Reply to Don Keefer [see last post for Keefer's comments on my book The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life]
This is an experiment in posting a paper and reply from a conference. Philosophers often write pieces for conferences that are never published. But why not? At least it may be worthwhile to do so on a blog. This is not however to preclude us from publishing our comments elsewhere.
Don Keefer
and I share strong sympathies with Deweyan pragmatism. Not surprisingly, then, I find myself in
agreement with the four Deweyan points he makes at the beginning of his
comments. I do have trouble with the
distinction between truly appreciable objects and ones that are not, but this
is simply because I think any object can be appreciated in some context, with
suitable framing. I do not think this is
a big issue, however: as far as I can
see it, those who disagree with me on this point are just not exercising their
imaginations enough. More important, I
think, is Don’s point that proper appreciation requires the possibility of
giving reasons and of building a community of appreciators. Don is right that “success in coming to see
aesthetic properties that are the source of satisfaction is a significant
socio-cultural event” that “creates and expands the community of aesthetic
appreciators.” I have already suggested
that aesthetic properties can be intersubjective or “objective” in a
relativized way. However, I think that
philosophers tend to overemphasize the role that giving reasons plays in the
growth of aesthetic communities, especially in the domain of everyday
aesthetics. How often do we really
change our minds about appreciating something based on reasons someone has
given? Reasons play an essential role in
argumentation, but argumentation plays a relatively minor role in determining a
shared community of appreciators. If I
say to you “I want you to listen to this cut!” or “Don’t you think Joan Mitchell
is a powerful painter!?” or, in relation to everyday aesthetics, “The dinner
was just great!” I am not using reasons
but I am inviting you to join my community of appreciation. Sibley and
Isenberg I think did a good job of showing how little a role reasons really
play in aesthetics. Philosophers are also good at making up implicit
reasons to fill in the gaps where there really are no reasons. We could argue about cases all day.
Whether or
not a particular object is appreciated in an arbitrary manner is another issue,
and this brings me back to the case of LSD.
This relates Don’s suggestion that an aesthetic object should be
perpetually available for future engagement.
I just don’t see why perpetual availability would be necessary: something can be aesthetically valuable for
one individual or a small group for a short time (for example a particular
cloud configuration or shadows on a wall) and then become unavailable shortly
afterwards. I do not see that the
unavailability of the LSD experience afterwards (or of the aesthetic qualities
in the object after the drug as warn off) is prejudicial to the experience
being aesthetic. I don’t want to rule
out the possibility, by the way, that an aesthetic experience under LSD is
shareable by two people who have taken LSD or even by one person who has taken
it and one who has not but who is relatively open-minded to novel aesthetic
experiences. Anyway, share-ability does
not imply actual sharing, and so the condition is easily met.
The key
issue however is that what seems bland to the average viewer of the ceiling
looks marvelous to the person under LSD.
This may be due to adding colors or to heightened sensitivity to the
aesthetic qualities that are actually there.
If something is just added (as though for example one had taken colored
pens to the ceiling) then it seems that the object of appreciation is
different. However in the second case it
is not. Also, bear in mind that even in
the first case the appreciator can describe his experience or even create a
work of art that reproduces it for the viewer.
Why does Don
think that LSD experiences are limited to bah-hurrah reports? Aren’t there lengthy and elaborate reports of
such experiences? Similarly, discussion
of food goes far beyond “yummy” in some circles. I do not buy into the idea that non-audio or
visual experiences are especially interior.
This kind of thinking is reminiscent of the kind of dualism that Dewey
opposed in so many other areas: the
audio and visual standing in for mind and the more bodily senses standing in
for the body. In general, humans have
much more elaborate processing centers for aural and visual information than
for taste and touch. This may be the
reason for prejudice against these senses.
However, there is no reason there could not be an intelligent species with
dog-like smell capacity who would equally question our focus on sight or
hearing. You work with what you have, as
far as senses go. On a personal level, I
suspect that my sense of smell is more open to complex aesthetic experiences
than my sense of hearing: I enjoy music
but my enjoyment never seems to rise very high when compared to that of
colleagues as ASA meetings. Having
played in a band, I found that lots of practice and comparison didn’t make much
difference.
I have some
trouble with identification of what Dewey calls integral experience or “an
experience” with doings aesthetically appreciated. In one sense, Don is right, since for Dewey
all experience is a matter of doing (as it is, also, a matter of
undergoing). So, there is a doing
element in all experience. So every
integral experience has a doing element.
But then this does not mark out a special category of things called
“doings” to set down alongside physical objects as objects of aesthetic
experience. As far as Dewey is
concerned appreciation of a painting is as much a doing as appreciating a fine
dinner or appreciating the making of a fine dinner. They all involve doing and undergoing. They all happen over a span of time.
Don has fun
with Irvin’s almost Proustian savoring of a cup of coffee, an experience she
enhances by writing it up. Well, the
ordinary cup of coffee experience is not going to be an integral experience of
the Deweyan sort, but it can be so enhanced, partly by way of writing and other
art-based mediations. Part of what it
means to be interactive with the world is that the things we confront are not
just a set of properties or sense data.
