between popular art and avant-garde art. Audiences require very little training in order to understand “Transformers” or to appreciate Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” However, the same cannot be said of avant-garde painting, dance, music, or film. The avant-garde targets an audience of those well versed in the contemporary theoretical landscape and knowledgeable about the history of art. As we saw earlier, those who deny that there are intrinsic differences between popular art and avant-garde art have difficulty explaining how we can effectively sort works into the proper category. But the defender of mass art has a clear explanation: we can effectively sort works of mass art from avant-garde works by assessing their accessibility. The accessibility condition draws a nice distinction between avant-garde art and mass art. And it tracks what seemed right about the “popular” in “popular art.” Mass art is designed so that it can be popular. This feature of mass art has important implications. Most importantly, it places restrictions on mass artists. Radical formal experimentation will be impossible if the work must be widely accessible. This explains, for instance, why classical continuity editing is ubiquitous among popular films worldwide.7 Since it takes very little training to understand eye-line matches we would expect to find popular filmmakers using the editing pattern. And we do. One worry about this characterization of mass art is that it misdescribes much of what we find on television, the radio, and in movie theaters. Whether the second criterion is apt depends on what exactly one means by “accessible.” Popular music and television programs are not produced for undifferentiated masses. No, they are targeted to particular audiences, to particular demographics. The worry for the second criterion is that much mass art is accessible in some ways, but not others. It is true that we should not expect to find atonal music in the top 40 charts. But many works of popular art are inaccessible in other, less radical ways. Although it does not require much tutoring, Heavy Metal music is largely emotionally inaccessible to those who prefer easy listening. Even the humor in television programs designed for niche demographics is largely inaccessible to those outside. Hence, the worry is that the second criterion of mass art excludes much of what should be included. If Heavy Metal is not designed for maximum 220

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 220

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

Popular Art

accessibility, then it is not mass art. If so, then the concept of mass art encompasses little of the domain of popular art. Since we are looking for a concept that can account for the bulk of popular art, we will have to look elsewhere. The defender of the second criterion of mass art has a plausible defense: restrict the notion of accessibility. Clearly the fans of easy listening can understand what emotions Heavy Metal music is designed to elicit. They can comprehend the music. They just do not like it. However, even if we accept a more restricted notion of accessibility, a related worry arises. Mere accessibility is not enough for success. To be successful, people need to like the work. The problem is that tastes vary. Popular music, movies, and television shows are designed to appeal to particular demographics. Sure, there are globally successful action movies such as Avatar (Cameron, 2009). And stories of love, loss, and redemption are universal. But there is also a great deal of popular art that has far more limited appeal. One does not tell a love story, but a particular love story set in a particular place with particular people. Much supernatural horror, for instance, does not have appeal outside of the relevant religious group. Perhaps this does not so much as count as an objection to the characterization of mass art, as much as it is an extension to the view. The need for a work to be comprehensible to untutored audiences has great explanatory power. It does a good job of accounting for the commonality of core structural features of popular art. But when it comes to the particular content, we often need to take into account the demographic designs. Much of what we call popular art is not designed to appeal to the largest number of people possible. This fact has important implications for philosophical arguments concerning the aesthetic and political nature of mass art. Although we can draw a clear distinction between mass art and avant-garde art, it is not so clear if there is a principled way to demarcate popular art from high art. Further, it is not entirely clear that such a distinction is helpful for any theoretical or practical purposes. What purpose does it server to classify a genre, such as melodrama, or an art form, such as that of video games, as belonging to popular art? What do we know about any particular work when we learn that it is an instance of popular art? What does this imply about its nature? It seems very little. It appears that we would be better off finding new ways to talk about art. The label “art cinema” might be crude and largely uninformative, but the label “popular art” certainly is.

3. Question 2: Is Popular Art Aesthetically Inferior? Why is so much popular art bad? In the preceding discussion of the nature of popular art, I used the films of Michael Bay as examples. The problem is that he makes what any self-respecting critic would say are awful movies. By any 221

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 221

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

credible standard of taste, “Bad Boys” and “Transformers” are terrible. They may have done well at the box office, but they fall short of any artistic value. These are not isolated examples. When one looks around at the array of popular art, one finds a nearly endless array of dreck. Just turn on the radio or TV. What do you find? Bad music and bad shows. Certainly there must be some explanation. It must have to do with the nature of popular art. In what follows, I will consider the two most important arguments against the aesthetic value of popular art: (1) the argument from the appeal to the lowest common denominator, and (2) the argument from entertainment.8 Both of these arguments proceed from assumptions about the nature of popular art. They are philosophical arguments. They hold that the very nature of popular art makes it inferior to high art and the avant-garde.

3.1 The lowest common denominator The overwhelming majority of contemporary popular art is what, based on the preceding discussion, we might call mass art. It is plausible to think that works of mass art are created so that they will be accessible to large numbers of people. The purveyors of mass art hope that their works will draw huge audiences. This much is clear. The larger the audience, the more money there is to be made in sales and advertising. It is this very goal, some argue, that accounts for the aesthetic desert of mass art. In order to appeal to the largest number of people, works of mass art must be carefully designed so as not to exclude anyone (McDonald, 1957). The operative maxim is this: alienate no one. Hence, works of mass art should be designed to be accessible to the widest possible group—that is, they should be designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It is only by appealing to the lowest common denominator that a work can have the widest possible audience. Hence, this is why we find so much bad mass art. Intellectually challenging, politically progressive, aesthetically innovative work would alienate or just downright confuse mass audiences. Mass art must by its very nature be artistically inferior. There is certainly something to the argument from the lowest common denominator. Mass art is indeed designed to be intelligible by large groups of people. Makers of mass art certainly do not want to alienate significant portions of their audience. But, one might reply, this fact does not push mass artworks toward bad taste. Quite the contrary: mass art gravitates toward the middle. Artworks featuring pure mindless nonsense would alienate most viewers. There is no good reason to think otherwise. A film featuring only a nude bottom will never win an Oscar, despite the hilarious prediction of the dystopic future provided by “Idiocracy” (Judge, 2006). Not only is such inanity 222

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 222

2/27/2012 10:30:59 AM

Popular Art

discouraged by the general intelligence of the market, but aesthetic innovation is encouraged. Of course, network TV is not avant-garde, but in just the last two decades we have seen several innovative series, from “Twin Peaks” to “Mad Men,” not to mention the excellent offerings from HBO such as “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood.” Although popular art is not pulled toward some dismal lowest common denominator, it would be disingenuous to deny how much of what we find on the TV, radio, and in the cinema is devoid of artistic value. If the taste and intelligence of the population is distributed in a bell curve, then we would expect to find more shows like “The Sopranos,” but we do not. Perhaps, the critic might hold, society is divided into a couple of humps, with the largest on the leftside—the side of bad taste. If so, mass art that is designed to appeal to the largest possible audience will move left, toward the lower end of the taste spectrum. Perhaps this is indeed the case, but the defender of mass art need not fear. Mass art is not necessarily bad; it will just create lots of bad works to appeal to the fans of Michael Bay. But we would also expect to find shows like the “Sopranos” designed for an ever-growing market. Again, it is crucial to remember that not all popular art is designed for the largest possible audience. Much of what we find on the TV is created for a particular demographic and for particular communities of taste. It is hard to imagine that there is much overlap between those who watch the Lifetime channel and those who watch professional wrestling. Rather than gravitating toward the lowest common denominator, we should expect to find mass art gravitating toward the tastes of various audiences. As the channels of delivery multiply and where there is an audience of a substantial size, we will find artworks designed for their pleasure. Hence, we should expect to find a variety of works of differing quality. And, if one takes the time to look, this is indeed what one does find. It is equally important to highlight a contravening tendency against overspecialization. It is simply this: people like to talk about art—movies, music, and TV shows. Sure, the internet has made it possible to form a fan club for almost any curiosity, but people also interact with coworkers, friends, and strangers waiting for buses. Without a common array of reference, we become isolated. Mere sociability creates a common audience, or at least large clusters of commonality.

3.2 The argument from entertainment Earlier we considered a few unsuccessful ways that one might try to make a clean distinction between popular art and high art. One of the more plausible attempts concerns the goals of popular art. Unlike high art and unlike the avantgarde, popular art seeks to entertain. As noted above, this distinction is far too 223

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 223

2/27/2012 10:31:00 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

crude. Surely, Shakespeare intended to entertain audiences with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” So, the refined suggestion holds, popular art merely seeks to entertain, whereas high art and avant-garde art have other goals. There is no need to rehearse the reply, but a similar charge can be made against the aesthetic value of popular art. To be successful, works of popular art must not merely be accessible to untutored audiences, they must be appealing. People need to like the works. And people tend to like what they find entertaining. Hence, to be successful popular art must primarily be designed to provide entertainment. Since entertainment is inferior to the goals that the creators of high art and avant-garde art are free to pursue, popular art will tend to be inferior. It will tend to be inferior because of its very nature. This argument does not hold that popular art will necessarily be inferior. It allows for exceptions that prove the rule. There are certainly many failed avant-garde works that achieve few of their ambitious, putatively superior goals. Compared to these, a highly entertaining work of popular art will be superior. But these are exceptions. Further, as we noted in the preceding discussion, popular art can do more than merely entertain. Although many works of popular art are designed to entertain audiences, they can also be aesthetically innovative, within certain limits, and offer social criticism. The objection takes this under consideration. Again, it allows for instances of popular art that will be aesthetically superior to failed instances of high art. But, once again, these are exceptions. Popular art will tend to be inferior, or so the thinking goes. To be even remotely plausible, the argument from entertainment has to admit of major qualifications. It is implausible to claim that any given instance of popular art will be inferior to any instance of high art or avant-garde art. But in allowing for such exceptions, the conclusion of the argument proves to be very weak. If we acknowledge that some works of popular art can do more than merely entertain, and that some will be aesthetic successes, then we cannot infer much about any given work from its classification. That is, we cannot reason from the fact that something is a work of popular art to the conclusion that it is therefore bad. We cannot even conclude that it is inferior to all high art and avant-garde art. Assuming that entertainment is indeed inferior to the goals of avant-garde art, all we could conclude is that any given work of popular art is inferior to the very best avant-garde art—a hollow victory for the critic. Given the qualifications, when evaluating works of popular art, we cannot reason that they are necessarily defective. We have to consider the individual works, one by one. Hence, the argument from entertainment does very little theoretical work. At most it might help explain why there is so much bad popular art. But here too, the argument runs into problems. The central issue concerns the putative inferiority of entertainment to the relatively unspecified loftier goals of high art and avant-garde art. Consider aesthetic goals: as noted earlier, affording aesthetic experience is just one form of entertainment. Perhaps 224

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 224

2/27/2012 10:31:00 AM

Popular Art

aesthetic experience is superior to other forms of entertainment, but this tells us little about the value of popular art; popular artworks, too, frequently afford aesthetic experiences. And if aesthetic value is what is at issue, most avantgarde conceptual art is far inferior to rock music, since much conceptual art eschews aesthetic value for theoretical panache. In order to make the case against popular art, the critic needs to identify a set of superior goals that popular art is incapable of pursuing. Lacking such a list, we have no good reason to think that popular art tends to be inferior in any way to the avant-garde. The burden of proof is on the critic. As is, we have no reason to think that a video game, for instance, will be of little artistic value merely because video games are popular art.9 The argument from entertainment is closely related to concerns about profit considerations. As indicated in the preceding discussion, much of what is considered high art is not immune to the world of commerce (think Sotheby’s or Christie’s). Even the aesthetic choices of portrait painters are influenced by forprofit considerations. If anything, the influence of the market is even more pronounced in today’s artworld. But what we did not consider earlier is whether profit considerations necessarily adversely affect the aesthetic value of works of art. Although it seems obvious that profit and art do not mix, upon further consideration, there does not seem to be any reason why not. Consider the problem from the opposite angle: What is it that draws audiences to action movies? In part, it is clearly the aesthetic experience that the works provide through both spectacular explosions and engrossing narrative complications. John McTiernan could not have profited from “Die Hard” (1988) if no one went to the movie. Similarly, Michael Jackson would not have earned billions if people had not enjoyed his music. You make more money if more people like your work. In so far as people prefer aesthetically superior works of art, it pays to make better art. And it certainly does appear that many people appreciate aesthetic value. Hence, there is no reason to think that profit concerns necessarily adversely affect the value of an artwork. In fact, profit consideration might even be conducive to excellence by motivating artists to make good works.

4. Conclusion It is likely the case that most of what we consider high art may be better than the bulk of popular art, but this is not a result of the nature of popular art. Rather it is a product of how something becomes high art. Much of what now falls into the category of high art, such as Shakespeare’s plays, was the popular art of the day. Our category of high art is more honorific than classificatory. That is, it includes what has been deemed excellent. The high art that we find collected 225

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 225

2/27/2012 10:31:00 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

in literary anthologies and gathered into museums are typically works of recognized excellence. The popular often becomes canonized through the test of time. Hence, it is plausible that what differentiates the popular from high art is simply recognized excellence. Contemporary artists working in art forms and genres closely tied to a history of recognized excellence tend to be classified as high art. But as we have seen, no clear, principled distinction can be made that will track common classificatory practice, not popularity, profit, or entertainment. Further, pretheoretical practice seems to be based on a series of mistakes concerning the putative purity of high art. The distinction between high and popular art is a hodgepodge of tradition and prejudice. However, a more precise distinction can be drawn between mass art and avant-garde art. This distinction does some productive theoretical work. It can, for instance, account for the commonality of structural features that make narratives accessible. But based on a mere classification, we can conclude next to nothing about the aesthetic value of a work of art. In closing, one thing more needs to be said in defense of mass art. It is not fair to merely highlight all the bad mass art and to pretend that there is a special problem concerning the dearth of excellence. Mass art is not alone here; it is not as if most avant-garde art is artistically valuable. Take a walk through any random art gallery. I suspect that most of what you see will be simplistic, derivative work. Does this have to do with the nature of the avant-garde, or is there a more general explanation? I suspect that what we might find at work is Sturgeon’s Law: “ninety percent of everything is crud.” Since we are surrounded by mass art, we see a lot more awful mass art than avant-garde art. But that gives us no reason to think that popular art is necessarily or even typically inferior to the avant-garde.

Notes 1. There are many other important questions in the literature on popular art that cannot be addressed here. For instance: Is there anything politically liberating about popular art? Are video games art? What is interactivity? Are comics art? What is the work of rock music? How do works of popular art engage the emotions? How can we evaluate works of popular art on moral and ideological grounds? Is popular art essentially politically repressive? By far the best introduction to the area is Carroll (1998). 2. Greenberg (1986) prefers “kitsch.” McDonald (1957) proposes “mass art.” Carroll (1998) adopts McDonald’s label, but in a non-pejorative sense. I discuss Carroll’s suggestion in the next section. 3. For further defense of this claim, see Kivy (1990, ch. 10 and 2003). 4. Novitz (1992) and Levine (1988) provide alternate accounts of the distinction. 5. This style of eliminativism can be found in Bourdieu (1984).

226

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 226

2/27/2012 10:31:00 AM

Popular Art 6. A further way to draw the distinction might be on modes of aesthetic appreciation. (Cohen, 1999). 7. For a good overview of the conventions of continuity editing, see Bordwell and Thompson (1997, ch. 8). 8. There are other arguments against the aesthetic value of popular art. The two most important are the passivity argument and the formula argument. Since neither of these appeals to the nature of popular art, I decided to focus on two more philosophical charges. For an overview of the others, see the first chapter of Carroll (1998). 9. For a defense of the claim that video games can be art, see Smuts (2005).

227

9781847063700_Ch15_Final_txt_print.indd 227

2/27/2012 10:31:00 AM

16

Environmental Aesthetics Glenn Parsons

1. The Scope of Environmental Aesthetics The past 50 years have witnessed the rise of a new branch of philosophical aesthetics: environmental aesthetics. This new field of study has emerged largely in reaction to aesthetics’ traditional focus on the arts, and has important connections with another burgeoning field, the aesthetics of nature. Environmental aestheticians have sought to catalogue and characterize a wide range of aesthetic objects and experiences lying beyond the canonical realm of the arts. They have also offered novel conceptions of important theoretical concepts within aesthetics, including the notion of aesthetic appreciation itself. Surely the most striking feature of contemporary environmental aesthetics is its almost limitless scope. Philosophical works exploring architecture, domestic spaces, sports, recycling, eating, gardening, walking, and even sexual activity can all be placed within the discipline. In fact, it seems as if only imagination limits the extension of this list, given the very nature of environmental aesthetics itself. For, though it might seem odd to think of human activities such as sports and eating as a part of the environment, environmental aestheticians often construe “environment” in an extremely broad sense that includes more or less everything except art. Allen Carlson, for instance, glosses the environment as “our total surroundings” (1992, p. 142). Along similar lines, Arnold Berleant asserts that “any human context in which an aesthetic aspect is significant is an aesthetic environment” (1998, p. 118). Since anything at all, including human activities, can be said to belong to our total surroundings, in some sense, or to belong to a context with aesthetic aspects, these conceptions of environment provide a rationale for the view that “environmental aesthetics embraces the study of the aesthetic significance of almost everything other than art” (Carlson, 2007). This view is now widespread, as is shown by the diversity of topics covered in recent collections of papers in the field (Berleant and Carlson, 2007; Light and Smith, 2005; Berleant 2002; von Bonsdorff and Haapala, 1999). In the first part of this essay, I review recent work in the field of environmental aesthetics, understood in this broad sense, identifying some common themes and tracing some connections to the aesthetics of nature.

228

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 228

2/27/2012 10:31:03 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

In the second part of the essay, however, I turn to a somewhat different conception of environmental aesthetics, one based on a narrower understanding of the concept of environment. This narrower notion of environment has exerted important influences on some recent theoretical accounts of the aesthetics of non-art offered by environmental aestheticians. After exploring this narrower sense of environment and some of its main influences on recent theory, I review some current debates over its proper role in the project of environmental aesthetics.

2. Environmental Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Nature The roots of contemporary environmental aesthetics lie in the recent revival of philosophical interest in the aesthetics of nature. In the words of two leading figures in environmental aesthetics, Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, the aesthetics of nature is the “initiating and central focus of Environmental Aesthetics” (2004, p. 11). Although nature figures prominently in many classic writings in philosophical aesthetics, particularly those of eighteenth-century figures such as Hutcheson, Burke, and Kant, twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers have tended to restrict the focus of aesthetics to art. Ronald Hepburn’s contrarian essay “Contemporary aesthetics and the neglect of natural beauty” (1966) argued that nature deserves attention, alongside art forms such as painting, sculpture, and music, as an object of aesthetic attention. Hepburn emphasized, however, that nature differs from art, as an object of aesthetic attention, in important ways. One of these arises from the tendency of nature to envelop and surround us. When we appreciate a forest, or a plain, Hepburn notes, we often do not stand apart from it as a gallery goer stands apart from a painting; rather, we find ourselves in the midst of what we are trying to appreciate. Although Hepburn does not use the term “environment” specifically to describe nature, the idea of nature as something more encompassing and inclusive than a discrete art object is clearly present in his plea for the aesthetics of nature. In subsequent years, philosophers who responded to Hepburn’s calls for closer attention to the aesthetics of nature quickly placed the concept of environment at the fore. Allen Carlson, for instance, characterized his view of the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature as the “natural environmental model” (1979a). Arnold Berleant argued that both art and nature should be approached via an “aesthetics of engagement” that emphasizes our immersion in, and our sense of unity with, our environment (1992). In addition to these general approaches, more particularized studies in nature aesthetics have focused on the appreciation of specific types of environment, such as the forest

229

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 229

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

(Rolston, 1998) and the wetland (Callicott, 2003; Rolston, 2000). That the recent renaissance in nature aesthetics should have this focus is not surprising, given that it occurred at just the time that the notion of “environment” was gaining currency in the wider culture, both as a source of anxiety over issues such as pollution and chemical use, and as a subject of intense scientific study. The influence of the concept of environment can also be seen in the fact that recent debates in nature aesthetics have been dominated by two issues: the role of knowledge in aesthetic appreciation and the ethical dimensions of aesthetically appreciating the natural environment (for a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Parsons, 2007; for a more general survey of work in nature aesthetics see the introduction to Carlson and Berleant, 2004). The former issue has taken shape against the background of cultural accounts of the appreciation of art. These accounts, which continue to dominate thinking about art appreciation, hold that knowledge concerning artworks, in particular knowledge of their genre and content, plays an essential role in appropriate appreciation (for classic examples of cultural accounts, see Dickie, 1984; Danto, 1981; Walton, 1970). Some philosophers have argued that, in the appreciation of the natural environment, scientific knowledge about the natural environment plays an analogous role (Carlson, 2000; see also Matthews, 2002; Parsons, 2002; Eaton, 1998). In contrast, others have downplayed the role of scientific understanding in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, emphasizing instead imagination (Brady, 2003), emotion (Carroll, 2001, 1993), or a quasi-religious experience of transcendence (Godlovitch, 1994). Moral or ethical issues have also been an important focus of recent discussion, with some arguing that ethical considerations play an important role in determining the principles that guide the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Yuriko Saito, for instance, objects to certain traditional forms of landscape appreciation, such as picturesque and associationist approaches, on the grounds that they embody an overly anthropocentric perspective. On these approaches, nature is treated either merely as a scenic backdrop or as a sort of stimulus for evoking emotions and ideas situated within a cultural narrative (as when a particular plain excites thoughts of the glory of a military victory that occurred there). Saito suggests that moral considerations behoove us to “take nature on its own terms” instead, appreciating it in light of narratives that give it a central role (1998b). Other philosophers have explored the influence of the aesthetic on ethical issues involving the environment. For instance, some have assessed the feasibility of arguing that nature’s aesthetic value can be a good reason for preserving it from development or destruction (Hettinger, 2008; Parsons, 2008a; Hettinger, 2005; Loftis, 2003; Thompson, 1995; Hargrove, 1989). These two major preoccupations in recent work in the aesthetics of nature, the role of knowledge and the relation between the moral and the aesthetic, intertwine in discussions of the view that virgin nature, unlike art or the built 230

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 230

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

environment, is always aesthetically good. Arguments defending this view, which usually goes by the name “Positive Aesthetics,” have sometimes appealed to the role of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, in aesthetic appreciation of nature (see, for example, Saito, 1998a; Carlson, 1984). Positive Aesthetics has also received scrutiny as a key assumption in the aforementioned argument that we should preserve nature from development or destruction because of its aesthetic value (Parsons, 2008a; Thomson, 1995; Hargrove, 1989). As mentioned above, it is often observed that contemporary environmental aesthetics has deep roots in the aesthetics of nature. It is less frequently noted, but no less true, that the aesthetics of nature itself has been profoundly shaped by the concept of environment. This is apparent in the way in which more traditional ways of framing philosophical discussions of the aesthetics of nature, such as the concept of the sublime, have now been largely pushed aside (on contemporary attitudes toward the sublime, see Mothersill, 1992; Hepburn, 1988).

3. Recent Directions in Environmental Aesthetics Although the concept of environment found its first application to aesthetics in the realm of the natural, philosophers have now extended it much farther, to encompass more or less what Carlson calls “the world at large,” or “our total surroundings.” Carlson’s own work nicely illustrates this extension: his later essays deal with architecture, agricultural landscapes, gardens, and cities, all under the general rubric of environment. In this sense, Carlson’s career is somewhat representative of the evolution of the field itself, as many contributors to nature aesthetics, such as Arnold Berleant, Yuriko Saito, Emily Brady, Tom Leddy, and Stephanie Ross have also gone on to explore topics in environmental aesthetics. Of these new areas of study, perhaps the one with the tightest connection to the natural environment is that of the countryside or rural landscape. Such environments are often physically close to the wilderness areas that are a central concern in nature aesthetics, and themselves contain natural elements. Nonetheless, these environments are typically shaped to a large degree by human action, albeit often in subtle ways. Aestheticians have explored this disconnection between natural appearance and artefactual reality in the countryside, as well as its environmental and social implications (Schauman, 1998). Other studies have focused on the aesthetic significance of recent changes in the appearance of the countryside, such as the spread of industrial farming (Hettinger, 2005; Carlson, 1985) or the rise of wind farms (Boone, 2005; Saito, 2005, 2004). Environmental aestheticians have focused not only on the visual appearance of the rural landscape, but also on the aesthetics of working in it, particularly in agricultural pursuits (von Bonsdorff, 2005; Winkler, 2005). Also, 231

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 231

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

attention has been given to the impact of different ways of moving through the rural landscape: by highway, for instance (Andrews, 2007; Sepänmaa, 2005). Environmental aestheticians have also extended the concept of environment to urban or built spaces. Architecture has always fallen within the purview of modern aesthetics, based on its status as one of the fine arts (Kristeller, 1998), even if it has received relatively little attention from philosophers of art (for overviews of philosophical work on architecture specifically see de Clerq (this volume); Winters, 2007; Graham, 2003). Environmental aestheticians have expanded on this inquiry to consider not only the appreciation of buildings, but our aesthetic experiences of the larger array of elements, such as bridges, roads, and sidewalks, that combine with buildings to constitute the built environment. Some have offered general approaches to the aesthetics of built environments (Parsons, 2008b; von Bonsdorff, 2002; Carlson, 2001; Berleant, 1986). Others address more specific issues, such as the experience of different ways of moving through urban environments (Ryynanen, 2005; Macauley, 2000), and the multisensory character of the built environment (Sepänmaa, 2007). Other studies focus on quintessentially modern vernacular spaces, from Disney World (Berleant, 1997) to shopping malls (Brottman, 2005), and some take up spaces that fit uneasily with the very notion of a “built” environment, such as junkyards (Leddy, 2008; Carlson, 1976). Another particular kind of built environment, the garden, has also attracted interest. Here the connections between environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of nature are particularly prominent, with the precise relationship between gardens and nature coming in for philosophical scrutiny (see Parsons, 2008a; Cooper, 2006; Ross, 2006, 1999, 1998). Studies in this area have also focused on the relationship of gardens and garden appreciation to art (Cooper, 2006; Ross, 2006, 1999, 1998; Carlson, 1997; Miller, 1993; Leddy, 1988) and on the peculiarly “unnatural” character of Japanese gardens (Carlson, 1997; Heyd, 2002). In addition to these public or commercial areas, environmental aesthetics has also explored the aesthetic dimensions of domestic settings, such as the special emphasis placed on aesthetic qualities related to neatness and cleanness (Leddy, 1997, 1995). Attention has also been directed at particular objects and practices situated in these settings, rather than the settings themselves. Increasingly, a focus of attention is everyday artifacts, such as dishes, furniture, clothing, and tools (Saito, 2007a), along with practices, such as recycling (McCracken, 2005) and cleaning (Melchionne, 1998), that involve them. An interest in Japanese aesthetics, which places much importance on vernacular architecture and design, and on the aesthetic dimensions of “everyday life,” has been an important influence on much of this work (see, for example, Saito, 2007a, 2007b, 1999; Sandrisser, 1998). The aesthetics of everyday artifacts has also been approached, from a somewhat different perspective, in light of the functionality of those artifacts (Parsons and Carlson, 2008; Davies, 2006). 232

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 232

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

The above studies take as their focus something that is primarily visual and physical, such as a setting or some object in it. But some recent work in environmental aesthetics pushes beyond the realm of discrete physical objects to investigate the aesthetic dimensions of the “lower senses” and bodily experiences. Food, gustatory taste, and the act of eating have been examined philosophically (Saito, 2007a; Korsmeyer, 1999) as have smells (Brady, 2005; Kuehn, 2005). Bodily sensations, including proprioception, our awareness of our own bodily movements, have also been considered from the aesthetic point of view (Irvin, 2008b; Montero, 2006). Moving from inward and subject-oriented experiences to more obviously public ones, environmental aesthetics has also explored social relations and events. Some have argued that there are important aesthetic elements to relationships of love and friendship, and even to political relationships (Berleant, 2005). This line of thought draws upon a long tradition in German philosophy of discussion of “the aesthetic state” (Chytry, 1989). Particular political events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, have been considered (Aretoulakis, 2008). Sporting events have been discussed, particularly in relation to their status as art (Welsh, 2005). In the realm of personal, as opposed to political and social, relations, the connection between aesthetic and sexual experience has also been explored (Shusterman, 2006; Berleant, 1964). Surprisingly, however, the one issue that, arguably, dominates the aesthetics of social life, personal appearance, continues to receive relatively little attention within philosophical aesthetics (for brief treatments see Saito, 2007a; Gould, 2005; Zangwill, 2003; Novitz, 2001; see also the essays in Brand, 2000). Finally, environmental aesthetics brushes up against the traditional subject matter of aesthetic theory in recent discussions of environmental art (Parsons, 2008a; Brady, 2007; Brook, 2007; Lintott, 2007; Ross, 1993; Carlson, 1986). This genre is typified by works such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70), a gigantic cut in a desert mesa, Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral sculptures crafted from natural ice blocks in their original locations, and Christo’s wrapping of natural landscapes in synthetic materials. Environmental art is distinguished from art in general by the existence of an essential connection between the work and its location. Unlike more traditional instances of painting or sculpture, these works cannot be appreciated, or even apprehended, apart from their physical surroundings. In these discussions, environmental aestheticians have focused on the moral and ethical issues that arise when art is introduced into these non-gallery contexts. This work on environmental art manifests an important feature of much recent work in environmental aesthetics: its normative character. Although studies in this field are usually concerned, to some extent, with describing aesthetic responses to aspects of the environment, they also often argue that certain responses are more correct or appropriate than others. Importantly, 233

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 233

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the norms to which environmental aestheticians appeal may be either ethical or aesthetic in nature (for a general discussion of the two approaches, see Parsons, 2008a, ch. 2).

4. Themes in Recent Environmental Aesthetics Despite the diversity of topics and approaches described above, it is possible to identify a number of characteristic themes in recent work in environmental aesthetics. One of these is the emphasis on moral or ethical issues just mentioned. This emphasis extends far beyond environmental art to many other topics discussed in the field. Consider, for example, Yuriko Saito’s recent study of the aesthetics of everyday objects. Extending an argument originally formulated for the aesthetics of nature, Saito argues that, in aesthetic appreciation of everyday artifacts, we ought to take things “on their own terms” (2007a). Such appreciation, she claims, can help develop our moral capacity for “respecting the reality of the Other” (2007a, p. 131). She also argues that some of our aesthetic judgments concerning everyday artifacts have an important moral aspect. In these “moral-aesthetic judgments,” we “make a judgement that a designed object embodies moral qualities” in its perceptible appearance (2007a, p. 210). Thus our judgment that Japanese packaging looks respectful and thoughtful is an aesthetic judgment, in virtue of its being a response to the object’s perceptible qualities, but at the same time it is a judgment intimately caught up with the object’s moral dimensions. Saito also emphasizes the impact of aesthetic responses to the natural and built environment on what may be considered broadly moral and practical matters. Picking up on recent movements in environmental design, Saito notes that aesthetic responses to mundane items such as packaging, when widespread, can be important determinants of behavior with significant environmental effects. In some cases, such as tastes for manicured lawns, aesthetic preferences become a cause for environmental concern. This raises the question of whether aesthetic responses might be altered or “engineered” so as to encourage a more positive attitude toward what is environmentally good and a more negative attitude toward what is bad. These discussions harken back to arguments and theoretical debates found in recent discussions of the aesthetics of nature, such as those concerning the role of knowledge in aesthetic appreciation. They also dovetail with a broader trend in environmental philosophy toward scrutinizing the built or urban environment, rather than only wilderness areas (see, for example, Light, 2001). A second, and related, theme in environmental aesthetics is the ambivalence toward art and art-related notions of aesthetic appreciation. Some writers insist upon sui generis accounts of the aesthetics of non-art, as opposed to accounts derivative from art-centered theory (see, for example, Haapala, 2005). Others, 234

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 234

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

in contrast, eagerly explore the similarities of non-art to art, arguing that environmental aesthetics can make at least some use of the traditional principles and concepts of mainstream aesthetic theory (see, for example, Leddy, 1988). A third important characteristic of contemporary work in environmental aesthetics is its interdisciplinary and eclectic nature. While philosophers specializing in aesthetics are important contributors, studies in the field are also pursued by writers with diverse backgrounds, including landscape architects, urban theorists, cultural theorists, geographers, and environmental philosophers. Work in environmental aesthetics has also drawn upon a wide variety of intellectual schools and traditions, with ideas from Continental philosophers, such as Heidegger, and Pragmatists, particularly John Dewey, being especially influential. The field also has close connections with the field of comparative aesthetics (Higgins, 2003), most strikingly through its emphasis on Japanese aesthetics, and to the field of “everyday aesthetics.” In fact, in recent years it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish environmental aesthetics, understood as the aesthetics of our “total surroundings,” from everyday aesthetics, which is also often understood as analyzing “the possibility of aesthetic experience of non-art objects and events” (Sartwell, 2003, p. 761). Given this, one might conclude that the concept of environment is so generic and all-encompassing that the label “environmental aesthetics” lacks theoretical bite. On this line of thought, whether the aesthetics of non-art is called “environmental” or “everyday” ultimately makes no difference. But, while “environment” is frequently used in this extremely inclusive fashion, this is not always the case. In the remainder of this essay, I explore a narrower conception of the environment that is also found in discussions of environmental aesthetics. On this view, describing the aesthetics of non-art as “environmental” is not a move without implications: on the contrary, doing so introduces some substantive theoretical assumptions about the objects under study.

