Plato's Socrates on literary interpretation in Ion

Since Plato's Ion is a short dialogue, humorous, and probably quite early, it has not often been taken seriously.  Yet it does take very seriously the question "what is interpretation?"  This blog post will not be a systematic explication of Ion but rather a musing on the notion of interpretation set forth there.  The notion is ambiguous, perhaps even paradoxical.  Socrates asks Ion in his typical way to explain his art of being a rhapsode (a rhapsode was in part a reciter of great poetry, but also someone who interpreted what he recited.  His recitations were like one-person theatrical performances).   The conclusion of the story is that Ion has no art at all but rather that he is inspired by Homer and Homer by the epic muse.  Thus Ion is simply a spokesperson or a conduit, as Homer is, for a god.  The magnetic chain that begins with the muse goes through Homer to Ion and thence to the members of the audience.  Yet Ion himself, at least at the beginning of the dialogue, sees his art as one of interpretation, this to include not only the capacity to give interpretive readings, but also to interpret what Homer means, and to evaluate Homer's writings.  As Ion says "interpretation has certainly been the most laborious part of my art" and that this involves being able not simply to recite Homer but to "speak about Homer," which Ion believes he can do better than any other man.  Socrates himself had understood Ion's task as not merely to memorize Homer's words but to be able to "understand the meaning of the poet" and interpret his mind to the audience.  To interpret well requires that he understand what Homer means.  Ion peculiarly insists that he can interpret Homer and Hesiod equally well when they agree but not when they disagree.  We then find him agreeing with Socrates that a good prophet is a better interpreter of what each poet says about divination than he is.  It seems to us that Socrates is confusing the interpretation of the meaning of poets when they say something about divination with evaluation of the truth of what they say about divination.  He thinks that to understand Homer is to understand whether or not what Homer says about something, e.g. military tactics, is true.  (If this were what the dialogue came to in the end, it would not be worth much.  It would be based on a mistake.) In any case, the prophet will not be limited to whatever Homer and Hesiod agree about but will be equally able to interpret when they disagree, unlike Ion.  Ion also admits that only an arithmetician will be able to judge whether someone is a good speaker in the area of arithmetic, and he will be able to judge the bad speaker as well.  We naturally think here that Ion should say that he is indeed a good judge of epic poets just as the arithmetician is a good judge in math.  But of course what Socrates wants to say is that neither Homer nor Ion has a subject- matter proper to himself that he can be said to understand well.  That Ion probably is able to say better what Homer's intended meaning was seems to count not at all.  Socrates' solution to the dilemma is to insist that Ion does not speak of Homer with any "art of knowledge" or with "rules of art" or he would be able to be equally a good judge in all poetry: for "poetry is a whole."  Socrates then says that the gift by which he speaks of Homer is not an art but inspiration, that he is inspired by Homer, and Homer is inspired in turn by the muse.  Inspiration is described as a kind of possession in which the interpreter is not in his right mind.  An example given for not being in one's right mind is falling "under the power of music and meter."  Another example given is feeling as if one were in the very scene one is depicting, and thus having the same emotional reactions that the characters would have.

Socrates has offered, it appears to me, an alternative theory of interpretation, one that does not see it as a rule-following activity in the way the art of being a doctor or a charioteer might be, but as emphasizing a radically different kind of perception.  To understand this different kind of perception we need to look at the metaphors Socrates uses.  He waxes quite lyrical here, and this raises a question of whether or not he himself isn't like the poet and the rhapsode in being inspired (after all, we have the story of his personal daemon.)  This is the paradox:  Plato has Socrates make fun of poets and rhapsodes as having no real knowledge of the sort that doctors and charioteers have, and yet he waxes lyrical when talking about poetic inspiration, as though this were a good thing and even a valid method of interpretation.  In contemporary theory of interpretation the view that inspiration plays an important role in interpretation is usually discounted.  Some authors believe that we need to accurately transcribe the intended meaning of the author, some that we need to get the correct interpretation from the language itself, and some bring in social and historical context.  But what about creative interpretation?  What about inspiration?  What role does it play?  

