I have posted before on The Origin of the Work of Art here and here. So this can be taken as an addendum. I am mainly interested in this quote: "We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny." (197 in Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen Continental Aesthetics: An Antology, 2001) So it seems, for what it is worth, that Heidegger is on my side in the debate between the what I have called those who stress the ordinariness of the ordinary and those who do not. But I do not want to appeal to authority here. I just find Heidegger useful.
A key issue is the role of "the god." Here is my admittedly crude take on this. For the world/earth dynamic to work a god must be projected. The god provides a center for the holy precinct. But the god does not have to be an ancient Greek god. The god is whatever makes Being shine. I hypothesize that the god in the Van Gogh shoes example is the peasant woman, although a case could be made for the shoes as belonging to a peasant woman. "The god" on this account is very much like what Kant calls an "aesthetic idea." The shoes in Van Gogh's painting are an aesthetic idea. The god also plays a similar role to Nietzsche's description of Dionysus on stage in ancient Greek tragedy.
Something like this can happen in everyday life. In everyday life sometimes a thing makes the surrounding world uncanny. If that happens, the thing is "the god."
This happens in thinking too. A concept that symbolizes everything and seems to focus one's ideas: that can be the god for a thinker.
Of course this analysis is not inconsistent with atheism. "God" can be replaced by some other term and does not imply literal belief. If you are somewhat successful in finding "the god" you make the world shine again in the same way that the surroundings of the temple when it is set up takes on Being. When Heidegger says we have not been listening to Being.
Note how also Heidegger and Danto are opposed. Danto's Artworld is cut off from the world. The main disadvantage of that is that there is no earth/world dynamic. There is no wonder that beauty is lost since beauty arises along with Truth and Being in the earth/world dynamic. I side with Heidegger on this one.
Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Monday, November 5, 2018
Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art in a nutshell
But how does all of this sum up, students often ask. Here goes an attempt. (Whatever I will say here will probably seem like an oversimplification or distortion to someone.) For Heidegger the essence of art (great art is all he is interested in) is that it reveals truth. But truth is not scientific or science-like in this case: it is Being coming into unconcealment. But what is "Being"? It is the inner meaning of things. It is what we are no longer good at listening to. It can be seen as the inner essence of things, if we understand essence in a much more dynamic and historically embedded way than allowed by Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger is an atheist, but the most religious atheist I know. In this regard he is somewhat like a Zen Buddhist who tries to get us to attend to things without presuppositions.
In order to understand what art is we need to understand that it exists and thrives in an dynamic relation between artist, art object, and art (as in, the artworld) itself. Heidegger's approach to understanding art, as with everything else, is both phenomenological and existential. The phenomenological part is that he attempts to understand the essence (or, rather, the origin, the dynamic emerging) of something by way of a certain kind of observation and consequent description (phenomenological description.) By doing this he interestingly arrives at a similar place to Dewey's. Both philosophers believe that one should start with experience, and both understand experience as something that is rich and deep, not as a mere collection of data. To understand art, we have to start with our experience of art, but also with the experience of the artist, since it is the artist who experiences the creative process and gives rise to the product which we then experience.
So Heidegger looks at the question "what is art?" and asks whether this can't be understood in a simple way, that each art work is a thing, and art is the collection of all of these things. But this does not capture the dynamic nature of art. He then considers what a thing is.
This is where his philosophical discussion of art gets deep. There is a traditional notion of a thing which understands things as if they were pieces of equipment, for example a hammer or a shoe. A traditional view of things is that they are just examples of form applied to matter. But if you just attend to the thingly nature of a thing this idea begins to dissolve. That is, if you look at Chartres Cathedral and really see that it is made out of stone you also see that this stone is not mere stone: it itself vibrates with meaning. You become more aware, in the case of art, of the medium. But even afterwards, when looking at stones in nature, you become more aware of the way in which the stones themselves can vibrate with meaning. Back to the work. You notice the stonely nature of a work of architecture made out of stone.
So there is a view of art which says that it is just a physical thing with an added symbolic dimension, the symbolic dimension being the real meaning of the work. Collingwood seems to have had a view like that. You could say that Danto held this view as well. So it is a prominent view even today. Heidegger rejects it not because he thinks that the work is all the material thing or that he thinks it is all the meaning symbolized: rather he seeks to deconstruct or dissolve the very notion of thing as matter shaped by form, i.e. where the two are radically distinct.
So he uses the example of Van Gogh's painting of shoes to show that the thingly nature of a thing is not at all just the material side of a thing. In describing Van Gogh's painting Heidegger seems at first to be engaging in a sort of wool-gathering, as though he were imagining a particularly tough life of a peasant woman who may have worn these shoes. What he is actually doing is recognizing (much as Schopenhauer does when talking about the capacities of the artistic genius when observation a physical thing) that the artist is able to see deeply, in an existentialist sense, into the piece of equipment he is depicting, i.e. the shoes. By the artist looking closely at the equipment he sees it in the context of its world, the world of the peasant woman who uses them. And by us looking closely that a painting of this we too can see this world.
Heidegger does not mention this, but we also see ourselves into this world, as we share certain fundamental existential realities with the peasant woman: we are all beings heading to our deaths, and this is part of the way we experience the world. You cannot see a painting of worn shoes except by thinking of them as things worn hard by a person who exists in her own phenomenological space. The point is that the shoes do not symbolize something other than themselves. Rather this is their inner being, i.e. as present in the world of the peasant woman, i.e. as a window to that world. Nor does the painting symbolize something other than itself: it is in seeing the thingly nature of the painting that we see Being, that Being comes into unconcealment.
So what is the relevant of all of this to us in the 21st. century? We are surrounded by things but we do not notice the thingly nature of these things, nor do we notice the equipmental nature of equipment, i.e. what Heidegger calls reliability. We are surrounded by things that have for us, usually, a kind of boring usualness. Life, as a result, seems meaningless. We the purchase more things to fill in the gap. All we get is formed matter, matter that itself is inanimate and which has its meaning only by having form imposed on it. Primitive peoples perhaps do not experience the world in this way, but we postmoderns are alienated from things, as we are from people. For we also treat people as things; not as things ought to be treated, but as mere things. Just as a work of art is not a physical object with a meaning appended so too a person is not a physical body with a soul appended. This view of artworks and persons distorts both the physical side and the spiritual side. Again, these two sides need to be dissolved together.
When Being shines forth in a thing then its Thingly nature shines forth, and this means that what Heidegger calls "reliability" shines forth. The funny thing about this word "reliability" is that it means something quite different from what you would think it means: the reliability that shines forth is the essentiality of the thing, or better the Being in it coming to unconcealment. This is why it shimmers, it shimmers with Being. Art then gives life meaning by bringing us back to the point where we can see that the equipmental natura of equipment, the thingly nature of a thing, and the workly nature of a work, are essentially the same. You cannot reduce the work to the thing when the thing is taken as a mere thing, but then if you see the thing as something that manifests a world while at the same time doing through through its materials, through its medium, then Being comes forth.
So that's the theory in a nutshell.
In order to understand what art is we need to understand that it exists and thrives in an dynamic relation between artist, art object, and art (as in, the artworld) itself. Heidegger's approach to understanding art, as with everything else, is both phenomenological and existential. The phenomenological part is that he attempts to understand the essence (or, rather, the origin, the dynamic emerging) of something by way of a certain kind of observation and consequent description (phenomenological description.) By doing this he interestingly arrives at a similar place to Dewey's. Both philosophers believe that one should start with experience, and both understand experience as something that is rich and deep, not as a mere collection of data. To understand art, we have to start with our experience of art, but also with the experience of the artist, since it is the artist who experiences the creative process and gives rise to the product which we then experience.
So Heidegger looks at the question "what is art?" and asks whether this can't be understood in a simple way, that each art work is a thing, and art is the collection of all of these things. But this does not capture the dynamic nature of art. He then considers what a thing is.
This is where his philosophical discussion of art gets deep. There is a traditional notion of a thing which understands things as if they were pieces of equipment, for example a hammer or a shoe. A traditional view of things is that they are just examples of form applied to matter. But if you just attend to the thingly nature of a thing this idea begins to dissolve. That is, if you look at Chartres Cathedral and really see that it is made out of stone you also see that this stone is not mere stone: it itself vibrates with meaning. You become more aware, in the case of art, of the medium. But even afterwards, when looking at stones in nature, you become more aware of the way in which the stones themselves can vibrate with meaning. Back to the work. You notice the stonely nature of a work of architecture made out of stone.
So there is a view of art which says that it is just a physical thing with an added symbolic dimension, the symbolic dimension being the real meaning of the work. Collingwood seems to have had a view like that. You could say that Danto held this view as well. So it is a prominent view even today. Heidegger rejects it not because he thinks that the work is all the material thing or that he thinks it is all the meaning symbolized: rather he seeks to deconstruct or dissolve the very notion of thing as matter shaped by form, i.e. where the two are radically distinct.
So he uses the example of Van Gogh's painting of shoes to show that the thingly nature of a thing is not at all just the material side of a thing. In describing Van Gogh's painting Heidegger seems at first to be engaging in a sort of wool-gathering, as though he were imagining a particularly tough life of a peasant woman who may have worn these shoes. What he is actually doing is recognizing (much as Schopenhauer does when talking about the capacities of the artistic genius when observation a physical thing) that the artist is able to see deeply, in an existentialist sense, into the piece of equipment he is depicting, i.e. the shoes. By the artist looking closely at the equipment he sees it in the context of its world, the world of the peasant woman who uses them. And by us looking closely that a painting of this we too can see this world.
Heidegger does not mention this, but we also see ourselves into this world, as we share certain fundamental existential realities with the peasant woman: we are all beings heading to our deaths, and this is part of the way we experience the world. You cannot see a painting of worn shoes except by thinking of them as things worn hard by a person who exists in her own phenomenological space. The point is that the shoes do not symbolize something other than themselves. Rather this is their inner being, i.e. as present in the world of the peasant woman, i.e. as a window to that world. Nor does the painting symbolize something other than itself: it is in seeing the thingly nature of the painting that we see Being, that Being comes into unconcealment.
So what is the relevant of all of this to us in the 21st. century? We are surrounded by things but we do not notice the thingly nature of these things, nor do we notice the equipmental nature of equipment, i.e. what Heidegger calls reliability. We are surrounded by things that have for us, usually, a kind of boring usualness. Life, as a result, seems meaningless. We the purchase more things to fill in the gap. All we get is formed matter, matter that itself is inanimate and which has its meaning only by having form imposed on it. Primitive peoples perhaps do not experience the world in this way, but we postmoderns are alienated from things, as we are from people. For we also treat people as things; not as things ought to be treated, but as mere things. Just as a work of art is not a physical object with a meaning appended so too a person is not a physical body with a soul appended. This view of artworks and persons distorts both the physical side and the spiritual side. Again, these two sides need to be dissolved together.
When Being shines forth in a thing then its Thingly nature shines forth, and this means that what Heidegger calls "reliability" shines forth. The funny thing about this word "reliability" is that it means something quite different from what you would think it means: the reliability that shines forth is the essentiality of the thing, or better the Being in it coming to unconcealment. This is why it shimmers, it shimmers with Being. Art then gives life meaning by bringing us back to the point where we can see that the equipmental natura of equipment, the thingly nature of a thing, and the workly nature of a work, are essentially the same. You cannot reduce the work to the thing when the thing is taken as a mere thing, but then if you see the thing as something that manifests a world while at the same time doing through through its materials, through its medium, then Being comes forth.
So that's the theory in a nutshell.
Monday, June 5, 2017
Aesthetics and the Being of beings
I had previously posted on Heidegger and everyday aesthetics here Here are some further thoughts.
I have been returning to Heidegger to think about the meaning of aesthetics and more specifically of everyday aesthetics. Nothing I say here should be taken to imply that I am a follower of Heidegger. Let’s just say that I take inspiration from some of the things he says. The immediate impetus of my discussion has been reading George Steiner’s Martin Heidegger (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
The question Heidegger was most interested in concerned the Being of beings. Unlike Heidegger, I interpret this as a deeply aesthetic notion. This is how I take this in a nutshell: when we experience something with heightened aesthetic intensity we are experiencing the Being of beings, and conversely when we experience the Being of beings we experience with heightened aesthetic intensity. The Being of a being is the dynamic essential nature of the thing under consideration. But, as we shall see, my notion of "essence" is very unlike that of Plato or Aristotle. Philosophy and Art are concerned with the Being of beings. Heidegger sensed this when he placed so much attention on the arts of poetry, architecture and painting in his quest for the Being of beings. Yet Heidegger does not seem to be aware that Being is something fundamentally aesthetic.
(Steiner indicates that Heidegger ultimately failed to answer the question "What is the Being of beings?" I think that what I am providing here is an answer.)
I should also note that my view could be made consistent with a certain reading of Plato, a certain reading of Kant, and a certain reading of Nietzsche. I am very unlike Heidegger in this respect: whereas Heidegger sees his work as a radical rejection of previous philosophers, based usually on a rather willful misreading of these figures, I see continuities and deep affinities. When Plato, for example, talks about grasping Beauty itself in the Symposium and also talks about grasping The Good in The Republic he is talking about the same thing as when Heidegger and I talk about grasping the Being of beings. For Plato, grasping The Beautiful and The Good (the same thing, really) is the goal of philosophy: and that is not a matter of coming up with a definition but a matter of being able to see essences in the world. (It is more than that, but that's a start). What Heidegger calls "the is of what is" is just the essentiality of what is: but a lot depends here on how we take "essences." We cannot take them to be entities, beings. Rather, search for essences is searching for the Being of beings. I agree with Heidegger that Being is not a being. Heidegger’s attacks on Plato work only as attacks on the kind of characterization we get of Plato’s ideas in introductory classes. To think Being for Plato is every bit as much an activity as it is for Heidegger. The path up out of the cave is a path of activity, of dialectic. Moreover, the path down from perception of the Good is also a path of activity.
Heidegger’s own confusion about Being needs to be cleared up, however. Heidegger confuses mere existence with heightened experience of Being, an experience which, in my view, is also, at the same time, an emergence. That something exists or does not exist is of little interest to the philosophy of Being. We concern ourselves with existence in cases like "does global warming exist?" and this is only a question of whether the term "global warming" with its implied definition accurately describes the state of the world. Modern science confirms that global warming exists. This has nothing to do with what we are discussing here.
