Mark Johnson's The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: and the neglect of beauty

There is little I disagree with in Mark Johnson.  I have been reading his The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought:  The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art  (2018).  Johnson is every bit as much a Deweyan as I am.  That makes the little areas in which we might disagree interesting (to me).  What I think generally (our one point of disagreement) is that, with all his emphasis on meaning, Johnson neglects, or misses out on, the importance of beauty.  So he says, "Qualities are what we live for - the fresh, soft, translucent greens of leaves in early spring contrasted with the hardened, fatigued, dessicated greens in early fall..."   (227)  "This is the stuff of our lives." (227) There is something wrong here.  It is not the qualities we live for but rather the ways in which these qualities can be experienced as enhanced in a pleasurable way, or, to put it another way, experienced as objects of beauty or sublimity.   

Something is telling about Johnson's focus on contrast.  Contrast between qualities is interesting, and one may think about the contrast between two qualities of leaves in different seasons.  But this is not the "stuff of our lives."  The stuff of our lives is the quality of the leaves we experience now (say, in the Spring) and it is only really stuff of our lives, only really important for us, if it is experienced as beautiful.   After giving a  poem by William Stafford, Johnson writes (by way of summarizing the point of the poem), "The air, the water, the memories---all cool and refreshing.  And while it lasts, there you are, too, present, just present, taking it in, feeling the morning and the world and peace.  And that is the meaning of it all."  (227)  Well, you might think that a particular intense aesthetic experience is the meaning of it all, but again it is not the qualities alone by themselves.  The qualities have a quality:  and it is that quality, commonly called beauty, that gives life meaning.   

Johnson may be right that this is essentially Dewey.  As he puts it "Dewey's claim about the primordial qualitativeness of our lives would seem almost trivial, were it not for that fact that it is hard to think of a philosophy that does justice to this insight" i.e. that qualities are the "stuff of meaningful experience."  (227)  Johnson stresses the idea of the prevasive unifying quality in Dewey.  He refers to this as "Dewey's big idea." And there is reason to think it is! 

But notice this passage from Johnson, which refers to our ability to immediately recognize a Picasso in a museum: "there is a pervasive unifying quality of this particular work you are now engaging....[a]nd the meaning of that particular work is realized, as a horizon of possibilities for meaning, in and through its qualitative unity"  (231).  Johnson then quotes from Dewey.  But what I wish to stress here, and I will give the quote from Dewey to show this, is that the quote agrees with me and not with Johnson.  The quote does not support the position that Johnson is trying to support...i.e. that it is all about meaning.  

Here is the quote from Dewey:  "The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in a seizure by a sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse in one indistinguishable whole.  We say with truth that a painting strikes us.  There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about."  (Dewey, 1987, 150)  (Johnson, 231).  The point is that this impact precedes meaning, precedes "what it is about."  Focus on the term "sudden glory."  The pervasive unifying quality is precisely the profound beauty or perhaps sublimity of the object. (Or at least it is completely bound up with that beauty.) 

So it is missing something to say that, for Dewey, "art reveals, through immediate presentation of qualities unified in a comprehensive whole, the meaning and significance of some aspect of the world." (232)  This is true but it is not meaning alone that  makes experience meaningful.  Beauty, "the glory of it," is what counts, and without that, art, and any aesthetic experience, would be almost pointless, and certainly incomplete.  

Another quote from Dewey, also quoted by Johnson regarding the qualitative unity is: "There is no name to be given it.  As it enlivens and animates, it is the spirit of the world of art."  (Dewey, 1987, 193)   The animation, the making it so that we feel the work as something highly real:  this is what we mean when we say that it has an aesthetic aura (the term I prefer somewhat to "beauty"). 

Finally, at the end of his chapter on "Dewey's Big Idea for Aesthetics," Johnson makes clear what his problem is, that he thinks aesthetic theory fetishizes "the aesthetic." It is quite possible that he would think that this is what I am doing here.  (240)  But his path is perhaps more dangerous:  he has reduced the aesthetic to the meaningful.   He is worried that the aesthetic road will separate art from life "as if ordinary living was not an aesthetic undertaking" ---and I agree that this would be bad.  

He has an additional worry.  He says, "It is perfectly acceptable to speak, as Dewey sometimes does, of 'aesthetic experience' when we are trying to observe that certain experiences are marked out as meaningful unities....But what is not acceptable is to treat 'the aesthetic' as  some quality or feature that descends ....upon a certain select set of experiences."  (240)  I get the worry.  But it is equally not acceptable to reduce the aesthetic to merely meaningful unities...unless, of course, the word "meaningful" packs within it the idea of aesthetic experience.  The quality of  the aesthetic does not "descend":  it is those experiences in their (usually highly pleasurable) intensity. 

But Johnson's final paragraph begins with a sentence with which I fully agree:  "Dewey's entire philosophical orientation is founded on his insight that all experience, perception, understanding, imagining, thinking, valuing, and acting begins and ends in the aesthetic dimensions of human experience."  (241)  And I will end on that positive note.      

“The Aesthetic as a Matter of Practices: Form of Life in Everydayness and Art” by Giovanni Matteucci,

I just read “The Aesthetic as a Matter of Practices: Form of Life in Everydayness and Art” by Giovanni Matteucci, Comprendre  18:2 (2016)  9-28 link, a very interesting paper with which I mainly agree.  

