Do rocks think and feel?

I am intrigued by the new loosely associated school or trend in philosophy called speculative realism.  I am currently reading The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).  Shaviro is basically a Whiteheadian, and so his position is somewhat different from the other speculative realists I have read.  I will be pretty up front about my initial position at least.  Earlier I had posted on the speculative realism of Graham Harman, particularly as found in his book The Quadruple Object.   I think, as I argued there, that most of the useful claims made by the speculative realists can be better made within the context of the philosophy of John Dewey.  Dewey's philosophy also avoids some of their excesses.  I am sympathetic to the anti-anthropocentrism of the speculative realists.  We have to get beyond the idea that humans are the center of everything.  At the same time, I think they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  They are too eager to caste away everything about Kant for example.  Shaviro also advocates panpsychism.   Most of what he says about this makes sense to me:  for example, that animals and even plants can have consciousness or perhaps just intentionality.   I also agree that for thoughts and minds to exist it must be the case that all of nature has a mental aspect to it.  However I cannot agree that rocks think or that there is something that it is like to be a rock.  I also think that the speculative realists just neglect the fundamental fact that we cannot get out of our own consciousness.  Everything we experience is experienced by us, i.e. by humans.  This includes all of the thoughts had by speculative realists.  So I continue to agree with the phenomenologists, and with Dewey, that we philosophers must begin with experience, and specifically with our own experience.  I agree that values are out there in the world but only in the sense of being out there in the world of experience, in the world as experienced.  There may be values in the world as experienced by a virus:  I have no trouble with that.   But there is no reason to posit values in a world without experience or in a world inhabited entirely by non-living things.  Speculative realists like Shaviro are driven to their extreme panpsychist position because they think that the only other alternatives are anthropocentrism or eliminative materialism.  These are not the only alternatives.   Of course the non-mental physical world has the potential for the kind of complexity that leads to life and experience.  The world of thoughts and ideas is emergent upon the world of purely physical things.  There are probably even elements of the non-living world that are precursors to thought and experience, although we have no knowledge of that as this point.  

One thing that attracts me to Shaviro and keeps me coming back to him despite my disapproval of his more extravagant claims is that he, like Whitehead, places a very strong emphasis on aesthetics.  He talks about aesthetics in terms of allure (54).  When something has allure it addresses me and attracts my attention from beyond.  It is, following Whitehead, a "proposition" in the sense of a tale "that perhaps might be told about particular actualities" (Whitehead, PR 256) which proposes a potentiality to the viewer, one that is anchored in an actuality.  We do not encounter things just as packets of qualities.  Rather they offer a "promise of happiness" which is to say, the potential of beauty,  

I am happy with all of this except that unlike Shaviro I think that the object presents itself to me as a proposition partly because of its nature for me.  That is, this is how it is constituted in my experience.  Beauty arises out of the interaction of me with the object.  Others will not find that particular object as alluring precisely because their consciousness is not similarly prepared.  What doesn't work for me is Shaviro's tendency to anthropomorphize the object of allure, as when he speaks of qualities of the thing as "bait that the thing holds out to me." (55) I have no problem, however, with thinking of the thing as a being which acts as though it were a seducer, and it is as if it were providing bait.

When Shaviro goes on to say some other things in relation to an analysis of poem by Shelley that was performed by Whitehead, he really sounds like Dewey.  Here are some of the Deweyan like pronouncements:  "it is actually 'things' themselves - rather than their representations in the form of ideas or impressions - that flow through the mind.  Shelley's insistence on a universe of actually existing things goes against the subjectivism and sensationalism of the rest of the poem, and of British empiricism more generally....to the extent that the poem envisions a 'universe of things,' it suggests that we perceive and respond to objects themselves...We do not just analyze them in terms of universals by adding up and associating atomistic 'ideas.'  ....we do not just passively receive a series of bare, isolated sensa;  rather, we actually do encounter Mount Blanc, with its surrounding glaciers and woods and waterfalls...  Mount Blank allures us as it 'gleams on high'"  From a Deweyan perspective this is all good an to the point.