The philosophy of Being is only mistakenly seen as a theory about the word “is.” The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is a case in point. Heidegger made a big deal about the importance of this question. It seems at first to be simply a religious question, one that begs the question. That is, it simply assumes that there is an explanation for why the universe (not only this universe, but any universe) exists. God has been the traditional answer. Or perhaps it is thought that the question is somehow important, even though clearly God is not the best answer. I do not think that this question is very interesting, at least not when taken literally. But I do not think Heidegger always took it literally.
The real question (the one the stated question was really trying to ask) is rather, “why is there creativity?” That is, "why is it that sometimes we seem to get something from nothing?" Why is there an emergence of Being? Why do we experience certain things as more than the sum of their parts? Why is there potentiality as well as actuality? Why is there meaning at all? The question "why is there something rather than nothing" directs us to these other questions, which, when taken together, much better represent what we are getting at. Being, as Heidegger well saw, is the ontological question, and that is quite distinct from questions of ontics.
Except that we should be suspicious of the “why” word. Philosophy cannot really provide explanations, and certainly not causal explanations. The characteristic philosophical question is a what is x question, not a why question. Perhaps to some extent these questions just intend to get us to pay attention to the emergence of Being.
Another area in which Heidegger and I disagree is that I see Being as emergent from natural processes, from biological, cultural and personal evolution. I agree that Being arises from the interaction of language (in the broadest sense of that term, including all symbol systems) and the world. But this just means that the emergence of Being is phenomenological: it happens in consciousness. Being happens when truth emerges in experience. "Truth" in this sense has an ineliminable personal dimension. Being doesn’t just happen in the thing-in-itself. Or if it does, this is not our concern. But Being also emerges in shared experience: it is not purely subjective.
Investigation into the essences of things is investigation into the ways in which Being emerges. Plato saw this as investigation into Forms: asking the "what is" question, for example "what is piety?" Whenever we ask the "what is?" question of philosophy in a deep way we are trying to get at Being. Heidegger is right, however, to see this in a different way from Plato: Plato asks us to leave the sensuous world to experience Being. Nietzsche and Dewey taught us otherwise. Being emerges only through our interaction with materials, with media: it is when, for example, the architect allows Being to emerge through the materials of wood or stone.
Again, Heidegger thinks that existence is the key, and to a certain extent he is right. But, to put it better, that which gives rise to the experience of awe “exists” in the strong sense that Heidegger is indicating. So when Heidegger says that hidden being gives the rock its dense thereness (a point made by Steiner on pg. 66), I think this is best understood in terms of what Yuriko Saito has said about the Japanese gardenist's way of experiencing a rock: the rock has a dense thereness when we see it as manifesting Being, as manifesting essentiality. The Japanese gardenist listens to the request of the rock in the way that Heidegger asks us to return to a point at which we listen to Being.
I think that we have always been listening to Being, but I agree that this is rare and made difficult by contemporary life. To listen to Being is to open up to the way things in the world that speak to us about inner nature (not only their inner nature, but ours) through a medium, i.e. of language, paint, or the stone as used by the architect.
Interestingly, essentiality here is not just what it is defined as but rather the way in which it manifests reality itself. I said earlier that even Kant is misinterpreted here. A point at which Kant and Heidegger intersect is at the notion of “aesthetic ideas” developed in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The Being of beings is aesthetical.
This of course is all in tune what I have previously said in this blog on aesthetic atheism. See also my posts on Kant on aesthetical ideas.
Nothingness. Being does not emerge out of nothingness in a straightforward way. We should beware of hypostatizing nothingness. Being emerges by way of negation of that which is irrelevant in the construction of a perceived/conceived whole. But Being can just as well be said to emerge from fullness, or rather from over-fullness. It emerges from full engagement. If one fully engages with one's craft then sometimes light shines forth: Being emerges. This is creative intuition.
I have been returning to Heidegger to think about the meaning of aesthetics and more specifically of everyday aesthetics. Nothing I say here should be taken to imply that I am a follower of Heidegger. Let’s just say that I take inspiration from some of the things he says. The immediate impetus of my discussion has been reading George Steiner’s Martin Heidegger (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
The question Heidegger was most interested in concerned the Being of beings. Unlike Heidegger, I interpret this as a deeply aesthetic notion. This is how I take this in a nutshell: when we experience something with heightened aesthetic intensity we are experiencing the Being of beings, and conversely when we experience the Being of beings we experience with heightened aesthetic intensity. The Being of a being is the dynamic essential nature of the thing under consideration. But, as we shall see, my notion of "essence" is very unlike that of Plato or Aristotle. Philosophy and Art are concerned with the Being of beings. Heidegger sensed this when he placed so much attention on the arts of poetry, architecture and painting in his quest for the Being of beings. Yet Heidegger does not seem to be aware that Being is something fundamentally aesthetic.
(Steiner indicates that Heidegger ultimately failed to answer the question "What is the Being of beings?" I think that what I am providing here is an answer.)
I should also note that my view could be made consistent with a certain reading of Plato, a certain reading of Kant, and a certain reading of Nietzsche. I am very unlike Heidegger in this respect: whereas Heidegger sees his work as a radical rejection of previous philosophers, based usually on a rather willful misreading of these figures, I see continuities and deep affinities. When Plato, for example, talks about grasping Beauty itself in the Symposium and also talks about grasping The Good in The Republic he is talking about the same thing as when Heidegger and I talk about grasping the Being of beings. For Plato, grasping The Beautiful and The Good (the same thing, really) is the goal of philosophy: and that is not a matter of coming up with a definition but a matter of being able to see essences in the world. (It is more than that, but that's a start). What Heidegger calls "the is of what is" is just the essentiality of what is: but a lot depends here on how we take "essences." We cannot take them to be entities, beings. Rather, search for essences is searching for the Being of beings. I agree with Heidegger that Being is not a being. Heidegger’s attacks on Plato work only as attacks on the kind of characterization we get of Plato’s ideas in introductory classes. To think Being for Plato is every bit as much an activity as it is for Heidegger. The path up out of the cave is a path of activity, of dialectic. Moreover, the path down from perception of the Good is also a path of activity.
Heidegger’s own confusion about Being needs to be cleared up, however. Heidegger confuses mere existence with heightened experience of Being, an experience which, in my view, is also, at the same time, an emergence. That something exists or does not exist is of little interest to the philosophy of Being. We concern ourselves with existence in cases like "does global warming exist?" and this is only a question of whether the term "global warming" with its implied definition accurately describes the state of the world. Modern science confirms that global warming exists. This has nothing to do with what we are discussing here.
The philosophy of Being is only mistakenly seen as a theory about the word “is.” The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is a case in point. Heidegger made a big deal about the importance of this question. It seems at first to be simply a religious question, one that begs the question. That is, it simply assumes that there is an explanation for why the universe (not only this universe, but any universe) exists. God has been the traditional answer. Or perhaps it is thought that the question is somehow important, even though clearly God is not the best answer. I do not think that this question is very interesting, at least not when taken literally. But I do not think Heidegger always took it literally.
The real question (the one the stated question was really trying to ask) is rather, “why is there creativity?” That is, "why is it that sometimes we seem to get something from nothing?" Why is there an emergence of Being? Why do we experience certain things as more than the sum of their parts? Why is there potentiality as well as actuality? Why is there meaning at all? The question "why is there something rather than nothing" directs us to these other questions, which, when taken together, much better represent what we are getting at. Being, as Heidegger well saw, is the ontological question, and that is quite distinct from questions of ontics.
Except that we should be suspicious of the “why” word. Philosophy cannot really provide explanations, and certainly not causal explanations. The characteristic philosophical question is a what is x question, not a why question. Perhaps to some extent these questions just intend to get us to pay attention to the emergence of Being.
Another area in which Heidegger and I disagree is that I see Being as emergent from natural processes, from biological, cultural and personal evolution. I agree that Being arises from the interaction of language (in the broadest sense of that term, including all symbol systems) and the world. But this just means that the emergence of Being is phenomenological: it happens in consciousness. Being happens when truth emerges in experience. "Truth" in this sense has an ineliminable personal dimension. Being doesn’t just happen in the thing-in-itself. Or if it does, this is not our concern. But Being also emerges in shared experience: it is not purely subjective.
Investigation into the essences of things is investigation into the ways in which Being emerges. Plato saw this as investigation into Forms: asking the "what is" question, for example "what is piety?" Whenever we ask the "what is?" question of philosophy in a deep way we are trying to get at Being. Heidegger is right, however, to see this in a different way from Plato: Plato asks us to leave the sensuous world to experience Being. Nietzsche and Dewey taught us otherwise. Being emerges only through our interaction with materials, with media: it is when, for example, the architect allows Being to emerge through the materials of wood or stone.
Again, Heidegger thinks that existence is the key, and to a certain extent he is right. But, to put it better, that which gives rise to the experience of awe “exists” in the strong sense that Heidegger is indicating. So when Heidegger says that hidden being gives the rock its dense thereness (a point made by Steiner on pg. 66), I think this is best understood in terms of what Yuriko Saito has said about the Japanese gardenist's way of experiencing a rock: the rock has a dense thereness when we see it as manifesting Being, as manifesting essentiality. The Japanese gardenist listens to the request of the rock in the way that Heidegger asks us to return to a point at which we listen to Being.
I think that we have always been listening to Being, but I agree that this is rare and made difficult by contemporary life. To listen to Being is to open up to the way things in the world that speak to us about inner nature (not only their inner nature, but ours) through a medium, i.e. of language, paint, or the stone as used by the architect.
Interestingly, essentiality here is not just what it is defined as but rather the way in which it manifests reality itself. I said earlier that even Kant is misinterpreted here. A point at which Kant and Heidegger intersect is at the notion of “aesthetic ideas” developed in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The Being of beings is aesthetical.
This of course is all in tune what I have previously said in this blog on aesthetic atheism. See also my posts on Kant on aesthetical ideas.
Nothingness. Being does not emerge out of nothingness in a straightforward way. We should beware of hypostatizing nothingness. Being emerges by way of negation of that which is irrelevant in the construction of a perceived/conceived whole. But Being can just as well be said to emerge from fullness, or rather from over-fullness. It emerges from full engagement. If one fully engages with one's craft then sometimes light shines forth: Being emerges. This is creative intuition.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Heiddeger on museum art as institutional and then on architecture as holy
In "The Origins of the Work of Art," (I am using the Albert Hofstadter translation..a side note, as an undergraduate Hofstadter was one of my teachers at U.C. Santa Cruz.) Heidegger writes about works of art as they are commonly treated today: "well...the works themselves stand and hang in collections and exhibitions. But are they here in themselves as the works they themselves are, or are they not rather here as objects of the art industry? Works are made available for public and private art appreciation. Official agencies assume the care and maintenance of works. Connoisseurs and critics busy themselves with them. Art dealers supply the market. Art-historical study makes the works the objects of a science. Yet in all this busy activity do we encounter the work itself?" It is interesting how many different kinds of typical activities surrounding art he categorizes under the negative term "busy activity." Like John Dewey, he has a problem with the museum conception of art. Unlike George Dickie, he would have no truck with a definition of art that exclusively understands it in the context of the institution of the artworld and its art-designating activities, the artworld consisting of all of the above-mentioned characters and activities. Further, he clearly does not think that making a work available for public and private appreciation is in itself all that valuable, does not seem to value actual art maintenance (although elsewhere he talks positively of preservation), does not value the dominance of art dealers and the phenomenon of "art for the art market," and seems to be critical both the activity of connoisseurs and that of art historians. All of this is, for him, merely busy activity. (A Humean approach to aesthetics would be excluded, but also our contemporary highly contextualist art-historical approach.)
The preceding paragraph had stated that the work was accessible in what he calls its "pure self-subsistence" only by removing it from all relations to other things: it has to stand on its own. This would seem to indicate an interest in formalism, but we quickly learn that standing on its own means something very different. Moreover, it turns out, as we shall see, that some relations are really quite important: a thing cannot escape its relations entirely. The self-subsistence of art is mainly understood in terms of its independence from the artist: the artist, who, Heidegger thinks, usually intends that the work be self-subsistent. This artist "remains inconsequential" as compared to work (by which he means the great work), destroying himself in the creative process. So much for art as self-expression!
The whole thing is clarified in the discussion of the Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection (these are classical Greek sculptures from the pediment of the Aegina temple). The point is that (here, once again, in accord with Dewey) "placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world." And, further, this world has perished and this "can never be undone." (Doesn't he go too far here? Clearly he found no problem earlier in the essay entering into the world of the peasant woman by way of Van Gogh's painting of shoes, even though that world had perished or had been radically transformed by the time Heidegger had written his essay. Surely we can re-project the world of the work without, of course, ever completely matching the world that it originally projected.)
So now, housed in the museum, works such as these marbles "stand over against us in the realm of tradition and conservation" and "remain merely such objects": they are a consequence "of their former self-subsistence." This leads him to attack the art industry once again: "the whole art industry, even if carried to the extreme and exercised in every way for the sake of works themselves, extends only to the object-being of the works" as opposed to their work-being, i.e. as opposed to treating them in their essential meaning. This, again, seems inconsistent with the possibility addressed earlier that we could encounter a painting by Van Gogh in its work-being. For Heidegger, the upshot of this line of inquiry is that the work belongs "within the realm that is opened up by itself" and it is there that we have a "happening of truth at work" as in, he even mentions it here, the Van Gogh case.
It is this that introduces the architectural example. Heidegger seems to think that he still needs to explore the question of truth. This is not surprising since his notion of truth as unconcealment is so radically different from any of the other main approaches to truth: correspondence, coherence and pragmatist.
On one level one might think, in talking about the temple after talking about Van Gogh's painting of shoes, that he is just moving from representational art to abstract art. But more important is the move from easel art to public art. The article on the origin of the work of art would be very different if it just stopped with the Van Gogh case.
The example is a Greek temple. But in the course of this discussion I also want to think of a secular temple, in particular the Lincoln Memorial with its statue of Abraham Lincoln. Although there is much to be said for the Greek temple as an example, the Lincoln Memorial, insofar as it is not strictly religious, can direct our attention to other applications of the example.
So the specific Greek temple referenced, he imagines, simply stands in "the middle of the rock-cleft valley." (I cannot think of an example that actually fits this description.) I think Heidegger is trying to stress three things here, first that, in setting up the Greek temple, a world is set up, and so naturally it is "in the middle"; second that it's commanding presence is due to its being relatively isolated (at most it is part of a temple precinct) and is not seen as in the middle of a city; and third that it will have a profound affect, as we will see, on the rocks that surround it.