Here is his abstract: "A set of phenomena that have been marginalized for a long time are now putting to test the traditional boundaries of aesthetics. Today it’s not surprising to find books and

essays concerning the «aesthetics» of food and clothing, sport and daily objects and events. Such expansion de facto of the topics covered by aesthetics is sufficiently justified by the fact that the fore mentioned phenomena – although it is often difficult to

assess their aesthetic significance from a philosophical point of view – have a decisive influence on the current configurations of taste. This role was in the past assigned mainly to art and to its ability in shaping high cultural styles. But nowadays it seems to

have become the prerogative of daily life’s practices which include design, fashion, tourism, gastronomy, recreational and leisure activities, wellness, wellbeing etc. –in other words the crucible in which life-styles (instead of art-styles) are formed."

Matteucci argues for continuity between aesthetics of everyday life and aesthetics of art, agreeing with John Dewey, and yet also wishes to raise issues concerning the problems of aestheticization in our contemporary culture.  He has an interesting discussion of my concept of “aura” as developed in my book The Extraordinary in the Ordinary link but has a problem with what he considers my failure to consider the dialectical relation between auratic and non-auratic as well as with my stress on the notion of the exceptional or the extraordinary.  

Matteucci observes that the aura view leaves out the dialectical tension between the auratic and the non-auratic "that is necessary in order to avoid a dogmatic use of this notion."  I think he is right that aura is dialectical tension with non-auratic or with what Dewey called "inchoate" experience.  Part of that is that we see our auratic experience as a way of dealing with the dreadful aspects of everyday life.  Also I think he is right in his suggestion that there can be false or repressive aura, for example as generated by advertising campaigns or "reality" shows on television, or currently that which surrounds our President-elect.  Kitsch seems to have aura, but this is very shallow.  In the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin coined it, aura hardly disappears (contra Benjamin): it is just displaced, but in a way, often, that seems to strip it of most substance.  Strangely, original artworks take on even more aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. Witness the ways in which we treat great works of art as though they were religious relics.  But there is a positive side to this too.  Some of us still go to museums to contemplate great art in the original (and in fact, this is a very popular pastime, here in the San Francisco Bay Area...witness the popularity of the Museum of Modern Art).  

Matteucci also writes, "It’s not a matter of something exceptional or extraordinary, but of something that appears pointful in our interaction with the environment"  I don't have any problem with this as I think that the term "extraordinary" had important rhetorical purposes for me earlier but now can be replaced by other terms for other purposes.  "Pointful" might be too broad, however, or at least ambiguous since it might confuse the aesthetic with the important, useful or interesting.  We can meaningfully organize our experience without organizing it aesthetically.  Aesthetic meaning may be just one type of meaning.

One of the things Matteucci discusses is the change of aura and everyday aesthetics in a digital era.  This reminds me of a classroom experience I have been having recently.  I often show "slides" in my classroom, but see them on my computer screen more often than on the screen the students see.  And sometimes I notice that what they are looking at is drained of color or pixilated poorly.  The students are actually getting a worse aesthetic experience than I got when looking at actual slides projected by way of a light bulb in my undergraduate classes of the 1970s:  the color was just richer then.  I require my students to take a trip to a museum or art gallery and writer a paper about a work they have physically encountered.  At least they will get the color, texture and other rich aspects of the work not captured in the digital image, not to speak of the physical context of its placement.  

Along similar lines, we might also consider the thinning of experience within the library, where books are replaced by electronic products which are remarkably similar to physical books in look and experience and yet are resistant to the complex interactions we have with physical books, especially in our ability to flip not only through pages but through entire sections, while also flipping to the back for footnotes and index, back and forth.  In addition, the experience of marking up the book, and then rereading it with attention to our marks is largely lost with the electronic book.  Increasingly our libraries refuse to buy physical books, and only provide us with (usually more limited) access to electronic versions of the books.  This is an aesthetic as well as a scholarly loss in the everyday life of the scholar: a conscious loss for the teacher, less conscious for the student.

Also, Matteucci writes, in relation to our technological age, "even a painted image can enter a person’s aesthetic background more as a photograph or a screen picture rather than as viewed without artificial mediations."  In support of this point I have observed that some of my students are no longer able to distinguish between a photograph, a digitalized image, and a painting.  They often, quite surprisingly, use the word "photo" to refer to all three, even to a painting observed in a gallery.  In one instance a student referred to a photo as a painting!  They often also use "picture" to refer to all three.  Although this is grammatically right, it shows an unawareness of the differences between each kind of image. 

I find it difficult to correlate the idea of "rational argumentation," which Matteucci seems to support as a basis for legitimization of everyday aesthetics in relation to art (following Kant:  the sensus communis works in each case), but which I think is overrated in everyday aesthetics (do we really engage in rational argumentation over whether or not a room is neat....only when one is obsessed with rational argumentation?), and Roger Scruton's very different claim, supported by Matteucci only a few lines later, that, "[t]he doorframe is not just preferred but interpreted, and the interpretation involves metaphors..."!  I think Scruton captures better what happens in everyday aesthetics:  it is more a matter of interpretation by way of metaphor than one of "rational argumentation."

However, I like Matteucci’s idea of "a form of competence, a know-how that concerns and supports the ability to manage and enjoy an aesthetic experience while exploiting the normative criterion of its pointfulness," and especially his idea that “The new topic for aesthetic analysis is no longer the experience of something, but the experience with something. And this is the source of the current pervasive force of the aesthetic, a reservoir of experiential intensification in a reality connoted by the saturation of functional needs” which is to say that the very notion of “an experience” that Dewey once described so well is under transformation in our own information age.   

Finally, I am not sure I agree with the idea that there has been a shift of aura from art to practices and forms of life.  Rather there has been a shift in theoretical interest.  Why can't we just say that the newly enlivened field of everyday aesthetics has opened up a new arena of interest that, in no way, takes away interest from the long tradition of fine art.