But Shaviro goes on and says that Mont Blanc manifests a Power that 'dwells apart in its tranquility'...[and] this Power is also an actor in a vast web of interconnections:  a force of metamorphosis that rolls...through all things, exceeding 'the limits of the dead and living world..."  (59)  And this seems a bit much.  There is no question that we could experience Mt. Blanc as like this....but going beyond that to posit a Power is just speculation, and frankly has a whiff of residual Deism.   I have argued in other posts that aesthetic atheism does a better job with this, for, although it does deny God,  it does not deny these experiences or their meaningfulness for those who have them.  The primacy of aesthetics is partly a matter of such sublime experiences originally associated with religion and later incorporated into Transcendentalism, are still there.   Religion becomes subsumed under aesthetics, but a much broadened notion of aesthetics.  

Whitehead refers to the "brooding presence of the whole" of nature.  (60)  This anthropomorphizes what Dewey better referred to as the sense of an infinite background (see Art as Experience.)

Shaviro also says "every entity in the world has its own point of view, just as I do, and that each of them somehow feels the other entities with which it comes into contact, much as I do." (61) This includes stones, although Shaviro and Whitehead before him do not attribute consciousness to stones.  This seems a contradiction since feelings and points of view entail consciousness, or else Shaviro is using "consciousness" in a very different way.  "I attribute feelings to stones precisely in order to get away from the pernicious dualism that would insist that human beings alone (or at most, human beings together with some animals) have feelings, while everything else does not."  (61)  But this is not necessary, and is a false dichotomy.   One can attribute points of view and feelings and "what it is like to be...." to all living things, for sure, but need not go on to attribute all of this to stones.  

Again, I am happy with "stone as experienced" being treated as having feelings since they are constituted as part of our world as living beings, and our world as living beings extend beyond us.  The psychological truth that panpsychism and romanticism trades on is this experience of nature as animated.  I suspect that the romantics were right that this way of perceiving nature is more healthy, more conducive to happiness.  It would also be more conducive to preservation of the environment.  As Yuriko Saito has observed, the early Japanese garden theorists recognized this in their treatment of stones in a garden.  Shintoism, of course, takes the animation of stones to be literally true.  I take it to be more appropriately metaphorically true.

A great thing about everyday aesthetics is that in attending to aesthetic objects that are not deliberately constructed as art works we can see that even here there is benefit to seeing objects as having "aura" in my terminology.   Karen Barad is observed by Shaviro as holding that it takes radical rethinking of agency to appreciate how lively dead matter can be.  In a way, I think that is right.  In a way, it is important to overcome the distinction between animate and inanimate, that is within the realm of everyday aesthetic experience.  Everyday aesthetics and closely associated aesthetics of nature can reanimate the everyday and the natural.  But to believe literally that inanimate things have agency is just to bring back an early form of Deism and a kind of magical thinking that can help us little.

When Shaviro and the speculative realists attack what they call correlationism, they are attacking something that contemporary Deweyan pragmatists like myself would also attack in many instances.  For example Shaviro associates the attack on correlationism with Whitehead's attack on "bifurcation":  "Modern Western thought, from Descartes through Locke and on to Hume, partitioned the world between primary and secondary qualities, or between objectively extended objects on the one hand and merely subjective 'psychic additions'...on the other."  Dewey would agree with this, and agree that this was a mistake.  But the speculative realists also hold that the world is not "beholden to our ways of shaping an processing it..."  (55)  This is problematic in a complicated way.  The world as we experience it is in fact beholden to our ways of shaping and processing it in two closely related ways:  first, most of the experienced world is literally beholden to it in that we are constantly shaping and reshaping that would physically to meet our needs:   putting paint on a canvas is one example of such reshaping;  second, and related to the first point, we are constantly categorizing the world, thinking about it, talking about it, and seeing it from our perspective:  much of this is preliminary to the literal reshaping of it mentioned above.  One important aspect of this reconstituting of the world is the way in which we can bring to it our capacity to see aspects of the world as symbols and therefor as animated.  This animation of the world we experience brings it closer to us:  de-alienates it, one might say.  Much of everyday aesthetic experience is a matter of bringing out the potential for animation.