Further, "the building encloses the figure of the god and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico." Phidias, the most famous Greek sculptor, was known for his Athena in the center of the Parthenon and for his Zeus at the temple of Zeus at Olympia. But the sculpture of Lincoln by Daniel Fester French placed within the Greek-styled temple-like building designed by Henry Bacon in 1920 also works here. The words "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln in enshrined forever" appear above the statue.
But, a reader might reply, "Lincoln is not a god." My answer would be that the statue of Lincoln in that spot and when animated with the holy is a god in Heidegger's sense of the word. Heidegger, after all, was an atheist. We will see that the statue of Lincoln fits his criteria of a god every bit as much as the statue of Zeus.
So it is said that "by means of the temple, the god is present in the temple." Perhaps it would be better to say, by means of the temple and the sculpture of the god. The god is present as much as a god can be in a world that is without gods. The god extends the holy precinct, which is to say that the work of the temple with its god is to transform its physical surroundings by animating them: "it is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself of the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquired the shape of destiny for human being." This may seem strange here, but, after all, Heidegger is an existentialist philosopher. So he begins phenomenologically with the things we care about most deeply, birth, death, disaster, blessing, victory, disgrace.
The temple constitutes a holy space which is much like the stage of Greek tragedy: it is a place where our hopes and fears can undergo cathartic ennoblement. He had already brought up such things in discussing the peasant woman he imagined as the owner of the shoes in Van Gogh's painting (he would not admit he was imagining here: but that is not important). When Heidegger speaks of art bringing truth into unconcealment and of the truth of beings happening in the work, he means existential truth. He means what is most fundamentally real in human experience: death, birth, disaster, blessing and so forth.
I write this essay on the day after the presidential victory of Donald Trump, when America faces divides perhaps as great as any since the Civil War. So, when Heidegger says that "the all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people" I find myself thinking more of the USA as a "historical people" than of his own Germany, which, to speak of the unfortunate "elephant in the room" in this discussion, was closely associated in his mind at the time he wrote the first draft of this essay with his support for the Nazi movement.
We must not let Heidegger's moral and political failures in this regard, deep as they were, blind us, however to the insights or potential insights of this essay. Reading great philosophy is always a matter of setting aside the material or implications we find repellent, or perhaps just not useful, and appropriating the material that has meaning for us. And so, looking at the Lincoln Memorial, we may think of a monument built sixty years after the Civil War one that attempts to reconsecrate the destiny of a historical people much like the Parthenon of Athens build after the destruction of Athens by the Persians. Do not we need, similarly, art that recreates the American dream out of the ruins of a traumatic presidential election?
So, what is the relationship between the great work of architecture and its surroundings? The work changes the way we see things. This would have been particularly true for the ancient Greeks, who really believed in these religious cults, but can also be true for us even with the Greek temples, ruined as they are, to the extent that we can read ourselves back into the frame of mind of the creators, and perhaps find what Gadamer referred to as a fusion of horizons, that is between our own perspectival horizon and theirs.
But there is also the claim that the great work of architecture transforms not only its surrounding but also its materials. To put it briefly, art animates them, i.e. within experience. The world comes alive when seen by way of and through the great work of art: "this resting of the work [on its rocky ground] draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support."
Let me tell a personal story to illustrate. My wife and I were once visiting the Greek island of Naxos. We had arrived by ferry too late to secure a hotel room and because of some confusions and mistakes ended up spending the rest of the night sitting on a park bench nodding off sometimes and pretty cold. I had to go out onto the nearly beach to urinate, and as I stood there I suddenly became aware that I was facing the ruins of a Greek temple alone and luminescent in the moonlight. The experience was transformative and life-changing. My admiration and love of the ancient Greeks all seemed to be concentrated into this one experience.
Similarly, experiencing a temple in a storm will have us experience the storm differently: "Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence." The building not only animates the world and phenomena around it, but brings out its essential nature. This is also true for the materials out of which the building is made. Heidegger rejects the view that art is simply materials formed by craftsmanship and indicating or symbolizing some mental thing, the real work of art. Rather the materials are animated by being in the work. They come alive.
"The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night." The stone of the building not only gains its own luster and gleam through its animation, but this is in dynamic relation to the sun, the sky and the night. They inter-animate each other. Without this inter-animation the work of architecture lacks soul. "The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air." It is not just that the temple makes negative spaces, but rather that it makes us aware of how air too is animated when perceived through the eyes of the temple, i.e. in the context of its interaction with the temple in our experience.
Heidegger describes this process in terms of his own interpretation of the Greek word "phusis," a word that we often associated with "physics" because it is its etymological root. But here it means something very different. It is almost the opposite of the physicalist way of looking at things. Phusis, for Heidegger, and perhaps for at least some Greeks, means this: "The Greeks early called this emergent and rising [for example, of the essence of the raging sea when contrasted experientially to the repose of the temple] in itself and in all thing phusis."
So what does phusis do? It "clears and illuminates...that on which and in which man bases his dwelling," which Heidegger calls "earth," a term for which he has, here, a highly technical meaning. To speak with the earliest Greek philosophers, for example Thales, phusis would have both a material and a spiritual side. All things are water but they are also filled with spirit. When the physical element, including surrounding and the materials out of which the work is made, is illuminated by the temple set up in its midst (and made up out of it) we have a world which is not merely mechanical but is also animated.
"Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation." The temple allows the air, for example, to arise into its animation as phusis, and then, if this arising is not a violation, then there is also a way in which the earth (in short, all of this animated context and materials) shelters, makes peaceful, protects: so the earth, in its dynamic relation with the work of art and the world it exhibits is a "sheltering agent." This kind of harmonious relation between earth, world, and work is utopian: something we hardly ever achieve, a kind of ideal.
So, "the temple...opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground." The earth only emerges as animated when the temple opens up a world, i.e. the world of ancient Greece, or perhaps of a re-unified or at least re-animated and re-consecrated America.
Heidegger asks us to leave our framework, then, of thinking of the temple as just another thing set into a world of pre-existing "men, animals, plants and things" but rather as something that in creating a world and in creating a world/earth dynamic through creating a world also animates these things and gives them meaning. That is expecting a lot of art, I know.
So the temple not only gives "things their look" but also, insofar as it creates a world and a destiny for a historical people gives men "their outlook on themselves." This is true, Heidegger insists, "as long as the god has not fled from it." For an atheist, what this means is that the animation of the world that one accepts if one is not a strict physicalist is one which can be understood in terms of the presence of the, admittedly fictional, god. If the god has left the Lincoln memorial (one thinks of the time Nixon came out there to speak with demonstrators...an odd but strangely moving as well as pathetic effort to recreate the spirit of America in another time of national crisis).
Heidegger then applies the same logic to the sculpture as to the temple: "it is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself." This of course is idolatry and quite shocking to traditional believers, particularly to Christians. But the point is fundamental to aesthetic atheism: that there is meaning in religion to the extent that there is a presence of the holy as a numinous aura and a center of concentrated meaning to be found in the sculpture, temple or work of art. But the god can leave, the numinous can be drained.
Heidegger then launches into his discussion of the difference between setting up a work in an exhibition (going back to his anti museum theme) and "setting up in the sense of erecting a building, raising a statue, presenting a tragedy at a holy festival." The latter form of setting up involves praise and dedication, and in setting up the work in this sense "the holy is opened up as holy and the god is invoked into the openness of his presence." Dignity and splendor are "given to the god."
The preceding paragraph had stated that the work was accessible in what he calls its "pure self-subsistence" only by removing it from all relations to other things: it has to stand on its own. This would seem to indicate an interest in formalism, but we quickly learn that standing on its own means something very different. Moreover, it turns out, as we shall see, that some relations are really quite important: a thing cannot escape its relations entirely. The self-subsistence of art is mainly understood in terms of its independence from the artist: the artist, who, Heidegger thinks, usually intends that the work be self-subsistent. This artist "remains inconsequential" as compared to work (by which he means the great work), destroying himself in the creative process. So much for art as self-expression!
The whole thing is clarified in the discussion of the Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection (these are classical Greek sculptures from the pediment of the Aegina temple). The point is that (here, once again, in accord with Dewey) "placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world." And, further, this world has perished and this "can never be undone." (Doesn't he go too far here? Clearly he found no problem earlier in the essay entering into the world of the peasant woman by way of Van Gogh's painting of shoes, even though that world had perished or had been radically transformed by the time Heidegger had written his essay. Surely we can re-project the world of the work without, of course, ever completely matching the world that it originally projected.)
So now, housed in the museum, works such as these marbles "stand over against us in the realm of tradition and conservation" and "remain merely such objects": they are a consequence "of their former self-subsistence." This leads him to attack the art industry once again: "the whole art industry, even if carried to the extreme and exercised in every way for the sake of works themselves, extends only to the object-being of the works" as opposed to their work-being, i.e. as opposed to treating them in their essential meaning. This, again, seems inconsistent with the possibility addressed earlier that we could encounter a painting by Van Gogh in its work-being. For Heidegger, the upshot of this line of inquiry is that the work belongs "within the realm that is opened up by itself" and it is there that we have a "happening of truth at work" as in, he even mentions it here, the Van Gogh case.
It is this that introduces the architectural example. Heidegger seems to think that he still needs to explore the question of truth. This is not surprising since his notion of truth as unconcealment is so radically different from any of the other main approaches to truth: correspondence, coherence and pragmatist.
On one level one might think, in talking about the temple after talking about Van Gogh's painting of shoes, that he is just moving from representational art to abstract art. But more important is the move from easel art to public art. The article on the origin of the work of art would be very different if it just stopped with the Van Gogh case.
The example is a Greek temple. But in the course of this discussion I also want to think of a secular temple, in particular the Lincoln Memorial with its statue of Abraham Lincoln. Although there is much to be said for the Greek temple as an example, the Lincoln Memorial, insofar as it is not strictly religious, can direct our attention to other applications of the example.
So the specific Greek temple referenced, he imagines, simply stands in "the middle of the rock-cleft valley." (I cannot think of an example that actually fits this description.) I think Heidegger is trying to stress three things here, first that, in setting up the Greek temple, a world is set up, and so naturally it is "in the middle"; second that it's commanding presence is due to its being relatively isolated (at most it is part of a temple precinct) and is not seen as in the middle of a city; and third that it will have a profound affect, as we will see, on the rocks that surround it.
Further, "the building encloses the figure of the god and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico." Phidias, the most famous Greek sculptor, was known for his Athena in the center of the Parthenon and for his Zeus at the temple of Zeus at Olympia. But the sculpture of Lincoln by Daniel Fester French placed within the Greek-styled temple-like building designed by Henry Bacon in 1920 also works here. The words "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln in enshrined forever" appear above the statue.
But, a reader might reply, "Lincoln is not a god." My answer would be that the statue of Lincoln in that spot and when animated with the holy is a god in Heidegger's sense of the word. Heidegger, after all, was an atheist. We will see that the statue of Lincoln fits his criteria of a god every bit as much as the statue of Zeus.
So it is said that "by means of the temple, the god is present in the temple." Perhaps it would be better to say, by means of the temple and the sculpture of the god. The god is present as much as a god can be in a world that is without gods. The god extends the holy precinct, which is to say that the work of the temple with its god is to transform its physical surroundings by animating them: "it is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself of the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquired the shape of destiny for human being." This may seem strange here, but, after all, Heidegger is an existentialist philosopher. So he begins phenomenologically with the things we care about most deeply, birth, death, disaster, blessing, victory, disgrace.
The temple constitutes a holy space which is much like the stage of Greek tragedy: it is a place where our hopes and fears can undergo cathartic ennoblement. He had already brought up such things in discussing the peasant woman he imagined as the owner of the shoes in Van Gogh's painting (he would not admit he was imagining here: but that is not important). When Heidegger speaks of art bringing truth into unconcealment and of the truth of beings happening in the work, he means existential truth. He means what is most fundamentally real in human experience: death, birth, disaster, blessing and so forth.
I write this essay on the day after the presidential victory of Donald Trump, when America faces divides perhaps as great as any since the Civil War. So, when Heidegger says that "the all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people" I find myself thinking more of the USA as a "historical people" than of his own Germany, which, to speak of the unfortunate "elephant in the room" in this discussion, was closely associated in his mind at the time he wrote the first draft of this essay with his support for the Nazi movement.
We must not let Heidegger's moral and political failures in this regard, deep as they were, blind us, however to the insights or potential insights of this essay. Reading great philosophy is always a matter of setting aside the material or implications we find repellent, or perhaps just not useful, and appropriating the material that has meaning for us. And so, looking at the Lincoln Memorial, we may think of a monument built sixty years after the Civil War one that attempts to reconsecrate the destiny of a historical people much like the Parthenon of Athens build after the destruction of Athens by the Persians. Do not we need, similarly, art that recreates the American dream out of the ruins of a traumatic presidential election?
So, what is the relationship between the great work of architecture and its surroundings? The work changes the way we see things. This would have been particularly true for the ancient Greeks, who really believed in these religious cults, but can also be true for us even with the Greek temples, ruined as they are, to the extent that we can read ourselves back into the frame of mind of the creators, and perhaps find what Gadamer referred to as a fusion of horizons, that is between our own perspectival horizon and theirs.
But there is also the claim that the great work of architecture transforms not only its surrounding but also its materials. To put it briefly, art animates them, i.e. within experience. The world comes alive when seen by way of and through the great work of art: "this resting of the work [on its rocky ground] draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support."
Let me tell a personal story to illustrate. My wife and I were once visiting the Greek island of Naxos. We had arrived by ferry too late to secure a hotel room and because of some confusions and mistakes ended up spending the rest of the night sitting on a park bench nodding off sometimes and pretty cold. I had to go out onto the nearly beach to urinate, and as I stood there I suddenly became aware that I was facing the ruins of a Greek temple alone and luminescent in the moonlight. The experience was transformative and life-changing. My admiration and love of the ancient Greeks all seemed to be concentrated into this one experience.
Similarly, experiencing a temple in a storm will have us experience the storm differently: "Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence." The building not only animates the world and phenomena around it, but brings out its essential nature. This is also true for the materials out of which the building is made. Heidegger rejects the view that art is simply materials formed by craftsmanship and indicating or symbolizing some mental thing, the real work of art. Rather the materials are animated by being in the work. They come alive.