What is the point of Thus Spoke Zarathustra? The Convalescent.

Whenever I finish reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra I find myself asking "but what is the point?"  And I find myself often saying, "well, it is about saying yes to life."  And yet that usually seems not quite sufficient.  I always try to read the book along with Laurence Lampert's Nietzsche's Teaching which is just a wonderful commentary.  But I still come away dissatisfied.  The feeling one gets on reading the concluding chapters of the original work (setting aside the later addition of Part IV) is that of one metaphor piled on top of another.  

What is beneath all of these metaphors? We readers do not live in a world where Zarathustra, the fictional character, is real, and if Nietzsche really thought he was Zarathustra then he was already insane when he wrote the book.  I do not want to think that, and I really do think there is something to be gained from pondering these pages.  We could read this book as nothing more than a entertaining and powerful story (something like a Greek tragedy), or even as wonderful.  It is like that, and maybe any reading of it by a philosopher would be like the kind of reading Martha Nussbaum gives ancient Greek tragedies.   But the book is not exactly the same in type as a Greek tragedy:  it is also philosophy.  It raises many philosophical issues and tries to resolve them, even though in an odd way.

So what about philosophy?  Why did Nietzsche think that the doctrine of eternal recurrence was such a great idea?  My short answer is that "eternal recurrence" came to symbolize, for Nietzsche, the entirety of his philosophy.  It is "the will to power" in the sense that to accept eternal recurrence in the best way is to achieve the most authentic form of will to power.  He does this a lot, i.e. organically connects his main concepts.  For example, "the overman" is a metaphor that begins the book and I think it was a way of symbolizing a lot of strands of his philosophical theory tied together in one knot at this stage in his life.  These big metaphors that sum up his philosophy come up one after another in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  He thinks of them as progressively deeper understandings of the world, each building on the previous ones. Unfortunately, all of this is reminiscent of Rosicrucianism or Scientology:  you reach one level and there is a deeper level of knowledge, all of it mysterious, secret, full of symbolism piled on symbolism.  Is that what Nietzsche is up to?  Is he just adding a lot of imagery to an insight that could be stated in more straightforward terms?  Another way of looking at this is that each new metaphor is a new angle that sheds new light on the earlier metaphors.  (Derrida does something similar.)  One could say that "eternal recurrence" is a metaphor that sums up all of the strands of the book:  the anti-Christian message, saying "yes" to the earth, announcing the coming of the overman, the doctrine of will-to-power, overcoming revenge, and even the critique of German educational institutions.  More precisely, it is a synecdoche: a figure of speech, a type of metonym, in which a term or part of something refers to the whole, i.e. his whole philosophy. 

So how does one make sense of the passage that begins with Zarathustra saying to his animals "chatter on like this and let me listen.  It is so refreshing for me to hear you chattering..."?   Zarathustra likes to hear his animals chatter, and "where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden."  It looks like the world is transformed into a garden by this thing called "chattering" which we might understand if we look back to what the animals were saying earlier.  We find that they are calling on him to step out of his cave because "the world awaits you like a garden."  So perhaps precisely this is "chattering" - talk about the world being a garden for the enlightened individual, or at least for the one who achieves Zarathustra's version of enlightenment.  

What is this world like?  The animals describe it: "The wind is playing with heavy fragrances that want to get to you, and all the brooks would run after you.  All things have been longing for you..."  (This all reminds me of Plato's Ion and his description of the inspiration of the poet who sees the world as a land of milk and honey.)  So, this world is playful, fragrant, and otherwise wondrous for the enlightened one: and it does this for the enlightened one because it loves and desires him:  this is true since the enlightened one is no longer separate from this (the) world.  

Note that this world is aesthetic in the highest degree.  The world as garden could be seen as aesthetic utopia.  All of nature is transformed into something which has aura.   When Zarathustra is awakened from his seven days "as one dead"  he takes a rose apple, smells it and finds its fragrance lovely.  The animals are responding to his finding the fragrance lovely.  Moreover, these things, indeed all things now, will be his physicians:  they will heal him and help him deal with a new knowledge he has gained, a knowledge that is "bitter and hard."  So, there is also an Apollonian healing dimension to the aesthetic quality experienced by Zarathustra. Beauty, however, would not exist if there was not also ugliness to be overcome.   The goal of aesthetic atheism is experience of this kind.  

Zarathustra then says, "how lovely it is that there are words and sounds!"  Of course not all words and sounds could be lovely, and the thought that the very existence of words and sounds is lovely is a bit odd.  One could say that about anything in the right mood...."how lovely that there are snow peas and carrots!"  The explanation is that words and sounds are "rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart."  But what can this mean?  Well, the word "apple" is a bridge to actual existent apples.  But that does not help since what we need is an illusive bridge between two things eternally apart.  A hint could probably be found in Nietzsche "Truth and Lies in the Extramoral Sense." See my previous posts on that.  There it is argued that the relationship between words and things is a kind of illusion, but a necessary one. 

Perhaps the words of Zarathustra's animals are an illusion (as are the words of all redemptive poets).  This may not be a bad thing for Nietzsche.  He often argues that illusions can be valuable, and this illusion is one that may bridge, for example, people who are in radically different psychological places.  We humans, in a sense, are eternally apart from each other, and words can sometimes bridge that gap. 

But also, one could argue, we are eternally apart from nature, and we need some illusion to bridge the gap between ourselves and nature.  Poetry (and art generally) may be what is being referred to here:  poetry can bridge the gap between ourselves and nature by way of creating a virtual world, an illusion of oneness.  When Z. then says "to every soul there belongs another world," and elaborates mysteriously that "for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld," perhaps he means that every soul faces other souls, each of which has its own world, and that the bridging of this gap is like the achievement of a heaven, an afterworld.  