5. The Environment as Background The notion of environment in question is defined as that which is a background or setting. This notion was characterized by Francis Sparshott in his early exploration of environmental aesthetics (1972). Sparshott explicates our concept of the environment as the setting or background that is the locus for, and which makes possible and sustains, our own existence and activities. In this sense, the environment is that which is contrasted with the objects or events that are found, or occur, in it: to be a part of the environment or background is to not be highlighted as a focus of attention and singled out as an object or an event. On this conception, the environment is, as Allen Carlson puts it, “necessarily unobtrusive” (1979a, p. 271). 235

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 235

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Understood in this sense, the label “environmental aesthetics” is a substantive one, exerting an influence on the way theoretical issues about the aesthetics of non-art are framed and conceived. In what follows, I describe three theoretical issues affected in this way.

5.1 The nature of the aesthetic Traditionally, the concept of the aesthetic, and its ancestor the beautiful, have been associated primarily and paradigmatically with the senses of hearing and vision (for two classic examples, see Prall (1929) and Santayana (1896)). This view, of course, accords perfectly with the view that the object of aesthetic experience is a traditional work of fine art: a visual object, such as a painted canvas or a sculpture, or an auditory one, such as a musical performance. A shift to viewing the environment as the object of appreciation, however, generates a tension with this view of the aesthetic. Sparshott argued this point as follows: If environmental aspects are background aspects, eye and ear lose part of their privilege. Smells may be more evocative, have more to do with our sense of the very place we are at, than sights. Touch also becomes important: the way floors and railings meet foot and hand. Taste perhaps not so much, save for the acids of city smog. Our proprioceptive senses might seem to be irrelevant, as directed on the inside rather than the environment out-side, but they are not; it is the arrangement of space around us that determines our inward ease in climbing stairs and ramps and in walking freely. (1972, p. 21) Concurring, Allen Carlson writes that when appreciating the environment, “we must experience our background setting in all those ways in which we normally experience it, by sight, smell, touch, and whatever” (1979a, p. 272). Viewing the environment as an object of aesthetic attention thus leads us toward a multisensory aesthetic. The idea of a non-traditional, multisensory aesthetic perhaps finds its purest expression in Arnold Berleant’s view of the aesthetics of engagement. Applying this view to nature, Berleant describes the aesthetic as a “total engagement, a sensory immersion in the natural world that reaches the still-uncommon experience of unity” (1992, p. 170). Berleant stresses the way in which the proximal senses of touch, smell, and taste, as well as capacities such as proprioception, are “actively involved in environmental experience” (1992, p. 17). However, even putting Berleant’s view to one side, we see a clear tendency in environmental aesthetics toward treating aesthetic experience as multisensory, involving not only the so-called “lower senses” of gustation, touch, and smell (Brady, 2005; Leddy, 2005; Korsmeyer, 1999), but even the sensations ascribed to forms 236

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 236

2/27/2012 10:31:04 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

of inner awareness, such as proprioception (Montero, 2006). Taking this trend farther, Sherri Irvin argues that even the simple everyday act of scratching an itch can be an aesthetic experience (2008b; see also Irvin, 2008a), and others have defended the aesthetic possibilities of sexual experience (Shusterman, 2006; Berleant, 1964).

5.2 The viewer-dependency of aesthetic objects The concept of environment as background setting is also apt to influence thinking about the objects of aesthetic appreciation. In aesthetic appreciation in the arts, the paradigmatic objects of appreciation are created or selected by an artist for display to the audience. Thus the audience, in its appreciative act, simply confronts an already defined object. The environment, considered as background setting, however, is precisely that which is not defined or set apart. For insofar as it is a background setting, the environment is not a discrete object, but rather a continuous array of sights, sounds, textures, and smells that meld together to form the background for discrete, defined objects. Thus, if we are to appreciate that setting aesthetically, as we would art, we must, as it were, define or set apart some portion of it ourselves. In this sense, what we appreciate when we appreciate the environment might be said to be “viewer-dependent,” in a way that artworks typically are not. This way of thinking about the environment as an object of aesthetic appreciation has frequently been used in environmental aesthetics, often to quite different effect. On one hand, it has been used to emphasize our freedom in appreciating the environment aesthetically. As mentioned above, Hepburn emphasizes the fact that, when we appreciate nature aesthetically, typically “we are in nature and a part of nature; we do not stand over against it as over against a painting on a wall” (1966, p. 290). Consequently, Hepburn argues, nature is “indeterminate” in comparison with art. He writes: The aesthetic impact made upon us by, say, a tree, is part-determined by the context we include in our view of it. A tree growing on a steep hill slope, bent far over by the winds, may strike us as tenacious, grim, strained. But from a greater distance, when the view includes numerous similar trees on the hillside, the striking thing may be a delightful, stippled, patterned slope, with quite different emotional quality—quixotic or cheery. So with any aesthetic quality in nature; it is always provisional, correctable by reference to a different, perhaps wider context, or to a narrower one realized in greater detail. (1966, p. 292) Hepburn sees the “provisional and elusive” character of the aesthetics of nature as being a positive feature: in virtue of its indeterminacy, the natural 237

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 237

2/27/2012 10:31:05 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

environment provides a stimulus to our creativity and imagination, challenging us to combine its elements in novel ways and view them from different perspectives. Applying a similar line of thought to the realm of everyday experience in the human world, Yuriko Saito emphasizes the freedom to choose what we are to appreciate in settings such as a city. Again pointing up the contrast with art, Saito describes us as “constructing the object of our aesthetic experience” (2007a, p. 19). As an example, Saito cites attending a baseball game, where we can select among a great number of features to appreciate, including the cheers of the fans, the smell of the hot dogs, and the heat of the sun beating down on our necks. Another of her examples is the experience of a metropolis like New York, where one can decide to focus only on the architecture, or to combine this visual experience with the olfactory, auditory, and tactile sensations of moving through the city streets. When constructing the object of our aesthetic attention, Saito maintains, “we are free to rely on our own imagination, judgment, and aesthetic taste as the guide” (2007a, p. 19). On the other hand, the idea that we are to an important degree responsible for determining the object of aesthetic appreciation has also been appealed to as a ground for criticizing certain modes of appreciating the environment as being in some way defective or inappropriate. Here the idea is that appropriate aesthetic appreciation requires appreciating something as the sort of thing it actually is. In the case of appreciating certain elements of an environment, this precept entails that we appreciate them as elements of that environment, rather than as something else. Thus, in our “construction” of the aesthetic object, we are free to select among various elements of the environment, but still constrained to construct something that is recognizably an environment. For example, in defending his “natural environmental model” of nature aesthetics, Allen Carlson rejects what he calls the “object” model of appreciation. According to this model, we “actually or contemplatively remove the object from its surroundings and dwell on its sensuous and design qualities and its possible expressive qualities” (1979a, p. 268). To treat an element of the natural environment in this way is more or less to treat it like a traditional sculpture whose surroundings are appreciatively irrelevant; Carlson’s example is removing a rock from a beach and setting it on a living room mantle. Such appreciation is not appropriate appreciation of the environment because “natural objects possess what might be called organic unity with their environments of creation: such objects are a part of, and have developed out of, the elements of their environment by means of the forces at work in those environments” (1979, p. 269). Along similar lines, Carlson also objects to formalist approaches to appreciating landscape, according to which landscape is viewed more or less as a two-dimensional array of visual qualities (1979b). Such approaches take the aesthetic value of nature to lie in vistas or views, which please in virtue of their 238

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 238

2/27/2012 10:31:05 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

arrangements of shapes, lines, and colors. Such approaches, Carlson insists, distort the aesthetic value of the natural environment, by encouraging us to view the environment as a detached, two-dimensional backdrop, rather than as the enveloping, three-dimensional setting that it is. Thus, when we “compose” the object of our appreciation, selecting which elements to appreciate, we must continue to treat it as an environment, as a set of interrelated elements possessing a kind of “organic unity.”

5.3 Sparshott’s paradox Perhaps the most striking conclusion that might be drawn from the conception of environment as background setting is that the aesthetic appreciation of the environment as such is impossible. The problem here is adumbrated again by Sparshott, who notes a tension between the notion of the environment as that which is not noticed, but background, and the notion of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is traditionally taken to involve some kind of focused attention on something, such that the object of our appreciation is foregrounded, or stands out in our consciousness. But the environment, qua environment, is precisely that which fails to stand out, that which is background. “Perhaps,” Sparshott muses, “aestheticians . . . necessarily fail to think environmentally. Under their gaze the environment crystallizes into an aesthetic object” (1972, p. 14). If it does, then it is not appreciated as environment, but as an instance of a contrasting category, such as “object” or “event.” On this line of thought, the very idea of “environmental aesthetics” turns out to be a paradoxical one. Those who take up this issue have responded in one of two ways. Some, like Allen Carlson, accept that the idea of appreciating the environment as such is paradoxical, but insist that this does not entail that the aesthetic appreciation of the environment is paradoxical (1979a). When we aesthetically appreciate the environment, we foreground it, rendering it non-environment, as it were (at least temporarily). But all that really matters is that we are able to aesthetically appreciate that which, in the normal course of things, constitutes our background setting. This response takes us back to the broader conception of environment as our total surroundings: environmental aesthetics becomes the appreciation of the various non-art things that constitute our total surroundings, though not the appreciation of those surroundings as such. In contrast, other philosophers insist that the paradox can be dissolved by rejecting the premise that aesthetic appreciation necessarily involves focusing attention on, or in some way foregrounding, that which we appreciate. Thus Haapala suggests that “we should simply become more aware of the pleasurable aspects of the everyday without making them objects of aesthetic appreciation in the traditional sense. Perhaps we could give new meaning to the phrase 239

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 239

2/27/2012 10:31:05 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

‘the aesthetics (or the art) of living’, that is, to value the particulars of the everyday” (2005, p. 52). Saito, taking a similar line, asserts that . . . it is equally important to illuminate those dimensions of our everyday life that normally do not lead to a memorable, standout, pleasurable aesthetic experience in their normal experiential context. Our usual reaction to dilapidated buildings, rusted cars, or dirty linens is to deplore their appearance . . . Such reactions are primarily, if not exclusively, aesthetic reactions. (2007a, p. 51) Sparshott’s attitude toward his own paradox seems to have been similar. “Perhaps if we don’t look very hard [at our environment],” he writes, “it won’t crystallize. One can have amenity in one’s surroundings without going to live in an art gallery, and among objects for a subject will be some which affect him without inviting him to concentrate his attention” (1972, p. 14).

6. The Future of Environmental Aesthetics? As I have noted, environmental aesthetics is often understood simply as the aesthetics of non-art. This terrain, however, is contested ground. Other concepts for organizing the discussion of non-art, such as the everyday, have also been proposed (Saito, 2007a; Leddy, 2005). In some recent discussions, it is often hard to see the distinction between the subject matter of the two fields. However, as we have seen in Section 5, the notion of environment is not entirely innocuous: it introduces, or at least renders more plausible, certain substantive theoretical assumptions. These implications have led some to question whether the label “environmental aesthetics” is, after all, the most fruitful way of categorizing the aesthetics of non-art. One source of concern is the conception of aesthetic object that emerges from environmental aesthetics. Leddy objects to environmental aesthetics’ tendency to “draw our attention away from appreciation of relatively isolated objects” (2005, p. 5; see also Saito, 2007a, p. 3), and to discourage “detached visual contemplation” of urban scenes (as one might experience through the window of a moving train, for example). Similar objections have been raised in the field of nature aesthetics, with some calling for more attention to isolated natural objects (Moore, 2008) and others defending the appreciation of landscape from a distance, roughly along formalist lines (Crawford, 2004; Newman, 2001; Stecker, 1997). The influence of the environment on the concept of the aesthetic itself also raises some important concerns. For one thing, although the idea that the aesthetic is multisensory in nature, rather than paradigmatically a matter of vision and/or hearing, has now become more or less orthodox in environmental 240

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 240

2/27/2012 10:31:05 AM

Environmental Aesthetics

aesthetics, it remains controversial outside it. Broader discussions of aesthetic experience in philosophical aesthetics continue to downplay the aesthetic possibilities of such bodily experiences. In support of this general position, Parsons and Carlson (2008) argue that multisensory accounts ultimately trivialize the notion of the aesthetic by obliterating the distinction between pleasure and aesthetic pleasure. A related worry about the concept of environment emerges when we consider certain replies to Sparshott’s paradox. According to one reply, we can have aesthetic responses to the environment as such, even though the environment, being a necessarily unobtrusive background, never rises to the level of our focused attention. This move, however, again threatens to dilute the notion of aesthetic response to an unacceptable extent. Saito, for instance, makes good on her promise to extend the aesthetic to the realm of unexceptional, everyday experience by including in the realm of the aesthetic “any reactions we form toward the sensuous and/or design qualities of any object, phenomenon or activity” (2007, p. 9). This definition will certainly count our unremarkable, even unconscious, responses to our unobtrusive backdrop as aesthetic. But it also designates any response to perceptual input “aesthetic”: by its lights, burning one’s hand on a hot surface, being blinded by the sun’s glare, and being induced to vomit by a foul stench are all aesthetic responses. At this point, we well may worry that the concept of environment has warped, beyond recognition, not only our ideas of what non-art we can appreciate aesthetically, and how we can appreciate it, but our very notion of aesthetic appreciation itself. At present, these discussions concerning the merits of employing the concept of environment as the central organizing concept in the study of the aesthetics of non-art continue. At the same time, philosophers are exploring alternative approaches, such as a focus on the everyday (Leddy, 2005), and a return to the aesthetics of function (Davies, 2006; Parsons and Carlson, 2008). However these disputes are resolved in the coming years, it seems clear that the study of the aesthetics of non-art will continue to expand, broadening and enriching our philosophical aesthetics.

241

9781847063700_Ch16_Final_txt_print.indd 241

2/27/2012 10:31:05 AM

17

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Toward a Paradigm David I. Gandolfo and Sarah E. Worth

1. Introduction Aesthetic theory, especially as it relates to epistemology, struggles with the notion of an ideal knower or an ideal aesthetic experience. In this essay, we will aim to provide a more inclusive paradigm for aesthetic experience and aesthetic value that takes into consideration lessons learned from “standpoint epistemology,” applied especially to the art and the experiences of marginalized art viewers and art makers. What we call “global standpoint aesthetics” is not concerned with finding an essential aesthetic view that will or should or does guide a global consideration of the beautiful. Rather, it is concerned with two things. First, global standpoint aesthetics draws our attention to the process by which global standards of the beautiful are arrived at. Second, it argues that this process should take into account the insights from the margins if it is to have any descriptive and/or normative force. Artists create for many reasons and in many social conditions. Global standpoint aesthetics as we see it seeks to acknowledge that one of the valid forces that moves an artist to create is the need to communicate something that can only be properly understood from the standpoint of the marginalized. Global standpoint aesthetics does not want to claim that only art that comes from, or is informed by, the margins is legitimate; rather, it seeks a place at the table for such art, recognizing that this art does what art by its nature does: it discloses in a particularly poignant way an insight or vision that would otherwise remain hidden. Since to be marginalized is to be actively ignored, disclosure from the margins is doubly enriching: what is disclosed is not only that which has not been seen, but also that which has been actively unseen.

242

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 242

2/27/2012 10:31:08 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

2. Art and Globalization Noël Carroll, in “Art and Globalization, Then and Now,” has made an important contribution to the discussion about the relationship between aesthetics and the larger global art and aesthetics market (both what is considered and sold as art, as well as what gets serious consideration by philosophers and art critics). Carroll notes that, in our age of so-called globalization, we are not as evenly connected as the term “global” might indicate. He notes, for example, that sub-Saharan Africa is not at all connected (economically, culturally, or digitally) with much of the rest of the First World. Thus, globalization might be an appropriate term when applied to the enhanced form of capitalism that dominates economic thinking, but it is not sufficient to describe what is actually happening today in the global artworld. Carroll suggests that the current situation in the artworld is transnational but not global “if by ‘global’ we mean to refer to something homogenous in every corner of the world” (2007, p. 136). A transnational artworld includes cultural hybrids, cross-cultural influences, and other cultural access to all kinds of artworks (dance, visual art, digital media, cuisine, film, and even craft) that previously had less influence and availability for a variety of reasons. A transnational artworld includes as artists those who might not otherwise be considered artists (craftsmen and other workers who do not enjoy status on an international art scene). Carroll suggests that what we are witnessing now differs from the past insofar as what we see emerging is something like a single, integrated, cosmopolitan institution of art, organized transnationally in such a way that the participants, from wherever they hail, share converging or overlapping traditions and practices at the same time that they exhibit and distribute their art in internationally coordinated venues. (2007, p. 136) Thus his contribution to this topic explains how art and artists influence each other in ways they had not done previously—in ways they had not wanted to do, were not able to do, or did not have the cross-cultural exposure to gain the prerequisite insight and understanding to do. Through improved communication and travel, many of us have regular exposure and access to artistic traditions we did not have access to before. Carroll explains that “what seems to be changing in the present historical moment is that a unified artworld with shared language games and traditions appears to be emerging across the globe” (2007, p. 141). Thus, it seems that we are expanding artistically and aesthetically in subtle ways that were not possible earlier.

243

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 243

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Carroll’s notion of a transnational artworld has some very particular limits, however, that we find troublesome. The expanded influence of an artworld to which Carroll appeals does not address inherent and unequal power relations. For example, Carroll talks about the Hollywood, Bollywood, and now Nollywood (Nigeria) film industries and how each developed in order to appeal to its regional audiences, but he does not take into account how each of these expressions of national culture may be warped by the same commercial, consumerist pressures. He does not address the kinds of oppression of women, for instance, that these new industries might enhance in their native culture. For example, Carroll discusses the “hybridization” of dance styles and notes that this kind of globalization is not particularly new. However, while a definite hybridization of styles has been occurring, there is another aspect to this encounter of cultures that his emphasis on hybridization fails to account for. The entry of an African style of dance into Western choreography does not by itself change the relations of power between the powerful and the powerless— the producers who determine which productions get funded have not changed. As in the wider global or transnational context, the financial, religious, and cultural domination of one society by another cannot be accounted for with the concept of hybridization of artistic influences. When considering encounters between cultures, power relations are of great importance, perhaps even foundational. Art that does not consider these relations can be easily caught up in the dominant, consumerist paradigms. Art is not powerless to transform these relations; art that consciously considers them and thereby consciously situates itself has the potential to show something radically new, something previously hidden. Such art should have a legitimate seat at the table. A global standpoint aesthetic will have to take this into account.

3. Standpoint Epistemology Standpoint epistemology takes seriously the idea that where you stand affects what you see. More particularly, people who come from differing life-circumstances see, interpret, and understand the world differently. To the extent that membership in a certain group (e.g., women, people of color, and other marginalized groups) molds one’s life-circumstances, that group identity constitutes a standpoint from which one understands aspects of reality that are harder (impossible, some might claim) to see from other standpoints. Standpoint epistemology rose to prominence within feminist thought in the mid-1970s to early 1980s (Harding, 2006, p. 82). Political philosopher Nancy Hartsock (1983), sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987), and sociologist of science Hilary Rose (1983) independently came to similar insights about the way in which “knowledge is always socially situated” (Harding, 2003, p. 7). Their work collectively led to a large 244

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 244

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

body of thought over the subsequent decades, and has had ripple effects in many other disciplines. For example, liberation philosophy and theology, (feminist) re-readings of the philosophical canon, aesthetics, and ethics have all benefited from the work of these early feminist standpoint epistemologists. Most importantly, standpoint epistemology has called into question not only the idealization of the omniscient, rational knower, but the very possibility of such a knower. The claim of standpoint epistemology, that reality looks different when viewed from different standpoints, can be rendered in either a weak or strong version. The weak version acknowledges that different standpoints yield different kinds of knowledge and suggests that one should attempt to enrich one’s knowledge by investigating more and varied standpoints. This version avoids a claim that makes some uncomfortable, namely, the claim to privileged knowledge that the strong version of standpoint epistemology will make, but it has difficulty avoiding epistemological relativism: if a situation looks different depending on the perspective from which it is seen, how do we determine which is the right, or best, perspective from which to view it—assuming that there is a “best” or “objectively superior” standpoint? If knowledge is determined, at least to some extent, by our epistemological perspective, if reality looks different from different perspectives, how can we determine what is really the case? The strong version of standpoint epistemology suggests that certain standpoints are epistemologically superior in that they yield better (more accurate or more useful) knowledge: the standpoints of the marginalized. That which can be seen from these standpoints is not only not seen from other standpoints, but is actively hidden by the standpoints of the powerful. This version of standpoint epistemology recognizes a relationship between power and knowledge: the distribution of power in society affects what is accepted as “known.” The powerful have many ways of influencing daily discourse: control over and access to the media; influence on research agendas, curricula at universities, and think tanks, and so on. As skilled propagandists have long known, a lie repeated often and loudly enough is eventually seen by most people to be true; the powerful have far more means to repeat it often, loudly, and over long periods of time. Within a skewed distribution of power, the standpoint of the powerful comes to count as “objective knowledge” (Harding, 1997, p. 382). Giving privileged attention to the perspective of the marginalized, then, brings forth knowledge that the powerful either do not know or are actively hiding. Insofar as the marginalized live daily the problems caused by the marginalizing effects of society (including the epistemological tyranny of the majority), they can see the problems the powerful overlook or hide. The experience of the marginalized can, thus, provide alternative research agendas for the problems that need to be addressed if society is to become more just (cf. Harding, 1993, p. 62). Before proceeding with a look at how standpoint epistemology has affected other disciplines, let us pause to address one common misunderstanding of 245

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 245

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

standpoint epistemology. The claim that (at least some aspects of) reality can be seen more accurately from the margins does not mean that whatever the marginalized hold to be true is indeed true. Rather, it means that we advance toward the truth: (1) by acknowledging the existence of the margins, that is, of a reality that is ugly, unjust, and that calls into question the legitimacy of the status quo; and (2) by recognizing that viewing the center from the margins casts the former in a different light, highlighting truths that the center does not want acknowledged. In the past few decades, numerous disciplines beyond feminist philosophy have provided examples of the stronger claim. Revisionist history, liberation theology, and liberation philosophy, for instance, have all advanced the idea that a more accurate view of reality is obtained from the standpoint of the marginalized. For the purpose of comparison, we will briefly consider how the claims of standpoint epistemology play out in the discipline of history.

4. Revisionist History One powerful example of the strong version of standpoint epistemology comes from the field of history. Howard Zinn, in the now classic A People’s History of the United States (1995/1980), presents his topic from the perspective of the oppressed. In his telling of history, Zinn announces in a straightforward manner the fact that he is going to take sides (p. 10). He argues that it is not possible not to take sides, so the best that one can do is to be honest about the perspectives being emphasized. To explain, he compares the task of the historian to that of the mapmaker: each has to make decisions about which of the surfeit of facts to bring in and, importantly, which to leave out (p. 8). The decision to emphasize one thing (e.g., the heroism and religious faith of Columbus) is automatically to de-emphasize other aspects of the story (e.g., the genocide and landtheft Columbus began): the style device known as “emphasis” only works if it is not applied to everything. Once one recognizes that it is not possible not to take sides, then one must choose which standpoint to emphasize. In a divided situation where power is part of the division, not choosing is automatically choosing in favor of the powerful. In order to bring back into the account the facts that the powerful do not want known, one must opt for the perspective of the marginalized, from whose perspective one sees those facts. Given, then, that taking sides is unavoidable, many reasons can be adduced to support the claim that taking the side of the oppressed gives one a better and more complete understanding of history. z Claims about human progress are empty without (1) knowing the costs

incurred, in suffering and lost opportunities, to create the situation we 246

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 246

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

z

z

z

z

have today, and (2) making the case that what we have today is worth those costs. The costs are best seen from the perspective of those who have suffered them, that is, the oppressed.1 We study history so that the wrongs of the past will not be repeated. Historical wrongs are thrown into sharp relief when viewed from the perspective of the oppressed, because oppression by its nature is a wrong, and the oppressed are those who have been wronged. Reviewing the heroic deeds of heroes from the narratives of the past allows other heroes to emerge. When we no longer celebrate the deeds of those acting in the interest of power exclusively, the deeds of those also acting from a concern for humanity can also be seen. Those who seek to build a better, more just, more humane world must learn the lessons of those acting from a concern for humanity. The traditional way of telling history assumes that the nation is homogeneous and that one can tell its story by focusing on its leaders. This assumption is false. Zinn notes that “[n]ations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest” (pp. 9–10). The nation is a collection of disparate communities with different, competing, even contradictory interests, and this complexity is lost if one focuses solely on the “leaders.” History as the story of the leaders is the obliteration of all perspectives except those of the powerful. A genuine respect for the core values of democracy and equality demands that the story be told from the perspective of all the people, not only from the perspective of those who hold power, and thus demands that we pay attention to perspectives that are being covered up.

Zinn claims that the perspective of the oppressed is a privileged perspective from which to see history more accurately; an indispensable aspect of the truth about what happened in the past is discovered from the perspective of the oppressed. Zinn is not just giving us the other half of a story we already know. When the victims’ perspectives are known, the traditional version of history, which tends to celebrate the achievements of the victors, morphs from a tale of heroism into one of, at best, unfortunate acts that in the end, after much hand-wringing, “were worth it.”2 Traditional historical accounts, written from the perspective of the powerful, cannot simply be combined with the victims’ perspectives to yield a homogenous whole, because the former changes, and ultimately grows very thin, in the stark light of the latter. The upshot of Zinn’s philosophy of history is that adopting the standpoint of the oppressed in telling history enables us to know valuable things that would otherwise be lost, knowledge that is not only not possible from the perspective of the powerful but is more important and more valuable than the knowledge available from the perspective of the powerful. 247

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 247

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

5. Marginalization Feminist standpoint epistemology grew out of a recognition that there is an epistemological exclusion grounded in institutionalized oppression. This exclusion is operative in two ways. First, the knowledge of the marginalized is undervalued—they are assumed to have no insights, or their insights are assumed not to be important. Second, knowledge about the conditions of the marginalized is undervalued—as marginalized, they are overlooked because they are assumed to be unimportant. Feminist standpoint epistemology recognizes that both claims are false and, thus, argues for an epistemological privilege at the margins. To bring these insights into a consideration of global aesthetics, it will help, first, to flesh out the concept of the “margin,” and second, to consider marginalization in a global context. What constitutes a margin? There are three important aspects of the margin that are relevant to our discussion. First, we note that a margin is part of the whole. In dealing with the marginalized, we are not dealing with an entirely separate universe, but with something that is a marginal part of something else. Second, the marginalized groups to which standpoint epistemology refers are marginalized in socio-politico-economic terms, that is, in terms of power; sociopolitico-economic power is the marginalizing factor. Third, the margin is such only in relation to a center. In the socio-politico-economic context, the center has taken to itself the power that constitutes it as the center, leaving the margins with the dearth of power that constitutes them as the margins. The active accumulation of power by the center, by which the center constituted itself as such, at the same time drained the margins of power. Whether or not the creation of the marginalized was directly intended by the center when it was actively seeking the power that elevated it over others, the center’s actions caused the existence of the margins. In this sense and to that extent, the center is responsible for the existence of the margins. In using the concept of the marginalized in a socio-politico-economic context, we are not concerned directly with individuals but with social groups. When a nation seeks power for itself, it is a very thin line between, on the one hand, seeking it so as to be the master of its own destiny and, on the other hand, seeking it over others. Taking this step is not a logical necessity or a foregone conclusion, but that it was indeed taken by today’s powerful in the process of accumulating their power (e.g., through genocide, slavery, and colonization) is historical fact. When the processes by which today’s powerful accumulated their power are viewed from the standpoint of the marginalized, they stand out starkly for what they were: acts of oppression. Behind the ideological constructs of Manifest Destiny, “civilizing” the “barbarians,” or bringing Christianity to the “heathens,” is the historical reality of theft, slavery, and genocide by the powerful, intent on increasing their wealth and power. When seen from the 248

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 248

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

perspective of the marginalized, there is no doubt that heathens were not only being baptized, they were also being murdered, raped, and enslaved by selfdesignated Christians; the so-called “barbarians” were not being “civilized,” they were being murdered, raped, and enslaved by the self-designated “civilized.” The power of the standpoint of the marginalized to highlight these historical facts, to show the other side of the coin of history, is a power that a global standpoint aesthetics can tap into. A society is marginalized to the extent that it cannot exercise agency over its economy, its political decisions, and its culture. The global margins, then, are those societies who lack the power: z to affect the global economy or to control their own economic priorities z to have their concerns play a determining role in both global political

forums and in their own, domestic political forums, and z to have their culture a) be taken seriously as a living, changing reflection

on what is important in life, rather than a section in a museum and a source of alternative, inexpensive gifts; and b) not be overwhelmed by imports that are not necessarily “better” but only more successfully marketed. In sum, the marginalized are the poor and powerless. The question of what global standpoint aesthetics might look like must be inclusive of their perspective. The promise of a standpoint epistemology is that more of reality can be known when we take into account the hidden parts that can only be seen from the standpoint of the marginalized. A global standpoint aesthetics will be aware of this and use it to disclose the reality of marginalization hidden by the powerful center.