"The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night." The stone of the building not only gains its own luster and gleam through its animation, but this is in dynamic relation to the sun, the sky and the night. They inter-animate each other. Without this inter-animation the work of architecture lacks soul. "The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air." It is not just that the temple makes negative spaces, but rather that it makes us aware of how air too is animated when perceived through the eyes of the temple, i.e. in the context of its interaction with the temple in our experience.
Heidegger describes this process in terms of his own interpretation of the Greek word "phusis," a word that we often associated with "physics" because it is its etymological root. But here it means something very different. It is almost the opposite of the physicalist way of looking at things. Phusis, for Heidegger, and perhaps for at least some Greeks, means this: "The Greeks early called this emergent and rising [for example, of the essence of the raging sea when contrasted experientially to the repose of the temple] in itself and in all thing phusis."
So what does phusis do? It "clears and illuminates...that on which and in which man bases his dwelling," which Heidegger calls "earth," a term for which he has, here, a highly technical meaning. To speak with the earliest Greek philosophers, for example Thales, phusis would have both a material and a spiritual side. All things are water but they are also filled with spirit. When the physical element, including surrounding and the materials out of which the work is made, is illuminated by the temple set up in its midst (and made up out of it) we have a world which is not merely mechanical but is also animated.
"Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation." The temple allows the air, for example, to arise into its animation as phusis, and then, if this arising is not a violation, then there is also a way in which the earth (in short, all of this animated context and materials) shelters, makes peaceful, protects: so the earth, in its dynamic relation with the work of art and the world it exhibits is a "sheltering agent." This kind of harmonious relation between earth, world, and work is utopian: something we hardly ever achieve, a kind of ideal.
So, "the temple...opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground." The earth only emerges as animated when the temple opens up a world, i.e. the world of ancient Greece, or perhaps of a re-unified or at least re-animated and re-consecrated America.
Heidegger asks us to leave our framework, then, of thinking of the temple as just another thing set into a world of pre-existing "men, animals, plants and things" but rather as something that in creating a world and in creating a world/earth dynamic through creating a world also animates these things and gives them meaning. That is expecting a lot of art, I know.
So the temple not only gives "things their look" but also, insofar as it creates a world and a destiny for a historical people gives men "their outlook on themselves." This is true, Heidegger insists, "as long as the god has not fled from it." For an atheist, what this means is that the animation of the world that one accepts if one is not a strict physicalist is one which can be understood in terms of the presence of the, admittedly fictional, god. If the god has left the Lincoln memorial (one thinks of the time Nixon came out there to speak with demonstrators...an odd but strangely moving as well as pathetic effort to recreate the spirit of America in another time of national crisis).
Heidegger then applies the same logic to the sculpture as to the temple: "it is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself." This of course is idolatry and quite shocking to traditional believers, particularly to Christians. But the point is fundamental to aesthetic atheism: that there is meaning in religion to the extent that there is a presence of the holy as a numinous aura and a center of concentrated meaning to be found in the sculpture, temple or work of art. But the god can leave, the numinous can be drained.
Heidegger then launches into his discussion of the difference between setting up a work in an exhibition (going back to his anti museum theme) and "setting up in the sense of erecting a building, raising a statue, presenting a tragedy at a holy festival." The latter form of setting up involves praise and dedication, and in setting up the work in this sense "the holy is opened up as holy and the god is invoked into the openness of his presence." Dignity and splendor are "given to the god."
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Scruton on poetry, truth, Heidegger and everyday aesthetics
Roger Scruton's "Poetry and Truth," in The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford, 2015) ed. John Gibson (149-161) is one of the more interesting discussions of the topic, especially given that Scruton begins with a discussion of Heidegger's concept of poetry as "the founding of truth" which Scruton takes to be true! Scruton rightly takes "truth" to refer here not to evaluation of sentences in terms of truth value, so loved by Frege and friends, but in the sense of revelation, or as Heidegger would put it, unconcealment. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is a bringing forth which is also a bestowing. Scruton says that Heidegger is "attempting to gives a secular version of [a religious idea of revelation]. And by attributing the process of revelation to poetry - in other words, to a human product, in which meaning is both created by human beings and also 'bestowed' by them he can be understood as advocating revelation without God." (150) In relation to my posts on aesthetic atheism, I like Scruton's idea, taken from Wagner's essay "Religion and Art," that "religions have all misunderstood their mission, wishing to propose as true stories what are in fact myths...that cannot be spelled out in literal language." (150) and that "the meanings of the myths must be grasped through art, which shows us the concealed deep truth of our conditions, in dramatized and symbolic form." He also mentions (as a more bleak view) Nietzsche's similar idea that we need art "so that we will not perish of the truth" i.e. that God is dead.
For Scruton, "the heart of poetry is the poetic use of language" i.e. as distinct from everyday and scientific uses, a use that involves figures of speech that do not describe connections but make them in the mind of the reader. He makes a strong distinction between the poetic and the prosaic use of language, the later being instrumental, having the property of aboutness, having an interest in truth as correspondence, and having substitutivity of equivalent terms.
Scruton says that Keats in his "Ode to the Nightingale" "does not describe the bird and its song only: he endows it with value. The nightingale shares in the beauty of its description, and is lifted out of the ordinary run of events, to appear as a small part of the meaning of the world." I have argued elsewhere that Scruton originated the idea of the aesthetics of everyday life back in the 1970s, although, of course, the true grandfather of the movement was John Dewey. Scruton has continued to make major contributions to the field, most notably in his book Beauty. I have also argued that everyday aesthetics happens when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and that that often happens when everyday phenomena are seen with the eyes of the artist. Scruton shows, through the Keats example, how poetry can make this happen. As he puts it "poetry transfigures what it touches, so that it is revealed in another way" and the test is "truth" in something like Heidegger's sense. Scruton understands the idea of poetry bestowing truth partly in this way: Eliot in Four Quartets "is looking for the sincere expression of a new experience, one that will remain true to its inner dynamic, and how what it is to live that experience in the self-awareness of a modern person. He is looking for words that both capture the experience and lend themselves to sincere and committed use." (159) Yet Eliot's idea may seem overly subjective. By contrast, Heidegger insists on an objective dimension in the grounding that poetry bestows.
Scruton finds in Rilke's "Ninth Elegy" the source of Heidegger's thought, where the truth of the thing, e.g. the house, "is a truth bestowed in the experience." Further "Its measure is the depth with which these things can be taken into consciousness and made part of a life fully lived." (160) So Scruton concludes that there is an inner truth to things, one bestowed by poetry, and that this inwardness is of our experience: "the fusing of a thing with its associations and life-significances in the poetic moment" (161) i.e. achievements that are "fruit of a life lived in full awareness."
Over time, I have become a bigger and bigger fan of Scruton (don't like his politics): he has the broad vision one might call wisdom and stands far above the usual in the realm of analytic aesthetics. Here is one final quote: we question what is the meaning of a world that has come to this: "The right answer is that answer that enables us to incorporate the things of this world into a fulfilled life. For each individual object, each house, bridge, fountain, gate, or jug, there is such an answer. And the poet is the one who provides it....His answer is true when it shows how just such a thing might be part of a fulfilled human life..."
For Scruton, "the heart of poetry is the poetic use of language" i.e. as distinct from everyday and scientific uses, a use that involves figures of speech that do not describe connections but make them in the mind of the reader. He makes a strong distinction between the poetic and the prosaic use of language, the later being instrumental, having the property of aboutness, having an interest in truth as correspondence, and having substitutivity of equivalent terms.
Scruton says that Keats in his "Ode to the Nightingale" "does not describe the bird and its song only: he endows it with value. The nightingale shares in the beauty of its description, and is lifted out of the ordinary run of events, to appear as a small part of the meaning of the world." I have argued elsewhere that Scruton originated the idea of the aesthetics of everyday life back in the 1970s, although, of course, the true grandfather of the movement was John Dewey. Scruton has continued to make major contributions to the field, most notably in his book Beauty. I have also argued that everyday aesthetics happens when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and that that often happens when everyday phenomena are seen with the eyes of the artist. Scruton shows, through the Keats example, how poetry can make this happen. As he puts it "poetry transfigures what it touches, so that it is revealed in another way" and the test is "truth" in something like Heidegger's sense. Scruton understands the idea of poetry bestowing truth partly in this way: Eliot in Four Quartets "is looking for the sincere expression of a new experience, one that will remain true to its inner dynamic, and how what it is to live that experience in the self-awareness of a modern person. He is looking for words that both capture the experience and lend themselves to sincere and committed use." (159) Yet Eliot's idea may seem overly subjective. By contrast, Heidegger insists on an objective dimension in the grounding that poetry bestows.
Scruton finds in Rilke's "Ninth Elegy" the source of Heidegger's thought, where the truth of the thing, e.g. the house, "is a truth bestowed in the experience." Further "Its measure is the depth with which these things can be taken into consciousness and made part of a life fully lived." (160) So Scruton concludes that there is an inner truth to things, one bestowed by poetry, and that this inwardness is of our experience: "the fusing of a thing with its associations and life-significances in the poetic moment" (161) i.e. achievements that are "fruit of a life lived in full awareness."
Over time, I have become a bigger and bigger fan of Scruton (don't like his politics): he has the broad vision one might call wisdom and stands far above the usual in the realm of analytic aesthetics. Here is one final quote: we question what is the meaning of a world that has come to this: "The right answer is that answer that enables us to incorporate the things of this world into a fulfilled life. For each individual object, each house, bridge, fountain, gate, or jug, there is such an answer. And the poet is the one who provides it....His answer is true when it shows how just such a thing might be part of a fulfilled human life..."
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Is object-oriented ontology good for artists?
I have read that many artists are intrigued by Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology or object-oriented metaphysics. Having just read his The Quadruple Object (Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011), I would say they could do better. Harman's theory is fascinating, but deeply flawed. Mainly he is inspired by Husserl, Heidegger and Whitehead. Although he rejects Husserl's idealism, his theory inherits some of the weaknesses of Husserl's phenomenology. Most importantly it suffers from a lack of the kind of insight a close reading of Dewey would provide. Harman makes some of the same criticisms of traditional empiricists that Dewey made, and yet finds himself committed to a Cartesian-like dualism. This is the fatal flaw of the theory. Some might find Harman attractive simply because his theory is not anthropocentric. But there are other ways to go against anthropocentrism. Sometimes Harman worries that he might be considered a crackpot. Although I take much of what he says quite seriously and admire him for the scope of his thought, there is a crackpot dimension to it. Anyone who claims that he has isolated exactly ten ontological categories and then goes on to explicate the system in terms of the relations of suits in a deck of cards, as Harmon does in his ninth chapter, is hard to take seriously. Or, to put it another way, Harman takes himself way too seriously.
I was introduced to Harman by an article in the current issue of Art Forum, "Those Objects of Desire" by Andrew Cole (Summer 2015). Cole is critical of Harman although from a different perspective than I am. He basically thinks that Harman has failed to see how Kantian his theory really is, and that personifying such objects as commodities runs up against criticisms already raised by Marx. Although Cole makes some good points, my response draws more from the American Pragmatist tradition.
One way to test Harman's theory, which is supposed to cover all sorts of objects, is to see how it works in relation to a work of art. Heidegger himself in "The Origin of the Work of Art" developed his notion of the thingliness of a thing in relation to works of art, famously a painting by Van Gogh of shoes and a Greek Temple. Harman argues that all objects have two sides, one side being the real object, something much like Kant's thing-in-itself, and the other being what he calls the sensual object, i.e. the object-as-experienced. (It is not clear whether the thinks that the sensual dog and the real dog are two sides of the same dog or two completely different things, although usually he talks as though they are completely different things.) He believes that real things are completely autonomous and do not depend in any way on relations to other things. This raises many concerns. Use our example of a work of art. It is impossible to understand a painting by Edward Hopper, for example, without understanding something about the context in which it was created.
I should put my Deweyan assumptions to the fore before going on. (David L. Hildebrand has written an excellent book that explains how Dewey avoids the very dilemmas that Harman finds himself in: Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). Rather than saying that we should base our metaphysics on isolated or autonomous objects, Dewey would stress experience, although experience understood in his own way. Dewey is no subjectivist or idealist. On his account, experience arises out of the interaction between ourselves as live creatures and our environments. Because Dewey takes a naturalist perspective he does not rank humans as anything special. Animals and even plants can interact as live creatures with their environments, although the nature of their experience would be quite different from that of humans. Nonetheless, Dewey is not guilty of a mechanistic worldview typical of previous naturalist philosophers, or of the simplistic approach to empiricism found in Locke and Hume.
For Dewey, and me, the live creature, say a human, confronts an object, say a watch, directly. Rejecting dualism, Dewey would not accept that the watch that we confront sensuously is to be distinguished from the real watch. There are, of course, many manifestations of the watch, many ways in which it appears to us. These manifestations are all ways we confront the watch.
One of the ways in which Harman's philosophy is both anti-art and anti-aesthetic is the way in which he discusses sensuous qualities. Harman likes to talk about these qualities as "gems, glitter, and confetti of extraneous detail" (25). The aesthetic aspect of experience is to be degraded to the merely pretty. Following Husserl, he sees sensuous objects as "frosted over with accidental features" irrelevant to their identity. Again, as he understands Husserl, the objects of our world are "heavily adorned with frivolous decorations and surface-effects." Whereas Harman sees these sensuous qualities as superfluous, the everyday aesthetics position I advocate, approaches them as rich in meaning. Moreover, from a pragmatist perspective, these meanings are played out in the activity of the live creature. The sensuous qualities may be pursued to fulfillment, for example, in "an experience."
Not to be overly negative, I want to give credit to Harman for stressing one point which he derives from Husserl. He writes: "what we encounter in experience are unified objects, not isolated points of quality. Indeed...the individual qualities of things are already imbued with the style or feel of the thing as a whole. Even if the exact hue of red in my apple can also be found in a nearby shirt or can of spraypaint, the colors will have a different feel in each of these cases, since they are bonded to the thing to which they belong." (11) This seems right, although at the same time one should take into account Goodman's idea that objects can exemplify certain qualities, thereby indirectly referencing all other instances of that quality.