The "world in itself - the world as it exists apart from us" (66) doesn't make sense.  Such a world a priori cannot be experienced or even thought about.  One would have to imagine oneself out of existence, which is basically impossible.  Moreover, to talk about such a thing is to go back to the dualistic vision of Kant, the side of Kant that the Deweyan pragmatist rejects. 

However Shaviro is onto something when he says "we habitually grasp the world in terms of our preimposed concepts.  We need to break this habit in order to get at the strangeness of things in the world...."  (56)  This is what  I have referred to as finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.   I agree that preimposed concepts can be a problem if we want to reanimate experience.  Looking at the world without preimposed concepts and getting at the strangeness of things is a matter of taking the aesthetic attitude.

"If philosophy begins in wonder - and ends in wonder....then its aim should be not to deduce and impose cognitive norms, or concepts of understanding, but rather to make us more fully aware of how reality escapes and upsets these norms."  (67)  I agree with this, except that I take a more Nietzschean line with this.  Nietzsche in his essay on truth "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extramoral Sense" recognized the problem of imposing concepts of understanding on the world:  for him, this is the columbarium of ideas, of dead metaphors, which he later associated with the Alexandrian.  However Nietzsche also recognized that the intuitive man may introduce living metaphors.  These constitute reality in a way that escapes and upsets norms.

Shaviro thinks we must go beyond Kant here, and we must speculate.  Speculation means thinking about the world of things-in-themselves.  I prefer a more Hegelian/Husserlian/Deweyan approach and just reject the world of things in themselves.  Hence I would still reject speculation.  Shaviro says "Pace Kant, we must think outside of our own thought, and we must positively conceive the existence of things outside our own conceptions of them."  But Kant has another strategy which Shaviro neglects:  the genius artist thinks aesthetic ideas.  Aesthetic ideas are not speculative:  rather they are things taken as symbols of the transcendent realm.  Thinking aesthetic ideas is in a sense thinking outside of our own thought in that aesthetic ideas are not traditional conceptions.  They are original creative ideas.  They animate things.  The things thus animated achieve aura.  

It is my view that when this happens essence emerge.  This is not the path of seeing the real as "inarticulable inarticulate mush" (67) but rather as seeing that which is most heightened in its quality of being real as also being ineffable.  The aesthetic idea is ineffable in that it cannot be described in literal language.  

"Philosophers have only described the correlationist circle, in various ways:  the point, however, is to step outside of it.  The aim of speculative realism...is to break free of the circle....attain [the precritical freedom of Spinoza and Leibniz] without reverting...to any sort of precritical ...metaphysical 'dogmatism."  Although I do not accept the critique of correlationism I find exciting the notion of reviving something of the precritical freedom of Spinoza and Leibniz.  For Meillassoux this means "to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not" whereas I would say it is a matter of getting out of ourselves in the conventional way to find our deeper selves which is what achieved by the genius through aesthetic ideas and through opening ourselves up to aura in things and to the emergence of essences.



    

What is the aesthetic attitude? Stolnitz revisited.

It is common for readers in a discipline, even sophisticated ones, to dismiss writers and thinkers popular at one time by way of labeling them.  Then when you sit down and actually read something by that person carefully the position turns out often to be much more complex and nuanced than one would expect.  Carolyn Korsmeyer's Aesthetics:  The Big Questions contains a selection from Jerome Stolnitz's Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism, A Critical Introduction (1960) which defends and develops his own version of the aesthetic attitude.  The selection is followed by  Marcia Muelder Eaton's "Locating the Aesthetic," which came from her Aesthetics and the Good Life (1989).  It is easy to dismiss Stolnitz as a formalist uninterested in subject-matter and become an advocate of Eaton's contextualism.  But now, almost a quarter of a century after the contextualist revolution --- now that contextualism is our dominant form of critical practice, and has been for a long time -- it might be worthwhile to reread Stolnitz with a kinder and even more sympathetic eye, if for nothing else but to just gain some perspective.  I already tried to do that in my book, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (2012) and in my previous article “Practical George and Aesthete Jerome Meet the Aesthetic Object,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 28:1 (1990) 37-53.  In the book I say: 