6. Aesthetics and Standpoint Epistemology Having considered the origin of standpoint epistemology in feminist thought, and its application in the discipline of history, let us now turn our attention to its application in aesthetics. We will look at this from the perspective of the knower/perceiver, and by looking at the artworld itself as a possible institution of oppression. The most influential work that opposes any kind of standpoint preferences came from David Hume and the eighteenth-century British taste theorists. Hume, in particular, in his Of the Standard of Taste (1757), outlined two important things. First, he made a clear distinction between matters of opinion or sentiment (aspects that are not in objects but merely constitute our feelings about objects) and matters of judgment (which have reference to something beyond themselves and can be said to be either true or false). Matters of sentiment cannot be said to be true or false. According to Hume, beauty does not exist in an object, but only in the mind of the perceiver. Aesthetic judgments, 249

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 249

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

however, can have meaning, and he argues that although matters of taste cannot be said to be either true or false, they can be more or less effectively defended or justified. Second, Hume expands on the qualities that make one’s assessment of taste more justified, that is, what makes one a true judge. Qualities of a true judge are delicacy of imagination, practice in making judgments, the ability to make comparisons, good sense, and a mind free from prejudice—he is disinterested or impartial. It is the last of these qualifications that has had the largest philosophical impact on the history of aesthetics and has given Hume a permanent place in aesthetic standpoint theory. Although Kant, Hume, and Hutcheson all used the term, Hume’s notion of disinterestedness seems to have had the longest lasting impact in terms of our ideal stance to take toward artworks. Hume suggested that this disinterested stance, looking at the formal aspects of a work, in a rational way,3 would provide the most judgment-like assessment of a work of art. Assessments of works of art could not be true judgments, even though they aimed to be judgments and were to be considered more or less accurate. Hume’s arguments provided aestheticians and art critics a starting point to argue that aesthetic judgments could be more or less validated and that the true, disinterested judge is a form of an idealized knower. Hume’s main argument in reference to disinterestedness is that some judgments and some perspectives are superior, and more accurate, than others. Even though he denies that beauty can be a property of objects, he still suggests that making aesthetic judgments can be a meaningful practice. Although there had been some suggestions that disinterestedness need not be the ideal stance toward works of art, it was really not until the twentieth century that one could see that disinterestedness was really an inappropriate approach to much of the art then being produced, including conceptual art, feminist, outsider, installation, political art, and even much of the art produced by other cultures—tribal African masks seem to be a perennial favorite example of artworks that seem to lose much of their value when placed behind glass in a museum.4 Peg Brand (1998) has suggested that a fuller approach to political and/or feminist art would be one where the viewer learns to toggle back and forth between what she calls Interested Attention (IA) and Disinterested Attention (DA; the abbreviations are Brand’s). In the face of feminist critics who have sought to dismantle the notion of this ideal, rational observer and appreciator of art (which has also been largely constructed as masculine-as-rational/ disinterested and feminine-as-emotional/interested), Brand suggests that disinterestedness can still serve as an appropriate and useful mode of experiencing art. It must, however, be used in conjunction with what Brand calls the feminist antithesis of male disinterestedness. Viewing an artwork interestedly allows one to engage emotionally with the work, to be bothered by its political charge, or to take an interest that is “self-conscious and self-directed” (Brand, 1998, p. 162).5 Brand suggests we commit a kind of “‘gender treason’, defined as the 250

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 250

2/27/2012 10:31:09 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

simultaneous endorsement of both authority and freedom, order and flexibility, objectivity and subjectivity, and reason and feeling” (p. 163). She argues that this approach affords a more complete aesthetic experience for a viewer and also gives the work due justice. But the toggling back and forth between IA and DA still seems insufficient to us since it does not take into consideration the possible (likely) marginalized conditions in which artworks made by oppressed groups are produced, marketed, and sold. It seems to us that the marginalization of the production, culture, and even the medium needs to be taken into consideration as well for one to have full appreciation of such works of art.6 A broader application of standpoint aesthetics would deny the disinterested ideal observer and acknowledge the productive conditions of the marginalized artist in order to best engage with the artwork. To bring Zinn’s approach into the realm of aesthetics, the marginalized—socially, economically, politically, and globally—would be recognized as having a privileged view to contribute to the production and appreciation of art. Thus, in a similar way that moral, epistemic, and aesthetic luck acknowledge that the experiences of an individual largely influence how his or her moral, epistemic, and aesthetic compasses develop, standpoint aesthetics recognizes the influences and experiences of the oppressed—in terms of both the production and appreciation of art.7 The importance of these theories of luck on standpoint aesthetics is that circumstances, fortunate or unfortunate, centered or marginalized, give legitimacy to one’s standpoint. Anne Eaton (2009) has argued for a particularly feminist standpoint aesthetic. That is, by arguing that a biased perspective may not always be a negative thing, she demonstrates that taking a feminist viewpoint (and we would argue that this applies more widely to the marginalized as well) can give an appreciator a better, fuller experience. Taste, Eaton notes, is deeply socially constructed. She explains three aspects of the social influences on taste: 1. Social location systematically shapes how art is made, and how both art and nature are understood, appreciated, and evaluated. 2. Taste is normative: judgments of taste admit of degrees of success and competence, and correct judgments of taste have legitimate claims on others. 3. Standpoints can be aesthetically privileged in certain crucial respects (2009, p. 272). These are three of the most relevant things we want to focus on as well, with an appeal specifically to the marginalized. The disinterested notion of Hume’s taste and his true judge is difficult to defend when one can make an argument that there is not really one ideal perspective from which to appreciate art. As Eaton argues, bringing the marginalized perspectives into 251

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 251

2/27/2012 10:31:10 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

consideration, or bringing neglected perspectives into view, can “thereby allo[w] us to see beauty, ugliness, and other aesthetic values where they had been missed, or new forms of these values, or old forms of these values in new and surprising ways” (2009, p. 273). Thus a real global standpoint aesthetic will take into account two things. First, epistemological considerations—that the marginalized have a legitimate perspective that cannot be dismissed with the claims that their perspective does not qualify as, say, true justified belief, or that the marginalized do not qualify as true, disinterested judges. Second, standpoint aesthetics will take into consideration matters of appreciation that might not have previously acknowledged the arts, crafts, and experiences of the socially, politically, economically, and geographically marginalized. This means that a lot of what standpoint aesthetics might use as a starting point is what Carroll describes as a Transnational Artworld—for example, the digital arts (video, film, photography, computer art) might take precedence over the more traditional arts of painting and sculpture since the digital arts are more accessible and are more “emblematic” of the current world situation (2007, p. 139). Further, there will be culturally hybrid influences manifested in all kinds of artistic media. Most importantly, the high/ low art distinction might become blurred.

7. Conclusion: Standards for a Global Standpoint Aesthetic What then, does a global standpoint aesthetic provide that previous approaches have neglected? First, we believe that Carroll’s claim that the world has made some genuine progress toward a transnational, though not necessarily global artworld, is an accurate observation, but that the “shared language games and traditions” which he puts forth as characteristic of this emerging artworld do not get at the profound insights that art from the global margins makes available. Art that is informed by the perspectives of the marginalized discloses insights that are not available elsewhere. Second, Hume’s claim that objective viewpoints are to be aimed for and are superior to perspectival views is antithetical both to feminist standpoint epistemology and now to global standpoint aesthetics. Just as the former has found ways to avoid the problem of relativism, so too will the latter have to be on guard against relativism. But the insights of the artist whose creativity grows out of having an interest in the margins have a genuine, important, and indeed indispensable contribution to make. Third, global standpoint aesthetics needs to consider both the weak version of feminist standpoint epistemology and the strong version. At the weak

252

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 252

2/27/2012 10:31:10 AM

Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm

end, art from the perspective of the marginalized discloses insights not otherwise available, and the viewer who considers such art will have her worldview enriched. At the strong end, art from the margins discloses information and insights that are not available from other standpoints. Such art arrives as an “annunciatory revelation” that can present a more human, humane, and humanizing way of seeing because it reveals an overlooked, ignored, dehumanized, and dehumanizing aspect of human existence. There is, thus, a kind of natural affinity between the artist and the standpoint of the marginalized. Indeed, the vibrancy and life of marginalized art is that it discloses what others might miss—art from the margins does precisely this. The artist is frequently herself a member of the economically marginalized, having been called to a vocation that values something else more than money.8 This kind of artist is in a potentially powerful revelatory position—her talent and insight as an artist enable her to communicate something about the margin she occupies. Standpoint aesthetics recognizes that art, by its nature, tries to show the unseen and that art that speaks to its age shows the contours of the age, its margins. In the age of globalization a standpoint aesthetics values art that values, highlights, discloses the global margins. If we adopt a post-Hegelian stance that recognizes the historical grounding of value, we can suggest as conclusion that a global standpoint aesthetics that recognizes a marginal privilege is perhaps the relevant aesthetic for our time: a globalizing world of oppressed margins. We end, then, by suggesting some topics in need of further research in the development of a global standpoint aesthetics. First, it would be instructive to examine directly a body of art that consciously tried to side with the marginalized—for example, the Harlem Renaissance, socialist realism, some of the standardly considered “women’s art,” graffiti, many of the craft items made in rural cultures, and even outsider art. One might investigate the extent to which they succeeded or failed in disclosing insights from the margins, as well as the extent to which they succeeded or failed as art and, thus, failed to disclose anything. How might global standpoint aesthetics be refined so as to promote these successes and avoid these mistakes? Second, one might consider more closely the institutional aspects of the artworld (museums, galleries, publishers, and art schools) and the extent to which they can or should make a preferential option for the marginalized. The question of power is inextricably part of standpoint aesthetics. The institutions of the artworld may need to actively opt in favor of art from the perspective of the marginalized, for this will not happen automatically.9 Finally, we have drawn attention to the knowledge of reality disclosed by art from the margins. Further inquiry is needed into the way art from the margins challenges not just the truth claims of the center, but their aesthetic claims as well.

253

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 253

2/27/2012 10:31:10 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Notes 1. Once the costs are recognized, there is a difficult question to confront: if genocide and, later, slavery are not too heavy a price to pay for progress, what would be? This topic is explored further in Gandolfo (2009). 2. Once again, the costs would have to be tallied and then justified in order for the claim “it was worth it” to have any meaning. 3. Laura Mulvey, among others, has made the argument that general notion of disinterested attention is structured in a particularly masculine way. See “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1975). 4. See, for instance, Anthony Appiah’s book In My Father’s House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). He includes a chapter detailing the decision making process that a group of cocurators went through to chose African art for an exhibit at the Center for African Art in New York called Perspectives: Angles on African Art. He discusses a photograph called Yoruba Man with a Bicycle as being controversial since it is “neotraditional” (p. 140) (read postmodern) when really what people were looking for were precolonial views on art. Our prejudicial vision of what African art should be precludes the presentation of something modern or Western. 5. See also Noël Carroll (2000) “Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2), pp. 191–208, and Robert Stecker (2001) “Only Jerome: A Reply to Noël Carroll,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 41 (1), pp. 76–80. Carroll especially deals directly with engaging politically with an artwork. 6. An analogy might be made here between our task of developing the boundaries of global standpoint aesthetics and the difficulties that have been found in developing a proper appreciation of nature. Allen Carlson, for example, in “Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment” (in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds, Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge, 2008) proposes a number of different kinds of models of art appreciation that might or might not be helpful in appreciating nature. He ultimately suggests a new model to appreciate nature that does not work for appreciating works of visual art. 7. The seminal essays on the moral luck debate are Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck” and Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” both in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 50 (1976), pp. 115–35 and 137–51, respectively. See also B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On epistemic luck, see Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); on aesthetic luck, see Anna Christina Ribeiro, “Aesthetic Luck” (manuscript in preparation). 8. To be clear, this point here refers to all artists. The vocation (as such) of art values beauty, and the communication of insights through the beautiful handling of communicative media, more than money. This is not to suggest that artists cannot make money from their art; only that art cannot be produced by those whose primary motive is to make money. 9. There is a parallel here between the preferential option for the poor that is found in liberation theology and the aesthetic option in favor of art from the perspective of the marginalized that is being advocated.

254

9781847063700_Ch17_Final_txt_print.indd 254

2/27/2012 10:31:10 AM

18

New Directions in Aesthetics Paisley Livingston

Anyone who sets out to write an essay about new directions in aesthetics faces some hard choices. One option that comes to mind is to attempt a reasonably comprehensive and standard survey of highly salient trends in the recent literature. Such a piece could turn out to be informative to those few outsiders to the field who might happen to read it, but is unlikely to be of any great interest to anyone who has been following the literature and has already noticed those trends that could be identified in an uncontroversial survey, such as the fact that a lot of important recent work focuses on questions pertaining to art and ethics, or the fact that there has been a surge in the areas of environmental and “everyday” aesthetics. A short survey of obvious trends is, however, doomed to superficiality given the enormous scope of the topic. What is more, any entry conceived of along the lines of a grand survey is likely to prove redundant given that a variety of truly excellent companions, guides, handbooks, and encyclopedias are already available, both on and off line, as a result of the publishers’ massive investment in the commissioning of introductory and reference works over the past two decades. The one salient alternative to attempting a sweeping descriptive survey, which is to settle on writing something more selective, argumentative, and evaluative—something that even experts could find unexpected and informative—also has its dangers. Such an essay’s inclusions, exclusions, and judgments are likely to be thought tendentious or entirely wrongheaded by many aestheticians. After all, one philosopher’s exciting new avenue of enquiry is often another philosopher’s hopeless cul-de-sac. For example, while many people working in aesthetics think of cognitive science as an exciting cluster of interrelated fields having many promising implications for aesthetics, others see no real payoffs in the computational metaphors and talk of semantic information-processing, and show little interest in papers in this vein. Similar worries can be raised with regard to many other more or less recent trends one might care to go into, such as the steady flow of books on film theory inspired by the late metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze, the “new” strategy of having recourse to experimental methods, comparative aesthetics, evolutionary approaches, the 255

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 255

2/27/2012 10:31:13 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

application of anti-realist semantics and metaphysics, pragmatism, gender and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and so on. Given such worries, what is to be done? The attentive reader of what follows may conclude that, confronted with the dilemma of being either correct but obvious, or not-so-obvious but tendentious, the present author nicks himself on the former horn and then impales himself fatally on the latter. I begin with some observations about the very idea of new directions in aesthetics and then take a somewhat closer look at some issues raised by a trend known as “everyday aesthetics.” Drawing upon some basic assumptions about aesthetic experience, I address myself to some worries that have been raised about a fundamental tension at the heart of the philosophical project of everyday aesthetics. I argue that these worries can be laid to rest. *

*

*

What counts as a new direction in aesthetics? What is the context of assessment, short of the unknowable total history of the discourse on our sprawling subject? As the novelty clause is hard to apply, a simpler option would be to construe the “new” in “new directions” as simply meaning “recent.” The bullet to bite, however, is this: philosophers who have just reinvented one of the wheels of aesthetics, which happens quite often, would have to be said to be part of a new direction. Yet if “recent” is construed narrowly enough, we need not wait long to retract such judgments. With regard to “directions,” it may seem good enough to say that the term is used to refer to intellectual goals, and especially the questions people in the field raise and try to answer. Such directions include the relative emphasis on contemporary problem-solving efforts dealing with universal, or at least highly general, questions in aesthetics, as opposed to attempts to answer questions about substantive historical matters related to specific arts, taste, natural beauty, and so on, as well as second-order historical questions concerning what earlier thinkers did or did not say or believe about topics in the field. Although it is somewhat obvious, it should be added that the questions philosophers choose to answer are not the only source of directions worth talking about in a survey of the field. As another aspect of the journey metaphor would have it, sometimes people keep the same destination but change routes. Perhaps some of the new directions in aesthetics are not new questions to be answered, but different ways of trying to answer the same old questions. “Directions,” then, could refer to methods, types of arguments, and also to rhetorical strategies and styles. Other “directions” in this larger sense include the relative emphasis given to abstract argumentation as opposed to careful interpretation of historical sources or well-researched appreciation of particular examples (from the fine arts and elsewhere). Perhaps this is just wishful thinking or the product of some kind of salience bias on my part, but I note a happy trend in 256

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 256

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

which more and more philosophers making arguments about general topics in aesthetics successfully ground, or at least illustrate, their claims with impressively detailed and well-researched descriptions of aptly chosen specific cases. This trend in philosophical aesthetics is contrasted, at least in my imagination, to an earlier situation in which philosophers writing about art, taste, and so on seemed satisfied to make do with evocations of threadbare examples. As Elisabeth Schellekens argues in this volume, some of the core issues in aesthetics (such as the issues raised by de gustibus) are inextricably bound up with the most difficult ontological and epistemological problems, so there should be no question here of recommending a trend whereby aesthetics is divorced from the results of ongoing debates over fundamental issues in metaphysics and other core areas of philosophy. Yet, aesthetics is a large and complex area of enquiry, and with regard to at least some of its topics, successful research does not require solutions to fundamental topics in metaphysics. For a development of this point with regard to the ontology of music, see Andrew Kania (2008), who writes about the state of the art with regard to both fundamental and “higher level” issues in musical ontology. More generally, it can be observed that some aestheticians are not directly concerned with fundamental metaphysical topics, and are effectively doing criticism and critical theory related to one or more of what is sometimes called “the aesthetic disciplines” (literary studies, art history, visual studies, drama and film studies, etc.). At times they outdo the “coverage model” specialists at what used to be their own game (that is, the niche left open when many of them completely abandoned issues in aesthetics to pursue identity politics and cultural studies). *

*

*

I turn now to consider some issues raised by one more specific “direction” in which I have taken an interest, namely, a trend or subfield that is generally labeled by its proponents as “everyday aesthetics.” The basic idea of attending to the aesthetic dimensions of popular culture and everyday activities and objects is, of course, neither new nor recent. Limiting our attention rather drastically to book-length works in English published in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a few forerunners that readily come to mind include Joseph Kupfer (1983), David Novitz (1992), Crispin Sartwell (1995), and Carolyn Korsmeyer (1999). Yet this is not to deny the significance or interest of more recent developments, such as philosophers (e.g., Smith, 2007; Hales, 2007) writing insightfully about the appreciation of wine and beer, thereby following up on the more general avenue of enquiry argued for by Korsmeyer’s ground-breaking book. Unless it is a misnomer, the body of work labeled “everyday aesthetics” is a matter of philosophical discourses the subject of which is the aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation of familiar and common items. Such a characterization of the subfield, however, raises the question: familiar and commonplace 257

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 257

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

for whom? For example, most Danish kitchens have a simple type of tin opener (one with no moving parts) the likes of which many people from the rest of the world have never seen and do not know how to use.1 Do these objects, which are wholly unfamiliar items for some people, fall within the purview of the discipline of everyday aesthetics? Presumably many people in that field would be inclined to say “yes,” the assumption being that these objects are part of the everyday lives of a significant population, and that the question of their aesthetic value is worth raising (I say more on this below). Yuriko Saito, for example, does not hesitate to include a discussion of common Japanese packaging practices in her (2007) treatise on everyday aesthetics, it being perfectly obvious that the exquisite design of even familiar paper packaging in Japan is anything but commonplace to most non-Japanese. That some category of items is familiar to the members of some group of people would seem necessary for its inclusion in the object domain of everyday aesthetics, but what are the sufficiency conditions? In an essay on the nature of everyday aesthetics, Tom Leddy lists some topics belonging squarely within everyday aesthetics: “the home, the daily commute, the workplace, the shopping center, and places of amusement,” and he adds that, “The issues that generally come up have to do with personal appearance, ordinary housing design, interior decoration, workplace aesthetics, sexual experience, appliance design, cooking, gardening, hobbies, play, appreciation of children’s art projects, and other similar matters” (2005, p. 3). Leddy acknowledges that these and the other objects of everyday aesthetics form a “loose category,” but he is far from thinking it all-inclusive. In many cases, even though something is both aesthetically significant and familiar to a group of people, it still should not be taken as a topic in everyday aesthetics. One of his examples of a topic that falls outside everyday aesthetics involves musicians who practice and play just about every day. For such people, music is quite literally a part of everyday life, yet Leddy considers that since music is one of the fine arts, its aesthetic analysis does not belong within everyday aesthetics. How, then, is that subfield to be delimited? Leddy writes that everyday aesthetics covers all aesthetic experiences that are not already included in “well-established” domains of aesthetic theorizing. What is thereby positioned outside everyday aesthetics, he suggests, includes “issues” connected closely with the fine arts, the natural environment, mathematics, science, and religion. Adopting this proposed definition of “everyday aesthetics” could have some unwanted consequences. What should be said when a topic that once belonged to everyday aesthetics, thus defined, becomes part of a well-established discourse in aesthetics? For example, should the discourse in philosophical aesthetics on the aesthetics of food and drink become a well-established topic (and arguably it has already done so), it would thereby fall outside the field of everyday aesthetics. The very success of everyday aesthetics as a branch of aesthetic 258

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 258

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

enquiry would, then, eventually lead to the continuous expulsion of its own topics and results from this subfield. A better way to work with Leddy’s key insight is to anchor the intended contrast category of “well-established” topics more securely. Here’s one way to do this. It is important to remember that one of the most basic motivations behind investigations in everyday aesthetics is the desire to explore the aesthetic value of phenomena that were overlooked as a result of an emphasis on the fine arts and certain aspects of the natural environment (those deemed sufficiently “pictorial” or dramatic to correspond to prominent eighteenth-century ideas about the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime—or what Saito (1997, 2007) usefully labels “scenic” natural items). On the assumption that this motivation behind everyday aesthetics is accepted, as I think it should be, it can be maintained that this subfield of aesthetics should accordingly embrace the aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation of things familiar or everyday, but not the aesthetics of the fine arts and scenic nature. Questions about the scope and purpose of everyday aesthetics remain. Most of the people who advocate everyday aesthetics and provide descriptions and assessments of the aesthetic value of familiar items have joined the chorus challenging the classical legacy whereby only vision and hearing were recognized as properly aesthetic senses (see Korsmeyer, 1999). Contemporary everyday aestheticians tend to take aisthesis broadly and champion all five senses, as well as the role of beliefs and the imagination in aesthetic experience. There remains, however, some disagreement as to whether purely visual properties appreciated through disengaged, passive contemplation merit inclusion in the new field of everyday aesthetics, one thought being that this sort of thing was central to old-fashioned aesthetic doctrine (Berleant, 1997). If the sphere of everyday aesthetics is to be contrasted boldly to that of aesthetics more generally, ought not an emphasis be placed on modes of appreciative engagement that surpass visual contemplation? Leddy (2005, pp. 4–5) resists this conclusion and contends that there have been valuable interactions between the aesthetics of the fine arts, nature, and everyday life. For example, many still-life pictures help viewers attend to the aesthetic rewards of familiar, overlooked items in the everyday world (cf. Bryson, 1990); similarly, the everyday aesthetician can take a page from art’s book and engage in visual contemplation of imaginarily “framed” non-artistic situations. I side with Leddy here. More generally, it seems unwarranted to describe everyday aesthetics as a radical breach with a wrongheaded monolith labeled “traditional aesthetics.” Saito, for example, finds some of Archibald Alison’s ideas about the context-bound emergence of aesthetic qualities congenial to her own approach to aesthetic experience (Saito, 2007, pp. 121–2). As I mentioned earlier, several prominent figures writing about everyday aesthetics have discussed what they themselves label as a basic “tension” in the field. This set of philosophical concerns arises roughly as follows. Assume, 259

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 259

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

at least for the sake of the argument, that philosophers who contribute to everyday aesthetics attempt to describe and assess the aesthetic experiences occasioned by familiar everyday objects, activities, and scenes. Assume as well that aesthetic experience only takes place above some threshold of awareness. If some music is perceived, yet the subject remains totally unaware of hearing this music, the auditory experience does not cross the threshold into the domain of aesthetic experience, even if the experience does satisfy behavioral and motivational conditions on what should be recognized as perceptual uptake in the absence of awareness (Dretske, 2006). Assume as well that in everyday life, perceptual input of what is wholly commonplace and familiar often fails to be the object of a mode of awareness crossing the threshold in question. For example, the subject has seen the view along the road on the daily commute a thousand times before and is not inclined to pay much attention to it; in any case, she is too busy contending with the hectic traffic to attend to the complex flow of sights, sounds, and smells along the way. It follows from these assumptions that this person had no aesthetic experience of the environment on this commute. Enter the everyday aesthetician, who attends carefully to the environment along this same stretch of the road and has an aesthetic experience. In light of this aesthetic experience, the everyday aesthetician reclassifies this part of the world as falling within the sphere of everyday aesthetics; the aesthetician thereby practices and preaches a renewed, aesthetically oriented attention to this environment. The worry that arises here is that although the philosophical operation has been successful, the very “object” of everyday aesthetics has somehow vanished or been vitiated as a result. The philosopher has described his or her own experience, not what was actually experienced as commonplace and familiar by the commuter. In Saito’s words, the philosopher has rendered the “ordinary extraordinary” (2007, p. 245). With reference to aesthetic attitude theorists who believe that anything can be appreciated under the aesthetic attitude, Leddy similarly worries that, “Such a position dissolves the distinction between everyday aesthetics and every other form of aesthetics” (2005, p. 17). Yet, as far as Leddy is concerned, the source of the problem is not just aesthetic attitude theory: “any attempt to increase the aesthetic intensity of our ordinary everyday life-experiences will tend to push those experiences in the direction of the extraordinary. One can only conclude that there is a tension within the very concept of the aesthetics of everyday life” (2005, p. 18). Saito addresses herself to this sort of worry in the conclusion to her book. In an effort to characterize what she also describes as a “tension” in the discourse of everyday aesthetics, she introduces a distinction between normative and descriptive goals of everyday aesthetics. In its normative moment, a key aim of everyday aesthetics is to enjoin us to become more aware of the aesthetic dimension of familiar environments. This is not a matter of aestheticizing the negative, 260

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 260

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

or of abandoning moral awareness for a morally blind aesthetic perspective— Saito is eloquent about the dangers of this sort of tendency. The point, rather, is to strive toward keener sensitivity and more distinct perceptions so as to uncover a hidden and rewarding aesthetic domain: “There are many aesthetic gems hidden in our everyday life, but we do not notice, let alone appreciate, most of them because we usually do not engage with them as aesthetic objects” (2007, p. 244). It would appear, then, that as a subfield in philosophy, everyday aesthetics shares the ambition that the Russian formalists attributed to good art—defamiliarization or ostranenie [making strange]. To realize that ambition it is necessary to awaken aesthetic experience and aesthetic appreciation in places where there was very little, or even none, before. According to Saito, the philosophical project of everyday aesthetics also has an important descriptive moment, the goal of which is to represent familiar, everyday life and experience faithfully. This means acknowledging or even respecting the very conditions where the aesthetic gems remained hidden and unnoticed. Everyday aesthetics should not, then, be entirely taken up with the evaluative project requiring us to bracket or overrule practically directed responses to an object’s instrumental value. Saito writes that the goal of descriptive everyday aesthetics is to “preserve and focus on the ordinary, seemingly non-aesthetic, reaction,” which is contrasted to the evaluative project of rendering “the ordinary extraordinary” (2007, p. 245). The challenge to everyday aesthetics, then, is how to “negotiate” these two contrasting, evaluative and descriptive directions of aesthetics. Although I think both Saito and Leddy are onto something here, I want to argue that the worry about a fundamental tension in everyday aesthetics can be relieved. One way to do so would be to have recourse to some notion of aesthetic properties. Everyday aesthetics would then be the subfield that investigates the aesthetic properties of items not falling in the categories of scenic nature or the fine arts. Whether people usually pay attention to these properties is irrelevant. Such a solution would not work, however, for those who do not share that concept of aesthetic properties or who think our idea of aesthetic properties has to be derived from a notion of aesthetic experience, evaluation, or appreciation. That is the type of solution I will explore in what follows. This kind of approach is based on assumptions about the differences between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience. A point of departure is the uncontroversial observation that our orientation and experiences in everyday life are often predominantly practical: we have various goals and try to realize them, and our sensations, emotions, and thoughts are largely caught up in, directed, and colored by these instrumental anticipations. Yet, this predominance of practical concerns and expectations in our experience does not always obtain. Experiences also have an intrinsic valence that can sometimes pervade one’s awareness. For example, a loud grating noise 261

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 261

2/27/2012 10:31:14 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

is immediately unpleasant, and not because we take it as signaling some possible danger; the “nose” of a fine wine is instantly rewarding, not only because we anticipate future payoffs with regard to the wine’s taste. And of course, the subtle combination of flavors of an excellent wine is often something we appreciate for its own sake. A physical pain can be distressing because we worry about the serious illness it portends, but the immediate sensation itself has its own negative valence. That the capacity to experience pain is instrumentally valuable does not contradict the observation that pain’s immediate and intrinsic subjective valence is often overarchingly negative. What is wanted in thinking about everyday aesthetics is a broad contrast between two kinds of experiences. In experiences of the first type, meansend rationality prevails. The primary objects of attention are the agent’s goals and whatever seems to be related to their realization or thwarting, such as the agent’s own efforts and perceived or imagined obstacles to their success. Instrumental experiences of this type are predominantly anticipatory as far as their evaluative dimension is concerned, as what looms large in our minds is the anticipated risks and payoffs, as well as the plans and actions that are directly related to such “utilities.” In experiences of the second type, the content of the experience is not primarily a matter of these sorts of instrumental matters, but whatever contributes to the intrinsic valence of the experience, or in other words, whatever makes the experience positively or negatively valued intrinsically, or for its own sake. In the terminology of C. I. Lewis (1946), aesthetic experiences figure among the experiences that have a predominantly or “preponderant” intrinsic value in addition to whatever instrumental payoffs they may be anticipated as having. Things that can occasion experiences that have a predominantly intrinsic value by way of contemplation are said to have inherent value, and aesthetic value is one species of inherent value more generally. As words such as “predominantly” and “preponderant” are scalar, whether an experience is aesthetic or non-aesthetic will be a matter of degree, and it is impossible to identify a quantitative ratio that traces the boundary. It is easy to find examples situated at the extremes, just as it is easy to imagine messy, hybrid cases where the subject is strongly focused on a non-practical, immediate valence as well as on anticipated practical payoffs. It is important to note that for Lewis, the immediate valence of aesthetic experience does not entail any simple hedonistic calculus, as it includes modes of valuation irreducible to pleasure (Lewis, 1946, p. 405). It is also important to note that for Lewis, the intrinsic valence of experience is not necessarily a matter of a second-order evaluative belief about that experience; instead, the valence can be part of the immediate, first-order content of the “presentation.” Also, degrees of conscious awareness or attentiveness are orthogonal to the distinction between “non-aesthetic” and “aesthetic” experiences. A successful practical experience can be a matter of the agent having an extremely alert and 262

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 262

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

emotionally charged attention to goals and outcomes. Yet, a successful practical activity can also be a matter of inattentive routine, as when one opens a tin without paying much attention to how one does it. Similarly, many aesthetic experiences involve heightened awareness and rapt attention to every nuance in a performance, but one could also have a positively valenced experience of some music while being only dimly aware of listening. It may be important to add, however, that in the total absence of awareness, experience can have no immediate, intrinsic valence, and so could not be aesthetic. I will not go into Lewis’s views at great length here, having done so elsewhere (2004, 2006, 2009). Versions of this sort of account of aesthetic experience and aesthetic value have been defended by various authors, most of whom never cite Lewis. Lewis obviously read and was influenced by Kant’s work, but trying to fold his views in aesthetics back into Kant’s will not do. Lewis makes no distinction between beauty and the agreeable, does not mention the free play of the faculties, does not attempt a deduction of subjective universal validity, and does not accept a Kantian idea of disinterestedness (even though he sometimes used the word). Lewis allows that experiences are normally mixed in that they have both final and instrumental value, so that if “disinterested” means “having no extrinsic or instrumental value,” then it is the wrong word to use in describing aesthetic experience. Although Lewis at times uses the phrase “aesthetic attitude” in his descriptions of aesthetic experience, he argued against the idea that every aesthetic experience results from the intentional adoption of a special stance or attitude. Contemplation of what is immediately presented in experience is, however, crucial to the sorts of experience he sought to single out. Lewis summed up a key element of his account as follows: “Only those values are distinctively esthetic which are resident in the quality of something as presented or presentable, and are explicitly enjoyable in the discernment of them and by that pause of contemplative regard which suspends the active interests of further purpose” (1946, p. 454). It may be helpful to flesh out this Lewis-inspired way of drawing the contrast between non-aesthetic and aesthetic types of experiences with reference to an example. Imagine that the proud and beautiful Yukiko has received a gift of wa-gashi (confectionery) from a suitor. As she initially attends to the package, her attention is dominated by her curiosity about which of the shops the gift is from, and what this choice indicates about the discernment and taste of the suitor, which she already tends to think of as inferior to her own. Once she has satisfied her curiosity on this score (her expectations, she finds, have been confirmed), her attention turns to the practical problem of efficiently undoing the elaborate packaging without cutting, tearing, or otherwise damaging the materials, as this is the only proper way to do it. Having successfully completed the operation, Yukiko barely glances at the pastries and sets the box aside. 263