Harman is opposed to something called "correlationism" which holds that "we cannot think of world without humans or humans without world." He is right to reject this view. We can certainly think a world unperceived by humans. However, whatever we think and whatever we experience is, by necessity, thought or experienced by humans. We cannot expunge that aspect of experience. We start from out own positions in life and in philosophy. There is a real world, but the world we experience is one that has us at the center and is experienced in our terms. For example, any description we make of such a world is a description necessarily in a language of human making, with terms and meanings that carry out contribution. So, although correlationism is false, it does point to a certain truth that Harman ignores.
Harman is also interested in Husserl's notion of eidetic features of the sensual object, features that make up the eidos of the object. Harman follows Husserl in thinking that real eidetic qualities "can only be the target of intellectual and not sensuous intuition." The radical division of intellectual and sensuous intuition is the source of yet another problem: this is another dualism that needs to be undercut. All intellectual intuition is in part sensual and all sensual intuition is in part intellectual. I have written about essences elsewhere and will have more to say about them in the future. Suffice it here to say that essences on my view are emergent from the activity of searching for essences. Essences are not eternal and unchanging but emergent. Nor are they solely intellectual objects. Moreover, they may be deeply connected to the particular and the accidental. Some quality in all of its particularity can exemplify. We can say for example that this particular thing standing for universal, but I think that sometimes it is deeper than that. When a particular thing stands for a universal it does not do so in such a way as to lose its particular nature.
Harman's object centered metaphysics is based as much on his interpretation of Heidegger as on his interpretation of Husserl. In particular he focuses on Heidegger's understanding of a hammer. He also has his own understanding of what Heidegger means by the four-fold, which I will discuss in a future post. I think that Heidegger's understanding of a hammer in Being and Time is deeply flawed, and this is the basis for many problems I also find in Harman. Heidegger says that hammers are usually present to us only when they fail. This idea undercuts (and is in deep opposition to) the entire aesthetics of design. When I handle a hammer I am aware of its design. It is satisfying when it feels good in my hand, looks good, and does its job well. The awareness of the hammer I have when it is broken is different in kind from that: it is an awareness of a functional ugliness. But when a hammer works well, looks good, etc. it is a thing of beauty, more so of course for a carpenter than for me. Heidegger and Harman just exclude from consciousness the aesthetically positive value of the hammer.
Let Vico intrude here. Here is a quote from wikipedia on Vico: "Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language"). The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”" Vico and Dewey are on the same page here: Descartes, Husserl, Heidegger and Harman are on the other page. We know the hammer through its creation and through using it in the act of creation. Knowledge is connected with the live creature doing things in the world. Knowledge is an aspect of experience. The hammer by no means functions behind or beneath experience. Heidegger should have known better since he is the one who stressed the way in which technology has made us close our ears to Being. It is technology when treated in a merely mechanical way that causes the hammer to recede. Things lose the shiny sparkly quality of aliveness in a world which is mechanized. Heidegger's and Harman's philosophy of the receding hammer is just a sign of the very concept of the thing as mere object of use that Heidegger critiques elsewhere.
Harman's Heideggerian talk of hammers withdrawing into "subterranean background, enacting their reality in the cosmos without appearing in the least" is offensive mystification. In talking about what lies behind all phenomena, Heidegger and Harman go in the opposite direction of Dewey, since Dewey rejects precisely this dualism, the phenomena/noumena dualism that goes back to Kant, but even further to Descartes and ultimately Plato.
The sentence "conscious awareness makes up only a tiny portion of our lives" (37) seems innocuous at first, perhaps trivially true, and yet what sense can really be made of it. Even when engaging in psychoanalysis everything that happens to me is in consciousness: I become conscious of unconscious desires. Moreover, the other manifestations of those unconscious desires also happen, for example in my Freudian slips, in daily life. Conscious awareness makes up most of our lives, not a tiny portion...we are the lives we live, the lives we experience, our conscious lives.
Harman and Heidegger say that I usually fail to notice my eyeglasses. In a way that is true. If my attention is directed elsewhere from my eyeglasses I do not notice them: they are on the very edge of my consciousness. However it is easy to redirect my attention to my eyeglasses, and this does not require that they be broken or even maladjusted. I can attend more or less to my eyeglasses and to their various features, for example how well they work and how good they look. Although the idea that tools "withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically" just seems implausible when I think about my glasses, Heidegger at least recognizes that tools exist in terms of relations to other pieces of equipment, often in a system of interrelated things, for example ink and inkstand.
The absurdity of Harman's position has be found in the sentence: "the world in itself is made of realities withdrawing from all conscious access." (38) The realities we encounter in life, for example my glasses, do not withdraw from conscious access. If I want to have conscious access to my glasses I simply attend to them. When I lose my glasses I can find them: that is because they are still available.
Following Heidegger, Harman says "an earthquake calls my attention to the solid ground on which I rely..." I have been through a major earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California. I was in my backyard when it happened. It drew my attention to the way in which the ground, which I formerly saw as solid, could take another form entirely, something more like a wave at sea. Retroactively I could think of how my assumptions about the earth or the "solid" ground and what it could do were naive. The solid ground is not always solid. At the same time, it is easy for me to attend to the solidity of ground in non-earthquake times, for example when I am looking for a good foundation for a ladder. What does it mean to "silently depend" on the solidity of the ground?
Harman has a strange way of combining what seems to be common sense with nonsense. He says "There will always be aspects of these phenomena [for example the solid floor of my home] that elude me; further surprises might always be in store. No matter how hard I work to become conscious of things, environing conditions still remain of which I never become fully aware. When I stare at a river, wolf....I do not grasp the whole of their reality." Who could disagree! And then "This reality slips from view into a perpetually veiled underworld., leaving me with only the most frivolous simulacra of these entities." (39) What sense can possibly be made of this idea? It must mean something more than the mere truisms that preceded it.
For Harman there are only two kinds of objects: "the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience." (49) The alternative position is that there is only one kind of object, the real object which is also the sensual object, i.e. the object that I sense. Although we can imagine stuff that never can be experienced we can only deal with the world as experienced, and even the most hypothetical and intellectualized or fantastic objects are experienced in some way, for example unicorns are experienced by way of unicorn pictures even though it would be wrong to say that there are animals rightly called unicorns.
I was introduced to Harman by an article in the current issue of Art Forum, "Those Objects of Desire" by Andrew Cole (Summer 2015). Cole is critical of Harman although from a different perspective than I am. He basically thinks that Harman has failed to see how Kantian his theory really is, and that personifying such objects as commodities runs up against criticisms already raised by Marx. Although Cole makes some good points, my response draws more from the American Pragmatist tradition.
One way to test Harman's theory, which is supposed to cover all sorts of objects, is to see how it works in relation to a work of art. Heidegger himself in "The Origin of the Work of Art" developed his notion of the thingliness of a thing in relation to works of art, famously a painting by Van Gogh of shoes and a Greek Temple. Harman argues that all objects have two sides, one side being the real object, something much like Kant's thing-in-itself, and the other being what he calls the sensual object, i.e. the object-as-experienced. (It is not clear whether the thinks that the sensual dog and the real dog are two sides of the same dog or two completely different things, although usually he talks as though they are completely different things.) He believes that real things are completely autonomous and do not depend in any way on relations to other things. This raises many concerns. Use our example of a work of art. It is impossible to understand a painting by Edward Hopper, for example, without understanding something about the context in which it was created.
I should put my Deweyan assumptions to the fore before going on. (David L. Hildebrand has written an excellent book that explains how Dewey avoids the very dilemmas that Harman finds himself in: Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). Rather than saying that we should base our metaphysics on isolated or autonomous objects, Dewey would stress experience, although experience understood in his own way. Dewey is no subjectivist or idealist. On his account, experience arises out of the interaction between ourselves as live creatures and our environments. Because Dewey takes a naturalist perspective he does not rank humans as anything special. Animals and even plants can interact as live creatures with their environments, although the nature of their experience would be quite different from that of humans. Nonetheless, Dewey is not guilty of a mechanistic worldview typical of previous naturalist philosophers, or of the simplistic approach to empiricism found in Locke and Hume.
For Dewey, and me, the live creature, say a human, confronts an object, say a watch, directly. Rejecting dualism, Dewey would not accept that the watch that we confront sensuously is to be distinguished from the real watch. There are, of course, many manifestations of the watch, many ways in which it appears to us. These manifestations are all ways we confront the watch.
One of the ways in which Harman's philosophy is both anti-art and anti-aesthetic is the way in which he discusses sensuous qualities. Harman likes to talk about these qualities as "gems, glitter, and confetti of extraneous detail" (25). The aesthetic aspect of experience is to be degraded to the merely pretty. Following Husserl, he sees sensuous objects as "frosted over with accidental features" irrelevant to their identity. Again, as he understands Husserl, the objects of our world are "heavily adorned with frivolous decorations and surface-effects." Whereas Harman sees these sensuous qualities as superfluous, the everyday aesthetics position I advocate, approaches them as rich in meaning. Moreover, from a pragmatist perspective, these meanings are played out in the activity of the live creature. The sensuous qualities may be pursued to fulfillment, for example, in "an experience."
Not to be overly negative, I want to give credit to Harman for stressing one point which he derives from Husserl. He writes: "what we encounter in experience are unified objects, not isolated points of quality. Indeed...the individual qualities of things are already imbued with the style or feel of the thing as a whole. Even if the exact hue of red in my apple can also be found in a nearby shirt or can of spraypaint, the colors will have a different feel in each of these cases, since they are bonded to the thing to which they belong." (11) This seems right, although at the same time one should take into account Goodman's idea that objects can exemplify certain qualities, thereby indirectly referencing all other instances of that quality.
Harman is opposed to something called "correlationism" which holds that "we cannot think of world without humans or humans without world." He is right to reject this view. We can certainly think a world unperceived by humans. However, whatever we think and whatever we experience is, by necessity, thought or experienced by humans. We cannot expunge that aspect of experience. We start from out own positions in life and in philosophy. There is a real world, but the world we experience is one that has us at the center and is experienced in our terms. For example, any description we make of such a world is a description necessarily in a language of human making, with terms and meanings that carry out contribution. So, although correlationism is false, it does point to a certain truth that Harman ignores.
Harman is also interested in Husserl's notion of eidetic features of the sensual object, features that make up the eidos of the object. Harman follows Husserl in thinking that real eidetic qualities "can only be the target of intellectual and not sensuous intuition." The radical division of intellectual and sensuous intuition is the source of yet another problem: this is another dualism that needs to be undercut. All intellectual intuition is in part sensual and all sensual intuition is in part intellectual. I have written about essences elsewhere and will have more to say about them in the future. Suffice it here to say that essences on my view are emergent from the activity of searching for essences. Essences are not eternal and unchanging but emergent. Nor are they solely intellectual objects. Moreover, they may be deeply connected to the particular and the accidental. Some quality in all of its particularity can exemplify. We can say for example that this particular thing standing for universal, but I think that sometimes it is deeper than that. When a particular thing stands for a universal it does not do so in such a way as to lose its particular nature.
Harman's object centered metaphysics is based as much on his interpretation of Heidegger as on his interpretation of Husserl. In particular he focuses on Heidegger's understanding of a hammer. He also has his own understanding of what Heidegger means by the four-fold, which I will discuss in a future post. I think that Heidegger's understanding of a hammer in Being and Time is deeply flawed, and this is the basis for many problems I also find in Harman. Heidegger says that hammers are usually present to us only when they fail. This idea undercuts (and is in deep opposition to) the entire aesthetics of design. When I handle a hammer I am aware of its design. It is satisfying when it feels good in my hand, looks good, and does its job well. The awareness of the hammer I have when it is broken is different in kind from that: it is an awareness of a functional ugliness. But when a hammer works well, looks good, etc. it is a thing of beauty, more so of course for a carpenter than for me. Heidegger and Harman just exclude from consciousness the aesthetically positive value of the hammer.
Let Vico intrude here. Here is a quote from wikipedia on Vico: "Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("On the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language"). The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes, through observation: “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”" Vico and Dewey are on the same page here: Descartes, Husserl, Heidegger and Harman are on the other page. We know the hammer through its creation and through using it in the act of creation. Knowledge is connected with the live creature doing things in the world. Knowledge is an aspect of experience. The hammer by no means functions behind or beneath experience. Heidegger should have known better since he is the one who stressed the way in which technology has made us close our ears to Being. It is technology when treated in a merely mechanical way that causes the hammer to recede. Things lose the shiny sparkly quality of aliveness in a world which is mechanized. Heidegger's and Harman's philosophy of the receding hammer is just a sign of the very concept of the thing as mere object of use that Heidegger critiques elsewhere.
Harman's Heideggerian talk of hammers withdrawing into "subterranean background, enacting their reality in the cosmos without appearing in the least" is offensive mystification. In talking about what lies behind all phenomena, Heidegger and Harman go in the opposite direction of Dewey, since Dewey rejects precisely this dualism, the phenomena/noumena dualism that goes back to Kant, but even further to Descartes and ultimately Plato.
The sentence "conscious awareness makes up only a tiny portion of our lives" (37) seems innocuous at first, perhaps trivially true, and yet what sense can really be made of it. Even when engaging in psychoanalysis everything that happens to me is in consciousness: I become conscious of unconscious desires. Moreover, the other manifestations of those unconscious desires also happen, for example in my Freudian slips, in daily life. Conscious awareness makes up most of our lives, not a tiny portion...we are the lives we live, the lives we experience, our conscious lives.
Harman and Heidegger say that I usually fail to notice my eyeglasses. In a way that is true. If my attention is directed elsewhere from my eyeglasses I do not notice them: they are on the very edge of my consciousness. However it is easy to redirect my attention to my eyeglasses, and this does not require that they be broken or even maladjusted. I can attend more or less to my eyeglasses and to their various features, for example how well they work and how good they look. Although the idea that tools "withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically" just seems implausible when I think about my glasses, Heidegger at least recognizes that tools exist in terms of relations to other pieces of equipment, often in a system of interrelated things, for example ink and inkstand.
The absurdity of Harman's position has be found in the sentence: "the world in itself is made of realities withdrawing from all conscious access." (38) The realities we encounter in life, for example my glasses, do not withdraw from conscious access. If I want to have conscious access to my glasses I simply attend to them. When I lose my glasses I can find them: that is because they are still available.