"One can look at an everyday streetscape from a disinterested perspective, focusing on sensuous and design features, and then switch to a perspective that takes into account history and context. One can follow Stolnitz in isolating the object from the flow of experience and from its interrelations with other things, and then toggle [I adopt this idea from Peggy Brand] to a non-isolated form of perception.  I have been arguing that taking the aesthetic attitude is taking an attitude that allows objects, environments or events to have aura.  Although either disinterestedness or interested perception alone might do this, toggling between interested and disinterested perception is more likely to heighten significance. The toggling approach may be applied to all types of aesthetics:  of art, of nature and of everyday life."  (198)  I still endorse this view.

So what more can we get out of Stolnitz.  Much of the selection in Korsmeyer's book is an attempt both to enrich our notion of what goes on with the aesthetic attitude and also to overcome some prejudice against the notion.  [True scholarship would look at Stolnitz's book as a whole, and also his entire life's writing.  But hey this is a blog.]  Let's assume for the moment that Stolnitz is right that our ordinary practical attitude towards things is such that we only perceive things in a partial way.  After all, it would be "stupid and wasteful to become absorbed in the object itself" under normal circumstances.  There is no value, for example, in absorbing ourselves in the aesthetic features of a stop sign:  we need to just know when to stop or go.  So the perception of things under practical conditions is "limited and fragmented."  It is sufficient just to identify the thing, something we do habitually, as when we choose a pen over a paper clip to write with.  As Stolnitz puts it, we "read the label" rather than look at the thing itself.  But when we pay attention to the thing itself for the sake of enjoying the way it looks or sounds [or...add the other senses] then we are taking the aesthetic attitude. This happens for example in attending to a play or even when we glance aesthetically at our surroundings while on vacation.

Stolnitz's definition of aesthetic attitude is "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."  The rest of the selection attempts to explain the concepts in the definition. [Unfortunately Stolnitz does not explain "for its own sake alone":  what exactly is the "sake" of a landscape seen from a car?] 

The key here is that the aesthetic attitude is needed for having an aesthetic experience.  Stolnitz stresses that we are not taking an aesthetic attitude when we have a cognitive interest, as in that taken by a sociologist or a historian, or when our interest is in judging, as in that of an art critic.  This last point is somewhat surprising since Kant, who had also promoted the idea disinterested perception, had associated it strongly with critical judgment.  So, in a sense, Stolnitz's version of disinterestedness is even more purified than Kant's.  He further elaborates that the aesthetic attitude "isolates" the object insofar as it focuses on the look or the sound, and it is not seen, therefore, in the fragmented manner characteristic of practical perception.   The inference seems odd, but the idea is noteworthy:  that aesthetic perception is specifically not fragmented. 

Stolnitz further stresses that the aesthetic experience is not "un-interested" but in fact is "intensely absorbed."  This leads into the notion of "sympathetic" which has to do with preparation for the aesthetic experience.  The aesthetic attitude is sympathetic in that we "prepare ourselves to respond to the object" in order to "relish its individual quality."  He talks about this as accepting the object "on its own terms."  What this means is never made clear, as mentioned above, although he elaborates it in terms of "being receptive" to what the object has to offer perceptually, and inhibiting unsympathetic responses, for example of the sort we would have to a novel that does not accord with our way of thinking. So we are to "follow the lead of the object and respond in concert with it." This seems interestingly in accord with the recent school of object-centered theory that I discussed in a recent post. 

Stolnitz tries to explain this point further by talking of a sonnet by Milton written as a protest, but which now seems remote from us in terms of the "heated questions of religion and politics" involved. To be sympathetic to the work is to "give it a chance" to show what about it would be interesting to perception.   