Socrates describes the poets as being like Bacchic maidens "who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind."  What is this to "draw milk and honey from the rivers"?  The answer to this question is, I believe, the key to the dialogue.  Both the good poet and the good interpreter are like ecstatic religious participants who perceive mere water at something both more nutritious and sweeter, something transformed, something with an aura of significance.  They are not in their right minds because they perceive the physical world radically transformed, as perhaps transformed into a mythological or a fictional realm.  (Note that the passage shows indirectly an intense interest in the aesthetics of nature, one not usually recognized in the ancient Greeks.  The idea presumably is that nature is properly understood aesthetically when it is perceived in the way the Bacchic maidens would perceive it:  transformed.)  Socrates also says that the soul of the lyric poet brings "songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower." And so the good poet is someone who works in a place where nature is transformed under the eyes of divinity.  Socrates then says,  "For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him."  The poet can invent things but only when inspired.  He is inspired when he is no longer rational but rather is possessed.  His lightness seems to imply something non-serious or at least less serious than science.  The poetic way of perceiving nature is here proposed as a viable alternative to the scientific way.  Even when the poet says "noble words" concerning men's actions he is not speaking "by any rules of art."  

But let's set aside the idea promoted by Socrates that poetry and literary interpretation are just the work of God himself, and focus on the way in which this alternative works against current views of literary interpretation and current views of the aesthetics of nature, both of which shortchange the ways in which ecstasy transforms the field of perception.  Ion says "I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the Gods to us" the things of the Gods being simply the things of the world perceived as transformed in the way the river was transformed into milk and honey for the revelers.  After this, how can one take seriously Socrates' surface message that the works of poetry should be replaced with tracts on medicine, charioteering, and other crafts that involve following rules.  Of course, we might today prefer to say that these crafts too can benefit from inspiration, and that they are what we now call "arts" exactly when they do these, and otherwise they are simply technologies.  Funny how words change their meaning.

Emerson on Beauty Again

This post will be on "The Nature of Beauty" a selection from Emerson's Nature: Addresses and Lectures (1849) which appears in Carlson and Lintott's textbook Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism.  I had posted before on Emerson on beauty here.  

What interests me most about Emerson is seeing his vision as a kind of foil for the most commonly held view concerning the aesthetics of the natural environment, scientific cognitivism.  This passage from Emerson ironically appears at the beginning of a textbook compiled by aestheticians who favor scientific cognitivism.  

An interesting feature of Emerson's approach to nature not shared by contemporary aestheticians of nature is stress on the idea of return to childhood:  "few adult persons can see nature."  For example we may see the sun but we do so, as adults, only in a superficial way:  "The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child."  So the lover of nature becomes as a child.  Emerson speaks of this in terms of of a harmony of inward and outward senses.  This is achieved only when the adult "has retained the spirit of infancy."  When this happens there is "a wild delight" that "runs through the man" and makes all his sorrows and griefs seem small.  This leads to appreciation of all seasons of nature, not just the summer:  "every hour and change corresponds to an authorizes a different state of mind."  One of my favorite lines is the following: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the bring of fear." This is something we can all relate to, even atheists.  Emerson connects this to becoming a child once again.  In the very next sentence he writes, "In the woods too, a man casts off his years...and at what period soever of life, is always a child."  The response to nature of becoming like a child is not discussed in the aesthetics of nature literature I know.  Even Kant, who talks about the free play of imagination and understanding in aesthetic experience, does not associate this play with child-likeness.  Scientific cognitivism as a position in the aesthetics of nature could not accept this stance since scientific cognition is a matter for adults, not children or the child-in-us.  For Emerson, this childlikeness is even a moment of a kind of pleasant false belief:  in the woods "I feel that nothing can befall me in life...which nature cannot repair."  I feel "uplifted into infinite space" and my sense of ego vanishes.  Emerson then writes, famously, "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."  Whether an atheist can have these same feelings is open to question.  But he or she can certainly get part of the way there, for example in becoming like a child and in feeling as if one's ego as dissolved.   For Emerson, immortal beauty can only be found in the the wilderness: "In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages."  But I wonder why such feelings cannot be had in urban settings as well. 