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 263

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Turning now to a different kind of experience, imagine a case where Yukiko’s experience of the gift is not primarily filled by her interpersonal and practical concerns. Instead, she experiences a mild pleasure as she examines the exquisite packaging and enjoys looking at the lovely and pleasingly intricate pattern on the paper. Once the box is open, she relishes one of the cakes, savoring its gooey texture and the contrast between the flavor of the dough and the bean filling. We can also imagine a third Yukiko who, as she examines the package, is at least mildly displeased by what she recognizes as a mere imitation of the kinds of patterns now used by the most skilled and discerning craftsmen, her disapproving assessment of the craft and overall visual impression of the packaging registering as an intrinsically negative experience. It strikes me as uncontroversial to observe that our second Yukiko has an aesthetic experience, while the first one does not. I would also classify the third Yukiko’s experience as an aesthetic one, but that is more controversial. In some of the aesthetic doctrines on offer in the literature (including Lewis’s proposal), aesthetic appreciation is said to entail liking, admiration, enjoyment, or some other positive assessment or response (for a sampling, see Budd, 2008; Iseminger, 2008; Pritchard, 2009; Shusterman and Tomlin, 2008; and Stecker, 2006). Against this idea it can be retorted that it is possible and sometimes appropriate to appreciate some aesthetically disastrous item, in the sense of attending to and noting its varied aesthetically relevant flaws with warranted displeasure or disapproval. Although I find the latter line of thought appealing, I shall not pursue this issue here, but will focus my remarks primarily on the contrast between the types of experience illustrated by my first two examples. As a philosophical discipline, everyday aesthetics finds its central and defining subject matter in the kind of experiences the second Yukiko has, the key restrictions being that the objects or occasions of the experience cannot be the fine arts or scenic nature, and they must be familiar or commonplace. The worry about a tension at the heart of everyday aesthetics finds its apparent basis in the fact that there is obviously a sense in which the Yukikos are responding to “the same object”—quite broadly, the packaging of the gift. And in both cases the objects of experience are in some sense “familiar” to the subject. Gifts of wa-gashi are normally not literally received every day, but these sweets and this kind of packaging are part of Yukiko’s everyday life or familiar Lebenswelt. It might be of concern that the first Yukiko’s reaction is more typical of everyday life with its emotionally and cognitively entangling web of social and practical concerns, whereas it is only the everyday aesthetician who would have people slow down and appreciate everyday packaging “for its own sake,” the way the imaginary second Yukiko does. Yet the second and third Yukikos’ experiences are by no means so very extraordinary. That someone in her situation could with some degree of awareness have a positively or negatively valenced experience of the packaging is not just a philosophical fantasy. In describing such experiences, 264

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 264

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

we do not render the ordinary extraordinary. Unless she is vain, self-absorbed, and sadly obsessed with her relations to others, a young woman of leisure with Yukiko’s education and intelligence will have the peace of mind, inclination, and ability to attend to the objects around her with discernment, without anxiety or some overarching concern for their practical consequences. In her concern for social distinction, the first Yukiko misses out on an aesthetic experience, even if she accurately classifies the packaging’s place in a hierarchy of goods. It could be objected that the proposed distinction between types of experience does not really apply so smoothly. Suppose the first Yukiko actually derives an immediate satisfaction from her experience of receiving and evaluating the gift; this strong immediate “valence” entails that her experience falls on the same side of the distinction as the second Yukiko’s—surely an unwanted conclusion. Yet it should be remembered that the key content of this postulated, intrinsically valued experience on the part of the first Yukiko is her own proud sense of her status or identity in relation to the suitor; in short, her social distinction. Lewisians rule such possessive and acquisitive self-directed attitudes out of the sphere of aesthetic experience, even in those cases where the other Lewisian conditions on aesthetic experience are satisfied. Similarly, a consumer’s immediate delight in acquiring an expensive object, even should it have nothing to do with anticipated payoffs of ownership, does not count as an aesthetic appreciation of that object. Lewis’s manner of ruling such contents out of aesthetic experience is to appeal to what he called a “moralistic” condition: the focus on “mine and thine” is incompatible with the kinds of interests that should guide the classification of experience as aesthetic or non-aesthetic. The second Yukiko may be equally knowledgeable about social distinctions, but in the case of her experience of the packaging, it is her immediate perception and enjoyment of the quality of the packaging that provides the positive valence of her experience, and the content of this valued experience is not overshadowed by some possessive concern for la distinction. Imagine now, with regard to some category of familiar objects, that those for whom these objects are familiar never actually have any aesthetic experiences of them (incredibly, then, everyone is always like the first Yukiko, though in a culture where exquisitely beautiful packages are still prevalent). Here it could be possible for a philosopher—an outsider, perhaps—to come along and successfully provide an aesthetic appreciation of such packaging, which, in such a case, would be a fitting topic in everyday aesthetics. Whether the results correspond to experiences that were already taking place is not the key issue (the contrary assumption being a key source of the conundrum about a “tension” at the heart of everyday aesthetics). What we want to say in the case of the first Yukiko is that because her experience of the packaging is primarily instrumental, she fails to appreciate the inherent aesthetic value of the packaging, understood as a capacity to occasion intrinsically valued experiences through contemplation. 265

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 265

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

What if it is objected that it is the practical goal of the everyday aesthetician to pursue a career in philosophy, and that one means to that end is having aesthetic experiences of familiar objects, like the tin openers mentioned earlier in this chapter? Given these instrumental ambitions, how could a philosopher have an aesthetic experience that satisfies the Lewisian definition outlined above? Either the philosopher’s overarching practical orientation makes a genuine aesthetic experience impossible, or the philosopher could in fact have an aesthetic experience, but this would have to be one that is a counterexample to the Lewisian conception of what counts as such. In either case, the project of everyday aesthetics would be ill-served by the Lewisian conception. Yet, such an objection hinges on a faulty understanding of the Lewisian conception of aesthetic experience. A philosopher who sets out to write a successful paper about the aesthetic value of the tin opener is ill-advised to continue to focus his or her thoughts and imaginings on the big, hoped-for payoffs (the fame, the wealth, the power!), for in so doing he or she would have nothing to write a paper in aesthetics about. The content of the aesthetic experience to which the paper is meant to refer has to be the look, feel, shape, and design of the object, and whatever else makes the contemplation of this item have some kind of predominantly intrinsic valence. “Intrinsic,” here, should not be misconstrued as entailing that relational properties cannot be part of the “aesthetic essence” as defined by Lewis. It may be worth mentioning in passing that Lewis argued for a contextualist ontology of what he calls “aesthetic essences,” or the objects of aesthetic experience, as he denied that any aesthetic object or work of art is in principle reducible to a particular physical object. Lewis asserts, for example: “That we may evaluate esthetically a concrete physical thing, in no wise contradicts the fact that there can be no physical object the esthetic evaluation of which is altogether independent of its relations to some context” (1946, p. 477). With regard to the nature of “aesthetic essences,” he remarked tersely: “The kind of abstractions which, like poems and musical compositions, have esthetic value, can be presented through the medium of physical things: they are sensuous or imaginable though repeatable in different exemplifications” (1946, p. 478). It follows that relational properties can be relevant to the object’s inherent value, or capacity to occasion intrinsically valuable experiences through contemplation. In the case at hand, this would mean that if the philosopher has got hold of one of the openers belonging to the recent and very lovely Normann Copenhagen’s “Butterfly” series (designed by Marianne Britt Jørgensen and Rikke Hagen), which comes in a variety of pleasing colors, it is worth knowing that this type of opener was based on the more familiar, simple, and functional stainless steel models (such as those produced by Ginge Raadvad). Comparing and contrasting these two similar types of openers, as well as some of the many other, highly different sorts in the market, could contribute to an appreciation of the openers’ respective powers to occasion aesthetic experience. 266

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 266

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

New Directions in Aesthetics

To sum up, I hope that the worry raised about a fundamental tension in everyday aesthetics has been laid to rest. That does not mean, of course, that there are no outstanding difficulties. Saito is right to say that it is a challenge to know when we should suspend or supplement the primary project of everyday aesthetics, namely, the description of properly aesthetic experiences, by attending instead to related practical experiences and assessments of familiar things. This is a problem for aesthetics and philosophy more generally, a problem that has deeper roots in the difficulty of knowing how to live a good life. It has to do, for example, with the difficulty of balancing competing types of ends, as well as present and future payoffs. When some item is of acute practical importance for the members of some group, it may be incongruous or inappropriate to linger over an intrinsically valued experience obtained through a bracketing or neglect of these prudential or moral concerns. In some cases there is no use enjoining people to attend primarily to the intrinsic valences of their experiences of some kind of item, either because the upshot would be practically disastrous for them, or because there are no intrinsically rewarding gems to be uncovered in this manner. Yet often it is a good idea to follow the everyday aesthetician in an exploration of the neglected aesthetic powers of familiar things.

Note 1. Anna Christina Ribeiro informs me that most Brazilians are familiar with a similar, simple kind of opener.

267

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 267

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

9781847063700_Ch18_Final_txt_print.indd 268

2/27/2012 10:31:15 AM

19

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Darren Hudson Hick

Notes on Selection This chronology, as with this Companion as a whole, focuses on those works that contribute to the Western tradition of aesthetics, and, beginning in the twentieth century, in the analytic current of thought within that tradition (as opposed to the Continental one). As with the history of Western philosophy in general, the study of philosophical problems in art and beauty dates back to the ancient period, and is influenced by the major philosophical and cultural movements through the centuries. Much of what survives from the ancient to the post-Hellenistic period does so in fragments or references. In cases where only fragments or references exist, and where dating these is especially problematic, the author or attributed author and (where available) his dates of birth and death are listed. Where works have not survived even as fragments, these are not listed. As well, much of what survives up to the medieval period is difficult to date, and is at times of disputable attribution. In these cases, whatever information is available is listed. Aesthetics in the period between the ancients and the medievals tends to be dominated by adherence to Platonic, Aristotelian, and other theories rooted in the ancient period, and as such tends to be generally lacking in substantive theoretical advancements. And while still heavily influenced by ancient thinking, works from the medieval period tend also to be heavily influenced by religious thinking, and so many issues pertaining to art and aesthetics are intertwined with issues of religion as “theological aesthetics.” Movements in art theory and aesthetics in the Renaissance, meanwhile, were largely advanced by working artists, and so tend to be couched in observational or pedagogical approaches, rather than strictly theoretical ones. As such, in these periods and others, works selected for inclusion in this chronology are those that either focus largely on issues of aesthetics or art theory, or those that, while not focused specifically on these topics, have nevertheless been influential in the tradition of Western aesthetics. 271

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 271

2/27/2012 10:31:20 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

It is in the eighteenth century that Western aesthetics cements itself as a discipline, and philosophers begin to focus their efforts. As such, we find in this period a concerted effort to build what might be called “pure” aesthetics and philosophy of art, at least conceptually distinct from the concerns to which the study had been largely directed in preceding centuries. Given the great proliferation of aesthetics literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, some care has been taken to select from among works published in the contemporary period those that have proven to be particularly influential in the tradition. Any chronology of aesthetics will, of necessity, be selective, and may leave out figures or works which some would argue are especially important to the history of aesthetics. Throughout the chronology, titles of non-English works appear in their original languages, except in such cases where English translations of titles have become standard. My thanks especially to Jeanette Bicknell, Raphael DeClercq, Sherri Irvin, John Kulvicki, Jerrold Levinson, Paisley Livingston, Joshua Preiss, and Anna Christina Ribeiro for their very helpful suggestions in the creation of this chronology.

Fifth Century BCE As Western philosophy is born in Classical Greece, so too is the philosophy of art. Both Plato and Aristotle develop robust theories of art, but many thinkers of the Classical and Hellenistic periods make contributions, though often combined with rhetoric and mathematics. Democritus (c. 460–370 BCE), fragments Polyclitus, Canon (fragments) (date uncertain, probably third quarter of fifth century BCE) Anonymous, Dissoi Logoi or Dialexeis (c. 400 BCE)

Fourth Century BCE Aristoxenus, Elementa Harmonica (fourth century BCE) Xenocrates of Chalcedon (c. 396–314 BCE), fragments Plato, Hippias Major (c. 390 BCE) Plato, Gorgias (c. 388 BCE) Plato, Symposium (c. 385 BCE) Isocrates, Panegyricus (c. 380 BCE) Plato, Ion (c. 380 BCE)

272

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 272

2/27/2012 10:31:20 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Xenophon, Memorabilia (or Commentarii) (date uncertain, probably after 371 BCE) Plato, Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE) Plato, The Laws (c. 360 BCE) Plato, The Republic (c. 360 BCE) Aristotle, Metaphysics (c. 350 BCE) Aristotle, Poetics (c. 350 BCE) Aristotle, De Sensu (c. 350 BCE) Aristotle, Rhetoric (c. 322 BCE) Epicurus (341–270 BCE), fragments Zeno (c. 334–262 BCE), fragments Cleanthes (c. 330–230 BCE), fragments

Third Century BCE Theophrastus (c. 381–287 BCE), On Style (fragments) (probably third century BCE) Neoptolemus of Parium (third century BCE), fragments Chrysippus (c. 280–207 BCE), fragments

Second Century BCE From the post-Hellenistic period through the medieval period, a substantial amount of art-theoretical work is produced, with particular efforts by Cicero (first century), Lucian of Samosata (second century), and St. Augustine (fourth century). In large part, however, work produced in these periods is heavily dominated by Platonic and Aristotelian principles. Crates of Mallos (second century BCE), fragments Diogenes of Babylon (c. 230–150 BCE), fragments Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 220–145 BCE), fragments Posidonius (c. 135–51 BCE), fragments Dionysius Thrax (attributed), Art of Grammar (second century BCE)

First Century BCE Philodemus of Garada, On Music (between 70–40 BCE) Philodemus of Garada, On Poems (fragments) (between 70–40 BCE) Cicero, Orator ad M. Brutum (c. 46 BCE) 273

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 273

2/27/2012 10:31:20 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (c. 45 BCE) Cicero, De Natura Deorum (c. 45 BCE) Cicero, De Officiis (c. 44 BCE) Cicero, Topica (c. 44 BCE) Horace, Ars Poetica (c. 18 BCE) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Imitation (fragments) (late first century BCE) Anonymous, Tractatus Coislinianus (date uncertain, possibly as early as first century BCE)

First Century CE Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime (probably first century CE) Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura (The Ten Books on Architecture) (first century CE) Seneca the Elder, Controversiae (early first century CE) Seneca the Elder, Seusoriae (early first century CE) Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis (c. 77 CE) Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (c. 95 CE) Plutarch, De Audiendis Poetis (late first century CE) Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales (late first century CE) Dio Chrysostom, Orations (late first and early second century CE)

Second Century CE Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos (probably second century CE) Lucian of Samosata (attributed), Charidemus (probably second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, Bis Accusatus Sive Tribunalia (second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, Calumniae non Temere Credendum (second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, De Parasito (second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, De Saltatione (second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, Pro Imaginibus (second century CE) Lucian of Samosata, Prometheus es in Verbis (second century CE) Ptolemy, Harmonics (second century CE)

Third Century CE Demetrius, On Style (probably third century CE) Plotinus, The Six Enneads (c. 250–270 CE) Philostratus the Elder, Imagines (third century CE) 274

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 274

2/27/2012 10:31:20 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Aristides Quintilianus, On Music (late third or early fourth century BCE)

Fourth Century CE Philostratus the Younger, Imagines (c. 300 CE) Callistratus, Imagines (probably fourth century CE) St. Augustine of Hippo, De Pulchro et Apto (c. 380 CE) St. Augustine of Hippo, De Ordine (387 CE) St. Augustine of Hippo, De Musica (389 CE) St. Augustine of Hippo, De Vera Religione (391 CE) St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones (397–401 CE)

Fifth Century CE Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato (c. 439 CE) Proclus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato (fifth century CE) Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names (probably late fifth century CE)

Sixth Century CE Manlius Severinus Boethius, De Institutione Musica (c. 500–510 CE) Cassiodorus, De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum (c. 560 CE) St. Isidore of Seville, Differentiae (c. 598 CE) St. Isidore of Seville, Sententiae (probably late sixth century CE)

Seventh Century CE Aldhelm, De Septenario, et de Metris, Aenigmatibus ac Pedum Regulis (seventh century CE) St. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (written c. 622–623 CE, published c. 636 CE)

Eighth Century CE In the eighth century, Byzantine Emperor Leo III begins the iconoclast movement, and the controversy over heretical art spurs substantial discussion on the nature of art lasting well into the eleventh century. Throughout 275

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 275

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

the medieval period, concerns with art tend to remain intertwined with religion. St. John Damascene, On Holy Images (c. 730 CE) Iconoclast Council at Hieria, The Epitome of the Definition of the Iconoclastic Conciliabulum (754 CE) Libri Carolini (c. 790 CE) The Synod of Frankfurt, Canones (794 CE) The Synod of Frankfurt, Mansi (794 CE)

Ninth Century CE The Synod of Aachen, Mansi (811 CE) The Synod of Tours, Mansi (811 CE) Nikephorus I of Constantinople, Apologeticus Minor (c. 813–814) St. Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici adversus Iconomachos (early ninth century CE, after 815) St. Theodore the Studite, Refutatio et Subversio Impiorum Poematum (early ninth century CE, after 815) The Synod of Aachen, De Cantoribus (816 CE) Nikephorus I of Constantinople, Apologeticus Major (817 CE) Walafrid Strabo, De Rebus Ecclesiasticis (c. 840 CE) Aurelian of Réôme, Musica Disciplina (c. 850 CE) Anonymous, Musica Enchiriadis (mid- to late ninth century CE) Anonymous, Scolica Enchiriadis (mid- to late ninth century CE) Remigius of Auxerre, Musica (late ninth century CE)

Eleventh Century CE Alhazen, Book of Optics (1011–21) The Synod of Arras, Mansi (1025) Alberic of Monte Cassino, Breviarium de Dictamine (c. 1075) Aribo Scolactivus, De Musica (1078)

Twelfth Century CE Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (twelfth century)

276

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 276

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Gilbert Foliot, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum (twelfth century) Adelard of Bath, De Eodem et Diverso (c. 1107) Hugh of St. Victor, Eruditionis Didascaliæ, Libri Septem (c. 1125) Theophilus the Presbyter, De Diversis Artibus (c. 1125) Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus Super Auctores (c. 1130) St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs (1135–53) Anonymous, Isagoge in Theologiam (c. 1148–52) Dominicus Gundissalinus, De Divisione Philosophiae (second half of twelfth century) Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major (c. 1160) Thomas of Perseigne, Commentary on the Song of Songs (c. 1170–98) Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria (c. 1175)

Thirteenth Century CE Albertus Magnus, Opusculum de Pulchro et Bono (thirteenth century) Robert Grosseteste, De Artibus Liberalibus (c. 1200–10) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova (c. 1210) Eberhard the German, Laborintus (c. 1212) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Documentum de Modo et Arte Dictandi et Versificandi (c. 1213) Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica Antiqua (1215, revised 1226) Gervase of Melcheley, Ars Poetica (c. 1215) William of Auvergne, De Bono et Malo (c. 1225–28) Robert Grosseteste, De Luce (c. 1230–35) Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica Novissima (1235) Robert Grosseteste, Commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names (c. 1240) Robert Grosseteste, Hexaëmeron (c. 1240) Alexander of Hales and others, Summa Fratris Alexandri (after 1245) St. Bonaventure, Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae (c. 1250–52) Hermannus Alemannus, Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1256) St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium (before 1257) St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum (c. 1259) St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’ Divine Names (c. 1260–62) Ulrich of Strassburg, Summa de Bono (1265–72) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–74) Witelo, Optica or Perspectiva (1270) St. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology (c. 1270) St. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron (1273) John Duns Scotus, Quaestiones Super Praedicamenta Aristotelis (c. 1295) 277

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 277

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense (c. 1298–1304)

Fourteenth Century CE As the Renaissance unfolds in Europe, beginning in Italy and spreading outwards, both scholars and artists become increasingly interested in the nature of art and beauty, and as art enters this period of rapid development, treatises on art follow suit. Mathematical theories of art and beauty resurface. Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia (c. 1303) Dante Alighieri, Convivio (c. 1304–07) Dante Alighieri, Commedia (1308–21) Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia (1312–13) Petrarch, Invectivae Contra Medicum (1355) Petrarch, Epistolae Familiares (collected 1359) Giovanni Boccaccio, De Genealogiis Deorum Gentilium (1360) Petrarch, De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (1360) Petrarch, Epistolae Seniles (1361–73) Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, Il Libro dell’ Arte (probably late fourteenth or early fifteenth century)

Fifteenth Century CE Leonardo Bruni, De Studiis et Litteris Liber (1424) Laurentius Valla, De Voluptate (1431) Leon Battista Alberti, De Pittura (1435) Leon Battista Alberti, De Statua (1436) Lorenzo Ghiberti, Commentarii (c. 1436) Laurentius Valla, Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (c. 1440) Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria (1450) Nicholas of Cusa, De Mente (1450) Denys Ryckel (Dionysius the Carthusian), De Venustate Mundi et Pulchritudine Dei (c. 1452) Bartholomaeus Facius, De Viris Illustribus (c. 1456) Nicholas of Cusa, Tota Pulchra Es, Amica Mea (1456) Nicholas of Cusa, De Ludo Globi (1462–63) Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino), Trattato di Architettura (1464) Marsilio Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, de Amore (1469) Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi (c. 1474) 278

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 278

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Johannes Tinctoris, Diffinitorum Musices (c. 1475) Johannes Tinctoris, Complexus Effectuum Musices (c. 1474–75) Angelo Poliziano, Penepistemon (1491) Girolamo Savonarola, “In Apology of the Art of Poetry” (c. 1492) Girolamo Savonarola, De Simplicitate Vitae Christianae (1496) Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche Sopra Ezechiele (delivered 1496–97) Luca Pacioli, De Divina Proportione (written 1496–98, published 1509)

Sixteenth Century CE Pomponius Gauricus, De Scultura (1504) Antonio S. Minturno, De Poeta (1509) Pomponius Gauricus, De Arte Poetica (c. 1510) Pietro Bembo, De Imitatione Libellus (1512) Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani (1525) Franceso Berni, Dialogo Contro i Poeti (1526) Marco Girolamo Vida, De Arte Poetica (1527) Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano) (1528) Albrecht Dürer, Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (1528) Gian Giorgio Trissino, La Poetica (1529) Agostini Nifo, De Pulchro (1531) Bernardino Daniello, Poetica (1536) Girolamo Fracastoro, Naugerius Sive de Poetica (c. 1540) Bartolomeo Ricci, De Imitatione Libri Tres (1545) Benedetto Varchi, Lezzione sopra la Pittura e la Scultura (1546) Henry Glarean, Dodekachordon (1547) Agnolo Firenzuola, Delle Bellezze delle Donne (1548) Paolo Pino, Dialogo di Pittura (1548) Francesco Robortello, In Librum Aristotelis de Arte Poetica Explanationes (1548) Michelangelo Biondo, Della Nobilissima Pittura (1549) Joachim du Bellay, Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française (1549) Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno (1549) Benedetto Varchi, Due Lezzioni (1549) Benedetto Varchi, Lezzione della Maggioranza delle Arti (1549) Girolamo Cardano, De Subtilitate Rerum (1550) Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) Vincenzo Maggi and Bartolomeo Lombardi, In Aristotelis Librum De Poetica Communes Explanationes (1550) Francesco Patrizi, Discorso della Diversità de’ Furori Poetici (1553) Alessandro Lionardi, Dialogi della Inventione Poetica (1554) 279

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 279

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

G. P. Capriano, Della Vera Poetica (1555) Pontus De Tyard, Solitaire Secondon Prose de la Musique (1555) Jacques Pelletier du Mans, Art Poétique (1555) Lelio Gregorio Giraldi, Dialogi duo de Poetis Nostrorum Temporum (1556) Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della Pittura Intitolato l’Aretino (1557) Giovanni della Casa, Galateo (1558) Gioseffo Zarlino, Istitutioni Harmoniche (1558) Antonio Minturno, De Poeta (1559) Bernardino Parthenio, Della Imitatione Poetica (1560) Bernardino Tomitano, Della Ligua Toscana (1560) Giambattista Pigna, Poetica Horatiana (1561) Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (published 1561) Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogo Degli Errori de’ Pittori (1564) Antonio S. Minturno, L’Arte Poetica (1564) Leonardo Salviati, Trattato della Poetica (1564) Lodovico Castelvetro, Parere sopra l’Aiuto che Domandano i Poeti alle Muse (1565) Pierre de Ronsard, Abrégé de l’Art Poétique Français (1565) Benedetto Grasso, Oratione (1566) Vincenzo Danti, Trattato della Perfetta Proporzione (1567) Torquato Tasso, Lezione sopra un Sonetto di Monsignor della Casa (1567–70) Daniele Barbaro, La Practica della Perspettiva (1568) Tomás Correa, De Toto eo Poematis Genere, Quod Epigramma Vulgo Dicitur (1569) Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele Vulagarizzata (1570) Andrea Palladio, Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (1570) Benedetto Varchi, L’Hercolano (1570) John Rainolds, Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae (c. 1572) Richard Willis, De Re Poetica Disputatio (1573) Alessandro Piccolomini, Commento Sulla Poetica (1575) Filippo Sassetti, Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 1575) Torquato Tasso, Allegoria della Gerusalemme Liberata (1575) Ludovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta (1576) Giacomo Zabarella, Opera Logica (1578) Francisco Buonamici, Discorsi Poetici (1579) Thomas Lodge, Defence of Poetry (1579) Giovanni Antonio Viperano, De Poetica Libri Tres (1579) Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580) Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della Musica Antica e della Moderna (1581) Giordano Bruno, De Umbris Idearum (1582) Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso Intorno alle Imagini Sacre e Profane (1582) Raffaele Borghini, Il Riposo (1584) Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’Arte della Pittura (1584) Giordano Bruno, De Gli Eroici Furori (1585) 280

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 280

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Antonio Riccoboni, Poetica (1585) Francesco Patrizi, Della Poetica (1586) Leonardo Salviati, Parafrasi e Commento della Poetica d’Aristotile (1586) William Webbe, Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) Tomás Correa, In Librum de Arte Poetica Horatii Explanationes (1587) Torquato Tasso, Dell’Arte Poetica et in Particolare del Poema Heroico (1587) Giasone Denores, Discorso (1588) Giasone Denores, Poetica (1588) Vincenzo Galilei, Discorso Intorno All’opere Di Messer G. Zarlino (1589) George Puttenham (attributed), Art of English Poesie (1589) Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590) Benedetto Varchi, Libro della Beltà e Grazia (published 1590) Giordano Bruno, De Vinculis in Genere (1590–91) Giordano Bruno, De Minimo (1591) Gregorio Comanini, II Figino Overo del Fine della Pittura (1591) Tomás Correa, De Eloquentia Libri Quinque (1591) John Harington, Apology for Poetry (1591) Atonio Possevino, Tractatio de Poesi et Pictura Ettnica, Humana et Fabulosa (1593) Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1593) Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie (published 1595) Tommaso Campanella, Poetica (c. 1596) Juan Bautista Villalpando, Ezechielem Explanationes (1596–1604)

Seventeenth Century CE In the seventeenth century, all manner of thinkers move to weigh in on matters of art and beauty, including artists (Leonardo da Vinci), natural philosophers (Francis Bacon), political philosophers (Thomas Hobbes), and mathematicians (Blaise Pascal, also a philosopher). Faustino Summo, Discorsi Poetici (1600) Thomas Campion, Observations on the Art of English Poesie (1602) Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme (1603) Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning (1605) Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Art Poétique (1605) Federico Zuccari, The Idea of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1607) Lope de Vega, The New Art of Writing Plays (1609) Pierre de Deimier, L’Académie de l’Art Poétique (1610) Giovanni Battista Agucchi, Trattato della Pittura (c. 1607–15) Rudolphus Goclenius, Lexicon Philosophicum (1613) René Descartes, Compendium Musicae (1618) 281

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 281

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) Francis Bacon, “Of Beauty” (1626) Johann Heinrich Alsted, Encyclopaedia (1630) René Descartes, Letter to Mersenne of March 18 (1630) Vicente Carducho, Diálogo de la Pintura (1633) Marquis de Racan, Harangue Prononcée en l’Académie (1635) Jean Chapelain, Sentiments de l’Académie sur le Cid (1637) Georges de Scudéry, Observations sur Le Cid (1637) Francis Junius, De Pictura Veterum (1637) Hippolyte Jules Pilet de la Mesnadière, La Poétique (1639) Georges de Scudéry, L’Apoligie du Théâtre (1639) Mateo Pellegrini, Trattato delle Acutezze (1639) Peter Paul Rubens, “De Imitatione Statuorum” (before 1640) Baltasar Gracián, Arte de Ingenio. Tratado de la Agudeza (1642) Thomas Hobbes, Elementa Philosophiae (1642–58) Gerhard Vossius, De Artis Poeticae Natura (1647) Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio (1648) Abraham Bosse, Sentimens sur la Distinction des Diverses Manières de Peinture, Dessein et Gravure (1649) René Descartes, Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (1649) Fréart de Chambray, Parallèle de l’Architecture Antique et de la Moderne (1650) Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della Pittura (published 1651) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) Pierre Mambrun, Dissertatio Poetica de Epico Carmine (1652) Blaise Pascal (attributed), Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour (c. 1652–53) Blaise Pascal, Pensées (c. 1654–62) François Hédelin d’Aubignac, Pratique du Théâtre (1657) Pierre Nicole, Traité de la vraie et de la fausse beauté dans les ouvrages d’esprit et particulièrement dans l’épigramme (1659) Pierre Corneille, Discours de l’Utilité et des Parties du Poème Dramatique (1660) Fréart de Chambray, Idée de la Perfection de la Peinture (1662) Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Ideal in Art (1664) Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Journal de Voyage du Cavalier Bernini en France (1665) Paul Fréart de Chantelou, “Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France” (1665) André Félibien, Entretiens sur les Vies et les Ouvrages des Plus Excellens Peintres (1666–85) Charles LeBrun, Conferences sur l’Expression des Differents Caracteres des Passions (1667) Charles du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica (1668) Charles du Fresnoy, L’Art de la Peinture (1668) 282

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 282

2/27/2012 10:31:21 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Charles LeBrun, Méthode pour Apprendre à Dessiner les Passions (1668) John Dryden, Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) John Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico (1670) Dominique Bouhours, The Conversations of Aristo and Eugene (1671) Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1672) Roger de Piles, Dialogue upon Colouring (1673) Claude Perrault, Les Dix Libres de Vitruve (1673) Nicolas Boileau, Art Poétique (1674) Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’Architecture (1675) René le Bossu, Traité du Poème Épique (1675) René Rapin, Réflexions sur la Poétique de ce Temps et sur les Ouvrages des Poètes Anciens et Modernes (1675) André Félibien, Treatise on Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and the Other Arts (1676) Henri Testelin, Préceptes (1679) Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de Bien Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit (1687) Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1687) Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688) John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693)