Following Heidegger, Harman says "an earthquake calls my attention to the solid ground on which I rely..." I have been through a major earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California. I was in my backyard when it happened. It drew my attention to the way in which the ground, which I formerly saw as solid, could take another form entirely, something more like a wave at sea. Retroactively I could think of how my assumptions about the earth or the "solid" ground and what it could do were naive. The solid ground is not always solid. At the same time, it is easy for me to attend to the solidity of ground in non-earthquake times, for example when I am looking for a good foundation for a ladder. What does it mean to "silently depend" on the solidity of the ground?
Harman has a strange way of combining what seems to be common sense with nonsense. He says "There will always be aspects of these phenomena [for example the solid floor of my home] that elude me; further surprises might always be in store. No matter how hard I work to become conscious of things, environing conditions still remain of which I never become fully aware. When I stare at a river, wolf....I do not grasp the whole of their reality." Who could disagree! And then "This reality slips from view into a perpetually veiled underworld., leaving me with only the most frivolous simulacra of these entities." (39) What sense can possibly be made of this idea? It must mean something more than the mere truisms that preceded it.
For Harman there are only two kinds of objects: "the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience." (49) The alternative position is that there is only one kind of object, the real object which is also the sensual object, i.e. the object that I sense. Although we can imagine stuff that never can be experienced we can only deal with the world as experienced, and even the most hypothetical and intellectualized or fantastic objects are experienced in some way, for example unicorns are experienced by way of unicorn pictures even though it would be wrong to say that there are animals rightly called unicorns.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Heidegger and Everyday Aesthetics Being and Time #13
Being and Time paragraph 13 intimates a theory concerning everyday aesthetics, especially by way of the concept of fascination. Heidegger has established that Being-in-the-world is "a basic state of Dasein" where Dasein pre-eminately operates in everydayness. Heidegger here stresses the mistake of setting up a relation between a knowing subject and an independent Object, this subject/ Object distinction to be replaced by the Dasein/world distinction. Now, the concept of everyday aesthetics comes into this chapter through the concept of fascination. Fascination itself is close to an aesthetic concept, so close that perhaps it is one. We speak of being fascinated by aesthetic objects. Fascination is when we perceive something and cannot jerk ourselves away. The object is "fascinating." It perceptually holds. We think of fascination mainly as something positive, and so it is a kind of pleasure, or perhaps a delight in the sense of Edmund Burke when he speaks of the sublime as an object of delight but not pleasure. For Heidegger, "Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned." This happens when concern "holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating and the like." Thus it is a "tarrying alongside" which lets us encounter things in the world purely in the way they look. This implies a kind of looking-at in which we dwell "alongside entities within-the -world." This "dwelling" is one in which "perception of the present-at-hand is consummated," which reminds us of Dewey's notion of the aesthetic experience as a consummation. However, here the consummation is a matter of addressing oneself to something and discussing it as such, expressing what is perceived in determinate propositions.
All of this, of course, is related to the problem of knowing. Heidegger sees this as "interpretation in the broadest sense" in which the perception is made determinate. Knowing is not the primary mode but is something based ultimately on Being-in-the-world. The question is whether fascination is an aesthetic mode upon which all other modes, including that of knowing, are ultimately based. If knowledge were simply a matter of bringing something into an internal box or cabinet then the aesthetic relation to the objects of knowledge would be unimportant. A close or caring relationship Heidegger posits with objects of knowledge implies the fascination which brings in the aesthetic dimension. So then it would seem that the aesthetic is primary and the epistemological is only secondary.
All of this, of course, is related to the problem of knowing. Heidegger sees this as "interpretation in the broadest sense" in which the perception is made determinate. Knowing is not the primary mode but is something based ultimately on Being-in-the-world. The question is whether fascination is an aesthetic mode upon which all other modes, including that of knowing, are ultimately based. If knowledge were simply a matter of bringing something into an internal box or cabinet then the aesthetic relation to the objects of knowledge would be unimportant. A close or caring relationship Heidegger posits with objects of knowledge implies the fascination which brings in the aesthetic dimension. So then it would seem that the aesthetic is primary and the epistemological is only secondary.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Heidegger's Aesthetic Approach to Phenomenology in Being and Time Introduction II
The method Heidegger seeks to use is phenomenology, which is commonly characterized by the cry of "To the things themselves!" (I am working with Being and Time tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, SCM Press, 1962) My working hypothesis is that this means something radically different in Heidegger than it did in Husserl, that the things themselves are no longer placed in opposition to things that are not phenomena. Hediegger does not in any way see humans as walking in bubbles of experience.
An epoche is not even necessary. Rather, phenomena simply consist in the entities we experience. Subject/object dualism is deconstructed. But what else is new? I suspect that the analysis becomes fundamentally aesthetic, not because of the primacy of aesthesis, the Greek for perception, but because of primacy of metaphorical seeing. That is, metaphorical seeing is the core of Heideggerian approach to ontology. Heidegger does not much use the term "essence," but the goal of his effort is revelation of the Being of beings, which I would call the essential nature of beings (recognizing that these are not Platonic Forms but rather aspects that change over time.) Heidegger uses false or questionable etymologies to structure our thinking in a such a way as to undercut traditional ways we might look at phenomenology, ontology and philosophy in general. The phenomenon becomes something that shows itself, and thus is no longer thought of as something internal or subjective. His derivation of phenomenon from phaino for "bring to light" takes us to seeing phenomena as moving temporally from the obscure into light rather than as objects there simply to be described. The idea that the object "shows itself" indicates that the viewer is not the sole active agent in the person/entity relationship. The phenomena include not only the things that are in the light but also things than "can be brought to light." Moreover a phenomenon can "show itself as something which in itself it is not" and can then "look like something or other," which is a matter of "seeming." Yet, Heidegger argues, the two ideas of phenomenon (bring to light and seeming) are "structurally interconnected." First, something has to claim to show itself before it can show itself as something it is not. This he distinguishes also from symptoms or appearances. "Appearing" involves something not showing itself, rather than something showing itself as what it is not, as in "semblance." Also, appearance involves the showing itself of something: it is just that something appears without being an appearance, appearing taking on three meanings, as announcing-itself and as what does the announcing, and as mere appearance, the phenomenon being something that hides itself in the appearance.
The concept of "seeming" seems at first to be entirely negative, but takes on a different aspect when we look at the second part of the analysis of the word "phenomenology." Logos is understood in many ways, but Heidegger characteristically traces it back to one Greek insight, that it is a function of discourse, which, in his understanding, lets something be seen in its essential nature. Again, discourse does not occur in an experiential bubble. Genuine discourse takes its clue from the thing itself, making it accessible to the other party in the discourse. So it is a dynamic involving three things, the phenomenon and two interlocutors.
Now for the aesthetic part. Heidegger sees discourse as "synthesis" in the sense not of a "psychical binding" (in the way Kant would see it) but as letting "something be seen in its togetherness with something" i.e. "seen as something." This is the metaphorical moment which I have referred to in my working hypothesis, that Heidegger sees phenomenology as revealing essences that are essentially metaphorical, the Being of beings as metaphorical, as seemings, but of a particular powerful, truthful, rather than the (usual) untruthful, sort. This is why a correspondence theory of truth will not work here. Truth is something that happens in the synthesis of what is with what it is not; a revealing that also, at the same time, conceals. We, in talking, let the hidden thing be "seen as something unhidden" or, in the false mode, cover it up. Truth is this process in which we let something be seen.
For Heidegger, aisthesis, "the sheer sensory perception of something" is "true" in the Greek sense of true, although not in the contemporary propositional sense. He takes this to provide a kind of insight into truth, the idea being that the noein "is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess" and which can be perceived just by looking. The next stage is the synthesis structure when something is being seen as something and thus possibly covering it up, the true judgment being the opposite of this. What Heidegger seems to be suggestion is that the Platonic doctrine of ideas is correct if understood in a different way, i.e. under this Greek notion of truth as unconcealment. (The emphasis on aesthetisis seems to indicate that the uncealment happens in the live interaction of the human creature with its environment, to use Deweyan terminology.) What is shown in phenomenology is "something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself as all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself." (59) The is why phenomenology is hermeneutics: it is interpretation which reveals the hidden.
So phenomenological reveals Being but not in the mode of judgments under the correspondence theory of truth but in the mode of revealing the hidden while at the same time keeping something hidden by the fact that the truth is metaphorical, a seeming, although a powerful one. No doubt this is a stretch: my apologies to Heidegger scholars. But something to think about.
An epoche is not even necessary. Rather, phenomena simply consist in the entities we experience. Subject/object dualism is deconstructed. But what else is new? I suspect that the analysis becomes fundamentally aesthetic, not because of the primacy of aesthesis, the Greek for perception, but because of primacy of metaphorical seeing. That is, metaphorical seeing is the core of Heideggerian approach to ontology. Heidegger does not much use the term "essence," but the goal of his effort is revelation of the Being of beings, which I would call the essential nature of beings (recognizing that these are not Platonic Forms but rather aspects that change over time.) Heidegger uses false or questionable etymologies to structure our thinking in a such a way as to undercut traditional ways we might look at phenomenology, ontology and philosophy in general. The phenomenon becomes something that shows itself, and thus is no longer thought of as something internal or subjective. His derivation of phenomenon from phaino for "bring to light" takes us to seeing phenomena as moving temporally from the obscure into light rather than as objects there simply to be described. The idea that the object "shows itself" indicates that the viewer is not the sole active agent in the person/entity relationship. The phenomena include not only the things that are in the light but also things than "can be brought to light." Moreover a phenomenon can "show itself as something which in itself it is not" and can then "look like something or other," which is a matter of "seeming." Yet, Heidegger argues, the two ideas of phenomenon (bring to light and seeming) are "structurally interconnected." First, something has to claim to show itself before it can show itself as something it is not. This he distinguishes also from symptoms or appearances. "Appearing" involves something not showing itself, rather than something showing itself as what it is not, as in "semblance." Also, appearance involves the showing itself of something: it is just that something appears without being an appearance, appearing taking on three meanings, as announcing-itself and as what does the announcing, and as mere appearance, the phenomenon being something that hides itself in the appearance.
The concept of "seeming" seems at first to be entirely negative, but takes on a different aspect when we look at the second part of the analysis of the word "phenomenology." Logos is understood in many ways, but Heidegger characteristically traces it back to one Greek insight, that it is a function of discourse, which, in his understanding, lets something be seen in its essential nature. Again, discourse does not occur in an experiential bubble. Genuine discourse takes its clue from the thing itself, making it accessible to the other party in the discourse. So it is a dynamic involving three things, the phenomenon and two interlocutors.
Now for the aesthetic part. Heidegger sees discourse as "synthesis" in the sense not of a "psychical binding" (in the way Kant would see it) but as letting "something be seen in its togetherness with something" i.e. "seen as something." This is the metaphorical moment which I have referred to in my working hypothesis, that Heidegger sees phenomenology as revealing essences that are essentially metaphorical, the Being of beings as metaphorical, as seemings, but of a particular powerful, truthful, rather than the (usual) untruthful, sort. This is why a correspondence theory of truth will not work here. Truth is something that happens in the synthesis of what is with what it is not; a revealing that also, at the same time, conceals. We, in talking, let the hidden thing be "seen as something unhidden" or, in the false mode, cover it up. Truth is this process in which we let something be seen.
For Heidegger, aisthesis, "the sheer sensory perception of something" is "true" in the Greek sense of true, although not in the contemporary propositional sense. He takes this to provide a kind of insight into truth, the idea being that the noein "is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities as such may possess" and which can be perceived just by looking. The next stage is the synthesis structure when something is being seen as something and thus possibly covering it up, the true judgment being the opposite of this. What Heidegger seems to be suggestion is that the Platonic doctrine of ideas is correct if understood in a different way, i.e. under this Greek notion of truth as unconcealment. (The emphasis on aesthetisis seems to indicate that the uncealment happens in the live interaction of the human creature with its environment, to use Deweyan terminology.) What is shown in phenomenology is "something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself as all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself." (59) The is why phenomenology is hermeneutics: it is interpretation which reveals the hidden.
So phenomenological reveals Being but not in the mode of judgments under the correspondence theory of truth but in the mode of revealing the hidden while at the same time keeping something hidden by the fact that the truth is metaphorical, a seeming, although a powerful one. No doubt this is a stretch: my apologies to Heidegger scholars. But something to think about.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
On appreciating thumbtacks: Arthur Danto's "Aesthetics and the Work of Art"
My comment here will be based on thinking about the fourth chapter of Arthur Danto's great book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard, 1981). Before I go on I should note that Danto recently passed away. Sad news indeed! He was such a wonderful man. He was kind to me on the couple occasions I met him, as he seems to have been to everyone he met. He has always been one of my heroes not only as a philosopher but as a world-class intellectual. Some might think that criticizing the dead is inappropriate, but there would be no better thing for a philosopher, that is if the criticism amounts to taking his or her ideas very seriously. These comments are therefore dedicated to Arthur Danto.
I take it that Danto is arguing in this chapter that aesthetic appreciation means something very different when it comes to art than when it comes to non-art objects. Much of this chapter (and much of the book) is directed against George Dickie, and Dickie argues that the only difference between appreciation of art and appreciation of nonart is that the two have different objects, Dickie holding that what we appreciate in art is the same as what we appreciate in nonart. This is why Dickie entertains the idea that in appreciating Fountain we appreciate its gleaming white surface and other features that virtually identical urinals would have. Danto, by contrast, insists that in appreciating Fountain we are appreciating very different qualities than we would in a urinal. He calls these properties "aesthetic" too, but one could more usefully call them art-qualities. One example would be Fountain's wittiness. This quality is not shared with the urinals back in the hardware store. Danto even questions whether "gleaming surfaces and deep reflections" are qualities of Fountain (even though they might well be the qualities of the urinal upon which this work is based.) This goes against my own feeling that the separation between art and life should not be seen as quite so radical, that Duchamp, despite everything he said, picked a urinal for this work of art because it looked cool to him, just as Le Corbusier a few years later picked grain elevators as new paradigms for architecture. There is something modernist about choosing a urinal to display as art: for example the "gleaming surface" look we also find not only in Brancusi's sculptures but in most high design artifacts of the period. (There is also something modernist in the Freudian aspects of the wit involved.) Duchamp had to pick something that had powerful aesthetic qualities for the time just so that he could be making a real point when he insisted that he did not pick it for its powerful aesthetic qualities! Danto takes the rather extreme position that the properties of the the urinal "deposited in the artworld it shares with most items of industrial porcelainerie [industrial objects made of porcelain] while the properties Fountain possesses as an artwork it shares with the Julian Tomb of Michelangelo." Really? And what pray-tell are those that it shares with Michelangelo's breath-taking sculptures other than those of the sort, "its photograph appears in an Art History book," "many sophisticated people consider it art," and "is smaller than the sun"? This is a thin set of similarities indeed. Danto may be leading us into a false dichotomy, for he considers the (only!) alternative to be that "what made Fountain an artwork were only the qualities it shared with urinals" which is surely false, I agree. But his position goes further and is clearly directed against the possibility of a general aesthetics (one that covers art, nature and everyday life) and thus is against continuities between art and nonart. He says a work of art has many qualities which are "of a different sort altogether" (94) from qualities belonging to objects indiscernible from it but not artworks. For example, Fountain has many qualities entirely different from the urinal that Duchamp picked up.