In my earlier post on this topic I discussed Emerson's view of the eye as the "best of artists."  He also speaks in the same paragraph of light as "the first of painters."  Indeed, "there is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful."  It can give the sense  "a sort of infinitude" which makes "all matter gay."  I think of the experience of walking through my neighborhood at sunset or at sunset and seeing everything in a golden glow of light, so that even the uglier homes are beautiful.  The opposite of this is certain gray days when everything seems tawdry.  

Emerson says "almost all the individual forms [of nature] are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone...."   This makes me think of the works of my artist friend Judith Miller who captures the spirit of Emerson by taking little hand-sized pieces of nature and incorporating their images into her paintings.

Emerson stresses that city inhabitants only favor the country half the year, and yet every season has its beauties.  We today do not have a problem with this idea.  He goes further to stress that "each moment of the year has its own beauty" to the attentive eye, and further that such an eye could even notice the different unique beauties at different hours of the day, for example as different insects come out.  It is therefore implied that some people are better appreciators of nature than others, those who attend to these changes. We should bear in mind that Emerson is not talking necessarily about untrammeled or pristine nature.  He sees beauties as changing in the countryside based on changing agricultural conditions:  "The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week."   Emerson has special admiration for the river which is a "perpetual gala" which art cannot rival.  However, he then expresses the puzzling view that "this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part" and that if these beauties are sought out consciously, "eagerly hunted," then they will be "mere shows" and will "mock us with their unreality."  The moon will be "mere tinsel" unless viewed when it "shines upon your necessary journey."  His idea seems to be that only when we observe these things in the course of practical activity are they beautiful, or perhaps that it is better to be caught unawares by beauty than to seek it out. But perhaps this talk about beauty as mere tinsel when not related to human action is a lead in to the higher, spiritual element to beauty, which is "essential to its perfection."  This higher type of beauty is "combined with the human will" and especially virtue and "natural action."  Here follows one my favorite quotes:  "Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine."  Contemporary aestheticians of nature do not make this distinction or discuss it at all, and yet it is arguable that there is a deeper form of natural beauty, one that is connected to human action. 

Another favorite passage is "To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.  The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again.  In their eternal calm, he finds himself.  The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon."  Would that we could have this experience so immediately today.  And yet, when I pull myself away from my study and take a walk, I head where I can see greater distances.

Emerson does not leave art out of analysis entirely.  He writes "The creation of beauty is Art" and "The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.  A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world.  It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature."  Works of nature cannot be counted and all all different, and "what is common to them all, that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."  So "the standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, the totality of nature" and nothing is beautiful alone, individual objects being beautiful only insofar as they suggest universal beauty.  "The poet, the painter...seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty..."  So Art is nature passed through man.  

Thoreau on Walking

   Henry David Thoreau,  June1856.by Benjamin D. Maxham 

The comments here are on a selection from Thoreau's "Walking" that appears in a textbook Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism ed. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, Columbia university Press, New York, 2008.   All quotes are from pages 54-56.  I am currently using this text in my graduate seminar on aesthetics.  Ideally I should be commenting on Thoreau's essay as a whole, but I like the limitation of using a selection, or in this post, a selection of a selection.