Eighteenth Century CE The eighteenth century represents the birth of modern aesthetics—both as the term itself is coined by Alexander Baumgarten, and as theoretical camps develop, primarily in Britain and Germany, with concerted effort placed on understanding the nature of taste and of beauty. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1700) John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) John Dennis, A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry, and the Causes of Degeneracy of It (1702) John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) Dominique Bouhours, The Art of Criticism (1705) Charles de Saint-Évremond, Œuvres Mêlées (published 1705) Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Della Perfetta Poesia Italiana (1706) Gerard de Lairesse, The Great Book on Painting (1707) André Félibien, L’Idée du Peintre Parfait (published 1707) Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Della Ragion Poetica (1708) 283

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 283

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Riflessioni sopra il Buon Gusto (1708) Giambattista Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (1709) Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711) Joseph Addison, “Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712) Sébastien Le Clerc, Traité d’Architecture avec des Remarques et des Observations Très Utiles (1714) Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Treatise on Beauty (1715) Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Della Tragedia (1715) Jonathan Richardson, Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) Antonio Palomino y Velasco, The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale (1715–24) Richard Blackmore, Essays upon Several Subjects (1716) Jean-Baptiste du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (1719) Jonathan Richardson, The Science of a Connoisseur (1719) Antoine Coypel, Discours Prononcés dans les Conferences de 1’Academie Royale de Peinture (1721) Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) Jonathan Richardson, “An Essay on the Theory of Painting” (1725) Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1727) Johann Ulrich König, Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht- und Redekuns (1727) Charles-Etienne Briseux, L’Architecture Moderne (1728) Yves-Marie André, Essay on Beauty (1731) Comte de Caylus, “On Drawings” (1732) Lambert Hermanson ten Kate, “The Beau Ideal” (1732) Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry (1735) Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica (1739) David Hume, “Of Beauty and Deformity” (1739) Johann Jacob Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst (1740) John Turnbull, “A Treatise on Ancient Painting” (1740) Johann Jakob Bodmer, Kritische Betrachtungen Über die Poetischen Gemälde der Dichter (1741) David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1741) Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (1742) James Harris, Three Treatises (1744) Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Della Forza della Fantasia (1745) Charles Batteaux, Les beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746) John Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime” (1747) Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller Schönen Wissenschaften (1748) 284

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 284

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (1750) Comte de Caylus, “On Composition” (1750) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” (1750) Jonathan Edwards, “The Beauty of the World” (c. 1750) Charles-Etienne Briseux, Traité des Proportions Harmoniques (1752) Charles-Etienne Briseux, Traité du Beau Essentiel dans les Arts Appliqué Particulièrement à l’Architecture (1752) Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (1753) William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Time (1753) Allan Ramsay, Dialogue on Taste (1755) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, “An Essay on Taste” (1757) David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) David Hume, “Of Tragedy” (1757) Voltaire, “Essay on Taste” (1757) Moses Mendelssohn, Ueber das Erhabene und Naïve in den Schönen Wissenschaften (1758) Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759) Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1759) Etienne Falconet, “Reflexions on Sculpture” (1761) Johann Georg Hamann, Aesthetica in Nuce (1762) Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762) Anton Raphael Mengs, Reflections on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762) Denis Diderot, “Salon of 1763” (1763) Johann Gottfried von Herder, Fragments of a Treatise on the Ode (1764) Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764) Charles Batteux, Cours de Belles Lettres (1765) Denis Diderot, “Notes on Painting” (1765) Gotthold Lessing, Laocoön (1766) William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767) Moses Mendelssohn, Phaedon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1767) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Musique (1767) Gotthold Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) James Usher, Clio: or, A Discourse on Taste (1769) Johann Gottfried von Herder, Critical Forests, or Reflections on the Science and Art of the Beautiful (1769) Johann George Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (1771) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried von Herder, Of German Character and Art (1773) 285

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 285

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Charles Batteux, Principes de la littérature (1774) Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (1774) Thomas Reid, Lectures on the Fine Arts (1774) James Beattie, Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (1776) Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1776) Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Entretiens sur l’État de la Musique Grecque au Quatrième Siècle (1777) Johann Gottfried von Herder, On the Effect of Poetic Art on the Ethics of Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times (1778) Johann Gottfried von Herder, On the Influence of the Beautiful in the Higher Sciences (1781) James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) Martin Gerbert, Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra (1784) Comte de la Cépède, La Poétique de la Musique (1785) Karl Philipp Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung aller Schönen Künste” (1785) Thomas Reid, Essays of the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste (1785) Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, System der Aesthetik (1790) Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (1790) William Gilpin, Three Essays (1791) Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful (1794) Christian Gottfried Körner, “Ueber Charakterdarstellung in der Musik” (1795) Adam Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation which Takes Place in What are Called the Imitative Arts” (1795) Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795) Jean Baptiste Leclerc, Essai sur la Propagation de la Musique en France (1796) Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), Das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798–99) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799)

Nineteenth Century CE Due largely to the influence of Kant’s third Critique (1790), nineteenthcentury aesthetics grows rapidly, particularly along paths set out by Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. A number of artists, art critics, and historians also produce treatises on art theory. Johann Gottfried Herder, Kalligone (1800) 286

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 286

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch Über die Poesie (1800) William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Vorlesungen über Schöne Literatur und Kunst (1801) Jean Nicolas Louis Durand, Précis des Leçons d’Architecture (1802) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (1802–03) Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804) Aubin Louis Millin, Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts (1806) Johann Friedrich Herbart, Sämtliche Werke (1808) August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1808) Dugald Stewart, “On Taste” (1810) Dugald Stewart, “On the Beautiful” (1810) Dugald Stewart, “On the Sublime” (1810) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors (1810) Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, “Alison on Taste” (1811) Jean Rondelet, Traité de l’Art de Bâtir (1812) Johann Gottfried Herder, Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (1813) Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, De L’Allemagne (1814) Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, “Essay on Beauty” (1816) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and as Representation (1819) Friedrich Schleiermacher, Lectures on Aesthetics (1819–33) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics (Lectures delivered 1820–29; published posthumously) Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs, Aesthetische Vorlesgungen über Goethe’s Faust (1825) François-Joseph Fétis, Revue Musicale (1827–35) Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs, Das Wesen der Antiken Tragödie (1827) James Mill, An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) F. R. de Toreinx, L’Histoire du Romantisme en France (1829) William Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures (1831) Johann Friedrich Herbart, Kurze Encyclopädie der Philosophie (1831) John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” (1833) Victor Cousin, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien (published 1836) John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture: Cottage, Villa, etc., to Which Is Added Suggestions on Works of Art (1837–38) Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism (1838) Robert Zimmermann, Asthetik (1838) Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aesthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (1846–57) 287

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 287

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1846–60) John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849) Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama (1851) Eduard Hanslick, On the Beautiful in Music (1854) John Ruskin, Architecture and Painting (1854) John Ruskin, “A Joy Forever” and Its Price in the Market, or The Political Economy of Art (1857) John Ruskin, The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals and Religion (1858) Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (1859) William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics (published 1859) Charles Lévêque, La Science du Beau Étudiée dans ses Applications et dans son Histoire (1861) Charles Lévêque, Le Spiritualisme dans l’Art (1864) Herbert Spencer, Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic (1865) Hippolyte Taine, La Philosophie de l’Art (1865) Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art en Italie (1866) Hippolyte Taine, L’Idéal dans l’Art (1867) Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art dans les Pays-Bas (1868) Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art en Grèce (1869) Charles Lévêque, Les Harmonies Providentielles (1872) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Robert Vischer, Das optische Formgefüehl. Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (1873) Josef Durdik, Všeobecná Aesthetika (1875) Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Cours d’Esthetique (published 1875) Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Ästhetik (1876) Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (1877) John Ruskin, Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880) Emile Zola, “The Experimental Novel” (1880) Emile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre” (1881) Josef Durdik, Poetika (1882) Friedrich Nietzsche, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (1886) K. Heinrich von Stein, Die Entstehung der Neuren Ästhetik (1886) Konrad Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit (1887) Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying (1889) Theodor Lipps, Ästhetische Faktoren der Raumanschauung (1891) Wilhelm Dilthey, “Three Epochs in Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task” (1892) Karl Gross, Einleitung in die Ästhetik (1892) Konrad von Lange, Die bewusste Selbsttäuschung als Kern des Künstlerischen Gnusses (1895) 288

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 288

2/27/2012 10:31:22 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896) Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1896) Theodor Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897) Clementina Anstruther-Thomson and Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness (1897) Carl Georg Lange, Bidrag til Nydelsernes fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel æstetik (1899)

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries CE At the turn of the twentieth century is a concerted effort to define art, from Tolstoy to Croce to Bell to Dewey and beyond. Philosophers begin to specialize in aesthetics, and midway through the century, academic journals devoted to aesthetics are established. Subspecialties within aesthetics begin to emerge. Yrjö Hirn, Origins of Art (1900) August Kirschmann, Concepts and Laws of Aesthetics (1900) Konrad von Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst (1901) Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902) Karl Groos, Der ästhetische Genuss (1902) Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik (1903–06)George Santayana, “What is Aesthetics?” (1904) Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905) George Santayana, Reason in Art (1905) Max Dessoir, Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in den Grundzuegen (1906) Paul Claudel, Art Poétique (1907) Waldemar Conrad, “Der ästhetische Gegenstand: eine phänomenologische Studie” (1908–09) A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909) Broder Christensen, Philosophie der Kunst (1909) Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle” (1912) Benedetto Croce, Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetic) (1913) Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (1913) Eleanor Rowland, The Significance of Art: Studies in Analytic Esthetics (1913) Clive Bell, Art (1914) Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915) Viktor Sklovskij, “Art as Device” (1916) T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920) Lascelles Abercrombie, An Essay Towards a Theory of Art (1922) 289

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 289

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and James Wood, The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922) Gustav Spet, Aesthetic Fragments (1922–23) Henri Bergson, Le rire (1924) J. A. Smith, The Nature of Art (1924) Samuel Alexander, Art and the Material (1925) R. G. Collinwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925) I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) Louis Arnauld Reid, “Artistic Experience” (1926) Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (1928) Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (1929) C. J. Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art (1929) D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (1929) Etienne Souriau, L’Avenir de l’esthétique (1929) Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (1931) Paul Valéry, Aesthetics (1931) Nicolai Hartmann, Das problem des geistigen Seins (1933) John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, Fine Art (1934) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1935) Paul Valéry, Notion générale de l’art (1935) Benedetto Croce, La Poesia (1936) D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Analysis (1936) George Boas, A Primer for Critics (1937) Stephen C. Pepper, Aesthetic Quality: A Contextualist Theory of Beauty (1937) R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938) Paul Valéry, Degas, danse, dessin (1938) George W. Beiswanger, “The Esthetic Object and the Work of Art” (1939) Igor Stravinsky, “Poetics of Music” (1939–40) Helge Lundholm, The Aesthetic Sentiment (1941) Paul Valéry, Bad Thoughts and Others (1942) Paul Claudel, L’Œil Écoute (1946) Arnold Isenberg, “The Technical Factor in Art” (1946) C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946) Stephen C. Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (1946) W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) Ētienne Souriau, La correspondance des arts: éléments d’esthétique comparée (1947) Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication” (1949) Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations (1949) Richard Rudner, “The Ontological Status of the Esthetic Object” (1950) 290

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 290

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

C. L. Stevenson, “Interpretation and Evaluation in Aesthetics” (1950) Henry Aiken, “The Aesthetic Relevance of Belief” (1951) Paul Ziff, “Art and the ‘Object of Art’” (1951) Stuart Hampshire, “Logic and Appreciation” (1952) R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953) Mikel Dufrenne, La phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (1953) Nicolai Hartmann, Ästhetik (1953) Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953) Harold Osborne, Theory of Beauty (1953) Andrew Paul Ushenko, Dynamics of Art (1953) Paul Ziff, “The Task of Defining a Work of Art” (1953) Rolf Ekman, Estetiska Problem (1954) Margaret Macdonald, “The Language of Fiction” (1954) W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (1954) Emilio Betti, Teoria Generale della Interpretazione (1955) Stephen C. Pepper, The Work of Art (1955) Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956) Étienne Gilson, Painting and Reality (1957) Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art (1957) C. L. Stevenson, “On ‘What Is a Poem?’” (1957) J. O. Urmson, “What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?” (1957) Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958) William E. Kennick, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” (1958) Ruby Meager, “The Uniqueness of a Work of Art” (1958–59) O. K. Bouwsma, The Expression Theory of Art (1959) Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts” (1959) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (1960) E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960) Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960) John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (1962) Emilio Betti, Die Hermeneutik als Allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (1962) John Hospers, “The Ideal Aesthetic Observer” (1962) Isabel Hungerland, “The Logic of Aesthetic Concepts” (1962) Roman Ingarden, Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk, Bild, Architektur, Film (1962) Virgil C. Aldrich, Philosophy of Art (1963) Ētienne Gilson, Introduction aux arts du beau (1963) Francis Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (1963) Frank Cioffi, “Intention and Interpretation in Criticism” (1963–64) 291

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 291

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

R. G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1964) Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld” (1964) George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (1964) Roman Ingarden, “Artistic and Aesthetic Values” (1964) Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1964) George Dickie, “Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic Experience” (1965) Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts” (1965) Joseph Margolis, The Language of Art and Art Criticism (1965) I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1965) Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” (1966) Meyer Schapiro, “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content” (1966) R. K. Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art” (1967) E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (1967) Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas (1967) Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968) Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1968) Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (1968) Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (1968) Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” (1969) George Dickie, “Defining Art” (1969) Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969) Göran Hermerén, Representation and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1969) Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (1970) Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Aesthetic Point of View” (1970) Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (1970) Harold Osborne, The Art of Appreciation (1970) Siegfried J. Schmidt, Ästhetische Prozesse (1970) Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art” (1970) Roland Barthes, “De l’oeuvre au texte” (1971) Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression: A Study in Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics (1971) Max Black, “How Do Pictures Represent?” (1972) Julian Hochberg, “The Representation of Things and People” (1972) Monroe C. Beardsley, “What Is an Aesthetic Quality?” (1973) Arthur C. Danto, “Artworks and Real Things” (1973) Arnold Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism (1973) Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (1973) Arthur C. Danto, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” (1974) George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974) 292

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 292

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Francis J. Kovach, Philosophy of Beauty (1974) Joseph Margolis, “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” (1974) Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (1974) Frank Sibley, “Particularity, Art and Evaluation” (1974) P. F. Strawson, “Aesthetic Appraisal and Works of Art” (1974) Thomas G. Pavel, “‘Possible Worlds’ in Literary Semantics” (1975) Colin Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” (1975) John Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” (1975) Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty (1975) Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Toward an Ontology of Artworks” (1975) Ted Cohen, “Notes on Metaphor” (1976) Jack Glickman, “Creativity in the Arts” (1976) E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (1976) Joseph Margolis, “Robust Relativism” (1976) Mark Sagoff, “Aesthetic Status of Forgeries” (1976) Timothy Binkley, “Piece: Contra Aesthetics” (1977) Joseph Margolis, “The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art” (1977) Robert J. Matthews, “Describing and Interpreting a Work of Art” (1977) Monroe C. Beardsley, “Metaphorical Senses” (1978) Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (1978) David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction” (1978) Mark Sagoff, “On Restoring and Reproducing Art” (1978) Eva Schaper, “Fiction and the Suspension of Disbelief” (1978) Guy Sircello, Mind and Art (1978) Kendall L. Walton, “Fearing Fictions” (1978) Kendall L. Walton, “How Remote Are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?” (1978) Monroe C. Beardsley, “In Defense of Aesthetic Value” (1979) Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” (1979) Robert Howell, “Fictional Objects: How They Are and How They Aren’t” (1979) Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically” (1979) Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) R. A. Sharpe, “Type, Token, Interpretation, and Performance” (1979) William Tolhurst, “On What a Text Is and How It Means” (1979) Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980) P. D. Juhl, Interpretation (1980) Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell (1980) Jerrold Levinson, “Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited” (1980) 293

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 293

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Jerrold Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is” (1980) Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (1980) David Novitz, “Fiction, Imagination and Emotion” (1980) Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (1980) Allen Carlson, “Nature, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Knowledge” (1981) Allen Carlson, “Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity” (1981) Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) Peter Lamarque, “How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?” (1981) Monroe C. Beardsley, “Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived” (1982) Marcia Eaton, “A Strange Kind of Sadness” (1982) E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye. Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1982) Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience” (1982) Anthony Savile, The Test of Time (1982) Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (1982) Monroe C. Beardsley, “An Aesthetic Definition of Art” (1983) Peter Kivy, “Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense” (1983) Philip Pettit, “The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism” (1983) Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (1983) Susan L. Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy” (1983) Ted Cohen, “Jokes” (1983) Philip Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation” (1984) Allen Carlson, “Nature and Positive Aesthetics” (1984) Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art” (1984) George Dickie, The Art Circle (1984) Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (1984) Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (1984) Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985) Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions (1985) Gregory Currie, “What is Fiction?” (1985) Jenefer Robinson, “Style and Personality in the Literary Work” (1985) Gregory Currie, “Fictional Truth” (1986) Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986) Alexander Nehamas, “What an Author Is” (1986) Bruce Vermazen, “Expression as Expression” (1986) George M. Wilson, Narration in Light (1986) Stephen Davies, “Authenticity in Musical Performance” (1987) Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film (1987) Alexander Nehamas, “Writer, Text, Work, Author” (1987) 294

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 294

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

David Novitz, Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination (1987) Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987) George Dickie, Evaluating Art (1988) Lubomír Doležel, “Mimesis and Possible Worlds” (1988) Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage (1988) Linda Nochlin, “Women, Art, and Power” (1988) Kendall L. Walton, “What Is Abstract About the Art of Music?” (1988) James O. Young, “The Concept of Authentic Performance” (1988) Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius (1989) Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art (1989) Jerrold Levinson, “Refining Art Historically” (1989) Joseph Margolis, “Reinterpreting Interpretation” (1989) Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (1990) Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (1990) Peter Kivy, Music Alone (1990) Karen Hanson, “Dressing Down Dressing Up: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion” (1990) Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990) Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (1991) Kathleen Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (1991) Alex Neill, “Fear, Fiction and Make-Believe” (1991) Noël Carroll, “Art, Intention, and Conversation” (1992) Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992) David Novitz, The Boundaries of Art (1992) Jeremy Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art” (1992) Paul Thom, For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (1992) Malcolm Budd, “How Pictures Look” (1993) Noël Carroll, “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art” (1993) Randall R. Dipert, Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency (1993) Berys Gaut, “Interpreting the Arts: The Patchwork Theory” (1993) Hilde Hein, “Refining Feminist Theory: Lessons from Aesthetics” (1993) John Morreall, “Fear without Belief” (1993) Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (1994) Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1994) Jenefer Robinson, “The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music” (1994) Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (1994) Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (1995) Peter Kivy, Authenticities (1995) 295

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 295

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism” (1996) Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (1996) Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (1996) Peter Lamarque, Fictional Points of View (1996) Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (1996) Dominic M. Lopes, Understanding Pictures (1996) A. D. Nuttal, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996) Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Les Célibataires de l’art: pour une esthétique sans mythes (1996) Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts (1997) Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (1997) Colin Lyas, Aesthetics (1997) Preben Mortensen, Art in the Social Order (1997) Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (1997) Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (1998) Berys Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art” (1998) Stan Godlovitch, Musical Performance (1998) Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image and Experience (1998) Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (1998) Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature” (1998) Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (1999) Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal” (1999) Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (1999) Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (2000) Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy (2000) Julien Dodd, “Musical Works as Eternal Types” (2000) Berys Gaut, “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept” (2000) Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (2001) Marcia Muelder Eaton, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (2001) Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (2001) Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (2001) Malcom Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (2002) Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge” (2002) Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds (2002) Paisley Livingston, “On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics” (2003) Guy Rohrbaugh, “Artworks as Historical Individuals” (2003) Robert Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (2003) Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg, “Emotions, Fiction, and Cognitive Architecture” (2003) Gregory Currie, Arts and Minds (2004) 296

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 296

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

David Davies, Art as Performance (2004) Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (2004) Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (2004) Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics (2004) Aaron Ridley, The Philosophy of Music (2004) R. A. Sharpe, Philosophy of Music (2004) Matthew Kieran, Revealing Art (2005) Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (2005) Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (2005) John Hyman, The Objective Eye (2006) Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (2006) John Kulvicki, On Images: Their Structure and Content (2006) Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (2006) Dominic Lopes, Sight and Sensibility (2006) Julian Dodd, Works of Music (2007) Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (2007) Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007) Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (2007) Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (2007) Kendall Walton, Marvelous Images (2008) James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (2008) Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (2008)

297

9781847063700_Ch19_Final_txt_print.indd 297

2/27/2012 10:31:23 AM

20

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Darren Hudson Hick

Journals Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Established in 1942 by the American Society for Aesthetics and published quarterly, JAAC is the first and remains one of the leading specialist journals in aesthetics. Taking a broad approach to the arts, and publishing research articles not only by philosophers but also by artists and academics in related fields, the journal regularly features symposia, special issues, and extensive book reviews.

British Journal of Aesthetics Founded in 1960 and published on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics, the BJA is the British counterpart to the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Published quarterly, the journal features articles, symposia, and critical notices on the broad array of topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as well as extensive book reviews.

Æ: Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne d’Esthetique (Online) Sponsored by the Canadian Society for Aesthetics and published since 1996, “Æ” includes a broad range of both English and French-language articles in aesthetics by philosophers as well as working artists and scholars in other academic fields.

American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal (Online) Sponsored by the American Society for Aesthetics, ASAGE is a peerreviewed online journal for graduate students of philosophy and other 298

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 298

2/27/2012 10:31:27 AM

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

disciplines. Published twice a year since its creation in 2008, ASAGE offers the unique feature of allowing online commentary and discussion about each published article.

Contemporary Aesthetics (Online) Published online since 2003 and free to the public, Contemporary Aesthetics features a range of articles by philosophers as well as researchers from a range of other disciplines. Embracing its online format, CA is designed to employ multimedia formats and publishes articles as soon as they are available. The journal regularly includes symposia, forums, and special issues.

Empirical Studies of the Arts Published twice a year, Empirical Studies of the Arts is the official journal of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. Incorporating anthropological, psychological, semiotic, and sociological research into the creation and appreciation of the arts, the journal provides useful and up-to-date empirical data for philosophers of art.

Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics Begun in 1964 as a journal for Czech and Slovak aesthetics, Estetika was revamped as an international journal in 2008. Publishing twice annually in English and German, Estetika publishes on a broad array of current topics in aesthetics, and includes historically archived documents and articles not easily found elsewhere.

Film and Philosophy Published annually by the Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts, Film and Philosophy regularly publishes both topically focused and generalist issues, and regularly publishes work by leading philosophers of art who take an interest in cinema, television, and related media.

International Yearbook of Aesthetics (Online) Sponsored by the International Association for Aesthetics, and organized around the annual International Congress of Aesthetics, the Yearbook strives to provide a truly multicultural perspective on the philosophy of art. Published since 1996, each volume of the series is centered on an internationally oriented topic—for example “Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture” (1999); “Ontology, Art, 299

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 299

2/27/2012 10:31:27 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

and Experience: Perspectives from East and West” (2005); and “Art and Social Change” (2009)—with all material freely available online.

Journal of Aesthetic Education Although written for the general audience of critical arts educators, the JAE regularly attracts research by many of the world’s leading aestheticians, and provides an outlet for topics both central to and on the borderlines of philosophical aesthetics. Published quarterly.

Journal of Philosophy Although publishing papers on aesthetics only infrequently, the monthly generalist Journal of Philosophy (founded in 1904) has published many influential works in aesthetics, including Arthur Danto’s “The Artworld,” Jerrold Levinson’s “What a Musical Work Is,” and Kendall Walton’s “Fearing Fictions.”

Literature and Aesthetics Published twice annually by Australia’s Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, the journal regularly features not only philosophical articles on the arts written from a range of perspectives, but also poetry, visual art, short stories, and book reviews.

Mind In addition to the occasional aesthetics article and critical notice, the generalist philosophy journal Mind publishes a great many in-depth reviews of recently published major works in aesthetics, with both the texts and reviews written by leading aestheticians.

Nordic Journal of Aesthetics Established in 1988 and published biannually, this English-language journal includes articles on the broad array of topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, both historically and contemporarily oriented. Although primarily a venue for Nordic philosophers, the journal regularly attracts work by international authors.

Philosophical Review While rarely publishing aesthetics papers today, the quarterly general journal Philosophical Review has published several very influential papers on 300

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 300

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

aesthetics, including Frank Sibley’s “Aesthetic Concepts” and “Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic,” Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art,” and Jenefer Robinson’s “Style and Personality in the Literary Work.”

Philosophy and Literature Specifically devoted to philosophical issues in literature, and including a wide array of articles, notes and fragments, discussion papers, and reviews, Philosophy and Literature is published semiannually. Founded in 1977, the journal strives to maintain an open balance between perspectives and to publish works in ordinary language, avoiding specialized academic jargon.

Philosophy Compass (Online) Designed to offer specialized insight for both students and professors across philosophy, Philosophy Compass includes a broad array of in-depth invited survey articles written by leading aestheticians. Publishing 100 philosophy articles online annually, Philosophy Compass is a fast-growing and invaluable resource for both students and professional philosophers.

Poetics Focused on empirical research in the arts and culture, Poetics regularly includes research reports from sociological, psychological, economic, and other diverse viewpoints, as well as theoretical articles on the arts. Founded in 1971 and published quarterly, the journal regularly features special topical issues.

Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics (Online) Although aimed at offering a venue for publication for graduate students in aesthetics, the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics, also regularly features articles by top aestheticians, including Gregory Currie, David Davies, Peter Lamarque, and others. Published online thrice a year since 2004.

Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics Published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Art Museum, Res is an interdisciplinary journal including contributions by philosophers, art historians, linguists, architects, and others working from an anthropological perspective. Founded in 1981 and published twice 301

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 301

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

each year, Res also features publication of historical textual and iconographic materials of interest to art historian and theorists.

Print Resources Michael Kelly, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998) With 600 articles written by many of the world’s leading aesthetics scholars, Kelly’s four-volume encyclopedia provides entries on both Western and nonWestern traditions, the array of philosophers who have contributed to the field, the influences of law, politics, and morality, and both classical and contemporary developments in art. Incorporating philosophical, historical, sociological, and biographical perspectives, the encyclopedia is designed not only for breadth but also for ease of reference, providing insight for philosophers and artists, students and professionals.

Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics (Continuum Press, 2006) Originally published in Polish in 1962–67, Tatarkiewicz’s three-volume history was translated to English by Adam and Ann Czerniawski and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1970–74, and republished by Continuum Press in 2006. Tatarkiewicz traces in great detail the development of aesthetic theory from the pre-Socratics to the seventeenth century, with substantial quotation from the original sources. Providing in-depth analysis of thinkers both familiar and often overlooked, Tatarkiewicz’s work is an invaluable resource for students of aesthetics.

Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Blackwell Publishing, 1998–2003) In three volumes (1648–1815, 1815–1900, 1900–2000), editors Harrison and Wood (and Gaiger in the later two) have collected a wealth of writing on art, with a great many of the nearly 900 pieces not easily found elsewhere. The first two volumes include a mix of writing by philosophers, artists, political figures, and others, while the third volume concentrates primarily on those of artists. Organized for ease of use, this art-oriented series provides an unparalleled insight into the development of art and art theory from the modern to contemporary periods, and a valuable counterpoint to more common anthologies collecting philosophical writings in the analytic tradition. 302

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 302

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Online Resources Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy www.iep.utm.edu Often more accessible to the layperson or beginning student than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the IEP is a free peer-reviewed online encyclopedia with introductory articles written on a broad array of philosophical topics. The encyclopedia includes several articles on topics in aesthetics, including entries on “Art and Epistemology,” “Ethical Criticism of Art,” and “The Aesthetics of Popular Music.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu Created in 1995 by Edward N. Zalta, the SEP is an ever-growing free online encyclopedia of philosophy, with each extensive entry written and maintained by an expert on the topic. The encyclopedia contains a large repository of articles on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including articles on broad topics (e.g., “The Definition of Art,” “The Philosophy of Music,” “Feminist Aesthetics”) and detailed articles on the aesthetic theories of particular thinkers (from Plato to Benedetto Croce to Nelson Goodman).

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews http://ndpr.nd.edu/ With over 1,000 reviews on file, updated continuously, and easily searchable, the University of Notre Dame has since 2002 published substantive in-depth commissioned reviews on books in all areas of philosophy, including aesthetics. Available for free online or through free e-mail subscription.

Philosophy of Art Weblog http://artmind.typepad.com/ Begun in 2004, this group blog gives a terrific behind-the-scenes look at work currently being done in aesthetics. With dozens of philosophers of art (including a number of authors in this volume) both contributing entries and providing commentary, the blog is an interactive source of up-to-date thought and insight.

University of Kent Aesthetics Research Group Archive www.kent.ac.uk/arts/hpa/aestheticsresearchgroup/materialsarchive.html 303

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 303

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Dating back to 2007, the archive includes extensive video and audio files of interviews, lectures, and research seminars undertaken by the Aesthetics Research Group in the University of Kent’s Department of History and Philosophy of Art.

Aesthetics Societies and Associations American Society for Aesthetics www.aesthetics-online.org

Brazilian Society for Aesthetics (Associação Brasileira De Estética) www.abrestetica.org.br

British Society of Aesthetics www.british-aesthetics.org

Canadian Society for Aesthetics (Société Canadienne d’Esthétique) www.csa-sce.ca

Dutch Aesthetics Federation www.henkoosterling.nl/daf/

European Society for Aesthetics www.eurosa.org

Finnish Society for Aesthetics (Suomen Estetikan Seura) www.estetiikka.fi/

French Society of Aesthetics (Société Française d’Esthétique) http://sfesfe.wordpress.com/ 304

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 304

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

German Society for Aesthetics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik) www.dgae.de

Hellenic Society for Aesthetics (Ελληνική Εταιρεία Αισθητικής) www.hellenicaesthetics.gr

International Association for Aesthetics www.iaaesthetics.org

International Association of Empirical Aesthetics www.science-of-aesthetics.org

International Institute of Applied Aesthetics www.helsinki.fi/ksei/

Italian Aesthetics Association (Associazione Italiana per gli Studi di Estetica) www.unisi.it/ricerca/asso/aise/

Japanese Society for Aesthetics (Bigaku-Kai) www.soc.nii.ac.jp/bigaku

Korean Society of Aesthetics and Science of Art (뼑霢ꖭ뼎쁁) www.ksasa.org

Mexican Society of Aesthetics (Asociación Mexicana de Estudios en Estética A.C.) www.estetica.org.mx

305

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 305

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics

Nordic Society of Aesthetics (Nordiska sällskapet för estetik/Nordisk Selskab for Æstetik/Nordisk selskap for estetikk/Félag norraenna fagurfraedinga / Pohjoismaiden estetiikan seura) www.nsae.au.dk

Polish Society of Aesthetics (Polskie Towarzystwo Estetyczne) www.iphils.uj.edu.pl/pte/

SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture (Turkey) (Sanart; Esthetik ve Görsel Kültür Dernegi) www.sanart.org.tr

Slovenian Society of Aesthetics (Slovensko Društvo za Estetiko) www.sde.si

Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts www.lhup.edu/dshaw

Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics www.ssla.org.au

Other Events and Centers International Congress of Aesthetics www.iaaesthetics.org Sponsored by the International Association for Aesthetics, the ICA is the largest conference on aesthetics in the world, and has met in Europe, Asia, North and South America. First convened in 1913, the ICA now meets every three years.

306

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 306

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics www.um.es/vmca/en/index.htm Encouraging participation by philosophers as well as artists and scholars of other art-related disciplines, and aimed at interdisciplinary discussion, the international Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics has met every few years since its inception in 2000. (The URL above is for the latest meeting, in 2011; web site varies by meeting.)

London Aesthetics Forum www.londonaestheticsforum.org Hosted by the Institute of Philosophy in London’s School of Advanced Study, the London Aesthetics Forum normally meets every two weeks through the school year. Each meeting features a paper presented by a philosopher from Britain, across Europe, or elsewhere, including a number of contributors to this volume.