Then he says, "have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing."  On the face of it, the answer is "no."  First, there is no god who gave names and sounds to things. And when men did, we have no idea whether this was to find things refreshing.  But we do know that when poets gives names and sounds to things in ways that are counter-intuitive and non-literal they do, when successful, make the world seem refreshing, or rather, they refresh the world.  So, when Zarathustra says "speaking is a beautiful folly:  with that man dances over all things" he must be speaking about our poetic capacity to recreate things through poetic interpretation, an interpretation which perhaps is folly but makes like worth living, to refer back to The Birth of Tragedy.  

I just saw the Bruce Conner show at the SFMOMA.  Conner was a man of immense genius and one thing I came away from with that show was a Nietzschean sense of life.

The difficulty of "The Convalescent" is in the fact that the animals do most of the talking about eternal recurrence, and yet Zarathustra says that they are singing a "hurdy-gurdy" song.  We can only presume that the animals are giving us an aspect of the truth, one that is not tragic enough, or at least not tragic/comic enough to capture what Zarathustra himself sees: and is a bit too upbeat, almost kitschy.  Zarathustra's own talk focuses, more darkly, on the experience of dealing with the eternal recurrence of the smallest man and even of the smallness that is always present even in the greatest.   

He tells us that he bit off the head of a monster and spewed it out. But what exactly does this symbolize?  If the doctrine of eternal recurrence requires some sort of acceptance or affirmation then shouldn't the metaphor be one of biting off and consuming rather than spewing out?   I think that he is spewing out not a condition or reality but a doctrine or perhaps a temptation based on a condition. He can reject the doctrine while not rejecting the condition.  It is clear that in the seven days when he was "as dead" Zarathustra had gone through a transformative experience.  Now he is convalescing from the sickness brought on by that experience.  But what is the role of the sickness?  Is that sickness also something he has to affirm?  

It is odd that even though he calls his animals "buffoons and barrel organs" he also thinks that they "know well" what he has gone through in those seven days, even though they say nothing about anything so negative or disturbing as biting a monster's head off.  In fact, what they say is that "all things themselves are dancing." Things are dancing as teasers, much Life does in "The Other Dancing Song" ... offering their hands, laughing, fleeing, coming back.  

The eternity the animals see is a cycle of the "wheel of being," one in which things die and blossom again.  Of course this is the cycle of the seasons where things do die in the winter and blossom again in the spring, and when the animals say "eternally runs the year of being" they could just mean that, for them, the seasons run eternally.  

But the language here is more metaphysical than that.  The animals go on to say: "Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built."  In this phrase, there seems to be redemption for everything that breaks, and this is what is meant by building the same house of being.  The reiteration of the idea in saying that "everything parts" and also that everything "greets every other thing again" makes us think not only of literal breaking but also of the breaking up of relationships and of friendships.  Thus the idea that being "remains faithful to itself" in the sense that what is broken comes back again is asserted.  Of course this is like Christianity's idea that loved ones will meet again in heaven.  And perhaps that is why this is, for Zarathustra, a hurdy gurdy song.  

More mysterious, and perhaps more helpful for a theory of Eternal Recurrence, is the next passage:  "In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There."  We know from previously that the Now is central to the entire doctrine.   Is this explained when the animals then say "The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity."?  It seems that wherever and whenever you experience something this is the center of being.  Eternity is bent in that it is bent back on itself.  Could there be a relationship between this focus on the Here and Now and the Bent nature of Eternity.  A simple solution is that the Here and Now is Eternity when understood properly.  I think that the animals' story captures one side of eternal recurrence;  it is true, but not complete.

Zarathustra says that all of this shows understanding of what he went through in the seven days, days in which he bit the monster and spewed it out and then was redeemed.  Oddly, his real problem with what the animals said is that they, in watching over him during his illness, were cruel, like humans who enjoy watching someone (someone heroic) in great pain, as in tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions.  This all seems unfair to the animals, since unlike these phenomena (the death of tragic heroes for example) the story turns out well for Zarathustra:  he has not been crucified or gored.

This may just be a way for Zarathustra (or Nietzsche) to complain about how the small man, when perceiving the great man screaming in pain, gets an almost sensual pleasure, which he then ironically calls "pity."  The point may be simply to introduce here the idea of the "small man," the person who feels this so-called pity.  
That the concept of "tragedy" has been introduced may illuminate the passage.  One thinks of Plato's critique of ancient Greek tragedy.  This would explain why the next paragraph begins with the poet who is a small man...or ambiguously, tragic poets in general (although it would be unfair to call Sophocles a small man!)  

Anyway, you could see how this might fit the idea of "how eagerly he accuses life with words!"  Certainly the tragic poet and the tragic figure within the tragic poem will do this.  (But Nietzsche is not really thinking of Sophocles:  he is thinking of Christians.) 

The rest of that paragraph however has a nice twist in that first, the accuser experiences delight in the accusation, and life herself responds with a wink and an impudent question "Do you love me?"  with the remark that she ha "no time" for such as you.  Of course, life is only going to respond positively to those who do not accuse her.  Then it turns out that the cruelty is not only only directed by the small against the great but also by man "against himself" insofar as he might, following Christianity, call himself a sinner, or somewhat more positively, a cross-bearer or a penitent (a sinner reformed).  That too is cause for "voluptuous delight."  Zarathustra then refuses to join this chorus and does not want to accuse man of sin (although perhaps he has accused man of being cruel!).  He has learned that "man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him" and that the most evil in him is "his best power" and most the most the important stone for him to break as a creator.  So to be better man must be "more evil."  So what is it to be more evil.  One possibility is that it is to not be the sort of person who calls oneself a sinner, cross-bearer or penitent.  Another is that one should actually sin.  He says that his great torture in the seven days, the monster in fact, is that man's greatest evil "is so very small" which is also to say that his best is "so very small." So his disgust with man, and it is his disgust with the smallness of man that choked him, is what crawled into his throat.