They do not just exist independently of our interactions with them but
are in dynamic relation to those interactions.
Experiencing something is not just undergoing but also doing.
Dewey
stresses that experiences are not private things. Integral experiences are not intrapersonal in
the sense of belonging entirely to private worlds. Irvin shares her experiences with us by
describing them, as did Proust. We enter
into their private worlds by building up something similar from our own
experiences. Sometimes there are
blockages to sharing: as I noted
earlier, I always find it difficult to enter into the emotional world of great
music… I never quite to get it. Entering
Irvin’s world of taste is a bit easier for me, but perhaps less so for
Don. It may all be just a matter of how
we are wired.
There are
lots of examples of having a good time that fall into the category of "an
experience" for Dewey, but there are some cases of having "an
experience" that might not be best described as simply having a good time,
for example breaking up an old relationship and going through a major
storm. Dewey also mentions several other criteria for “an experience”
including an end that is a culmination, not a sensation, and the presence of a
pervasive quality. One could have a good
time without these. But in my book I
argued that aesthetic experience goes beyond Dewey’s “an experience” and that
one might better see such experience as an aesthetic ideal. I am inclined to think that having a good
time is usually just a more conventional and less academic way of referring to
having an everyday aesthetic experience. We philosophers often use
high-fallutin terms for simple things, but the simpler terms are often
better. For example in my book I
referred to “looks good” as an aesthetic quality.
Don thinks
that rushing his perfectly smooth béchamel sauce to his wife to collect her
admiration is nothing like appreciating a turn of phrase, or the latest model
of VW Golf in that it is a purely private affair. His reasoning here is that his experience is
not something you can appreciate. Yet I wonder how appreciating the sauce
is different from appreciating the car.
In both cases one might be appreciating the aesthetic quality of
“smoothness.” There are connoisseurs
both of cars and of cooking. The only
difference I can see is that the aesthetic qualities of the car might be more
complicated, and the venue for the sauce appreciation in this instance is more
private. We may never see the
smoothness of this béchamel sauce again, but the Golf can be seen by many. I can see Don’s point that one does not
appreciate the experiences of others or even one's own experience: one
appreciates the object within experience. But I am not yet convinced that
there is a big difference between the objects here.
Don raises
challenging questions concerning the need for the concept of “aura.” My phrase
"description of an object's aura" was unfortunate if we see
description as a point by point portrayal of something. The dictionary
says that to describe is to give a verbal account of something and to tell
about it in detail. Obviously, aesthetic property terms cannot tell us
about aura, and certainly not in detail. I should have said that they
indicate the presence of aura. But perhaps the question remains why we
need to talk about aura when we can talk about grace, elegance, or a number of
other properties. My response is that there must be something that these
properties have in common. I am also
thinking about other terms that are not usually seen as aesthetic but which are
used to indicate something aesthetic or are used aesthetically. These too must refer to something shared with
aesthetic terms. Elegance, grace,
prettiness, and so forth, on my view are all specific types of aura.
This leads
to perhaps the most serious problem for aura theory, one kindly not mentioned
by any of my commentators, but I might as well bring it up myself. The objection is that there is a perfectly
good, although equally vague, term for what I am talking about, and that term
is "beauty," at least when taken in the most general sense. You
could say that beauty in this sense is indicated by the various aesthetic
property terms when they are used aesthetically. Another word, more
technical, but familiar to all of us, is "aesthetic." On this
view, what all the properties have in common is that they are aesthetic. So someone could say, “if you want a vague
term to do this work, why not use either ‘beauty’ or ‘aesthetic’: why use an even vaguer term such as your
‘aura’ to illuminate terms already famous for their vagueness, but at least
better known.” I might reply that one only makes progress in
understanding such things by working with a new metaphor that sheds light on
them, and that "aura" brings with it associations not commonly found
in "aesthetic" and "beautiful" while at that same time
leaving behind some associations with those terms that may hinder us. In
particular "beautiful" has associations with its more specific
meanings, where the beautiful, for instance, is contrasted to the pretty.
Aura avoids that. I also thought it might avoid commitment to the
objective/subjective dichotomy, although it turns out that both Don and Glenn Parsons, who also delivered comments on my book at the St. Louis ASA meeting,
interpret aura theory as subjectivistic, which was not my intention (since I
really am a good Deweyan). In my book I
give a series of what I consider virtues
of aura theory in contrast to other theories of aesthetics and aesthetic
experience, and I will stick with those.
My theory that philosophical theories are basically metaphors is
explained in other of my writings. For
now, I would just say that the value of the theory might be found simply in
what one can do with it. Here is an
example, in teaching Schopenhauer’s aesthetics the other day, it struck me that
all one had to do is substitute the Platonic Forms with “aura” and the theory
would make a lot of sense, and that further this helps to explicate my idea of
aura. When the someone perceives the
world with the eyes of an artist (something I commend in the book) then certain
objects (often subjects of future artworks) take on aura insofar as they are
more than themselves, imply that they are in another world, are as if
exemplifying the essential nature of their species, and so forth. Erasing the metaphysics from Schopenhauer
leaves aura theory.