University of Leeds Centre for Aesthetics www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/40004/centre_for_aesthetics The Centre for Aesthetics at Leeds is a locus of study in aesthetics, holding regular seminars for members and visitors, sponsoring workshops and international conferences, and working closely with the Popular Cultures Research Network, the collaborative White Rose Aesthetics Forum, and art-focused public outreach programs.

White Rose Aesthetics Forum www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/wraf.html A collaborate effort by philosophers of art at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York, the White Rose Aesthetics Forum meets for conferences three times annually, twice to feature works-in-progress, and once for a one-day workshop on a particular theme in aesthetics.

307

9781847063700_Ch20_Final_txt_print.indd 307

2/27/2012 10:31:28 AM

Bibliography Chapter 2 Appiah, K. A. (2008), Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beardsley, M. C. (1982), The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. M. J. Wreen and D. M. Callen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Budd, M. (2002), The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Campbell, R. and Hunter, B. (2000), Moral Epistemology Naturalized (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol. 26). Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. Carroll, N. (1999), Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge. —(2001), Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Churchland, P. (1986), Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Collingwood, R. G. (2008), An Essay on Philosophical Method, revised edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, G. (1989), An Ontology of Art. Basingstoke: Macmillan. —(1995), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dancy, J. (1985), Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell. Davies, D. (2004), Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell. Dempster, D. (1985), “Aesthetic Experience and Psychological Definitions of Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (2), pp. 153–65. Dickie, G. (1962), “Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?” The Philosophical Review, 71 (3), pp. 285–302. Elton, W. (1954), Aesthetics and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaut, B. (2007), Art, Emotion, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gettier, E. (1963), “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, 23 (6), pp. 121–3. Goldman, A. (1998), Aesthetic Value. Boulder: Westview Press. Goodman, N. (1983), Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harman, G. (1977), The Nature of Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1999), Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hepburn, R. (1966), “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, ed. B. Williams and A. Montefiore. London: Routledge, pp. 285–310. —(1996), “Data and Theory in Aesthetics: Philosophical Understanding and Misunderstanding,” in Verstehen and Humane Understanding, ed. A. O’Hear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–52. 308

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 308

2/27/2012 10:29:37 AM

Bibliography

Hume, D. (1985), “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 226–49. Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgment, trans. W. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Knobe, J. and Nichols, S. (2008), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kraut, R. (2007), Artworld Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, D. (1983), Philosophical Papers, Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Light, A. and Smith, J. (2005), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Margolis, J. (1987), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd edn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Plantinga, C. (1993), “Film Theory and Aesthetics: Notes on a Schism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (3), pp. 445–54. Plato (1989), “Theaetetus,” in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. F. M. Cornford, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 845–919. Prinz, J. (2008), “Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy,” in Experimental Philosophy, ed. J. Knobe and S. Nichols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 189–208. Quine, W. V. O. (1960), Word and Object. Cambridge: MIT Press. —(1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. (1951), “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics.” Philosophical Review, 60 (2), pp. 177–97. —(1999), A Theory of Justice, revised edn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sibley, F. (2006), Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. J. Benson, B. Redfern, and J. R. Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008), “Abstract + Concrete = Paradox,” in Experimental Philosophy, ed. J. Knobe and S. Nichols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 209–30. Sorrell, T. (1991), Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science. London: Routledge. Sosa, E. (2007), “Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition.” Philosophical Studies, 132 (1), pp. 99–107. Tersman, F. (1993), Reflective Equilibrium: An Essay in Moral Epistemology. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International. —(2008), “The Reliability of Moral Intuitions: A Challenge from Neuroscience.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 86 (3), pp. 389–405. Westland, G. (1969), “The Investigation of Creativity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (2), pp. 127–31. Williams, B. (2006), Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williamson, T. (2007), The Philosophy of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2001), Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollheim, R. (1980), Art and Its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zangwill, N. (2007), Aesthetic Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 309

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 309

2/27/2012 10:29:38 AM

Bibliography

Chapter 3 Adajian, T. (2005), “On the Prototype Theory of Concepts and the Definition of Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63 (3), pp. 231–36. Aristotle (1941), “Topics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon. New York: Random House, pp. 188–207. Blackburn, S. (1984), Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyd, R. (1988), “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. G. Sayre-McCord. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 181–228. —(1989), “What Realism Implies and What It Does Not.” Dialectica, 43 (1), pp. 5–29. —(1991), “Realism, Anti-Foundationalism, and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds.” Philosophical Studies, 61 (1–2), pp. 127–48. —(1997), “Kinds as the ‘Workmanship of Men’: Realism, Constructivism, and Natural Kinds,” in Rationalität, Realismus, Revision: Proceedings of the Third International Congress, Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie, ed. J. NidaRümelin. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 52–89. —(1999a), “Kinds, Complexity and Multiple Realization.” Philosophical Studies, 95 (1–2), pp. 67–98. —(1999b), “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa,” in Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. R. Wilson. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 141–85. Brigandt, I. (2003), “Species Pluralism Does Not Imply Species Eliminativism.” Philosophy of Science, 70 (5), pp. 1305–16. —(2009), “Natural Kinds in Evolution and Systematics: Metaphysical and Epistemological Considerations.” Acta Biotheoretica, 57 (1–2), pp. 77–97. Carroll, N. (1999), Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. —(ed.) (2000), Theories of Art Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Davies, D. (2004), Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell. Davies, S. (1991), Definitions of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(2003a), “Essential Distinctions for Art Theorists,” in Art and Essence, ed. S. Davies and A. C. Sukla. Westport: Praeger, pp. 3–17. —(2006), Philosophy of Art. New York: Blackwell. Davies, S. and Sukla, A. C. (eds) (2003b), Art and Essence. Westport: Praeger. Davis, W. (2003), Meaning, Expression, and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DePaul, M. and Ramsey, W. (eds) (1998), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Dickie, G. (1984), The Art Circle: A Theory of Art. New York: Haven. —(2001), Art and Value. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Dutton, D. (2003), “Universalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Aesthetics,” in Art and Essence, ed. S. Davies and A. C. Sukla. Westport: Praeger, pp. 213–27. —(2009), The Art Instinct. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Earl, D. (2006), “Concepts and Properties.” Metaphysica, 7 (1), pp. 67–85.

310

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 310

2/27/2012 10:29:38 AM

Bibliography

Elliot, R. (1966–7), “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, NS 67, pp. 111–26. Gaut, B. (2000), “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept,” in Theories of Art Today, ed. N. Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 25–44. Griffiths, P. (1999), “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences,” in Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. R. Wilson. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 209–28. Hamilton, J. (2007), The Art of Theater. New York: Blackwell. Kulvicki, J. (2006), On Images: Their Structure and Content. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leiter, B. (ed.) (2005), The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, J. (1991a), “Defining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 3–25. —(1991b), “Refining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 37–59. Lopes, D. M. (1996), Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2005), Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2008), “Nobody Needs a Theory of Art.” Journal of Philosophy, 105 (3), pp. 109–27. Lucas, J. (2000), The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics. London: Routledge. Lynch, M. (2000), Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mallon, R. (2003), “Social Construction, Social Roles, and Stability,” in Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, ed. F. Schmitt. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 327–54. —(2007), “Human Categories Beyond Non-Essentialism.” Journal of Political Philosophy, 15 (2), pp. 146–68. Matravers, D. (2000), “The Institutional Theory: A Protean Creature.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2), pp. 242–50. —(2007), “Institutional Definitions and Reasons.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 47 (3), pp. 251–57. Matravers, D. and Pike, J. (eds) (2003), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology. New York: Routledge. Meskin, A. (2008), “From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts,” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. K. Stock and K. Thomson-Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–49. Michaelian, K. (2008), “Testimony as a Natural Kind.” Episteme, 5 (2), pp. 180–202. Moravcsik, J. (1993), “Why Philosophy of Art in Cross-Cultural Perspective?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (3), pp. 425–36. Peirce, C. S. (1998), “Science and Natural Classes,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 115–33. Railton, P. (2003), Facts, Values, and Norms: Essays Toward a Morality of Consequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramsey, W. (2003), “Prototypes and Conceptual Analysis,” in Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, ed. M. DePaul and W. Ramsey. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 161–79.

311

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 311

2/27/2012 10:29:38 AM

Bibliography

Ribeiro, A. (2007), “Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (2), pp. 189–201. Rubin, M. (2008), “Is Goodness a Homeostatic Property Cluster?” Ethics, 118 (3), pp. 496–528. Scheler, M. (1973), Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. M. Frings and R. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sher, G. (2002), “Logical Consequence: An Epistemic Outlook.” The Monist, 85 (4), pp. 555–79. —(2004), “In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth.” Journal of Philosophy, 101 (1), pp. 5–36. —(2005), “Functional Pluralism.” Philosophical Books, 46 (4), pp. 311–30. Sober, E., Levine, A., and Wright, E. (2003), “Marxism and Methodological Individualism,” in Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. D. Matravers and J. Pike. New York: Routledge, pp. 54–69. Stecker, R. (1996), “Alien Objections to Historical Definitions of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 36 (3), pp. 305–8. —(1997), Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. —(2000), “Is It Reasonable to Attempt to Define Art?” in Theories of Art Today, ed. N. Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 45–63. —(2005), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Stock, K. (2003), “Historical Definitions of Art,” in Art and Essence, ed. S. Davies and A. C. Sukla. Westport: Praeger, pp. 159–77. Sturgeon, N. (1985), “Gibbard on Moral Judgment and Norms.” Ethics, 96 (1), pp. 22–33. —(2003), “Moore on Ethical Naturalism.” Ethics, 113 (3), pp. 528–56. Tatarkiewicz, W. (2005), History of Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Ancient Aesthetics, trans. Adam Czerniawski and Ann Czerniawski. London: Continuum. Walton, K. (1997), “Review of G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis.” Philosophical Review, 86 (1), pp. 97–101. Warmbrod, K. (1999), “Logical Constants.” Mind, 108 (431), pp. 503–38. Weitz, M. (1956), “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1), pp. 27–35. Williamson, T. (2005), “Past the Linguistic Turn?” in The Future for Philosophy, ed. B. Leiter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 106–27. Wilson, R. (1999), “Realism, Essence, and Kind: Resuscitating Species Essentialism?” in Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 187–207. Wilson, R., Barker, M., and Brigandt, I. (forthcoming), “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds,” Philosophical Topics.

Chapter 4 Baker, L. R. (1997), “Why Constitution Is Not Identity.” Journal of Philosophy, 94 (12), pp. 599–621. —(2000), Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 312

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 312

2/27/2012 10:29:38 AM

Bibliography

Collingwood, R. G. (1938), The Principles of Art. London: Oxford University Press. Croce, B. (1921), The Essence of Aesthetic, trans. D. Ainslie. London: Heinemann. Currie, G. (1989), An Ontology of Art. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Danto, A. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davies, D. (2004), Art as Performance. Malden: Blackwell. Davies, S. (2003), “Ontology of Art,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–80. —(2004), Musical Works and Performances. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dilworth, J. (2005), The Double Content of Art. Amherst: Prometheus Books. —(2007), “In Support of Content Theories of Art.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1), pp. 19–39. —(2008a), “The Abstractness of Artworks and Its Implications for Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (4), pp. 341–53. —(2008b), “The Propositional Challenge to Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (2), pp. 115–44. Ducasse, C. J. (1929), The Philosophy of Art. New York: Dial Press. —(1944), Art, the Critics, and You. New York: Hafner. Irvin, S. (2005), “The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63 (4), pp. 315–26. —(2008), “The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks,” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. K. Stock and K. Thomson-Jones. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–19. Johnston, M. (1992), “Constitution Is Not Identity.” Mind, 101 (401), pp. 89–105. Levinson, J. (1980), “What a Musical Work Is.” Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1), pp. 5–28. —(1985), “Titles.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (1), pp. 29–39. —(1996), “The Work of Visual Art,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 129–37. Lopes, D. M. (2007), “Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1), pp. 77–84. Macdonald, M. (1952–3), “Art and Imagination.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 53, pp. 205–26. Marcus, R. B. (1961), “Modalities and Intensional Languages.” Synthese, 13 (4), pp. 303–22. Margolis, J. (1974), “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 14 (3), pp. 187–96. Matheson, C. and Caplan, B. (2008), “Modality, Individuation, and the Ontology of Art.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 38 (4), pp. 491–518. Rohrbaugh, G. (2003), “Artworks as Historical Individuals.” European Journal of Philosophy, 11 (2), pp. 177–205. Salmon, N. (1979), “How Not to Derive Essentialism from the Theory of Reference.” Journal of Philosophy, 76 (12), pp. 703–25. Stecker, R. (1997), “The Constructivist’s Dilemma.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1), pp. 43–52.

313

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 313

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

—(2003), “The Ontology of Art Interpretation,” in Art and Essence, ed. S. Davies and A. C. Sukla. Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 177–91. Thomasson, A. (2004), “The Ontology of Art,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. P. Kivy. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 78–92. Wacker, J. (1960), “Particular Works of Art.” Mind, 69, pp. 223–33. Walton, K. (1970), “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review, 79 (3), pp. 334–67. Weitz, M. (1956), “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1), pp. 27–35. Wollheim, R. (1968), Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: Harper and Row. —(1980), “A Note on the Physical Object Hypothesis,” in Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 177–84. Wolterstorff, N. (1980), Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chapter 5 Beardsley, M. C. (1982), “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. M. J. Wreen and D. M. Callen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 285–97. —(2004), “An Aesthetic Definition of Art,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, ed. P. Lamarque and S. H. Olson. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 55–62. Budd, M. (1995), Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, Music. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —(2007), “The Intersubjective Validity of Aesthetic Judgements.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 47 (4), pp. 333–71. —(2008), “Aesthetic Essence,” in Aesthetic Experience, ed. R. Shusterman and A. Tomlin. London: Routledge. Bullough, E. (1995), “Psychical Distance,” in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. A. Neill and A. Ridley. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 297–311. Carroll, N. (1986), “Art and Interaction.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 45 (1), pp. 57–68. —(2002), “The Aesthetic Experience Revisited.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (2), pp. 145–68. —(2006), “Aesthetic Experience: A Question of Content,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 69–97. Dickie, G. (1973), “Psychical Distance: In a Fog at Sea.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 13 (1), pp. 17–29. —(1974), Art and Aesthetic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(1997), Introduction to Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, P. (2003), “The Cognitive Element in Aesthetic Experience: Reply to Matravers.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (4), pp. 412–18. Iseminger, G. (2003), “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 99–115. —(2004), The Aesthetic Function of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 314

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 314

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

Levinson, J. (1996), “What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 3–10. Matravers, D. (2003), “The Aesthetic Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (3), pp. 158–74. Stolnitz, J. (1960), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism. Cambridge: Riverside Press. Walton, K. (1993), “How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (3), pp. 499–510.

Chapter 6 Ayer, A. J. (1936), Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz. Bender, J. (1996), “Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (4), pp. 371–81. —(2001), “Sensitivity, Sensibility, and Aesthetic Realism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (1), pp. 73–83. Blackburn, S. (1993), Essays in Quasi-Realism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Budd, M. (2005), “Aesthetic Realism and Emotional Qualities in Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 45 (2), pp. 111–22. Carroll, N. (1984), “Hume’s Standard of Taste.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43 (2), pp. 181–94. Cohen, T. (1973), “Aesthetic/Non–Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste.” Theoria, 39 (1–3), pp. 113–52. Eaton, M. M. (1994), “The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52 (4), pp. 279–93. Goldman, A. (1995), Aesthetic Value. Oxford: Westview Press. Hampshire, S. (1954), “Logic and Appreciation,” in Aesthetics and Language, ed. W. Elton. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 161–9. Hermerén, G. (1988), “The Variety of Aesthetic Qualities,” in Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, ed. M. Mitias. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 11–23. Hume, D. (1965), Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. J. Lenz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Johnston, M. (1989), “Dispositional Theories of Value.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 63, pp. 139–74. Kant, I. (2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. P. Guyer. New York: Cambridge University Press. Korsmeyer, C. (1997), “Taste as Sense and Sensibility.” Philosophical Topics, 25 (1), pp. 201–30. Levinson, J. (1994), “Being Realistic about Aesthetic Properties.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 52 (3), pp. 351–4. —(1996), “Aesthetic Supervenience,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetic: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 134–58. —(2001), “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility,” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley, ed. E. Brady and J. Levinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 61–80. 315

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 315

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

—(2002), “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60 (3), pp. 227–38. —(2005), “What Are Aesthetic Properties?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 78, pp. 211–27. Matravers, D. (2005), “Aesthetic Properties.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 78, pp. 191–210. McDowell, J. (1983), “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. E. Schaper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–16 (reprinted in McDowell, 1998). —(1985), “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Morality and Objectivity, ed. T. Honderich. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 110–29 (reprinted in McDowell, 1998). —(1998), Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mitias, M. H. (1988a), What Makes an Experience Aesthetic? Amsterdam: Rodopi. —(ed.) (1988b), Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mothersill, M. (1989), “Aesthetic Laws, Principles and Properties: A Response to Eddy Zemach.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1), pp. 77–82. Pettit, P. (1983), “The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism,” in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. E. Schaper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–38. —(1991), “Realism and Response-Dependence,” in Response-Dependent Concepts. Canberra: ANU Working Papers in Philosophy, 1, pp. 4–45 (reprinted in Mind 100 (1991), pp. 587–626). Schellekens, E. (2006), “Towards a Reasonable Objectivism for Aesthetic Judgements.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 46 (2), pp. 163–77. —(2008), “Three Debates in Meta-Aesthetics: Realism, Objectivism, Cognitivism,” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. K. Stock and K. ThomsonJones. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 170–87. Scruton, R. (1982), Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sibley, F. (1959), “Aesthetic Concepts.” Philosophical Review, 68 (4), pp. 421–50 (reprinted in Sibley 2001). —(1965), “Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic.” Philosophical Review, 74 (2), pp. 135–59 (reprinted in Sibley 2001). —(1968), “Objectivity and Aesthetics.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 42, pp. 31–54 (reprinted in Sibley 2001). —(2001), Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers, ed. J. Benson, B. Redfern, and J. Roxbee Cox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Todd, C. (2004), “Quasi-Realism, Acquaintance, and the Normative Claims of Aesthetic Judgement.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (3), pp. 277–96. Wiggins, D. (1991), “Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 91, pp. 61–85. —(1998), “A Sensible Subjectivism?” in Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 185–214. Wright, C. (1988), “Moral Values, Projection and Secondary Qualities.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 62, pp. 1–26. —(1992), Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

316

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 316

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

Zangwill, N. (1998), “The Concept of the Aesthetic.” European Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1), pp. 78–93. —(2000), “Skin Deep or in the Eye of the Beholder?: The Metaphysics of Aesthetic and Sensory Properties.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (3), pp. 595–618. —(2001), “Beauty,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 325–43. Zemach, E. (1997), Real Beauty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chapter 7 Anderson, J. and Dean, J. (1998), “Moderate Autonomism.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 38 (2), pp. 150–66. Aristotle (1987), Poetics, trans. R. Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett. Beardsley, M. C. (1958), Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Indianapolis: Hackett. Bell, C. (2008), Art. New York: Book Jungle. Bonzon, R. (2003), “The Aesthetic and Ethical Value of Literature,” in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. D. M. Lopes and M. Kieran. London: Routledge, pp. 160–76. Booth, W. (1988), The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bullough, E. (1912), “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.” British Journal of Psychology, 5 (2), pp. 87–118. Carroll, N. (1989), “Clive Bell’s Aesthetic Hypothesis,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd edn, ed. R. Sclafani and R. Roblin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 84–95. —(1996), “Moderate Moralism.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 36 (3), pp. 223–38. —(1998), “Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 38 (4), pp. 419–24. —(2000), “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research.” Ethics, 100 (2), pp. 350–87. Devereaux, M. (1998), “Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will,” in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. J. Levinson. New York: Cambridge, pp. 227–56. Dickie, G. (1964), “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1), pp. 56–66. —(2005), “The Triumph in Triumph of the Will.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 45 (2), pp. 151–6. Eaton, A. W. (2003), “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian’s Rape of Europa.” Hypatia, 18 (4), pp. 159–88. Eaton, M. M. (1992), “Integrating the Aesthetic and the Moral.” Philosophical Studies, 67 (3), pp. 219–40. Gaut, B. (1998), “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. J. Levinson. New York: Cambridge, pp. 182–203. 317

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 317

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

—(2007), Art, Emotion, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, P. (1979), Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harold, J. (2006), “On Judging the Moral Value of Narrative Artworks.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2), pp. 259–70. —(2008), “Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (1), pp. 45–64. Hume, D. (1996), “Of the Standard of Taste,” in David Hume: Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 133–53. Iseminger, G. (1992), Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jacobson, D. (1997), “In Praise of Immoral Art.” Philosophical Topics, 25 (1), pp. 155–99. —(2006), “Ethical Criticism and the Vice of Moderation,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 342–55. John, E. (2006), “Artistic Value and Opportunistic Moralism,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 332–41. Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kieran, M. (1996), “Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Knowledge.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (4), pp. 337–51. —(2003), “Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism,” in Art and Morality, ed. J. Bermúdez and S. Gardner. London: Routledge, pp. 56–73. Lamarque, P. and Olsen, S. H. (1994), Truth, Fiction, and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackie, J. (1977), “The Subjectivity of Values,” in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin, pp. 15–49. Moore, G. E. (1988), Principia Ethica. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, esp. ch. 6. Mozi (2001), “A Condemnation of Musical Performances,” in Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, trans. P. J. Ivanhoe, ed. P. J. Ivanhoe and B. W. Van Norden. Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 105–10. Nehamas, A. (1998), “The Symposium,” in Virtues of Authenticity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 303–15. Nussbaum, M. (1990), “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 148–67. Plato (2004), Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, esp. 376e–392c and 595a–608a. Posner, R. (1997), “Against Ethical Criticism.” Philosophy and Literature, 21 (1), pp. 1–27. Robinson, J. (1995), “L’Éducation Sentimentale.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73 (2), pp. 212–26. Stecker, R. (2005), “The Interaction of Aesthetic and Ethical Value.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 45 (2), pp. 138–51. —(2008), “Immoralism and the Anti-Theoretical View.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (2), pp. 145–61.

318

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 318

2/27/2012 10:29:39 AM

Bibliography

Tolstoy, L. (1960), What Is Art? trans. A. Maude. New York: Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts. Walton, K. (1970), “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review, 79 (3), pp. 334–67. —(2006), “On the (So-Called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. S. Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 137–48. Weatherson, B. (2004), “Morality, Fiction, and Possibility.” Philosophers’ Imprint, 4 (3), Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, pp. 1–27, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0004.003 Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. and Beardsley, M. C. (1946), “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review, 54 (3), pp. 468–88. Xunzi (1994), “Discourse on Music,” in Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, Vol. III, trans. J. Knoblock. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 74–87. Zangwill, N. (2001), The Metaphysics of Beauty. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Chapter 8 Alperson, P. (ed.) (1994), What Is Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. —(ed.) (1998), Music Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Alperson, P. and Carroll, N. (2008), “Music, Mind, and Morality: Arousing the Body Politic.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 42 (1), pp. 1–15. Baptista, L. F. and Keister, R. A. (2005), “Why Birdsong Is Sometimes Like Music.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 48 (3), pp. 426–43. Benzon, W. (2001), Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. New York: Basic Books. Bicknell, J. (2001), “Music, Listeners, and Moral Awareness,” Philosophy Today, 45 (3), pp. 266–74. Boghossian, P. (2007), “Explaining Musical Experience,” in Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work, ed. K. Stock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 117–28. Boretz, B. (1970), “Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art from a Musical Point of View.” Journal of Philosophy, 67 (16), pp. 540–52. Brown, L. B. (1991), “The Theory of Jazz Music: It Don’t Mean a Thing . . .” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49 (2), pp. 115–27. —(1996), “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (4), pp. 353–69. —(1999), “Postmodernist Jazz Theory: Afrocentrism, Old and New.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (2), pp. 235–46. —(2000a), “Feeling My Way: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes—A Plea for Imperfection.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (2), pp. 113–23. —(2000b), “Phonography, Rock Records, and the Ontology of Recorded Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (4), pp. 361–72.

319

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 319

2/27/2012 10:29:40 AM

Bibliography

Brown, S. (2000), “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 271–300. Budd, M. (1985), “Understanding Music.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 59, pp. 233–48. Carroll, N. (2009), “Les Culs-de-Sac of Enlightenment Aesthetics: A Metaphilosophy of Art.” Metaphilosophy, 40 (2), pp. 157–78. Cohen, H. F. (1984), Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing. Cross, I. (2001), “Music, Cognition, Culture, and Evolution,” in The Biological Foundations of Music, ed. R. J. Zatorre and I. Peretz. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 28–42. Currie, G. (2009), “Art for Art’s Sake in the Old Stone Age.” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 6 (1), pp. 1–23. Darwin, C. (1882), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn. London: John Murray. Davies, S. (1994), Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(2001), Musical Works & Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2006), “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 179–91. DeBellis, M. (1995), Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1961), Compendium of Music (Musicological Studies and Documents, Vol. 8), trans. W. Robert. Rome: American Institute of Musicology. Dissanayake, E. (2000), “Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early MotherInfant Interaction,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 389–410. Dodd, J. (2000), “Musical Works as Eternal Types.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (4), pp. 424–40. —(2007), Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drake, C. (1998), “Psychological Processes Involved in the Temporal Organization of Complex Auditory Sequences: Universal and Acquired Processes.” Music Perception, 16, pp. 11–26. Feagin, S. (ed.) (2007), Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1) (Special Issue: Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics), pp. 1–146. Fisher, J. A. (1998a), “Rock ‘n’ Recording: The Ontological Complexity of Rock Music,” in Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, ed. P. Alperson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 109–23. —(1998b), “What the Hills Are Alive with: In Defense of the Sounds of Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 167–79. Fitch, W. T. (2006), “The Biology and Evolution of Music: A Comparative Perspective,” Cognition, 100 (1), pp. 173–215.

320

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 320

2/27/2012 10:29:40 AM

Bibliography

Geissmann, T. (2000), “Gibbon Songs and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 103–23. Goodman, N. (1968), Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gracyk, T. (1996), Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham: Duke University Press. —(2001), I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —(2007), Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grossman, M. (1994), “Performance and Obligation,” in What Is Music?: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, ed. P. Alperson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 255–81. Gurney, E. (1880), The Power of Sound. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Hartshorne, C. (1973), Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Higgins, K. (1991), The Music of Our Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kania, A. (2006), “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 64 (4), pp. 401–14. —(2008), “Piece for the End of Time: In Defence of Musical Ontology.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (1), pp. 65–79. Kant, I. (1951), Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner. Kimmel, L. (1992), “The Sounds of Music: First Movement.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 26 (3), pp. 55–65. Kingsbury, J. (2002), “Matravers on Musical Expressiveness.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (1), pp. 13–19. Kivy, P. (1980), The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —(1984), Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —(1989), Sound Sentiment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —(1990), Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(1993a), “Live Performances and Dead Composers: On the Ethics of Music Interpretation,” in The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–94. —(1993b), “Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense,” in The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–58. —(2001), “The Arousal Theory of Musical Expression: Rethinking the Unthinkable,” in New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 119–51. —(2002), Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Kristeller, P. O. (1951), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part I.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (4), pp. 496–527.

321

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 321

2/27/2012 10:29:40 AM

Bibliography

—(1952), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part II.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1), pp. 17–46. Kunej, D. and Turk, I. (2000), “New Perspectives on the Beginnings of Music: Archeological and Musicological Analysis of a Middle Paleolithic Bone ‘Flute’,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 235–68. Lerdahl, F. and Jackendoff, R. (1983), A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge: MIT Press. Levinson, J. (1980), “What a Musical Work Is.” Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1), pp. 5–28. —(1990), Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(1996), The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(1997), Music in the Moment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(2006), “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 191–204. Levitin, D. (2006), This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton. Luntley, M. (2003), “Non-Conceptual Content and the Sound of Music.” Mind and Language, 18 (4), pp. 402–26. Matravers, D. (2001), Art and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2007), “Musical Expressiveness.” Philosophy Compass, 2 (3), pp. 373–79. Miller, G. (2000), “Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 329–60. Molino, J. (2000), “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 165–76. Mosley, A. (2007), “The Moral Significance of the Music of the Black Atlantic.” Philosophy East and West, 57 (3), pp. 345–56. Nussbaum, C. (2007), The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. Cambridge: MIT Press. O’Dea, J. (1993), “Virtue in Musical Performance.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 27 (1), pp. 51–62. Papousek, H. and Papousek, M. (1995), “Beginning of Human Musicality,” in Music and the Mind Machine: The Psychophysiology and Psychopathology of the Sense of Music, ed. R. Steinberg. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 27–34. Peretz, I. (2006), “The Nature of Music from a Biological Perspective.” Cognition, 100 (1), pp. 1–32. — Peretz, I. and Zatorre, R. J. (eds) (2003), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinker, S. (1997), How the Mind Works. New York: Norton. Porter, J. I. (2009), “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (1), pp. 1–24. Radford, C. (1991a), “How Can Music Be Moral?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16 (1), pp. 421–38.

322

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 322

2/27/2012 10:29:40 AM

Bibliography

—(1991b), “Muddy Waters.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49 (3), pp. 247–52. Raffman, D. (1993), Language, Music, and Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. Richman, B. (2000), “How Music Fixed ‘Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas: On Rhythm, Repetition, and Meaning,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 301–14. Ridley, A. (2003), “Against Musical Ontology.” Journal of Philosophy, 100 (4), pp. 203–20. —(2004), The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rohrbaugh, G. (2003), “Artworks as Historical Individuals.” European Journal of Philosophy, 11 (2), pp. 177–205. Rothenberg, D. (2006), Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Birdsong. New York: Basic Books. —(2008), Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound. New York: Basic Books. Rudinow, J. (1994), “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52 (1), pp. 127–38. Sacks, O. (2007), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schellenberg, G. E. and Trehub, S. E. (1996), “Natural Musical Intervals: Evidence from Infant Listeners.” Psychological Science, 7 (5), pp. 272–7. Schmidt, J. (2005), “‘Not These Sounds’: Beethoven at Mauthausen.” Philosophy and Literature, 29 (1), pp. 146–63. Schopenhauer, A. (1966), The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Scruton, R. (1997), The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sharpe, R. A. (2004), Philosophy of Music: An Introduction. Bucks: Acumen. Shiner, L. (2009), “Continuity and Discontinuity in the Concept of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (2), pp. 159–69. Shusterman, R. (1995), “Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73 (2), pp. 269–79. —(2003), “Rap as Art and Philosophy,” in A Companion to African-American Philosophy: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. T. Lott. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 419–28. Tanner, M. (1985), “Understanding Music.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 59, pp. 215–32. Taylor, P. C. (1995), “So Black and Blue: Response to Rudinow.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3), pp. 313–16. Torff, B. and Gardner, H. (1999), “Conceptual and Experiential Cognition in Music.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33 (4), pp. 93–106. Trehub, S. E. (2000), “Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 427–48. Trehub, S. E., Unyk, A. M., Kamenetsky, S. B., Hill, D. S., Trainor, L. J., Henderson J. L., and Saraza, M. (1997a), “Mothers’ and Fathers’ Singing to Infants.” Developmental Psychology, 33 (3), pp. 500–7. Trehub, S. E., Schellenberg, G., and Hill, D. (1997b), “The Origins of Music Perception and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective,” in Perception and

323

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 323

2/27/2012 10:29:40 AM

Bibliography

Cognition of Music, ed. I. Deliège and J. Sloboda. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 103–28. Trivedi, S. (2002), “Against Musical Works as Eternal Types.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (1), pp. 73–82. —(2008), “Music and Metaphysics.” Metaphilosophy, 39 (1), pp. 124–43. Walhout, D. (1995), “Music and Moral Goodness.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 29 (1), pp. 5–16. Wallin, N. L., Merker, B., and Brown, S. (eds) (2000), The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolterstorff, N. (2003), “Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (1), pp. 17–27. Zatorre, R. J. and Peretz, I. (eds) (2001), The Biological Foundations of Music. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Zink, S. (1944), “The Good as Harmony.” The Philosophical Review, 53 (6), pp. 557–74.