I am not finished yet with my commentary but would like here to place a marker, a thought that will guide me.  The affirmation of eternal recurrence is going to be something more like aggressive assimilation of one's own past, including the smallest aspects of oneself and of one's neighbors, than mere acceptance.  I think, although I am not sure, that this is going to require appropriation and exploitation of one's own past:  a re-interpretation that is itself radical.  Saying "yes" to life is taking that which is "evil" in one's past, whatever one feels guilty about or whatever one resents or feels bad about, and reworking it, bringing it alive so that the Now becomes vibrant again, and the future becomes possible.

Nietzsche goes back to the soothsayer at this point and what he said: "All is the same, nothing is worth while, knowledge chokes." This is, on one level, an approach to eternal recurrence that is quite negative.  If all is the same then all is equal to the smallest and hence nothing is worthwhile, and knowledge of this chokes.  But perhaps this "knowledge" or rather belief is what chokes, and biting off this, biting off nihilism, and spitting it out, is what allows one to go almost the opposite direction:  everything is worthwhile, or perhaps can be aggressively interpreted for it to have worth.

It is natural, if one follows the Soothsayer's approach to eternal recurrence one will see a "long twilight" limping before, and this can be associated with death:  one become "weary with death, drunken with death."  One becomes depressed and suicidal thinking that smallness cannot be escaped. This is a nihilist phase in which all that is living become "human mold and bones and musty past to me."  To be redeemed one needs to be able to not just accept the small man but appropriate that aspect of humanity.  And don't think that this smallness is unique just to the smallest man, since even the greatest are "all-too-small." Zarathustra's sickness consisted in wallowing in this thought:  but now he is recovering.  

His animals again say:  "the world awaits you like a garden" and encourage him to learn singing from the song birds since singing is more appropriate for the convalescent than the healthy.  The convalescent is still recovering, and needs his own sorts of songs. Again Zarathustra recognizes the animals for being not only buffoons but also having an intuition, in this case an intuition into this own discovery of song, although not a hurdy-gurdy song.  The animals repeat:  you should not be talking but singing, and now with a "new lyre" or your "new songs."  The new songs will allow him to bear his great and unique destiny, your destiny as "teacher of the eternal recurrence."  There is an identity between his convalescence and his teaching, although this destiny is also a danger and sickness.  This is the first time that the animals repeat the version of eternal recurrence found earlier in the book, that "we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us" and that rather than talking about the seasons of the year we are really talking about the "great year" of the universe which repeats over and over again like an hourglass that has been turned, all with an emphasis on repetition of "what is greatest and what is smallest."  
Since sickness and danger are still an issue for Zarathustra so too is death.  The animals beg Zarathustra not to die yet, but rather to speak "breathing deeply with happiness" since a great weight has been taken from him.  They then say what he would say it he chose not to die, to say yes to life:  it is their doctrine that, as with Christianity, he achieves a kind of immortality, not of the soul, however, since it is "moral as the body" but rather through the "knot of causes in which [he] is entangled" which recurs and creates him again.  A remarkable sentence follows:  he would say, if he chose not to die:  "I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence."  Unlike the resurrected Christian he does not come again to "a new life or a better life" but rather to the same life, again both with the greatest and the smallest, and, of course, to teacher eternal recurrence again.  And then, mysteriously, he would say "Thus ends Zarathustra's going under."  This is the point of the fulfillment of his prophecy.

Zarathustra does not speak but converses with his soul, and his animals steal away.


 

    

Quality and Aura: Another Deweyan argument for the primacy of aesthetics in philosophy