Fountain is hardly indiscernible from the original urinal for two reasons on my account. First, Fountain is the original urinal: it is just that urinal transformed into a work of art. Danto would be shocked at this idea. But although the two are in different timeslices they are no more different essentially then myself at five years of age and myself now. We should distinguish between "identical with" and "is identified with." I am not identical with my five our old self: I am not even identical with myself yesterday. But I have the same identity. I am still Tom Leddy. I am the same person. This is true for the urinal that become Fountain. So it does not even make sense to speak of Fountain as indiscernible from the original urinal. You couldn't set the artwork and the "material counterpart" beside each other, the reason being that one thing cannot be in two places at once! You could, Danto might reply, compare photographs of each. Yes, but this is where the second point comes in: they are not indiscernible even in their photographs. The photograph of Fountain by Stieglitz shows it with a signature on it and placed on a pedestal. Even if a photo of the urinal that became Fountain existed and even if the urinal was lying on its side, the signature would be absent. So the we could tell which is which by looking at the photographs: they are not indiscernible counterparts. (Sometimes Danto talks as if the material counterpart of Fountain is exactly what we see when we see Fountain but not seen as art. So in this case the indiscernible mere thing counterpart would look just like Fountain.) This may seem a trivial point but something very like it is quite possibly true for all of Danto's examples when they are not completely imaginary. Very little in this world is really indiscernible. One could have a gallery show of paintings that are indiscernible: there was once one by Yves Kline, but this would pretty much require that all of the works be by one artist. Multiple monochrome artists will necessarily produce works with subtly interesting differences based on their own choices. Someone could of course argue that this does not work since Fountain is a multiple: there are other objects called Fountain in various museums, objects which Duchamp picked from hardware stores later and signed in the same or a similar manner. Whether Fountain is one work, a series, an edition, or of some other such ontological category, is not an issue I want to get into here: suffice it that each time a urinal was picked by Duchamp that urinal was transformed into a work of art while retaining its identity (it is still that object that began its life in a hardware store) as well as many of its properties. You could say, however, that it took on a new identity while retaining its old identity just as I took on the identity of being a college professor while retaining the more fundamental identity of being Tom Leddy, one that I have had from shortly after birth. It is nonsense to say that the urinal no longer has the property of "gleaming surface" for example when it becomes Fountain.
Danto argues that "there are two orders of aesthetic response, depending upon whether the response is to an artwork or to a mere real thing that cannot be told apart from it." (94) He uses this to attack the idea that "aesthetic" should be a term included in our definition of art. Its art nature determines what sorts of aesthetic responses are appropriate. So there is "a special aesthetics for works of art." (95) But is there? Can't a "mere thing" be witty? Isn't witty conversation witty even though it is not part of the art of literature? Does Danto seriously mean that beauty means something completely different when applied to art than when applied to a flower? Danto grants to Dickie that thumbtacks can be appreciated if one makes an effort, but just thinks that the language of appreciation is going to be totally different here than in the case of a thumbtack that has been transformed into the world of art.
Again, Danto talks about an artwork's "material counterpart" often as though we are referring here to the material substratum of the work of art rather than an indistinguishable object that is elsewhere from the work of art (back at the hardware store, for example.) One wonders whether on Danto's view the material substratum of works of art does not entirely disappear (although sometimes he speaks as though it remains at least in aspects of the material counterpart that are picked out by the particular interpretation). He says at one point that "a work whose material counterpart consists of three thumbtacks may have abysses of meaning" (103) to which one can only ask why the indiscernible object could not also have abysses of meaning i.e. for a Zen Buddhist having a satori experience. If completely different language is needed for each then "abysses of meaning" cannot mean the same, on Danto's view, in each case. But that seems strange, doesn't it?
Let's go into this a bit more. Consider the creative process (to which Danto plays very little attention). The main elements in the creative process are artist, materials, and subject-matter. (There is some possibility that in totally abstract art there is no subject-matter: but Danto would not think so himself since he insists that all art is about something.) Let's think of Cezanne in his studio looking at a still-life arrangement. As he looks at a group of peaches he perceives in them certain aesthetic qualities which he tries to bring out, express, enhance or exemplify in his painting. At the same time he is noticing certain aesthetic qualities in paint and in paint splotches that he has placed on canvas, which he also tries to bring out, express, enhance or exemplify. The amazing thing is that he tries and sometimes succeeds in doing both at once and in the same progressive act: the same act that progresses to completion of a painting, a masterwork by Cezanne. As Cezanne looks at the still life arrangement in front of him he sees it as art in the sense that he sees it in light of creating a work of art, not in the sense that he mistakenly believes it to be art. What is this, again, it is a matter of noticing and imaginatively interacting with certain aesthetic qualities already there in the arrangement and already there also in the paints on his pallet and on his unfinished canvas. There are continuities in aesthetic experience here that Danto simply denies. I am not denying that there is a "transfiguration of the commonplace" in art, but insist that the transfiguration also occurs in the creative process and in the way that the artist sees the world and in the way that people who aesthetically appreciate the common things of our world see those things, and that these are all related. Danto rightly sees the importance of theory in our seeing art as art but fails entirely to see the continuities between art and life.
Danto bases his thinking on a radical distinction between the physical senses and what one might call the value senses: i.e. an aesthetic sense, a moral sense, and a sense of humor. (96-100) For him, the sense of sight is innate and cannot be refined, unlike the value senses. So, on his view, seeing something is not tinged by values. But this is false. As Marx Wartofsky has shown in his writings on historical epistemology, perception changes historically. There is no pure seeing: seeing is always "seeing as." David Hume famously explained aesthetic taste by showing its continuities with physical taste, in particular, taste in wine. This is a good example that Danto fails to follow. Danto insists that the sense of taste and the sense of humor are culturally conditioned. Fine, but this is also true for the physical senses. Danto thinks that the big difference between the two types of "sense" (physical and value) is that in the case of humor for example we are responding to something because it is amusing. The idea is that in the value senses we attribute a value to an object and act in relation to it. Yet, in seeing, we are constantly connecting the act of seeing with the act of looking: the two cannot really be separated except in theory. Seeing is tied to a variety of practical actions and evaluations. How could it not be? Danto says that having a sense of humor affects one's life globally: but then so too does the way one sees things, the texture of one's perceptual life. Moreover, there are important phenomenological similarities between the seeing involved in looking at a landscape and the seeing involved in looking at a landscape painting. Isn't it obvious that there is a connect, even between very abstract landscapes such as those of Diebenkorn.
Danto's position seems to be tied to agreement with Wittgenstein that values are not in the world, and that there is a radical distinction between evaluation and observation. But I would hold, in a more Deweyan spirit, that all observation is value-laden, that values are to be found in the world-as-we-experience-it, and that these perceptions can be inter-subjective, the reason being that others can see the same objects in the same value-laden way that we can; and that, yes, Danto is right that "values involve a relationship between ourselves and the world," however it is wrong to see all of this as simply projection of our value responses "back onto the world" as Danto seems to think. Thus Danto is just wrong when he says that "responsiveness does not go with the so-called five senses." We never just "sense red" as Danto implies, but rather notice or say that something is red within a specific context of life and action: "red" is definitely not a matter best understood by whether someone says "red" when asked for a color identification in a psychological lab. So there is something disturbing about Danto's sentence "Mirroring the transformation of nature" is a natural and suitable metaphor for minds equipped solely with the five senses." (97) since those minds would be very much unlike human minds, and in these circumstances "five senses" would mean something very much unlike what we mean by "seeing" for example.
Danto thinks that the ordinary senses cannot admit of perversion whereas the value senses can. At first this seems plausible, but the problem lies in the radical abstraction of "ordinary senses" from value senses. All of our ordinary senses are value senses, and so, if there is perversion, there is perversion of both. It the Marxists are right, for example, that there is false consciousness this cuts across this supposed divide. It might be thought that "seeing" is not subject to intervention of the will (as Danto thinks), but looking, noticing, and observing are subject to will, and it is not clear how these are to be distinguished from seeing, in the end. So, when Danto says "no knowledge of an object can make it look different" and "an object retains its sensory qualities unchanged however it is classed and whatever it may be called" (98) one can only think that it is the failings of his theory that leads him to say things that are so obviously false. He wants to say that the aesthetic sense is a function of one's beliefs and that the ordinary senses are not. That's the big distinction, but it just doesn't hold. The only way he can get around the fact that we do change our perceptions of wine, for example, based on knowledge is to insist that when "told that a certain wine has the taste of raspberries, I may learn to discriminate this taste" which he did not at first even though it was there to be tasted, and so "the object did not acquire these qualities by being described" whereas the art object has qualities completely different from its indiscernible counterpart. This is the crux of the issue.
Danto is making two mistakes here. First, he underestimates the role of imagination and value-perception in the tasting of wine. Fine wine is more like art than he is willing to admit. The descriptors ("tastes like raspberries" for example) and their accuracy are to a large extent socially and culturally determined: the claims and experiences are no less real for that. These are complex relational qualities. Second, he underestimates the imaginative capacities (the value-laden perception) of the artist when observing the subject-matter or materials that are part of the creative process that goes into making a work of art. He thinks that "the qualities an object has when an artwork are in fact so different from what an indiscernible counterpart has when a mere real thing that it is absurd to suppose I missed those qualities in the latter." Well, it is not absurd. Some of Duchamp's Dadaist friends, maybe a few years after Fountain's creation, might reasonably have said to themselves, "how could I have missed the aesthetic possibilities for our project in a urinal!" They didn't see what he saw when he walked into that hardware store. (A more complex story could be told but to the same effect if Duchamp actually was inspired first by the idea of submitting something to the show that would be rejected and then thought of Fountain as the perfect response. Here, the urinal comes to mind imaginatively first, and this is followed by the trip to the hardware store to find the right thing.)
So when Danto says "no sensory examination of an object will tell me that it is an artwork, since quality for quality it may be matched by an object that is not one" (99) my reply is that a sensory examination of the object will necessarily carry with it concepts and values (as Kant say, there are no percepts without concepts) so that there just isn't anything indiscernible or matching Fountain quality for quality. (Incidentally, his claim here contradicts his other claim that quality for quality there is no match at all between Fountain and its indiscernible counterpart in the hardware store.) Our responses to artworks and to the things that are their causal sources (chosen subject matter, materials, etc.) are different, I agree, but I also insist that they are continuous and, in most instances, otherwise related.
Danto writes "learning it is a work of art means that it has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks" and so our aesthetic responses will be "an altogether different order of things." (99) Partially true, but not quite right. He is missing the transitional moments, for example when Duchamp beings to see the object differently in his mind, when he is working on Fountain in the studio but before he has presented it as art, and so on. Moreover, there is no reason why the original appropriated object couldn't carry with it into the artworld context many of its properties enhanced and otherwise transformed in such a way as to retain their identity. Duchamp had to insist that the aesthetic qualities of the urinal were left behind in Fountain precisely because this does not normally happen in the transfigurations of art. This might be a case where really rare cases just do not make for good philosophy. If, for example, Fountain was the only artwork in existence for which the artist denied that the aesthetic qualities of the subject matter or materials were of no relevance to its value, interpretation or identity as a work of art, then to make claims about art in general based on this would be absurd.
Interestingly, Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" could be read as in direct opposition to Danto on this point. Danto sets up the artworld as detached from the thingly nature of art (the material substratum). Heidegger sees the nature of art as revealing itself through the way a work of art can reveal the "abysses of meaning" in a pair of peasant shoes, whereas Danto would deny that "abysses of meaning" could apply with the same meaning both to Van Gogh's painting and to the peasant shoes it portrays. For Heidegger, art happens as truth happens, truth being the non-scientific truth that is the unconcealment of Being. As we learn about the equipmental nature of equipment we learn about the thingly nature of a thing and thereby the work-nature of a work of art. The relationship between the painting of shoes, the shoes, the peasant women who wears the shoes, the artist who paints the shoes, and we who look at and are moved by this painting, is intensely intimate. This is surely a case in which an analytic philosopher (one who, interestingly, was widely read in continental philosophy) and a continental philosopher deeply disagree....they are not just talking past each other or using different kinds of language. (It is also interesting that no one I know of has commented on this deep disagreement.) However although Danto was clearly trying in this book to refute major views held by his analytic philosopher contemporaries (Dickie, Cohen, Beardsley, etc.) he seemed unaware that he was in direct conflict with Heidegger. Who was right? Danto, like Plato (on most interpretations), leaves the world of mere things as a kind of dross, best to be forgotten when we enter the ideal realm of art (of Forms, in Plato's case). Heidegger finds the value of art to be deeply interrelated with everyday life. Currently I lean towards Heidegger on the question, but am open to counterarguments as I have a certain fondness for Danto, who was, at the very least, a nicer man.