Chapter 9 Aristotle (1954), Rhetoric and Poetics, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater, introduction by Friedrich Solmsen. New York: Modern Library. Atkinson, Q. D. (2011), “Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa.” Science, 332, pp. 346–9. Attridge, D. (2010), “The Singular Events of Literature.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (1), pp. 81–4. Batteux, C. (1746), Les beaux Arts réduits à un même principe. Paris: Durand. Accessed online at http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Beauxarts_réduits_à_un_même_principe Borges, J. L. (1964), “Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions. Carroll, N. (2009), “Les Culs-de-Sac of Enlightenment Aesthetics: A Metaphilosophy of Art.” Metaphilosophy, 40 (2), pp. 157–78. —(2010), Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colapinto, J. (2007), “The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?” New Yorker, 16 April, pp. 118–37. Currie, G. (2004), Arts and Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2009), “Art of the Paleolithic,” in Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Stephen Davies et al. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–10. —(2010), Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, C. (1874), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd edn, revised and augmented. London: John Murray. Accessed online at http:// books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id=CBQAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontco ver&output=reader Davies, D. (2007), Aesthetics and Literature. London: Continuum.

324

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 324

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

— (2008), “Review: Peter Kivy: The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (1), pp. 89–91. Feagin, S. (2008), “Critical Study: Reading and Performing.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (1), pp. 89–97. Fitch, W. T. (2000), “The Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Overview.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (7), pp. 258–67. Foster, J. L. (1993), “Egyptian Poetry,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. New York: MJF Books, pp. 318–19. Goodman, N. and Elgin, C. (1986), “Interpretation and Identity: Can the Work Survive the World?” Critical Inquiry, 12, pp. 567–74. Hirsch, E. D. (1978/2004), “What Isn’t Literature?” in Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings, ed. Eileen John and Dominic M. Lopes. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 46–50. First published in Hirsch, E. D. and Hernadi, P. (eds), What Is Literature? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 24–34. Jordania, J. (2009), “Times to Fight and Times to Relax: Singing and Humming at the Beginning of Human Evolutionary History.” Kadmos, 1, pp. 272–7. Kivy, P. (1997), Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2006), The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Kristeller, P. (1951), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Part I. Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (4), pp. 496–527. —(1952), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Part II. Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1), pp. 17–46. Lamarque, P. (2009), The Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Livingston, P. (2005), Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopes, D. M. (2008), “Nobody Needs a Theory of Art.” Journal of Philosophy, 3, pp. 109–27. Porter, J. I. (2009), “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 49 (1), pp. 1–24. Ribeiro, A. C. (2009), “Review: Peter Kivy: The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature.” Mind, 118 (469), pp. 186–91. Robinson, A. (1995), The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson. Schopenhauer, A. (1969), The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover. Tolhurst, W. and Wheeler III, S. (1979), “On Textual Individuation.” Philosophical Studies, 35 (2), pp. 187–97. Urmson, J. O. (1977/2004), “Literature,” in Philosophy of Literature, ed. John and Lopes, pp. 89–90. First published in Dickie, G. and Sclafani, R. J. (eds), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 334–41. Wittgenstein, L. (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Anscombe. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

325

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 325

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

Chapter 10 Alward, P. (2009), “Onstage Illocution.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (3), pp. 321–31. Aristotle (1984), Poetics, trans. I. Bywater. New York: McGraw-Hill. Auslander, P. (2007), “Humanoid Boogie: Reflections on Robotic Performance,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. D. Krasner and D. Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 87–103. Carroll, N. (1998), A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2001), “Interpretation, Theatrical Performance, and Ontology.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (3), pp. 313–6. Hamilton, J. (2001), “Theatre,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes. London: Routledge. —(2007), The Art of Theater. Oxford: Blackwell. Krasner, D. and Saltz, D. Z. (2006), Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kristeller, P. O. (1951), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part I.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (4), pp. 496–527. —(1952), “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part II.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1), pp. 17–46. Osipovich, D. (2006), “What Is a Theatrical Performance?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (4), pp. 461–70. Saltz, D. Z. (1991), “How To Do Things on Stage.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49 (1), pp. 32–45. —(2001), “What Theatrical Performance Is (Not): The Interpretative Fallacy.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (3), pp. 299–306. —(2006), “Infiction and Outfiction: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed. D. Krasner and D. Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 203–20. Searle, J. (1979), “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–75. Wollheim, R. (1968), Art and Its Objects. New York: Harper and Row. Woodruff, P. (2008), The Necessity of Theater. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 11 Au, S. (1988), Ballet and Modern Dance. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd. Beardsley, M. (1982), “What Is Going On in a Dance?” Dance Research Journal, 15 (1), pp. 31–6. Best, D. N. (1974), Expression and Movement in the Arts: A Philosophical Enquiry. London: Lepus Books. Carroll, N. (2003), “Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 583–93. 326

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 326

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

Carroll, N. and Banes, S. (1982), “Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s ‘What Is Going On in a Dance?’” Dance Research Journal, 15 (1), pp. 37–41. Cohen, S. J. (1982), Next Week, Swan Lake: Reflections on Dance and Dances. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Conroy, R. (2009), “The Art of Re-Making Dances: A Philosophical Analysis of Dancework Reconstruction,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Information and Learning. Cooper Albright, A. (1997), Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Croce, A. (1982), Going to the Dance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. H’Doubler, M. N. (1940), Dance: A Creative Art Experience, revised edn. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kirstein, L. (1987), Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing: Anniversary Edition. Pennington: Princeton. Levin, D. M. (1977), “Philosophers and the Dance,” in What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. R. Copeland and M. Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 85–94. Martin, J. (1965), The Dance in Theory, revised edn. Pennington: Princeton. McFee, G. (1992), Understanding Dance. London: Routledge. —(2001), “Dance,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes. London: Routledge, pp. 545–56. —(2004), The Concept of Dance Education, revised edn. Eastbourne: Pageantry Press. Montero, B. (2006), “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2), pp. 230–42. Siegel, M. (1972), At the Vanishing Point. New York: Saturday Review Press. Sparshott, F. (1983), “Why Philosophy Neglects the Dance,” in What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 94–102. —(1988), Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of the Dance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —(1995), A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —(2004), “The Philosophy of Dance: Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. P. Kivy. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 276–90. Van Camp, J. (1982), “Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.

Chapter 12 Abell, C. (2005a), “Against Depictive Conventionalism.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (3), pp. 185–97. —(2005b), “On Outlining the Shape of Depiction.” Ratio, 18 (1), pp. 27–38.

327

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 327

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

—(2005c), “Pictorial Implicature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63 (1), pp. 55–66. —(2007), “Pictorial Realism.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1), pp. 1–17. —(2009), “Canny Resemblance.” Philosophical Review, 188 (2), pp. 183–224. Alberti, L. B. (1435/1991), On Painting, trans. C. Grayson. New York: Penguin. Bantinaki, K. (2008), “The Opticality of Pictorial Representation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (2), pp. 183–92. Baxandall, M. (1988), Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Budd, M. (1993), “How Pictures Look,” in Virtue and Taste: Essays in Memory of Flint Schier, ed. D. Knowles and J. Skorupski. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 154–75. Chasid, A. (2007), “Content-Free Pictorial Realism.” Philosophical Studies, 135 (3), pp. 375–405. Gombrich, E. (1961), Art and Illusion, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodman, N. (1976), Languages of Art, 2nd edn. Indianapolis: Hackett. —(1978), Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett. —(1984), Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haugeland, J. (1981), “Analog and Analog.” Philosophical Topics, 12 (1), pp. 213–26. —(1991), “Representational Genera,” in Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, ed. W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hopkins, R. (1995), “Explaining Depiction.” Philosophical Review, 104 (3), pp. 425–55. —(1997), “Pictures and Beauty.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 97, pp. 177–94. —(1998), Picture, Image, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2003a), “Perspective, Convention, and Compromise,” in Looking into Pictures: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pictorial Space, ed. H. Hecht, R. Schwartz, and M. Atherton. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 145–66. —(2003b), “Pictures, Phenomenology, and Cognitive Science.” The Monist, 86 (4), pp. 653–75. —(2003c), “What Makes Representational Painting Truly Visual?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 77 (1), pp. 149–67. Hyman, J. (2004), “Realism and Relativism in the Theory of Art.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105 (1), pp. 25–53. —(2006), The Objective Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kulvicki, J. (2006a), On Images: Their Structure and Content. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2006b), “Pictorial Realism as Verity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (3), pp. 343–54. —(2006c), “Pictorial Representation.” Philosophy Compass, 1 (6), pp. 535–46. —(2010), “Pictorial Diversity,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. C. Abell and K. Bantinaki. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, J. (1998), “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3), pp. 227–33.

328

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 328

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

Lewis, D. K. (1971), “Analog and Digital.” Noûs, 5 (3), pp. 321–7. Lopes, D. M. (1995), “Pictorial Realism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3), pp. 277–85. —(1996), Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2003a), “Pictures and the Representational Mind.” The Monist, 86 (4), pp. 632–52. —(2003b), “The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency.” Mind, 112 (447), pp. 433–48. —(2005), Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2009), “Drawing in a Social Science: Lithic Illustration.” Perspectives on Science, 17 (1), pp. 5–25. Nochlin, L. (1972), Realism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Peacocke, C. (1987), “Depiction.” Philosophical Review, 96 (3), pp. 383–410. Plato (1992), The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Podro, M. (1998), Depiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schier, F. (1986), Deeper into Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voltolini, A. (forthcoming), “Gesturing toward a Syncretist Theory of Depiction,” in The Crooked Oar: Illusions of Outer and Inner Perception, ed. C. Calabi and K. Mulligan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walton, K. (1973), “Pictures and Make-Believe.” The Philosophical Review, 82 (3), pp. 283–319. —(1984), “Transparent Pictures.” Critical Inquiry, 11, pp. 246–77. —(1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —(2002), “Depiction, Perception, and Imagination.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60 (1), pp. 27–35. Wollheim, R. (1974), On Art and the Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —(1980), Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(1987), Painting as an Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —(1993), The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —(1998), “On Pictorial Representation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (3), pp. 217–26. —(2003a), “In Defense of Seeing-In,” in Looking into Pictures: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pictorial Space, ed. H. Hecht, R. Schwartz, and M. Atherton. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 3–16. —(2003b), “What Makes Representational Painting Truly Visual?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 77 (1), pp. 131–47.

Chapter 13 Allen, R. (2003), Identification in Cinema: A Conceptual Investigation. Unpublished manuscript. —(2009), “Psychoanalysis,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

329

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 329

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

Allen, R. and Smith, M. (1997), “Introduction: Film Theory and Philosophy,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Batson, C. D. (2009), “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” in Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Batson, C. D., Fultz, J., and Schoenrade, P. A. (1987), “Distress and Empathy: Two Qualitatively Distinct Vicarious Emotions with Different Motivational Consequences.” Journal of Personality, 55 (1), pp. 19–39. Batson, C. D., O’Quin, K., Fultz, J., Vanderplas, M., and Isen, A. M. (1983), “Influence of Self-Reported Distress and Empathy on Egoistic versus Altruistic Motivation to Help.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 (3), p. 706. Battaly, H. (2011), “Is Empathy a Virtue?” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford University Press. Bazin, A. (1967), What Is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. —(1971), What Is Cinema? Volume 2, trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bergstrom, J. (ed.) (1999), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bordwell, D. (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. —(1993), The Cinema of Eisenstein. New York: Routledge, 2005. —(1996), “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. —(2009a), “Cognitive theory,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge. —(2009b), “Observations on Film Art: Invasion of the Braniacs II.” www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/06/10/invasion-of-the-brainiacs-ii/ Bordwell, D. and Carroll, N. (1996a), “Introduction,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. —(eds) (1996b), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bråten, S. (ed.) (2007), On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Buckland, W. (2007), The Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, N. (1985), “The Power of Movies.” Daedalus, 114 (4), pp. 79–103. —(1992), “Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 6 (2), pp. 199–219. —(1996a), “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

330

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 330

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

—(1996b), Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(1998), A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2001), “Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2003), “Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures.” The Monist, 86 (4), pp. 521–56. —(2006), “Engaging Critics.” Film Studies, 8, pp. 161–9. —(2007), “On the Ties That Bind: Characters, the Emotions, and Popular Fictions,” in Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, ed. William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. —(2008), The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Choi, J. (2003), “Fits and Startles: Cognitivism Revisited.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (2), pp. 149–57. Cook, D. A. (1996), A History of Narrative Film, 3rd edn. W.W. Norton & Company. Coplan, A. (2004), “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (2), pp. 141–52. —(2006), “Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film.” Film Studies, 8, pp. 26–38. —(2009), “Empathy and Character Engagement,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London and New York: Routledge. —(2011a), “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2011b), “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case for a Narrow Conceptualization.” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 49, pp. 40–65. Coplan, A. and Goldie, P. (2011), “Introduction,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Pychoanalysis. London: Routledge London. —(1998), “Film and Psychoanalysis,” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curran, A. and Donelan, C. (2009), “Gender,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Carl Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Currie, G. (1995), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2004), Arts and Minds. New York: Oxford University Press. Davies, S. (2011), “Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Devereaux, M. (1990), “Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (4), pp. 337–47.

331

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 331

2/27/2012 10:29:41 AM

Bibliography

Diawara, M. (1988), “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Screen, 29 (4), pp. 66–79. —(ed.) (1993), Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge. Dyer, R. (1997), White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge. Eisenberg, N. (2000), “Empathy and Sympathy,” in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd edn, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones. New York: Guilford Press. Eisenberg, N. and Eggum, N. D. (2009), “Empathic Responding: Sympathy and Personal Distress,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eisenberg, N. and Strayer, J. (1987), “Critical Issues in the Study of Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eisenberg, N., Schaller, M., Fabes, R. A., Bustamante, D., Mathy, R. M., Shell, R., and Rhodes, K. (1988), “Differentiation of Personal Distress and Sympathy in Children and Adults.” Developmental Psychology, 24 (6), pp. 766–75. Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Miller, P. A., Fultz, J., Shell, R., Mathy, R. M., and Reno, R. R. (1989), “Relation of Sympathy and Personal Distress to Prosocial Behavior: A Multimethod Study.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57 (1), pp. 55–66. Eisenstein, S. (1942), The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. —(1949), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Erens, P. (ed.) (1991), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Feagin, S. L. (1996), Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Flory, D. (2008), Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Friedberg, A. (1990), “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Routledge. Gaut, B. (1997), “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” in Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(1999), “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —(2003), “Film,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2010), A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, A. I. (2005), “Imitation, Mind Reading, and Simulation.” Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, 2, pp. 79–93. —(2006), Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

332

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 332

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

—(2011), “Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grau, C. (2005), Philosophers Explore the Matrix. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haskell, M. (1974), From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Iacoboni, M. (2008), Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Irwin, W. (ed.) (2002), The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Peru, IL: Open Court. —(2005), More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded. Peru, IL: Open Court. Kaplan, E. A. (ed.) (1990), Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. New York and London: Routledge. —(1997), Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge. —(ed.) (2000), Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, P. (1997), “Cinematic Authorship,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2008), “Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy.” Philosophy Compass, 3 (4), pp. 590–603. —(2009), Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, P. and Plantinga, C. (eds) (2009), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Meskin, A. (2009), “Authorship,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Mulhall, S. (2001), On Film, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Mulvey, L. (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16 (3), pp. 6–18. Münsterberg, H. (1916), The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company. Neill, A. (1996), “Empathy and (Film) Fiction,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Pineda, J. A. (ed.) (2009), Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition. New York: Humana Press. Plantinga, C. (1999), “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —(2006), “Disgusted at the Movies.” Film Studies, 8, pp. 81–92. —(2009a), “Emotion and Affect,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge. —(2009b), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

333

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 333

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

Plantinga, C. and Smith, G. M. (1999), “Introduction,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prinz, J. J. (2004), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2007), The Emotional Construction of Morals. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rizzolatti, G. and Sinigaglia, C. (2008), Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, J. (1995), “Startle.” The Journal of Philosophy, 92 (2), pp. 53–74. —(2005), Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, B. (2000), “The Philosophical Limits of Film.” Film and Philosophy, Special Edition, pp. 163–7. — (2006), “Philosophical Limits of Film,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ryan, M. and Ryan, D. (1988), “Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film,” in Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sarris, A. (2005), “Auteur Theory and Film Evaluation,” in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings, ed. Thomas Wartenberg and Angela Curran. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Scruton, R. (1983), “Photography and Representation,” in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. London and New York: Methuen. Singer, T. and Lamm, C. (2009), “The Social Neuroscience of Empathy.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156, pp. 81–96. Smith, M. (1995), “Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema,” in Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(2001), “Film,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes. London: Routledge. —(2006), “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (1), pp. 33–42. Smith, M. and Wartenberg, T. (eds) (2006), Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell; American Society for Aesthetics. Stamenov, M. and Gallese, V. (2002), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, ed. M. Stamenov and V. Gallese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stecker, R. (2009), “Film as Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Tan, E. S. (1996), Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine, trans. Barbara Fasting. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thomson-Jones, K. (2008), Aesthetics and Film. New York: Continuum. Toi, M. and Batson, C. D. (1982), “More Evidence That Empathy Is a Source of Altruistic Motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43 (2), pp. 281–92.

334

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 334

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

Wartenberg, T. (2007), Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Wispé, L. (1987), “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 14 Addis, B. (2007), Building: 3000 Years of Design, Engineering, and Construction. London: Phaidon Press. Alexander, C. (1964), Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carlson, A. (1994), “Existence, Location, and Function: The Appreciation of Architecture,” in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. M. H. Mitias. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 141–64. —(2005), “Environmental Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn, ed. B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes. London: Routledge. Curtis, W. C. (1987), Modern Architecture since 1900, 2nd edn. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. De Clercq, R. (2004), “The Legitimacy of Modern Architecture.” Philosophical Forum, 35 (2), pp. 135–46. —(2008), “Lopes on the Ontology of Japanese Shrines.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (2), pp. 193–4. Edwards, T. A. (1946), Good and Bad Manners in Architecture: An Essay on the Social Aspects of Civic Design, 2nd edn. London: John Tiranti. Giedion, S. (1967), Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Graham, G. (2005), “Architecture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haldane, J. (1998), “Architecture, Aesthetics of,” in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Vol. I, ed. E. Craig. London: Routledge, pp. 361–6. Krier, L. (2007), Architecture: Choice or Fate. London: Papadakis. Lopes, D. M. (2007), “Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1), pp. 77–84. —(2008), “Reference, Ontology, and Architecture: Response to Rafael De Clercq.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (2), pp. 194–6. Matravers, D. (1999), “Revising Principles of Architecture.” Journal of Architecture, 4 (1), pp. 39–45. Mitrovic, B. (1998), “Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius’ De Architectura.” Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (3), pp. 667–88. —(1999), “Palladio’s Theory of the Classical Orders in the First Book of I Quattro Libri Dell’ Architettura.” Architectural History, 42, pp. 110–40. Novitz, D. (1994), “Architectural Brilliance and the Constraints of Time,” in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. M. H. Mitias. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 67–85.

335

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 335

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

Papalambros, P. Y. and Wilde, D. J. (2000), Principles of Optimal Design: Modeling and Computation, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, R. (1979), The Aesthetics of Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —(1994), The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. —(2000), “After Modernism.” City Journal, 10 (2), www.city-journal.org/ html/10_2_urbanities-after_modernis.html Suppes, P. (1991), “Rules of Proportion in Architecture.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16 (1), pp. 352–58. Watkin, D. (2001), Morality and Architecture Revisited. London: John Murray. Wicks, R. (1994), “Architectural Restoration: Resurrection or Replication?” British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (2), pp. 163–9. Wiggins, D. (1998), Needs, Values, Truth, 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Winters, E. (2005), “Architecture,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn, ed. B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes. London: Routledge. —(2007), Aesthetics and Architecture. London: Continuum.

Chapter 15 Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (1997), Film Art. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Boston: Harvard University Press. Carroll, N. (1998), A Philosophy of Mass Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1981), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Boston: Harvard University Press. Cohen, T. (1999), “High Art and Low Art, and High and Low Audiences.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (2), pp. 137–43. Greenberg, C. (1986), “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. I, ed. J. O’Brien. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ch. 2, pp. 5–22. Kivy, P. (1990), Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(2003), “Another Go at Musical Profundity: Stephen Davies and the Game of Chess.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (4), pp. 401–11. Levine, L. (1988), Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Boston: Harvard University Press. McDonald, D. (1957), “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. B. Rosenberg and D. M. White. New York: Free Press. Novitz, D. (1992), The Boundaries of Art. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Smuts, A. (2005), “Are Video Games Art?” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3, www. contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=299 —(2011), “‘Rubber Ring’: Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs,” in Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, ed. J. Gibson and N. Carroll. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ch. 7, pp. 131–53.

336

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 336

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

Chapter 16 Andrews, M. (2007), “The View from the Road and the Picturesque,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. A. Berleant and A. Carlson. Peterborough: Broadview Press, pp. 272–89. Aretoulakis, E. (2008), “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 6, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=510 Berleant, A. (1964), “The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23 (2), pp. 185–92. —(1986), “Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic.” Diogenes, 136, pp. 1–18. —(1992), The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. —(1997), “The Critical Aesthetics of Disney World.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11, pp. 171–80. —(1998), “Environmental Aesthetics,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, ed. M. Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 114–20. —(ed.) (2002), Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate. —(2005), “Ideas for a Social Aesthetic,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 23–38. Berleant, A. and Carlson A. (1998), “Introduction.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 97–100. —(2007), The Aesthetics of Human Environments. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Boone, J. (2005), “The Aesthetic Dissonance of Industrial Wind Machines.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=319 Brady, E. (2003), Aesthetics of the Natural Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —(2005), “Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 177–93. —(2007), “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art.” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 10 (3), pp. 287–300. Brand, P. Z. (ed.) (2000), Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brook, I. (2007), “Aesthetic Interventions of Unauthorised Environmental Interventions.” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 10 (3), pp. 307–18. Brottman, M. (2005), “The Last Stop of Desire: The Aesthetics of the Shopping Center,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. A. Berleant and A. Carlson. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Callicot, J. B. (2003), “Wetland Gloom and Wetland Glory.” Philosophy and Geography, 6 (1), pp. 33–45. Carlson, A. (1976), “Environmental Aesthetics and the Dilemma of Aesthetic Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 10 (2), pp. 69–82 (reprinted in Carlson, 2000).

337

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 337

2/27/2012 10:29:42 AM

Bibliography

—(1979a), “Appreciation and the Natural Environment.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37 (3), pp. 267–76 (reprinted in Carlson and Berleant, 2004). —(1979b), “Formal Qualities and the Natural Environment.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 13 (3), pp. 99–114. —(1984), “Nature and Positive Aesthetics.” Environmental Ethics, 6 (1), pp. 5–34 (reprinted in Carlson, 2000). —(1985), “Appreciating Agricultural Landscapes.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43 (3), pp. 301–12 (reprinted in Carlson, 2000). —(1986), “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (4), pp. 635–50 (reprinted in Carlson, 2000). —(1992), “Environmental Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. D. Cooper. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 142–4. —(1997), “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Japanese Gardens.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (1), pp. 47–56 (reprinted in Carlson, 2000). —(2000), Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. —(2001), “On Aesthetically Appreciating Human Environments.” Philosophy and Geography, 4 (1), pp. 9–24. —(2007), “Environmental Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta (Fall 2007 edn), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmentalaesthetics/ Carlson, A. and Berleant, A. (2004), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Carroll, N. (1993), “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. S. Kemal and I. Gaskel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 244–66. —(2001), “Emotion, Appreciation, and Nature,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 384–94. Chytry, J. (1989), The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cooper, D. (2006), A Philosophy of Gardens. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crawford, D. (2004), “Scenery and the Aesthetics of Nature,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, ed. A. Carlson and A. Berleant. Peterborough: Broadview Press, pp. 253–68. Danto, A. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davies, S. (2006), “Aesthetic Judgements, Artworks and Functional Beauty.” Philosophical Quarterly, 56 (223), pp. 224–41. Dickie, G. (1984), The Art Circle. New York: Haven. Eaton, M. M. (1998), “Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 149–56 (reprinted in Carlson and Berleant, 2005). Godlovitch, S. (1994), “Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 11 (1), pp. 15–30 (reprinted in Carlson and Berleant, 2004). Gould, C. (2005), “Glamour as an Aesthetic Property of Persons.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63 (3), pp. 237–47.

338

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 338

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Graham, G. (2003), “Architecture,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 555–71. Haapala, A. (2005), “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 39–55. Hargrove, E. (1989), Foundations of Environmental Ethics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Hepburn, R. (1966), “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, ed. B. Williams and A. Montefiore. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 285–310. —(1988), “The Concept of the Sublime: Has It Any Relevance for Philosophy Today?” Dialectics and Humanism, 15 (1–2), pp. 137–55. Hettinger, N. (2005), “Allen Carlson’s Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment.” Environmental Ethics, 27 (1), pp. 57–76. —(2008), “Objectivity in Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment,” in Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, ed. A. Carlson and S. Lintott. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 413–37. Heyd, T. (2002), “Nature Restoration without Dissimulation: Learning from Japanese Gardens and Earthworks.” Essays in Philosophy, 3 (1), pp. 1–13, http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol3/iss1/12/ Higgins, K. (2003), “Comparative Aesthetics,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 679–92. Irvin, S. (2008a), “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (1), pp. 486–500. —(2008b), “Scratching an Itch.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (1), pp. 25–35. Korsmeyer, C. (1999), Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kristeller, P. O. (1998), “Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual Overview,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, ed. M. Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 416–28. Kuehn, G. (2005), “How Can Food Be Art?” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 194–212. Leddy, T. (1988), “Gardens in an Expanded Field.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 28 (4), pp. 327–40. —(1995), “Everyday Surface Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty’.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (3), pp. 259–68 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). —(1997), “Sparkle and Shine.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (3), pp. 259–73. —(2005), “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 3–22. —(2008), “The Aesthetics of Junkyards and Roadside Clutter.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 6, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=511

339

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 339

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Light, A. (2001), “The Urban Blind Spot in Environmental Ethics.” Environmental Politics, 10 (1), pp. 7–35. Light, A. and Smith, J. M. (eds) (2005), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Lintott, S. (2007), “Ethically Evaluating Land Art: Is It Worth It?” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 10 (3), pp. 263–77. Loftis, R. J. (2003), “Three Problems for the Aesthetic Foundations of Environmental Ethics.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 10 (2), pp. 41–50. Macauley, D. (2000), “Walking the City: An Essay on Peripatetic Practices and Politics.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 11 (4), pp. 3–43 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). Matthews, P. (2002), “Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60 (1), pp. 37–48. McCraken, J. (2005), “The Aesthetics of Playtime Recycling,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. A. Berleant and A. Carlson. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Melchionne, K. (1998), “Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 191–200 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). Miller, M. (1993), The Garden as an Art. Albany: SUNY Press. Montero, B. (2006), “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2), pp. 231–42. Moore, R. (2008), Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics beyond the Arts. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Mothersill, M. (1992), “The Sublime,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. D. Cooper. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 407–11. Newman, I. (2001), “Reflections on Allen Carlson’s Aesthetics and the Environment.” Æ: Canadian Aesthetics Journal/Revue Canadienne d’Esthetique, 6, www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_6/Carlson/newman.html Novitz, D. (2001), The Boundaries of Art: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Place of Art in Everyday Life, 2nd edn. Christchurch: Cybereditions. Parsons, G. (2002), “Nature Appreciation, Science, and Positive Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (3), pp. 279–95. —(2007), “The Aesthetics of Nature.” Philosophy Compass, 2, pp. 258–72. —(2008a), Aesthetics and Nature. London: Continuum. —(2008b), “Nature, Aesthetic Values, and Urban Design: Building the Natural City,” in Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, ed. P. E. Vermaas, P. Kroes, A. Light, and S. A. Moore. London: Springer, pp. 341–52. Parsons, G. and Carlson, A. (2008), Functional Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prall, D. (1929), Aesthetic Judgment. New York: Crowell. Rolston, H. (1998), “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 157–67 (reprinted in Carlson and Berleant, 2004). —(2000), “Aesthetics in the Swamps.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43 (4), pp. 584–97.

340

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 340

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Ross, S. (1993), “Gardens, Earthworks, and Environmental Art,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. S. Kemal and I. Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 183–98. —(1998), What Gardens Mean. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. —(1999), “Gardens’ Powers.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33 (3), pp. 4–17. —(2006), “Paradoxes and Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens and Urban Nature.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 4, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=400 Ryynanen, M. (2005), “Learning from Venice.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Vol. 1, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=349 Saito, Y. (1998a), “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 101–11. —(1998b), “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms.” Environmental Ethics, 20 (2), pp. 135–49. —(1999), “Japanese Aesthetics of Packaging.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (2), pp. 257–65. —(2004), “Machines in the Ocean: The Aesthetics of Wind Farms.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 2, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=247 —(2005), “Response to Jon Boone’s Critique.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=321 —(2007a), Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2007b), “The Moral Dimension of Japanese Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1), pp. 85–97. Sandrisser, B. (1998), “Cultivating Commonplaces: Sophisticated Vernacularism in Japan.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 201–10 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). Santayana, G. (1896), The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sartwell, C. (2003), “Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 761–70. Schauman, S (1998), “The Garden and the Red Barn: The Pervasive Pastoral and Its Environmental Consequences.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 181–90 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). Sepänmaa, Y. (2005), “The Aesthetics of the Road, Road Art, and Road Traffic.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Vol. 1, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=348 —(2007), “Multisensoriness and the City,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. A. Berleant and A. Carlson. Peterborough: Broadview Press, pp. 92–9. Shusterman, R. (2006), “Aesthetic Experience: from Analysis to Eros.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2), pp. 217–29. Sparshott, F. (1972), “Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environment.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 6 (3), pp. 11–23. Stecker, R. (1997), “The Correct and the Appropriate in the Appreciation of Nature.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (4), pp. 393–402.

341

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 341

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Thompson, J. (1995), “Aesthetics and the Value of Nature.” Environmental Ethics, 17 (3), pp. 291–305. Von Bonsdorff, P. (2002), “Urban Richness and the Art of Building,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, ed. A. Berleant. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 89–101 (reprinted in Berleant and Carlson, 2007). —(2005), “Agriculture, Aesthetic Appreciation and the Worlds of Nature.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=325 Von Bonsdorff, P. and Haapala, A. (eds) (1999), Aesthetics in the Human Environment. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy. Walton, K. (1970), “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review, 79 (3), pp. 334–67. Welsh, W. (2005), “Sport Viewed Aesthetically, and Even as Art?” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 135–55. Winkler, J. (2005), “The Eye and the Hand: Professional Sensitivity and the Idea of an Aesthetics of Work on the Land.” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=289 Winters, E. (2007), Aesthetics & Architecture. London: Continuum. Zangwill, N. (2003), “Beauty,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 325–43.

Chapter 17 Brand, P. (1998), “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. C. Korsmeyer. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 155–71. Carroll, N. (2007), “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1), pp. 131–43. Eaton, A. W. (2009), “Feminist Standpoint Aesthetics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn, ed. S. Davies et al. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 272–5. Gandolfo, D. (2009), “The Past, Present and Future of Globalization: Colonialism, Terrorism, and the Need for Democratic Supranational Governance.” Review Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1), pp. 45–74. Harding, S. (1993), “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L. Alcoff. New York: Routledge, pp. 49–82. —(1997), “Comment on Heckman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Whose Standpoint Needs the Regimes of Truth and Reality?” Signs, 22 (2), pp. 367–74. —(2003), “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–15. —(2006), Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hartsock, N. (1983), “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist 342

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 342

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. S. Harding and M. Hintikka. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 283–310. Rose, H. (1983), “Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences.” Signs, 9 (1), pp. 73–90. Smith, D. (1987), The Everyday World as Problematic: A Sociology for Women. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Zinn, H. (1995), A People’s History of the United States, revised edn. New York: Harper Collins.