I am interested here in the relation between what I have called "aura" and what Dewey calls "quality." (These thoughts are inspired by Robert E. Innis's brilliant "The 'quality' of philosophy on the aesthetic matrix of Dewey's Pragmatism," in The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey:  Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science and Society ed. Larry A. Hickman et. al. Rudolpi 2011.) Dewey, following Peirce, speaks of Firstness as "sheer totality and pervading unity of of quality in everything experienced, whether it be odor, the drama of King Lear, or philosophic or scientific systems" experienced.  I am not entirely comfortable with the notion of a unique pervading quality that unifies each thing experienced since this has the slight odor of naive realism. However, consider another take on this, somewhat at angles with Dewey's and Peirce's original idea, but largely in accord with it. That is, (and here I am speaking in my own voice) anything can be perceived as having a pervading quality.  Let's say that this is the same as what I have described in my book as "aura."  Let's say that when something is perceived as having a pervading quality this is a quality that is emotionally charged, filled with a sense of potentiality, and seems to make the object or situation involved go beyond itself, makes the thing seem to be alive, and gives it aesthetic charge (which we humans generally experience as a kind of pleasure).  The point of divergence from Dewey and Peirce is that they would insist (I think) that King Lear has one proper pervading unity, whereas my idea is more relativist, i.e. that there are different possible readings of King Lear that can give rise to a pervasive quality, each such quality being different.  So whereas their account is of "the given permeating total quality of anything experienced" I speak of the given permeating total quality that anything experienced can have if it is experienced "as," which is to say that the experience of that thing has been heightened or intensified in the way described.  Articulation of such experience is usually in terms of some metaphor, i.e. some one word or phrase that takes on a special non-literal meaning insofar as it is what the object or situation experienced is experienced as.  King Lear has its Firstness, but on my account, this would be different for different powerful or good readings/interpretations of that work.  What Dewey refers to as a "total undivided quality" is, on my account, the quality of something experienced as with aura.  I would agree with Innis as to the "primacy of the aesthetic in world-building" but probably in a different sense than his, i.e. that this primacy is a matter of the inception moment of the creative process in science, art, art appreciation/interpretation, religion, philosophy, business, invention, etc. in which the thing or situation seems filled with meaning and possibility, and in which this "feel" guides future developments in the creative process, i.e. in world-making.  (I would allow the feel itself to evolve, perhaps unlike Dewey or Innis).  I agree with Innis that this is not a matter of the quale of primitives such as "red" but rather a "projection of a world." Despite the above-mentioned divergences, my account is completely in accord with Dewey's statement that "considered in itself, quality is that which totally and intimately pervades a phenomenon or experience, rendering it just the one experience which it is" and that this quality is "ineffable."  The only problem I have with Dewey here is that he makes a distinction between the quality as "first, present, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent" and the quality of descriptions of this very quality or the correlated situation that may follow.  The subtle difference I hold to is that the pervasive quality is an aspect the creative process that is not just at the first point but can come and go, and when it is there it certainly has these characteristics, but that this can happen during the process of description too. Thus, on my view there is a continuity between originary and descriptive experience so that descriptive experience is not one removed from the originary but is just one more iteration or mode, i.e. of thinking. That is, the creative process is not just a matter of first the feeling and then the articulation of the feeling. Thus I would strongly disagree with Innis when he says (perhaps agreeing with Langer) that "art, as thematic, is derivative from this prior matrix of qualitative world-building."  (45)  This seems a major error. However,  I certainly agree with Peirce's idea that, as Innis puts it, images, diagrams and metaphors "are all rooted in a shared quality, or firstness..."  A manifestation in short of the object experienced as object with aura is that it is paired with metaphors, images, etc., since it is a way of "seeing as."  This is a matter of seeing what I would call "essences" although such essences are historicised, unlike the Platonic or Aristotelian ones:  thus when Dewey speaks of the sentence "The red Indian is stoical" as a sentence which does not simply attribute a property to the Indian or place him in a class but rather that the Indian is "permeated throughout by a certain quality...he lived, acted, endured, stoically" we are, in my language, speaking of the Indian as being seen as essentially stoical i.e. under the metaphor of the "stoic."  Again, this should be historicized and not essentialized in the traditional Platonic/Aristotelian sense, which would leave us, for example, with a racist (in this case) static understanding of the Indian.  Rather "the red Indian is stoical" would be better seen in this context as a powerful metaphor, if paired with a wide variety of other materials and experiences, that might work well in some context or situation not described here or by Dewey (e.g. as the pervading idea or theme of a novel by James Fenimore Cooper).  

It should also be observed that there is an important relation between the pervasive quality and the notion of an organic whole: as something, for example a painting is seen, effectively, under a metaphor and "as" in this way, it is seen in such a way that each part seems internally related to every other part.  Again, this can happen effectively under different interpretations.  We can then see the pervasive quality as "articulated in the members of the configuration" as Innis puts it.  Note also that this is, as Innis observes, the background to all propositional symbolization.  Noteworthy in this regard is Innis's claim that "Peircean semiotics, for its part, is based on an explosion of the claim of uniqueness and exclusive of propositional - linguocentric symbolization" (48)  If this is true of Peirce then I have misjudged and under-rated Peirce who I have generally seen as a minor character next to Dewey, someone roughly equivalent of the contemporary analytic philosopher of a realist science-centered stamp.   

If, in the end, these findings go far beyond art to discussions for example of thinking in general and if it is right that, as Dewey puts it "existentially, thinking is association as far as the latter is controlled"  association meaning"connection of objects or their elements in a total situation having a qualitative unity" and if qualitative unity is a matter of aesthetics, then it is aesthetics that forms the basis of philosophy, not epistemology or logic in the traditional formalist non-Deweyan sense.  

Margolis vs. Danto: Margolis wins hands down, but I like to reread or rewrite Danto in my own way and perhaps Margolis wouldn't approve

In my view Joseph Margolis and Arthur Danto were the two greatest aestheticians of their generation, and frankly, in my life. Danto is widely recognized, Margolis less so.  But what Margolis lacks in fame he makes up for both in feistiness and plausibility. He is not as much fun to read as Danto, but in the end his position is much more sensible.  I have been reading his "Preparation for a Theory of Interpretation" which appears in the current issue of Contemporary Pragmatism (12, 20014, 11-37).  Danto specialized, one might say, in dazzling defenses of implausible theses:  the indiscernibility thesis, the rejection of deep interpretation, the idea that artist's interpretation constitutes the work of art, and the end of art thesis are examples.  All of this was situated within certain intuitions that he shared with Margolis in opposition to the previous generation:  for example, rejection of reductionist materialism and sympathy for Hegelian stories of historical dialectic.  In this essay however Margolis systematically takes after all of the above-mentioned questionable theses.  It is not an easy essay to read:  Margolis is seldom easy reading.  As a preliminary, here is the abstract:  "This paper points to a more viable theory of interpretation on the basis of opposing the missteps in Arthur Danto's theory. By noting the incongruities in Danto's theories of art and interpretation, a theory of interpretation emerges which unifies its varieties on the basis of the view of the human person as a culturally embodied and enlanguaged primate.  A feature notably absent from Danto's own account."  The abstract is ironic since little of what is mentioned discussed in any detail in the article!  But then, in reading the article and thinking about Margolis's many other writings, it is clear that he intends to support these theses, at least indirectly. The article is in reality, and more simply than the abstract indicates, a concentrated critique of Danto.   It only waives in the direction of Margolis's own emergentist view.  Start with the indiscernibility thesis.  Margolis is right:  Danto's key example of Warhol's Brillo Boxes just doesn't work, since these were never indiscernible from the originals. For one thing, they were made out of plywood.  Second, as Margolis notes, Warhol himself showed delight in the accidental variation of looks in the individual instances of Brillo Box which would be contrary to Danto's whole point that the aesthetic qualities of the work are irrelevant.