Much of the interest in reading a writer from another time is to try to perceive the world a bit as he did, testing his experience against one's own, and perhaps finding one's own a bit wanting.  Thoreau begins his essay by identifying Nature (he capitalizes it!) with "absolute freedom and wildness."  This in itself requires the modern reader to stretch his or her imagination:  I at least would not associate these words closely together.  For me, nature is just the world, i.e. what is, and some of it is more free, some less free, some more wild, some less wild.  But clearly Thoreau is talking about a small part of what I call "nature" when he speaks of Nature.  Moreover, it seems clear that he is speaking not just of a type of place but of a type of experience associated with a type of place.  The type of place is really wherever he took his walks, i.e. within ten miles of his home of Concord, Massachusetts. (Bear in mind that this land would have looked a far cry different then than it does today.) The type of experience is one characterized by feelings of absolute freedom and wildness.  The feeling of wildness is associated both with the fact that the place is wild and that one is oneself wild or wilder than at home.  Thoreau also stresses that he wants to make "an extreme statement" i.e. as a champion of Nature.  He wants to see man as part of Nature rather than as part of society.  But it also turns out that he thinks there are enough champions of civilized society already.  So, perhaps his "extreme statement" is a rhetorical device and he does not want to wholly dispute the value of civilization.  In fact, there are many passages in his writings that show a profound love of reading, and reading the classics at that.    

The second paragraph starts by observing that he has met few who have understood the art of Walking (his caps. again).  Of interest here for the aesthetician is the very idea that Walking can be an art.  We do speak of the art of conversation.  Perhaps Walking is an art of that sort.  He then speaks of a genius (which term was, at that time, associated with the fine artist) of SAUNTERING (his caps!), his term for the art of Walking. The implication is that walking can be a creative, art-like activity.  

He draws on the etymology of "sauntering" to explicate the art a bit more:  one source is in the notion of those who are on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and another is those who are without home, i.e. their home is everywhere.  They are like a river, which meanders, but at the same time seeks the shortest route to the sea. (One senses something Taoist about this.)  Thus, every walk (in the sense of a walk as part of the art of walking) is a crusade (religious) and the ideal walk is one from which one will never return, leaving family and friends, having settled one's affairs, "ready for a walk."  This is extreme, indeed, as if Thoreau were Jesus himself asking us to follow him.  Walking then, for Thoreau, is a fine art with religious pretensions or overtones.

I can hardly claim to know anything of walking in this sense, and yet, when reading Thoreau, I must connect him with my own experience.  Like Thoreau I often take walks from my home, although much shorter ones, and much more urban.  I live near the center of San Jose, a city of almost a million people, spread out over miles.  One walk I take is towards Olinder park, a park that was open grasslands and a clump of pine trees when I first moved here, but now has a green park lawn and marked trails.  It is a small park of a few acres bounded on the south by a freeway and on the east by Coyote Creek.  This creek is not cemented in:  so it does have a certain wild look, and fortunately, there is another park on the other side of the creek.  So, for me, Nature on this walk, is what happens to me when I am walking along the path that parallels the creek.  I admit it...not terribly wild, but pleasant enough.  My wife asked me yesterday whether I experienced things as magical and whether I could give an example.  I thought that a vision I had of a very old oak tree on that walk, near the creek, had something magical about it.  In my book I speak of aesthetic experience as experience of objects as having aura, and in this case, the oak tree had a magical aura.

Hey, I am not saying that Thoreau would consider me a fellow Walker.  Speaking of himself in the plural (in the way of a journalist?) he writes "We have felt that we are almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art," and then he observes that the others cannot do so since they need the "requisite leisure, freedom, and independence" which can only come by God's grace.  Others have only experienced Walking when they have lost themselves for half an hour in the woods.  Most have since confined themselves to public roads.  

Perhaps my experiences hiking with friends in the mountains count a bit more to practicing the art of walking.  Although an atheist, I still find myself feeling as if I were on some sort of pilgrimage, as if something spiritual were happening.  Or perhaps I could say that something spiritual does happen to me while walking in the Sierras, although I do not connect the word "spiritual" in any way with belief in God (or "magic" in any way with belief in things that violate the laws of nature).  So there it is, perhaps I partake in the art of Walking a bit.

Thoreau distinguishes Walking from mere "taking exercise" and makes a humorous comment about how swinging dumb-bells is of no real value in this respect since while you are doing this for health you are not visiting springs bubbling in far-off pastures: "If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life."  This tells us something more about Sauntering.  It includes a search for the springs of life, and this includes, sometimes literally, a search for a bubbling spring.  