Chapter 18 Berleant, A. (1997), Living in the Landscape: Towards an Aesthetics of Environment. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Bryson, N. (1990), Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Budd, M. (2008), Aesthetic Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dretske, F. (2006), “Perception without Awareness,” in Perceptual Experience, ed. T. S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 147–80. Hales, S. D. (2007), Beer and Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking. Malden: Blackwell. Iseminger, G. (2008), “Experiential Theories of Aesthetic Value,” in Aesthetic Experience, ed. R. Shusterman and A. Tomlin, New York: Routledge, pp. 45–53. Kania, A. (2008), “New Waves in Musical Ontology,” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. K. Stock and K. Thompson-Jones. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 20–40. Korsmeyer, C. (1999), Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kupfer, J. (1983), Experience as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life. Albany: SUNY Press. Leddy, T. (2005), “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. A. Light and J. M. Smith, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 3–22. Lewis, C. I. (1946), An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Light, A. and Smith, J. M. (eds) (2005), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Livingston, P. (2004), “C. I. Lewis and the Outlines of Aesthetic Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (4), pp. 378–92. —(2006), “Utile et Dulce: A Reply to Noël Carroll.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 46 (3), pp. 274–81. —(2009), “Lewis, C(larence) I(rving),” in A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn, ed. S. Davies et al. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 405–8. Novitz, D. (1992), The Boundaries of Art. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

343

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 343

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Bibliography

Pritchard, M. (2009), “Directions in Contemporary German Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43 (3), pp. 117–27. Saito, Y. (1997), “The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (2), pp. 101–11. —(2007), Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartwell, C. (1995), Art of Living. Albany: SUNY Press. Shusterman, R. and Tomlin A. (eds) (2008), Aesthetic Experience. New York: Routledge. Smith, B. C. (ed.) (2007), Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stecker, R. (2006), “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value.” Philosophy Compass, 1 (1), pp. 1–10.

344

9781847063700_Biblio_Final_txt_print.indd 344

2/27/2012 10:29:43 AM

Index

Abell, C. 174, 181 Abraham and Isaac (Donatello) 56, 61, 69 Acconci, V. 10 achievement-related properties, of artwork 58 active discovery 78 Actors Theatre of Louisville 148 Adajian, T. 52n. 5 Adagio for Strings 158 Adequacy of the Deflationist Definition thesis (ADD) 44 aesthetic anti-realism 87–90, 93–5 aesthetic attitude 18, 76 aesthetic education 2 aesthetic experience, of the agreeable 74–5 within Anglo-American aesthetics 74 Beardsley’s view 77–8 Beckett, S. 164n. 25 Budd’s view 82–3 Bullough’s view 75–6 Carroll’s view 80–1 content approach 80–3 Dickie’s view 76–7 epistemic approach 78–9 involving cognitions 75 Iseminger’s view 78–80 Kant’s view 74–5 Levinson’s view 81–2 non-instrumental value 75 phenomenological approach 75–80 psychological aspect 76–7 Stolnitz’ view 76 Walton’s view 79–80 aesthetic judgments 92–3, 100–1 aesthetic pleasure 81 aesthetic properties 2, 18 anti-realism argument 87–90, 93–5 categorization 86–7 at epistemological level 85–6, 89–90 at ontological level 85–6, 89

phenomenal nature of 92 philosophical problem in expressing 85–6 realist argument 91–5 response-dependent nature of 92–3 truth -conditions vs acceptability conditions 90 aesthetic qualities 84 categorization 86 as emotional qualities 87 aesthetic realism 91–5 aesthetic taste and perception, relativity of 88 aethetic values 100–2 Ainge, H. B. R. 208 Alberti, L. B. 6, 174 Alexander, C. 213n. 2 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) 188 Alien 187–8 Allen, R. 194 Alperson, P. 113, 119 Amazonian Pirahã tribe 126 analytic aesthetics 14 analytic philosophy 14 ancient Greek culture and aesthetics, art 2 beautiful or fine 2 concepts of beautiful/good/truth 4–5 imitation/representation 2 nature, imitation of 4 notion of aesthetic experience 2 pleasure 2 poetry 3 Anderson, J. 106 Andrews, M. 232 anti-aesthetic art 24 antiplatonism 209 anti-realism 86–90, 93–5 Apollinaire 134 Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (Pugin) 201

345

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 345

3/1/2001 9:42:08 PM

Index Appiah, K. A. 254n. 4 appreciation, theories of 31, 79 Aquinas 4 architectural aesthetics 6 authentic reconstructions 210–12 design 202–4 optical correction 208–9 style 204–8 Aretoulakis, E. 233 Aristophanes 3 Aristotle 1–4, 24, 50, 103, 112, 118, 127, 131, 140n. 14, 143, 154n. 4 arousal theory of musical expression 114 art, agreements and disagreements related to 39–40 in ancient Greek culture 2 anti-aesthetic 24 atypicality and typicality effects 47–8 Beardsley’s definition 23 cluster definitions 48–9, 53n. 40 deflationist definitions of 43–5 historical context of 129–30 institutionalist definitions of 40–2 as natural kind 48 nominalistic definition 42 as the paradigm object of aesthetic appreciation 17 reductionistic definitions of 43–8 technical/non-technical distinction 45–6 Zangwill’s definition 24 Art and Emotion 114 art-concerned bourgeoisie 26 The Art Instinct 11 art-specific values, aethetic 100–2 anti-theoretical view 109–10 as audience experience 104 autonomism and 106–7 as character or intentions of the artist 104 cognitive 102–3 ethicism and 107–9 interaction between moral and aesthetic 105–7 intrinsic 105 as manifested attitudes 104–5 moderate moralism and 107–9 moral and political 99–100 pluralists’ view 106

relations between aesthetic and moral values 109–10 art-theoretical innocents 26 artworks, study of 18 as an action 68–9 as constituted by physical objects 62–3 as content of physical object 64–7 as embodiment of physical object 63–4 as an idea 61–2 identity relation, problems with 58–61 methodology 55–7 as ontologically diverse 69–71 as physical objects 57 as a structure 67–8 artworld discourse 21–2 Transnational Artworld 252 Artworld Metaphysics 21 artworld values 22 aesthetician’s relationship with 22 Augustine 4 autonomism 106–7 Baker, L. R. 62, 72n. 18 Banes, S. 157 Bantinaki, K. 175 Baptista, L. F. 122 Barbaro, D. 209 Barber, S. 158 Barry, R. 61 basic beliefs 20 Batson, C. D. 196 Battaly, H. 196 Batteux, A. C. 7, 129–30, 140n. 25 Baudry, J.-L. 186 Baumgarten, A. 1, 100 Baxandall, M. 171 Bay, M. 215–16, 221, 223 Bazin, A. 185 Beardsley, M. C. 9–10, 23, 77–8, 102, 104, 157 Beat (Mark Dendy) 160 beautiful speech 127 beauty 2–8, 10–11, 16, 92, 203, 209, 250, 252, 263 Catholic scholasticism and 5 Hume’s views 85, 88, 249 Plato’s views 99 Beethoven symphony 77, 79, 120, 211, 216 Bell, C. 10, 101 Bender, J. 88, 90, 96n. 13 Benzon, W. 118

346

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 346

3/1/2001 9:42:09 PM

Index Bergman, I. 215–16 Berleant, A. 228–33, 236–7, 259 Best, D. N. 166 Bicknell, J. 119, 272 The Biological Foundations of Music 120 biomusicality 120–4 birdsong 122 Black Atlantic music 120 Blackburn, S. 52n. 4 Blade Runner 187–8 blocking notes 154n. 5 Boghossian, P. 115 Bonaventure 4 Bonzon, R. 110–11 Boone, J. 231 Bordwell, D. 192–4 Boretz, B. 117 Borges, J. L. 134 Borum, R. A. 55 Boyd, R. 49–51 Brady, E. 230–1, 233, 236 Brand, P. 233, 250–1 Branigan, E. 194 Britannica 129, 1768–71 British Journal of Aesthetics, the 113 Brook, I. 233 Brottman, M. 232 Brown, L. 113, 115–16, 120, 124 Bryson, N. 259 Budd, M. 17, 19, 80, 82–3, 117, 174, 264 Bullough, E. 75–6, 102 Bush, G. 219 “Butterfly” series 266

Churchlands 32 Chytry, J. 233 Clercq, R. De 201–13, 213n. 7 Closed Gallery Piece (Robert Barry) 61, 63 cognitive value of art 102–3 Cohen, S. J. 169n. 1 Cohen, T. 96n. 6, 112, 157, 163 coherence theory, of justification 28 of truth 28 Colapinto, J. 139n. 12 Collingwood, R. 11, 61 Compendium of Music (Descartes) 112 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi) 201 conceptual art 10 Conroy, R. M. 170n. 4 “continental” philosophical tradition 9 Cooper, D. 232 Cooper Albright, A. 162 Copenhagen, N. 266 Coplan, A. 196, 198, 200nn. 16, 18–20, 22 Copland, A. 112 The Corded Shell 113 Crawford, D. 240 Creed, B. 187 Croce, A. 164–5, 167–8 Croce, B. 11, 61 Cross, I. 117 cubism 180 Currie, G. 11, 27, 68, 72nn. 29, 32, 70, 134, 196 Curtis, W. 205

Cage, J. 10 Calligrammes 134 Cantor, G. 46 Caplan, B. 72n. 31 Carlson, A. 213, 228–33, 235–6, 238–9, 241, 254n. 6 Carroll, L. 188 Carroll, N. 9, 42, 52n. 12, 80–2, 100–1, 107, 109, 111n. 2, 119, 130–1, 154n. 6, 157, 185, 192–4, 197–8, 220, 230, 243–4, 252 Catholic mysticism 4 Cavell, S. 218 cave paintings 11 Cawdrey, R. 129 Chaplin, C. 189, 200n. 10 Chasid, A. 182

dance 1, 123 ballets 163 choreographers’ works 168 contemporary 165 Croce’s views 164–7 as an embodied art 163–4, 169n. 3 as an ephemeral art form 157–61 focus of body and movement sequences 162 hybridization of styles 244 kinesthetic responses to 166 notion of ephemerality 161–9 physical appearance of dancers 161 post-structuralist view 158 substantive aspects of non-dance life 164

347

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 347

3/1/2001 9:42:09 PM

Index Dancy, J. 28 Danger Music No. 5 (Nam Jun Paik) 71 Danto, A. 67–8, 72n. 24, 230 Darwin, C. 11, 123, 126, 128 Dauberval, J. 169n. 2 David (Michelangelo) 62, 71 Davies, D. 11, 27, 52n. 7, 56, 61, 68, 70, 72n. 29, 139n. 1, 141n. 44 Davies, S. 48–9, 52n. 4, 13, 53n. 27, 61, 113–15, 200n. 21, 232, 241 Dean, J. 106 DeBellis, M. 118 De Clercq, R. 212 Dedekind, R. 46 deflationism 43–5, 47 Deleuze, G. 255 demiourgoi 5 Dendy, M. 160 Descartes, R. 6, 112 descriptive aesthetics 20–2 Devereaux, M. 98 Dewey, J. 234 Dickie, G. 9, 40, 42, 76–8, 102, 106, 230 Dictionnaire de l’Academie francaise 129 Dilworth, J. 60, 64–7, 71n. 10, 72nn. 19, 22 directions, in aesthetics 256–7 disinterested attention (DA) 76, 250–1 disinterested pleasure, notion of 8, 10, 17 disinterestedness, notion of 7, 263 Dissanayake, E. 123 “divine inspiration” 8 Dodd, J. 115 domain of aesthetics 15–19 Donatello 69 Double Negative (Michael Heizer) 233 Drake, C. 121 Dretske, F. 260 DuBois, B. 162 Duchamp, M. 10, 24, 26, 59, 101 Dürer, A. 6 Dutton, D. 11, 49, 51 Earl of Shaftesbury 7 Eaton, A. W. 251 Eaton, M. M. 96n. 6, 230 eighteenth century aesthetics 6–8 Batteux’s Beaux Arts 7 Catholic church, role of 6 Diderot’s Encyclopédie 7 disinterested pleasure, notion of 8

ethical-aesthetic-epistemological value, idea of 7 philosophical thought of beauty and arts 6 Eisenberg, N. 196 Eisenstein, S. 184–5 Elgin, C. 133–4 eliminativism 45–7 Elton, W. 20 empirical philosophy 31 empiricism 8 Enlightenment era 129 environmental aesthetics 11 aesthetics of nature and 229–31 built environments 232 domestic settings 232 environmental art 233 environment as background 235–40 future of 240–1 scope of 228–9 significance of recent changes 231–2 Sparshott’s paradox 239–40 subject-oriented experiences 233 themes 234–5 viewer-dependency of objects 237–9 Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara 4 error theories 26–7 Esplanade 158 everyday aesthetics 11, 258–62, 264, 267 evolutionary aesthetics 11 experimental philosophy 31–2 expressive speech 127 Feagin, S. 113, 141n. 44, 173, 196 film theory, cinematic conventions 186 cognitive 192–4 conditions for moving image 185 emotional responses 194–8 essential features 185 feminist research 186 functionalist definition of film 185 history of 184–7 as illustrations 188 mirroring responses 198–9 Mulhall’s view 187–8, 190 Mulvey’s view 186–7 philosophical aspects 187–92 as philosophy thesis 190–1

348

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 348

3/1/2001 9:42:09 PM

Index principles of interpretation 191 Smith’s view 190 Wartenberg’s view 188–90 “first-order” aesthetic practices 20–1 Fisher, J. A. 116, 122 Fitch, W. T. 122 Flavin, D. 56 Fodor, J. 118 formalism 101 Foster, J. L. 139n. 6 Four Books of Architecture (Palladio) 201 Frege, G. 46 Friedberg, A. 187 Gadara 4 Gandolfo, D. I. 254n. 1 Gardner, H. 118 Gaut, B. 9, 18, 49, 100, 104, 107, 194–6 Geissmann, T. 123 A Generative Theory of Tonal Music 117 Gentileschi, A. 57, 63 “genuine judgements” 92 geometry 6 Gettier problem 32 Giedion, S. 205, 213n. 5 global standpoint aesthetics 242 art and 243–4 field of history and 246–7 marginalization 248–9 standpoint epistemology 244–6, 249–52 Godlovitch, S. 230 Goethe House in Frankfurt 210 Goldberg Variations 161 Goldie, P. 196 Goldman, A. 18, 88, 95, 198 Gombrich, E. 172 Gonzalez-Torres, F. 60, 63, 66 good, Kant’s view of 75 Goodman, N. 25, 113, 115, 133–4, 177–9, 182–3 goshoden 60 Gothic churches 6 Gould, G. 161, 233 Gracyk, T. 113, 115 Graham, M. 159, 169n. 1, 167, 202, 232 Griffiths, P. 50 Grossman, M. 120 Gurney, E. 117 Guyer, P. 75, 101

H’Doubler, M. N. 157 Haapala, A. 228, 234 Hagen, R. 266 Haldane, J. 202 Hales, S. D. 257 Hamilton, J. 51n. 2, 147, 153–4n. 3, 154n. 10, 155n. 29 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 91 Harding, S. 244–5 Hargrove, E. 230 Harman, G. 23, 32 Harold, J. 103, 110 Hartshorne, C. 122 Hartsock, N. 244 Haugeland, J. 178 heavy metal music 220–1 Hedda Gabbler (Ibsen) 147 Hegel, G. F. 8, 140–1n. 30 Heizer, M. 233 Hepburn, R. 18, 229, 231, 237 Hettinger, N. 230–1 Heyd, T. 232 Higgins, K. 119, 235 Hirsch, E. D. 130, 140n. 26 Hirst, D. 16 historicism 205 history, philosophy of 14 homeostatic property clusters 49–51 Hopkins, R. 173–6 Hume, D. 8, 16–17, 21, 85, 88–9, 94, 107, 249–50 Hutcheson, F. 7 Hyman, J. 175, 181 Iacoboni, M. 198 Ibsen, H. 147, 158 ideal aesthetic experience 242 idealism 8 identity relation of artworks, problems with 58–61 modalities 58–9 one-to-one relation, lack of 59–61 properties 58 Iliad 3, 138 imitative theory of art 2, 4 imitative vocalization 126–8 immoralism 108–9 imperialism 21 In Advance of the Broken Arm 59 incommensurability 203–4

349

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 349

3/1/2001 9:42:09 PM

Index inferential principles 25 Ingredients Model of theater 154n. 10 epistemological advantages 145–6 limitations 148 ontological aspects 146–8 inscription-based ontology 138 interested attention (IA) 77, 250–1 intra-stylistic judgments 180 intra-systemic judgments 180 intrinsic value of art 105 intuitions 29, 45, 49, 106, 143, 179 for aestheticians 32 anti-realist 92, 95 contingent 30 functional role 30 moral 30 ontological 56–7, 61, 69–70 as opinions 31 rationality of 30 realist 88, 94–5 scientists vs philosophers 30–3 Irvin, S. 70, 233, 237 Ise Jingu, Shinto shrine 60, 211–12 Iseminger, G. 74, 78–80, 104, 264 Jackendoff, R. 117 Jackson, M. 215, 220, 225 Jacobson, D. 108–9 Japanese architecture 60 Johnson, S. 129 Jørgensen, M. B. 266 Journal of Aesthetic Education 113 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 113 Judith Slaying Holofernes (Artemisia Gentileschi) 63 Kania, A. 116, 257 Kant, I. 8, 16–17, 19, 74–6, 100–2, 112, 263 Keister, R. A. 122 Kieran, M. 107–8 Kimmel, L. 116 Kingsbury, J. 114 Kivy, P. 9, 11, 113–15, 117, 119, 137–8, 141n. 44 knowledge-generating mode of inquiry 33 kodenshi 60 Korsmeyer, C. 233, 236, 257, 259 Krasner, D. 153n. 2 Kraut, R. 21–4, 27 Krier, L. 205

Kristeller, P. O. 10, 124n. 1, 129, 153n. 3, 232 Kuehn, G. 233 Kulvicki, J. 51n. 2, 173, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183 Kunej, D. 123 Kupfer, J. 257 La Sylphide 169n. 2 The Lady from the Sea 158 Lamarque, P. 102–3, 139n. 1, 140n. 30 Lamentation (Martha Graham) 159, 169n. 1 Language, Music, and Mind (Diana Raffman) 118 Le Corbusier 201 Leddy, T. 231–2, 234, 236, 240–1, 258–61 Lehrdahl, F. 117 Levin, D. M. 156 Levinson, J. 9, 11, 41, 67–8, 71nn. 6, 7, 72nn. 18, 26, 30, 81–2, 92, 94–5, 113–17, 173 Levitin, D. 118 Lewis, C. I. 262–3, 265–6 Lewis, D. 31, 178 Lewisian conception, of aesthetic experience 266 Light, A. 228, 234 Lintott, S. 233 Literary Model of theater, alternative to 144–52 modified (Recipe Model) 144 strength and weaknesses 143 literature 16, 45, 103, 143, 176 in academic circles 133 aestheticizing of 130 artistic expression of 128–9 categories 131–3 enunciations 137–8 headings 131 Iliad 138 imitation in 130 inscriptions 134–5 intentions and versions 136–7 Nussbaum’s views 103 ontological criteria 136–7 origins of 126 philosophical inquiry about 131 spellings 134 Liveness Model of theatrical performance, and enactment/pretense 152 objections to and defenses of 149–51 responses to criticisms 149–51

350

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 350

3/1/2001 9:42:09 PM

Index Livingston, P. 133–7, 141nn. 31, 32, 34–40, 187, 189–91, 200n. 12 Loftis, R. J. 230 Lomazzo 209 Longinus 4 Lopes, D. M. 9, 43–5, 60, 173–6, 181, 183, 211–12 Luntley, M. 118 Lutyens, E. 206 lyric poetry 127–8 see also poetry, philosophy of origins of 128 in sense of an art 1 Macauley, D. 232 Macdonald, M. 71n. 6 Mackie, J. L. 105 Mallon, R. 53n. 41 Marcus, R. B. 71n. 11 Margolis, J. 20, 63–4, 72n. 20 Mark, K. 66 mass art 219–21 Matheson, C. 72n. 31 Matravers, D. 52n. 3, 75, 95, 114, 207 The Matrix 189 Matthews, P. 230 McCraken, J. 232 McDonald, D. 222 McFee, G. 157, 166 Meditations on Poetry 7 Melchionne, K. 232 Meskin, A. 45–6, 47–8, 52n. 5, 53nn. 21, 35 metaphysics 32, 84–5, 87, 90, 92, 95, 112, 159, 202, 210, 255–7 methodology of aesthetics 15–19 aesthetic properties or aspects 16 artworks as objects of aesthetic appreciation 18 data for 17–19 definition schema 17–18 descriptive vs normative 20–4 intuitions and 29–33 methodological question 15–16 object-oriented approach 16–19 philosophical aesthetics 34–5 pragmatic constraints 27 reflective equilibrium 24–9 regards for nature 18

seminal approaches of Hume and Kant 16–17 subject-oriented approach 16–17 truth objection 28–9 Metz, C. 186 Michelangelo 57, 59, 216 Miller, G. 123 Miller, M. 232 mirror neurons 196 Mitrovic, B. 209 Modern Times (Charles Chaplin) 189, 200n. 10 The Modulor (Le Corbusier) 201 Molino, J. 123 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) 59, 71n. 13 Montero, B. 166, 233, 237 Moore, G. E. 105 Moore, R. 240 moral value of art 99–100 Mosley, A. 120 Mothersill, M. 92, 231 Mozart 215–17 Mulhall, S. 187–8, 190 Mulvey, L. 186–7, 254n. 3 Münsterberg, H. 185 music 1, 5–7, 12, 21, 31, 65, 79, 82, 84, 103, 144, 157–9, 257–8, 260, 263 analytical philosophy of 113–16 animal 122–3 as a biological capacity in humans 121–2 connection with morality 118–20 Darwin’s views 126–8 in emotional terms 113–14 evolution of 123–4 improvisational 115 Kivy’s view 114 Levinson’s view 114–15 ontology of 115–16 origins of 126 Schopenhauer’s discussion of 112 understanding and appreciation of 116–18 musical cognition 118 The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion 117 musical vocalization 127 The Music of Our Lives 119

351

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 351

3/1/2001 9:42:10 PM

Index natural kinds, homeostatic property-cluster view 49–51 Kripke/Putnam view of 48 natural objects 55–6, 71n. 1 naturalized epistemology 25 nature, imitation of 2, 4 as objects of aesthetic appreciation 18–19 Nazi regime 98 Nehamas, A. 99 Neill, A. 196 neoarousalism 114 Newman, I. 240 Nochlin, L. 180 non-basic beliefs 20 normative aesthetics 23–4 Noverre, J. G. 169n. 2 Novitz, D. 213n. 5, 233, 257 Nussbaum, C. 117 Nussbaum, M. 103 O’Dea, J. 120 Object Carried for One Year (Kelly Mark) 66 object directedness 78 objects of aesthetic theory 15 Olsen, S. H. 102–3 Omikami, A. 60 On Film (Stephen Mulhall) 187 onomatopoeia 173 ontological status of artwork 56, 69–71 optimization theory 203 Paik, N. J. 71 painting 1, 6 Palladio 201 Papalambros, P. Y. 203 Papousek, H. 123 Papousek, M. 123 Parfit, D. 162 Parmenidean option 28 Parsons, G. 230–1, 232–4, 241 Peacocke, C. 174, 178 A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn) 246 perceptual conceptions 181 perceptual properties 91 Peretz, I. 118, 120–1 Performance Model of theater 144

personal distress 200n. 19 Pevsner, N. 205 philosophical aesthetics 6, 34–5 philosophical problems 34–5 philosophy, history of 1 philosophy of art 1, 6 phonetic patterning 128 physical object 19, 233, 266 as artist’s creative activity 68–9 as complex structure in artwork 67–8 constitution relation with artwork 62–3 embodiment relation with artwork 63–4 intimate relation with artwork 69–71 as a reconstruction of artist’s idea 61–2 as representational content in artwork 64–7 pictorial realism 180–3 Pinker, S. 123 Plantinga, C. 192, 194, 197–8 Plato 1–5, 7–8, 22, 99–100, 104, 118, 209 platonism 209 pleasurable experience 74 pleasure 2 Plotinus 4 Podro, M. 173 poetry, philosophy of 1, 99 ancient Greek 3 Aristotle’s view 3 “cathartic” effect 3 Hellenistic thinkers 3–4 lyric 1, 128 for significant occasion 3 political value of art 99–100 popular art forms 11 aesthetic value of 221–5 as commercial enterprise 217 difference between high art and 216–17 entertainment criterion 218–19 nature of 215–21 popularity 216 profit motive distinction 217–18 positive aesthetics 231 Posner, R. 104 pragmatic constraints 61 in theorizing artwork 56 Prall, D. 236 prejudicial beliefs 25 pretheoretical beliefs 25–7 Pride and Prejudice 137

352

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 352

3/1/2001 9:42:10 PM

Index Primitive Mysteries (Martha Graham) 167 Prinz, J. 31, 200n. 22 Pritchard, M. 264 Production Model of theater 144–5 propositional pleasure 17 psychical distance 75–6 Pythagoras 5, 112 quadrivium 5 Quine, W. V. O. 25 Raadvad, G. 266 Radford, C. 114, 119 Raffman, D. 118 rationalism 8 Rauschenberg, R. 10 Rawls, J. 24–5 realism, aesthetic properties 86, 91–5 visual arts 180–3 recognition theories of depiction 173–5 reflective equilibrium 24–9 repleteness 177, 179 Republic 118 Ribeiro, A. C. 51n. 2, 141n. 44, 254n. 7, 267 Richman, B. 124 Ridley, A. 113, 116 Riefenstahl, L. 98, 100 Rizzolatti, G. 198 Robinson, J. 103, 200n. 21 Rohe, M. van der 205 Rohrbaugh, G. 71n. 10, 72n, 32, 115 Rolston, H. 230 Romanesque churches 6 romantic movement aesthetics 9–10 conceptual art 10 “continental” philosophical tradition 9 literary criticism 9 philosophy 9 Rose, H. 244 Ross, S. 231–3 Rothenberg, D. 122–3 Rudinow, J. 119 Russell, B. 46, 189, 191 Ryynanen, M. 232 Sacks, O. 121 Saito, Y. 230–4, 238–40, 258–61, 264–5 Saltz, D. 153n. 2 Sandrisser, B. 232

Santayana, G. 236 Sartwell, C. 235, 257 Schauman, S. 231 Schellenberg, G. E. 96n. 5, 97n. 35, 121, 257 Schenker, H. 117 Schier, F. 173, 181 Schmidt, J. 120 Schoenberg, A. 112 Schopenhauer, A. 8, 112 Scott, R. 187 Scruton, R. 10, 90, 115, 119, 201–9, 213nn. 1, 4 sculpture 1, 6 eighteenth century aesthetics 6 of Michelangelo 57 sense perception 16 Sepänmaa, Y. 232 Seraphic Song 165 sexual selection 126–7 Shakespeare 216, 224 Sharpe, R. A. 113 Shusterman, R. 113, 233, 237, 264 Sibley, F. 91, 96n. 6 Sidgwick, H. 24 Sidney, Sir P. 6 Siegel, M. 157–8 Sinigaglia, C. 198 Sinnott-Armstrong, W. 30 Smith, B. C. 257 Smith, D. 244 Smith, G. M. 192 Smith, J. M. 228 Smith, M. 189–91, 194–5, 198 Smuts, A. 218, 227n.9 Socrates 22, 24, 112 Sophocles 3 Sorrell, T. 34–5 Sosa, E. 30 Sound Sentiment 113 Sparshott, F. 156–7, 160, 163, 169–70n. 3, 235–6, 239–41 speech 127 Speer, A. 108 Spielberg, S. 195 standpoint aesthetics 11–12 standpoint epistemology 244–6, 249–52 Stecker, R. 41–2, 52n. 11, 53n. 27, 72n. 18, 109–11, 240, 264 Stern, R. A. M. 208 Stock, K. 42–3, 52n. 4

353

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 353

3/1/2001 9:42:10 PM

Index Stolnitz, J. 76–7 Stravinsky, I. 112 sublime, notion of 4 Suppes, P. 209 sympathetic attention 76 Taglioni, F. 169n. 2 Tan, E. 194 Tanner, M. 117 Tarantino, Q. 108 taste, notion of 2–3 Taylor, P. 120, 158 Ten Books on Architecture (Vitruvius) 201 Tersman, F. 28–30 Theaetetus 22 theatrical performance, role of pretense in 153 theory-laden reflective beliefs 30 Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (Mullhall) 188 Thomasson, A. 56–7, 61, 69, 71n. 5 Thompson, J. 230 Todd, C. 93 Tolhurst, W. 133–4 Tolstoy, L. 104 Tomlin, A. 264 Torff, B. 118 transparency 179 Tarski, A. 52n. 4 Trehub, S. E. 121, 124 Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl) 98, 100, 102, 104, 106 Trivedi, S. 115 trivium 5 Trojan war, story of 133 Tunniel, J. 188 Turk, I. 123 twenty-first-century aesthetics 10–13 cognitive value of art 10 connection between art and aesthetic experience 10 disinterested pleasure 10 evolutionary aesthetics 11–12 metaphysical nature of aesthetics 10 musical works 10–11 Urmson, J. O. 137–8 Van Camp, J. 156, 160 Van Gogh, V. 216

Venturi 201 vernacularism 205 Vignola 209 Vinci, L. da 6, 59, 218 visual arts, Goodman’s view 177–8 intrinsic properties of pictures 172 non-visual aspects of 171 Parmigianino’s Madonna 175–6 perceptual conceptions 181 Picasso’s depiction 175 pictorial representation 172–9 pretense account of depiction 176–7 realism in 180–3 recognitional capacities 173 recognitional similarity 173–5 structural accounts of depiction 177 syntactic and semantic density representational systems 177–8 transparency 179 Vitruvius 201, 209 Voltolini, A. 179 Von Bonsdorff, P. 228, 231–2 Wachowski, A. 189 Wachowski, L. 189 Walhout, D. 119 Wallin, N. L. 120 Walton, K. 58, 79–80, 105, 107, 173–4, 176, 230 Warhol, A. 10 Warmbrod, K. 52n. 14 Wartenberg, T. 188–9, 200n. 10 Watkin, D. 213n. 5, 205 “we,” notion of 11 Weatherson, B. 107 Weitz, M. 7, 45 Welsh, W. 233 Western architecture 207 whale song 122 Wheeler III, S. 133–4 Whitehead, A. N. 1 Wicks, R. 210–11 Wiggins, D. 162, 213n. 4 Wigman, M. 165 Wilde, D. J. 203 Williamson, T. 28–9, 46 Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. 104 Winkler, J. 231

354

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 354

3/1/2001 9:42:10 PM

Index Winters, E. 202, 232 Wittgenstein, L. 7, 112, 141n. 30 Wollheim, R. 11, 18, 58, 71n. 6, 172–3, 175, 195 Wolterstorff, N. 11, 119 Woodruff, P. 154n. 23

Zangwill, N. 23–4, 26, 91, 93, 97n. 32, 102, 233 Zatorre, R. J. 118, 120 Zeppelin, L. 120 Zinn, H. 246–7, 251

355

9781847063700_Index_Final_txt_print.indd 355

3/1/2001 9:42:10 PM