I cannot say that I disagree with anything Margolis says in this essay, and neither am I interested in summarizing his arguments.  I am interested in whether anything can be recovered from Danto after Margolis's onslaught.  So consider this quote from Danto:  "I shall think of interpretations as functions which transform material objects into works of art.  Interpretation is in effect the lever with which an object is lifted out of the real world and into the artworld, where it becomes vested in often unexpected raiment."  I agree that all of this is wrong, and I even, to be frank, feel a bit a Nietzschean disgust concerning the blatant Platonism implied here.  But I'll try to rewrite Danto in a way that is truer.  Here goes:  "I shall think of all of the things, including interpretations, that give things aura, that take them beyond the merely ordinary to something extraordinary.  This can happen with non-art objects, since all things can be seen in terms of sedimented as well as novel meaning.  But in art, this process is intensified.  Danto speaks of the 'artworld' and what I interpret this to mean (contrary to Danto himself) is that when something is seen imaginatively it seems as though it is carried out of this world into a world of its own, and that, in the case of art, this 'being carried out of and into' is something that is intensified deliberately, so that art, to use a Heideggerian sounding word, is a place of worlding, of creating worlds, for example the world of 'Starry Night' by Van Gogh.  So it is not that mere material objects are transformed into works of art (there are no mere material objects) but that artworks intensify what happens when material objects are perceived in terms of their aura of meaning/significance.  And when this happens, whether in everyday life or in the world of art, or more specifically, for example, in the concert hall listening to Handel's Messiah, there is an emergence of raiment (although not unexpected in the second place, since we paid big bucks to have that experience and are disappointed if it doesn't happen).  It should be born in mind that, contrary to Danto, interpretation is just one of many ways that intensification of significance which I call 'aura' can occur:  other ways include what Goodman calls exemplification, and also the other 'symptoms of the aesthetic' in his philosophy.  Danto's exclusion of the aesthetic from the process of constitution unduly narrows the richness of constitution of the aesthetic object, whether it be in the world of art or outside it, i.e. in nature or in everyday life."  That's my rewriting of Danto, and it is noteworthy that despite my near total agreement with Margolis I don't think that Margolis could assent to it.  So maybe I have escaped the embarrassment of agreeing too much with another philosopher, as though one did not have a mind of one's own.

Plotinus and everyday aesthetics (and architecture)

For Plotinus (Ennead I.6, On Beauty, MacKenna translation) the beauty of the sensuous realm is hardly the most important kind of beauty.  Yet he has something valuable to say about it.  He begins his discussion of beauty by noting that there is both beauty of sight and of hearing (which includes music) in the sensuous world, as also a beauty of the realm above sense, including the beauty of human virtues.  He will quickly turn to focus on this non-bodily realm.  Still, he at least asks what makes material forms and certain sounds beautiful.  His larger issue is whether there is One Principle for both kinds of beauty, the embodied and the bodiless, only the later being beautiful in itself.  Since not all bodies are beautiful, he asks, what is it that "attracts the eyes" in a beautiful object, giving us joy at the sight of it?  Most previous thinkers identified this with symmetry of parts, along with "a certain charm of color."  We find this idea for example in the Pythagoreans, in Aristotle, and also in the Stoics.  On this view, "only a compound can be beautiful," and the parts only have beauty "as working together to give a comely total."  Yet, he argues, "beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details."  A beautiful whole cannot be made out of ugly parts.  Moreover, there are things that are beautiful, for example, individual colors, the light of the sun, gold, lightning by night, and the stars, whose beauty cannot be understood in terms of symmetry.  Similarly in a beautiful musical composition the individual tones are delicious in themselves.  Moreover, things that are symmetrical are only sometimes beautiful.  So it follows that symmetry "owes its beauty to a remoter principle."  We also find that beautiful things perceived by the intellect, like noble conduct, excellent laws and abstract ideas also cannot be explained in terms of symmetry.  Note that, by attacking symmetry as that which defines beauty, Plotinus is attacking the notion that beauty can be objective in a science-like way.  The "golden mean" would similarly be rejected as the source of beauty, on his account.  Instead, he focuses on something more mysterious, a certain aura, one might say, that is exemplified by such things as the light of the sun, the shimmering quality of beautiful colors, and so forth.  (I discuss and update this concept in my book.)

What then is the Principle that makes material things beautiful?  Plotinus sees this Principle as something which the soul can perceive immediately, name, recognize, welcome, and, most importantly, enter "into unison with it."  The opposite of this happens when the soul falls "in with the Ugly" and denies and even resents the Principle.  The point is best made in this quote:  "the soul - by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being," when it sees anything like such Existents (the Forms), "thrills with an immediate delight" because it senses its own nature as having this affinity.  To the question, "what is there common between beauty in this world and beauty in the bodiless world?" the answer is: "all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form."  Ugly things, by contrast, have not "been entirely mastered by pattern, that is, by Reason."  Beauty happens when Matter yields "in all respects to Ideal-Form."  Further, the Ideal-Form enters by grouping and coordinating "what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity," and thus yields a "harmonious coherence."  Here, "Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum," as for example, when an architect confers beauty on "a house with all its parts," those parts including single stones which also may be given their beauty by "some natural quality." (One thinks of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.)  The concluding idea of this chapter of his book is that the "material thing becomes beautiful...by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine."  But in more practical contemporary (and atheistic) terms we might interpret this to mean that the beauty of a house is a function not just of the ordering of the parts but of the way that a non-mathematics-based aura can be found not only in the whole but in each of the parts, as if there were a divine presence giving these things their unity.  