Thoreau oddly worries some about the impact of Walking on his civilized side.  He observes that it might produce a certain "roughness of character" and rob us of "delicacy of touch."  The other extreme is to stay at home and have "a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin"  and also "increased sensibility to certain impressions."  He even thinks that if he had spent less time outdoors he would have been "more susceptible to some influences" important to his moral development.  The conclusion he seems to draw is that one should balance these two:  "proportion rightly the thick and thin skin."  This proportion is like that between thought and experience.  His concluding thought on this, however, is more like Rousseau:  "The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.  That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience."  So, so much for proportion, I suppose.

Language can be funny and sometimes there is a quote that has a newer aptness just because of the change of word meaning.  Thoreau says "When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods:  what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?"  Mall!  Well, he probably meant a sheltered walk, or a walk by a park bordered by trees:  basically an urban walk.  But it works well with our sense of "mall" too.   I have no quasi-mystical experiences walking in Valley Fair Mall, although I could see myself having one walking in one of the 18th or 19th century walkways Thoreau was probably thinking of....maybe because of the historical nostalgia I would feel.  Thoreau, in this paragraph, also speaks of philosophers "importing woods to themselves" since the ancient philosophers would plant goves and walks and walk in "porticos open to the air."  I often feel more philosophical on walks in nature, by which I mean that it puts me in a contemplative mood and turns my thoughts to life, meaning, reality....the big topic (although not usually in any way that I could turn into a professional article.)

One part of the art of Walking is the right attitude.  Thoreau believes that one should be in the woods in spirit, not just in body.  One should forget one's morning obligations and ones obligations to society.  To do this is to "return to my senses."  When I take my urban walks I often find that it works best if I try to make my mind empty.  Perhaps Walking is a kind of meditation.  

What was the goal of Walking for Thoreau?  He talks about how when he can achieve an "absolutely new prospect" this is "a great happiness."  An example of this is being carried in one of his local walks to "as strange a country as I expect to see," and an example of that, in turn, is that "a single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey."   So it is the strangeness and beauty of something new that he seeks.  Another aspect of his aesthetic experience, discussed in the same paragraph as this one is the harmony he finds between his own lifespan and the capability of the landscape within walking distance of his home which cannot be exhausted aesthetically during that span.  How often do we experience things as bracketed by and conditioned by our own awareness of our own lives, how long we have lived, and what the future holds for us personally. 

This then is followed by a new paragraph with a familiar theme:  "Nowadays, almost all man's improvement, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.  A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand!"  I do regret not being able to see the things Thoreau saw on his walks.  And yet we just have to live with what we have, or improve it in some way.  

Plato and the Second Bed.... or Table

I have been teaching Plato on the three beds (his critique of the imitative arts in Book X of the Republic), and the question that comes to mind is "what role can Plato's theory of Forms play for us?"  A reasonable first response is that Plato might well be right that there is an eternal unchanging Form for mathematical entities.  The argument that the perfect circle is the only circle and this the things that represent the circle or are called "circle" in our world are not really circles...is plausible.  Still, it is less convincing that there is such a thing as the perfect bed or even a correct and unchanging definition of "bed."  Equally implausible is that there is a perfect State, although clearly Plato thought so, as in the perfect State would be one in which the three classes were in harmony, the philosopher-kings ruling.  We can at the very least see talk of perfect Forms as simply talk of ideals (or perhaps as replaceable with more common-sense talk about ideals).  So the craftsman who is interested in making good tables can reasonably be expected to have some ideal in his/her mind and be dissatisfied with his/her table to the extent that it does not meet the ideal.  These ideals would not be eternal and unchanging or even universal.  However the notion that one could always make something better or closer to the ideal might itself be universal. 