I take it that Danto is arguing in this chapter that aesthetic appreciation means something very different when it comes to art than when it comes to non-art objects. Much of this chapter (and much of the book) is directed against George Dickie, and Dickie argues that the only difference between appreciation of art and appreciation of nonart is that the two have different objects, Dickie holding that what we appreciate in art is the same as what we appreciate in nonart. This is why Dickie entertains the idea that in appreciating Fountain we appreciate its gleaming white surface and other features that virtually identical urinals would have. Danto, by contrast, insists that in appreciating Fountain we are appreciating very different qualities than we would in a urinal. He calls these properties "aesthetic" too, but one could more usefully call them art-qualities. One example would be Fountain's wittiness. This quality is not shared with the urinals back in the hardware store. Danto even questions whether "gleaming surfaces and deep reflections" are qualities of Fountain (even though they might well be the qualities of the urinal upon which this work is based.) This goes against my own feeling that the separation between art and life should not be seen as quite so radical, that Duchamp, despite everything he said, picked a urinal for this work of art because it looked cool to him, just as Le Corbusier a few years later picked grain elevators as new paradigms for architecture. There is something modernist about choosing a urinal to display as art: for example the "gleaming surface" look we also find not only in Brancusi's sculptures but in most high design artifacts of the period. (There is also something modernist in the Freudian aspects of the wit involved.) Duchamp had to pick something that had powerful aesthetic qualities for the time just so that he could be making a real point when he insisted that he did not pick it for its powerful aesthetic qualities! Danto takes the rather extreme position that the properties of the the urinal "deposited in the artworld it shares with most items of industrial porcelainerie [industrial objects made of porcelain] while the properties Fountain possesses as an artwork it shares with the Julian Tomb of Michelangelo." Really? And what pray-tell are those that it shares with Michelangelo's breath-taking sculptures other than those of the sort, "its photograph appears in an Art History book," "many sophisticated people consider it art," and "is smaller than the sun"? This is a thin set of similarities indeed. Danto may be leading us into a false dichotomy, for he considers the (only!) alternative to be that "what made Fountain an artwork were only the qualities it shared with urinals" which is surely false, I agree. But his position goes further and is clearly directed against the possibility of a general aesthetics (one that covers art, nature and everyday life) and thus is against continuities between art and nonart. He says a work of art has many qualities which are "of a different sort altogether" (94) from qualities belonging to objects indiscernible from it but not artworks. For example, Fountain has many qualities entirely different from the urinal that Duchamp picked up.
Fountain is hardly indiscernible from the original urinal for two reasons on my account. First, Fountain is the original urinal: it is just that urinal transformed into a work of art. Danto would be shocked at this idea. But although the two are in different timeslices they are no more different essentially then myself at five years of age and myself now. We should distinguish between "identical with" and "is identified with." I am not identical with my five our old self: I am not even identical with myself yesterday. But I have the same identity. I am still Tom Leddy. I am the same person. This is true for the urinal that become Fountain. So it does not even make sense to speak of Fountain as indiscernible from the original urinal. You couldn't set the artwork and the "material counterpart" beside each other, the reason being that one thing cannot be in two places at once! You could, Danto might reply, compare photographs of each. Yes, but this is where the second point comes in: they are not indiscernible even in their photographs. The photograph of Fountain by Stieglitz shows it with a signature on it and placed on a pedestal. Even if a photo of the urinal that became Fountain existed and even if the urinal was lying on its side, the signature would be absent. So the we could tell which is which by looking at the photographs: they are not indiscernible counterparts. (Sometimes Danto talks as if the material counterpart of Fountain is exactly what we see when we see Fountain but not seen as art. So in this case the indiscernible mere thing counterpart would look just like Fountain.) This may seem a trivial point but something very like it is quite possibly true for all of Danto's examples when they are not completely imaginary. Very little in this world is really indiscernible. One could have a gallery show of paintings that are indiscernible: there was once one by Yves Kline, but this would pretty much require that all of the works be by one artist. Multiple monochrome artists will necessarily produce works with subtly interesting differences based on their own choices. Someone could of course argue that this does not work since Fountain is a multiple: there are other objects called Fountain in various museums, objects which Duchamp picked from hardware stores later and signed in the same or a similar manner. Whether Fountain is one work, a series, an edition, or of some other such ontological category, is not an issue I want to get into here: suffice it that each time a urinal was picked by Duchamp that urinal was transformed into a work of art while retaining its identity (it is still that object that began its life in a hardware store) as well as many of its properties. You could say, however, that it took on a new identity while retaining its old identity just as I took on the identity of being a college professor while retaining the more fundamental identity of being Tom Leddy, one that I have had from shortly after birth. It is nonsense to say that the urinal no longer has the property of "gleaming surface" for example when it becomes Fountain.
Danto argues that "there are two orders of aesthetic response, depending upon whether the response is to an artwork or to a mere real thing that cannot be told apart from it." (94) He uses this to attack the idea that "aesthetic" should be a term included in our definition of art. Its art nature determines what sorts of aesthetic responses are appropriate. So there is "a special aesthetics for works of art." (95) But is there? Can't a "mere thing" be witty? Isn't witty conversation witty even though it is not part of the art of literature? Does Danto seriously mean that beauty means something completely different when applied to art than when applied to a flower? Danto grants to Dickie that thumbtacks can be appreciated if one makes an effort, but just thinks that the language of appreciation is going to be totally different here than in the case of a thumbtack that has been transformed into the world of art.
Again, Danto talks about an artwork's "material counterpart" often as though we are referring here to the material substratum of the work of art rather than an indistinguishable object that is elsewhere from the work of art (back at the hardware store, for example.) One wonders whether on Danto's view the material substratum of works of art does not entirely disappear (although sometimes he speaks as though it remains at least in aspects of the material counterpart that are picked out by the particular interpretation). He says at one point that "a work whose material counterpart consists of three thumbtacks may have abysses of meaning" (103) to which one can only ask why the indiscernible object could not also have abysses of meaning i.e. for a Zen Buddhist having a satori experience. If completely different language is needed for each then "abysses of meaning" cannot mean the same, on Danto's view, in each case. But that seems strange, doesn't it?
Let's go into this a bit more. Consider the creative process (to which Danto plays very little attention). The main elements in the creative process are artist, materials, and subject-matter. (There is some possibility that in totally abstract art there is no subject-matter: but Danto would not think so himself since he insists that all art is about something.) Let's think of Cezanne in his studio looking at a still-life arrangement. As he looks at a group of peaches he perceives in them certain aesthetic qualities which he tries to bring out, express, enhance or exemplify in his painting. At the same time he is noticing certain aesthetic qualities in paint and in paint splotches that he has placed on canvas, which he also tries to bring out, express, enhance or exemplify. The amazing thing is that he tries and sometimes succeeds in doing both at once and in the same progressive act: the same act that progresses to completion of a painting, a masterwork by Cezanne. As Cezanne looks at the still life arrangement in front of him he sees it as art in the sense that he sees it in light of creating a work of art, not in the sense that he mistakenly believes it to be art. What is this, again, it is a matter of noticing and imaginatively interacting with certain aesthetic qualities already there in the arrangement and already there also in the paints on his pallet and on his unfinished canvas. There are continuities in aesthetic experience here that Danto simply denies. I am not denying that there is a "transfiguration of the commonplace" in art, but insist that the transfiguration also occurs in the creative process and in the way that the artist sees the world and in the way that people who aesthetically appreciate the common things of our world see those things, and that these are all related. Danto rightly sees the importance of theory in our seeing art as art but fails entirely to see the continuities between art and life.
Danto bases his thinking on a radical distinction between the physical senses and what one might call the value senses: i.e. an aesthetic sense, a moral sense, and a sense of humor. (96-100) For him, the sense of sight is innate and cannot be refined, unlike the value senses. So, on his view, seeing something is not tinged by values. But this is false. As Marx Wartofsky has shown in his writings on historical epistemology, perception changes historically. There is no pure seeing: seeing is always "seeing as." David Hume famously explained aesthetic taste by showing its continuities with physical taste, in particular, taste in wine. This is a good example that Danto fails to follow. Danto insists that the sense of taste and the sense of humor are culturally conditioned. Fine, but this is also true for the physical senses. Danto thinks that the big difference between the two types of "sense" (physical and value) is that in the case of humor for example we are responding to something because it is amusing. The idea is that in the value senses we attribute a value to an object and act in relation to it. Yet, in seeing, we are constantly connecting the act of seeing with the act of looking: the two cannot really be separated except in theory. Seeing is tied to a variety of practical actions and evaluations. How could it not be? Danto says that having a sense of humor affects one's life globally: but then so too does the way one sees things, the texture of one's perceptual life. Moreover, there are important phenomenological similarities between the seeing involved in looking at a landscape and the seeing involved in looking at a landscape painting. Isn't it obvious that there is a connect, even between very abstract landscapes such as those of Diebenkorn.
Danto's position seems to be tied to agreement with Wittgenstein that values are not in the world, and that there is a radical distinction between evaluation and observation. But I would hold, in a more Deweyan spirit, that all observation is value-laden, that values are to be found in the world-as-we-experience-it, and that these perceptions can be inter-subjective, the reason being that others can see the same objects in the same value-laden way that we can; and that, yes, Danto is right that "values involve a relationship between ourselves and the world," however it is wrong to see all of this as simply projection of our value responses "back onto the world" as Danto seems to think. Thus Danto is just wrong when he says that "responsiveness does not go with the so-called five senses." We never just "sense red" as Danto implies, but rather notice or say that something is red within a specific context of life and action: "red" is definitely not a matter best understood by whether someone says "red" when asked for a color identification in a psychological lab. So there is something disturbing about Danto's sentence "Mirroring the transformation of nature" is a natural and suitable metaphor for minds equipped solely with the five senses." (97) since those minds would be very much unlike human minds, and in these circumstances "five senses" would mean something very much unlike what we mean by "seeing" for example.
Danto thinks that the ordinary senses cannot admit of perversion whereas the value senses can. At first this seems plausible, but the problem lies in the radical abstraction of "ordinary senses" from value senses. All of our ordinary senses are value senses, and so, if there is perversion, there is perversion of both. It the Marxists are right, for example, that there is false consciousness this cuts across this supposed divide. It might be thought that "seeing" is not subject to intervention of the will (as Danto thinks), but looking, noticing, and observing are subject to will, and it is not clear how these are to be distinguished from seeing, in the end. So, when Danto says "no knowledge of an object can make it look different" and "an object retains its sensory qualities unchanged however it is classed and whatever it may be called" (98) one can only think that it is the failings of his theory that leads him to say things that are so obviously false. He wants to say that the aesthetic sense is a function of one's beliefs and that the ordinary senses are not. That's the big distinction, but it just doesn't hold. The only way he can get around the fact that we do change our perceptions of wine, for example, based on knowledge is to insist that when "told that a certain wine has the taste of raspberries, I may learn to discriminate this taste" which he did not at first even though it was there to be tasted, and so "the object did not acquire these qualities by being described" whereas the art object has qualities completely different from its indiscernible counterpart. This is the crux of the issue.
Danto is making two mistakes here. First, he underestimates the role of imagination and value-perception in the tasting of wine. Fine wine is more like art than he is willing to admit. The descriptors ("tastes like raspberries" for example) and their accuracy are to a large extent socially and culturally determined: the claims and experiences are no less real for that. These are complex relational qualities. Second, he underestimates the imaginative capacities (the value-laden perception) of the artist when observing the subject-matter or materials that are part of the creative process that goes into making a work of art. He thinks that "the qualities an object has when an artwork are in fact so different from what an indiscernible counterpart has when a mere real thing that it is absurd to suppose I missed those qualities in the latter." Well, it is not absurd. Some of Duchamp's Dadaist friends, maybe a few years after Fountain's creation, might reasonably have said to themselves, "how could I have missed the aesthetic possibilities for our project in a urinal!" They didn't see what he saw when he walked into that hardware store. (A more complex story could be told but to the same effect if Duchamp actually was inspired first by the idea of submitting something to the show that would be rejected and then thought of Fountain as the perfect response. Here, the urinal comes to mind imaginatively first, and this is followed by the trip to the hardware store to find the right thing.)
So when Danto says "no sensory examination of an object will tell me that it is an artwork, since quality for quality it may be matched by an object that is not one" (99) my reply is that a sensory examination of the object will necessarily carry with it concepts and values (as Kant say, there are no percepts without concepts) so that there just isn't anything indiscernible or matching Fountain quality for quality. (Incidentally, his claim here contradicts his other claim that quality for quality there is no match at all between Fountain and its indiscernible counterpart in the hardware store.) Our responses to artworks and to the things that are their causal sources (chosen subject matter, materials, etc.) are different, I agree, but I also insist that they are continuous and, in most instances, otherwise related.
Danto writes "learning it is a work of art means that it has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks" and so our aesthetic responses will be "an altogether different order of things." (99) Partially true, but not quite right. He is missing the transitional moments, for example when Duchamp beings to see the object differently in his mind, when he is working on Fountain in the studio but before he has presented it as art, and so on. Moreover, there is no reason why the original appropriated object couldn't carry with it into the artworld context many of its properties enhanced and otherwise transformed in such a way as to retain their identity. Duchamp had to insist that the aesthetic qualities of the urinal were left behind in Fountain precisely because this does not normally happen in the transfigurations of art. This might be a case where really rare cases just do not make for good philosophy. If, for example, Fountain was the only artwork in existence for which the artist denied that the aesthetic qualities of the subject matter or materials were of no relevance to its value, interpretation or identity as a work of art, then to make claims about art in general based on this would be absurd.
Interestingly, Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" could be read as in direct opposition to Danto on this point. Danto sets up the artworld as detached from the thingly nature of art (the material substratum). Heidegger sees the nature of art as revealing itself through the way a work of art can reveal the "abysses of meaning" in a pair of peasant shoes, whereas Danto would deny that "abysses of meaning" could apply with the same meaning both to Van Gogh's painting and to the peasant shoes it portrays. For Heidegger, art happens as truth happens, truth being the non-scientific truth that is the unconcealment of Being. As we learn about the equipmental nature of equipment we learn about the thingly nature of a thing and thereby the work-nature of a work of art. The relationship between the painting of shoes, the shoes, the peasant women who wears the shoes, the artist who paints the shoes, and we who look at and are moved by this painting, is intensely intimate. This is surely a case in which an analytic philosopher (one who, interestingly, was widely read in continental philosophy) and a continental philosopher deeply disagree....they are not just talking past each other or using different kinds of language. (It is also interesting that no one I know of has commented on this deep disagreement.) However although Danto was clearly trying in this book to refute major views held by his analytic philosopher contemporaries (Dickie, Cohen, Beardsley, etc.) he seemed unaware that he was in direct conflict with Heidegger. Who was right? Danto, like Plato (on most interpretations), leaves the world of mere things as a kind of dross, best to be forgotten when we enter the ideal realm of art (of Forms, in Plato's case). Heidegger finds the value of art to be deeply interrelated with everyday life. Currently I lean towards Heidegger on the question, but am open to counterarguments as I have a certain fondness for Danto, who was, at the very least, a nicer man.
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