Architecture is a leading idea in Plotinus's account of beauty.  and thus in Chapter 3 he asks, "On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful?  Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity."  This passage is an interesting combination of Plato, Aristotle and something else harder to describe.  The description of the architect is just like Plato's description of a carpenter in relation to a bed in Book X of the Republic, where the carpenter look to the ideal bed in the world of Forms to create his own bed.  Aristotle would insist that creation of an artifact involves both a material cause and the formal cause, the form being imposed on the matter.  The notion "the indivisible" exhibited or expressed in diversity is unique to Plotinus at this stage (although in the eighteenth century we have the idea of beauty as unity in diversity in Hogarth, for example).  The phrase "the stones apart" seems, however, to contradict what he has previously said about stones.  Instead, one would think that the beauty of the individual stones contribute to the beauty of the whole, they being what he refers to as the diversity that is expressive of an imposed unity.  

Perhaps the most interested passage is the following:  "
So with the perceptive faculty:  discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled the shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend:  the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul."
Consider "the perceptive faculty" to be what is later called the faculty of taste.  What this faculty does is mapped out in a sequence of stages:  (1) find a Platonic Form exemplified or expressed in the object (for example, Architecture within a building), (2) gather what remains fragmentary into a unity (by a kind of mental synthesis in perception), (3) internalize that unity within the mind, thus (4) erasing the division of the objects into parts (all parts are now seen as integrated aspects of an organic whole), and (5) posit the unity as congenial to the relevant Form, e.g. Architecture, from which (6) arises a joy in the soul of the critic (i.e. that part of the critic with greatest affinity with the world of Forms). 

The next passage is also quite extraordinary.  We had already learned that, on his anti-symmetry view, individual colors can be beautiful.  We now will see that this beauty is a function of the presence of the Form within the object perceived as beautiful and as a diversity unified:  "The beauty of color is also the outcome of a unification:  it derives from shape, from the conquest of darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle of an Ideal-Form." (Color is not here a matter of mere charm is previously suggested or as found in Kant, but more like color as found in its use in stained glass windows in Gothic churches.)  The description of light as pouring in from the world of the Forms is reminiscent of Plato's explication of the metaphor of light as truth in the Allegory of the Cave.  However, here we see that this beauty, which is not, again, based on symmetry, is a function of the overcoming of darkness and of the equivalent notion of unformed matter, where the presence of the Ideal-Form is not found in the mere Platonic relation of imitation (as when a drawn circle imitates the Form Circle) but rather in a suffusion of light/color.  Fire is stressed in the next paragraph as being the body closest to the unembodied, as having "color primally," other bodies taking the Form of color from it, thus giving its light a particular splendour, "the splendour that belongs to the Idea."

This might on the face of it seem to be the end of the discussion of everyday aesthetics and Plotinus, as Plotinus in Chapter 4, leaves the realm of sense and images, the world in which beauty enters into matter to "ravish us." Instead, he focuses on "loftier beauties" of the soul unrelated to the sense organs, these beauties including noble conduct and learning, as well as the Forms of Justice and Moral Wisdom, themselves more beautiful than a beautiful sunset or dawn (something admired by Plotinus for its non-symmetry-based beauty based on light and its attendant color.)  Yet, from a modern secular perspective, the beauties of personal virtue are also beauties of everyday life (and not completely divorced from what the senses can perceive if we include within this the way that perception can be infused with meaning to the extent that we can see, for example, the nobility in a person we know to be noble).  Thus Plotinus asks:  "What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls [and the beauty of yourselves within]?" Isn't this too a matter of everyday aesthetics, perhaps a necessary feature of it?  Is there not also a moral dimension to our perception of beauty in the people and people-produced artifacts and events around us?  Here, too, there is a kind of aura, or as Plotinus puts it in his overly-metaphysical way:  "shining down upon all [these moral virtues and their manifestations], the light of god-like Intellection." For Plotinus, it is that these things have reality of Being that makes them "really beautiful."  Again, the metaphor of light is invoked here as within the realm of physical beauty:  "this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues."  I am not going to discuss Plotinus's Puritan-like fulminations against ugliness in the realm of bodily sensation:  this clearly opposed to one aspect of the aesthetics of everyday life, the aspect that includes the the very "pleasures of the body" that Plotinus despises.  Suffice it to say that in Chapter 6 Plotinus adds one point about the everyday:  "The beauty in things of a lower order - actions and pursuits for instance - comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense.  For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds."  As with Plato, Plotinus has the soul conclude its upward path by rejecting beauties of this world:  it "can never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms."  Moreover, he calls on the spiritual adept to "withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once mad his joy." Too bad for him, I say. 

One final comment may be made about Plotinus's vision of an aesthetics of personal self-improvement.  This can be read in a Pragmatist vein (for example in line with the writings of Richard Shusterman) which in fact would subvert his Plotinus' overall purpose.  We are able to see the virtuous soul and its loveliness by looking within:  "And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful:  he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely fact has grown upon his work. So do you also:  cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."