At the same time, it is not clear that arguing over the nature of the perfect table or trying to come up with a definition of "table" would be of great use to a table designer.  One possibility in all of this is that we can have a definition that has no real normative dimension.  In discussion "table" my students suggested that a table must have a surface that can be used for writing or eating (the two main functions of tables) and must has some support to be sufficiently above the ground to serve this purpose.  The definition I have found on "The Free Dictionary" online is "An article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface."  This has the advantage of classifying it under a genus, i.e. furniture, but does not mention anything about its purpose.  Moreover, some things can rightly be called tables that do not have any legs.  Even the flat, horizontal surface is negotiable as long as the item serves the purpose of a table.  But then "serving the purpose of a table" is not the same as being a table.  A chair or a bed can be used for writing or eating on, but this does not make a chair or a bed a table (even when they have one or more vertical legs and have a flat horizontal surface!)  Still, if you are a table designer and are trying to make the best possible table, as I have suggested above, none of these definitions are going to help that much.  You are probably going to also be thinking of things like excellent craftsmanship, a perfect rendition of a certain design type, and quality of materials, as all going into the quality of your table - and these things just do not appear as features in any of the definitions on offer.  So perhaps one could drive a wedge between the notion of the ideal table and the notion of the ideal definition of a table.  In short, although I had thought that having a normative dimension to one's definition (for example, giving the function) would really help non-philosophers do their tasks, I now suspect that the ideal X incorporates a lot of other things than just the function (although functionality is still important.) 

What is the value of disinterested perception?

Immanuel Kant was famous for advocating disinterestedness in order to achieve aesthetic perception.  However in recent years this idea has been challenged.  Notably, Arnold Berleant in "Aesthetics without Purpose" takes on Kant directly in his criticism of disinterestedness.  However, there have also been some recent defenders of disinterestedness.  One such defender is Theodore Gracyk in his article "A Different Plea for Disinterest." (Aesthetics:  A Reader in Philosophy of Arts, ed. David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, Boston:  Prentice Hall, 2011).  Gracyk's basic argument is that disinterested attention can work together with interested attention, that it is not an either/or proposition.  As he puts it "DA secures attention to subject matter, but in a way that integrates DA with IA." (449)  His area of specific study is popular music.  He notes that in popular music "the music is designed to reward listening through DA, that is, apart from our grasp of the song's subject matter."  (Peggy Brand first developed the idea of toggling between DA and IA in her article "Disinterestedness and Political Art," n. paradoxa online issue no. 8 and 9 Nov. 1998 and Feb. 99.  Her views were the inspiration for Gracyk's.)  But Berleant complains that Kant's idea of disinterestedness rests "on Kant's distinction between objective and subjective sensation, and on excluding the aesthetic from all but humans" and that this involves "imposing external strictures on experience." (150-151)  Berleant is certainly right that function often plays an important role in our aesthetic appreciation of art.  However, Kant himself recognized this with his idea that there is such a thing as dependent beauty, and that architecture is an example of this.  Architecture clearly can be, or rather, must be, seen both in a disinterested way and in an interested way.  When we perceive in a disinterested way we do not have to think as much (or at all) about function....but we cannot do that for very long with architecture, since buildings must serve a function.  On my view the best way to view architecture is to toggle (following Brand and Gracyk) between DA and IA.  I grant that overemphasis placed on disinterested attention is guilty of all of the charges Berleant levels against disinterestedness as a concept.  But once disinterestedness is restrained and balanced against IA it is found to be of the greatest importance, and this is consistent with Kant's best insights into aesthetics.  It is not at all clear how giving credit to disinterestedness as a necessary moment in full and rich aesthetic experience makes the aesthetic "subservient to rationalistic and system-generated preconceptions" as Berleant would argue.  (151)  Nor is it required to see humans as radically different from animals in order to give disinterestedness this role.  Disinterestedness allows us to bracket issues of existence, morality, and knowledge, in perceiving an aesthetic object, thus allowing us to break away from certain prejudices and to see things in a fresh way. 

Is There a Perceptual Commons?