Stolnitz also warns us that we should not see aesthetic attention is a matter of just looking or of a blank stare but rather something like, or understood in terms of, what happens when we listen to a "rhythmically exciting piece of music" where we are absorbed by the "energy and movement" or when we find ourselves sitting on the edge of our chair:  it is not passive.  

The key notion is "coming alive."  Stolnitz writes:  "In taking the aesthetic attitude, we want to make the value of the object come fully alive in our experience."  This requires that we prepare our selves to respond in terms of imagination and emotion.  It is not just that we attend to the object but how intensely we attend to the object.  We only attend aesthetically when we are wholly absorbed. And this is attended by activity.  An example of this is keeping in time with the music by moving one's foot, or responding in a muscular way sympathetically to a sculpture.  

Arnold Berleant has been a long-time critic of the aesthetic attitude and yet it is therefore ironic that he shares with Stolnitz an interest in this kind of activity:  it is clear that what Berleant attacks is not really what Stolnitz believes, that Stolnitz's notion of the aesthetic attitude is much richer than what we find in traditional attacks on it, for instance in the famous attack by George Dickie.  Like Berleant, Stolnitz stresses that we experience a cathedral actively through walking through it. 

Stolnitz goes further and, drawing from Hume, stresses that in acting in regard to the object we savor it fully only when we focus on its "complex and subtle details."  Like Frank Sibley, he stresses the role of the "able teacher" in being able to make a work of art "vital and engaging" by way of showing us things to which we might have been insensitive.  

This comment is followed in the reading by a sentence that should be a surprise to Stolnitz's critics.  The sentence states that this kind of awareness often requires "knowledge about allusions or symbols which occur in the work" as well as possibly "training in the art form."  So that which is external is not necessarily excluded from attention to the object's intrinsic features, a point he surprisingly shares with Marcia Eaton.  

I mentioned his reliance on Hume.  However this should not be oversimplified.  For Stolnitz, there is a specific purpose for "discriminating attention."  For Hume, that seems just to allow us to reconcile judgments or to condemn others.  But for Stolnitz, the matter is more object-centered:  it is for the work to come alive to us.  Again, he explains this in terms of listening to a symphony where keeping the themes in mind, following the development, appreciating the dynamic of their interrelations, contributes to an experience that has "greater richness and unity."  So it seems that aesthetic attitude is an attitude that has as its end product an experience of greater richness and unity based on understanding structure, among other things.

In conclusion, for Stolnitz the aesthetic attitude is not just a blank or passive stare, but rather is setting oneself in preparation for aesthetic experience (i.e. being fully absorbed in the object of perception), that preparation involving giving the object a chance to reveal its individual quality worthy of appreciation, treating it in a non-fragmentary way, learning about allusions and other background considerations, physically engaging with the object in appropriate ways, and generally doing whatever is necessary to bring the object alive in experience.  His description of listening to a symphony is paradigmatic of what this involves:  one has to attune oneself to dynamic interrelations that give rise to greater richness and unity.  Finally, this attitude can be applied to anything whatever, even a landscape seen from a car.     

Dickie is often said to have definitely refuted Stolnitz, but given my description of Stolnitz's view above, that hardly seem plausible. Dickie's view is that there is only one kind of attention, and either one attends to the properties or not.  My specific criticism of Dickie is to be found in the above-mentioned article, however I might mention here that Dickie's is an overly spare notion of the structure of consciousness.  He thinks that differences in motive simply cause the critic, the philistine and the aesthete to focus on different properties in the aesthetic object.  Properties are treated as static attributes of the thing in question.  I think that there really is a profound difference between the kind of fragmented viewing Stolnitz calls "practical" and the rich and complex form of experience I have just described, an experience that requires some training, some preparation.  If one approaches something with this preparation and has the appropriate aesthetic experience then one can be said to have had the appropriate attitude.  Attending to something in such a way as to give it a chance and to bring it alive is very different from attending to it in such a way as to track its properties:  tracking properties is really just another way to look at something as having certain appropriate labels, which is precisely the form of perception which Stolnitz sought to wean us from.