Arnold Berleant has recently been arguing for an expanded concept of the aesthetic, and in his "The Aesthetic Politics of Environment" he has set forth a theory that would combine aesthetics and ethics. (in Aesthetics Beyond the Arts:  New and Recent Essays, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012)  The theory is basically a defense of a kind of political liberalism but from an aesthetic base.  I see myself as a liberal and I have long seen John Rawls as having set forth a convincing set of arguments in favor of this political position.  His ideas are based on a version of the idea that humans arrive at a social contract in the state of nature.  Of course, for Rawls, this takes place behind the "veil of ignorance," and the "social contract" is not an actual event but something more like a thought experiment.  We are all to imagine what basic rules we would arrive at if we were behind the veil of ignorance maximizing our own self-interest and developing a social contract.  Berleant rejects this as mythologizing and proposes an alternative:  the perceptual commons that will provide the basis for an aesthetic politics.  He sees the perceptual commons as "the ground of all perceptual experience" and he sees it also as "necessarily, immediately, and universally present and accessible..."   I have trouble believing in anything that has these qualities.  We do share a common world with other humans, but people of different cultures have very different ways of perceiving, and this is because they have different ways of understanding and imagining.   The notion of a pure world of perception beneath our cultural overlays is like that of what Kant refers to as the thing-in-itself.  I think we can do without either.  

Berleant thinks his idea of the perceptual commons can replace the vague concept of "rights."  His thought is that "rights" can be replaced by "claims" (by which he seems to mean "rightful claim" since he does not discuss or consider the possibility of unjustified or vague claims).  He speaks of various "perceptual claims" where most would speak of "rights":  for example to a "quiet public space" and a claim to pure and healthful air.  These are all good things, but it seems to me that whether we call them "claims" or "rights" is unimportant.  Moreover, they are better established in the Rawlsian way than through an appeal to something that is immediate, necessary and universal.

Before going on, I should say something about perceptual immediacy.  It is not entirely clear what Berleant means when he refers to perceptual immediacy.  It could be argued that there is no such thing.  Perception takes time and thus is never immediate.  For example it takes time to see a painting.  Granted, sometimes it seems as though a perceptual event takes no time at all, for example noticing that something is red.  But what percentage of our perception is relatively quick in this way?  It is hard to say.  Another sense of "immediate" is "not mediated" which is to say that nothing outside of the perception influences the perception,  I already questioned the idea of unmediated perception.   As for necessity and universality, there is an apparent contradiction here.  In many of his writings, Berleant argues against Kant's universalism, and yet his own talk of a perceptual commons seems little different. Berleant further explains that a claim, unlike a right, is "a simple assertion evidenced in behavior and grounded on the conditions necessary for life."  But this seems vague or at least problematic since what one person sees as necessary for life another may see as simply good for life, or merely useful, or not necessary at all.  As I suggested earlier, Berleant talks about perceptual claims as immediate and yet admits that it is extremely difficult to isolate the purely perceptual from the conceptual aspects of our experience that color our perceptions.  He says that no one needs a right to the air they breath:  rather they have a perceptual claim to that air. Their "living presence is the sole justification needed for exercising that claim."  Yet, unless you are a total pacifist, you will believe that sometimes it is necessary to kill others, and one of the main ways to do this is to deprive them of air.  It is hard to see how something about perception gives one the absolute right not to be killed by others by this means.  What if the only way to stop a person who is about to murder you is to deprive him of air?  Berleant thinks that his path of replacing rights with claims will avoid myth, which clouds our thought.  However, Rawls has shown that certain myths are valuable, when taken as myths.

Still, one could argue that Berleant's  idea of a perceptual commons is a useful myth too, and I could hardly deny that.  It is helpful to see at least much of the world (i.e. the part that is public) as a commons in which we share certain perceptual spaces.  And, as I said at the beginning of this note, it is valuable, sometimes at least, to see social issues from an aesthetic angle and in terms of perception. 

I do have trouble with the idea of treating rights, the right to water, for example, as perceptual rights.  We need water for survival but we do not need to perceive it in order to use it.  Someone in a coma needs water but cannot perceive the water she needs.  When it comes to water the properties that are relevant to aesthetics are those having to do with smell, taste and look, not healthiness.  Sure, it is usually more pleasant to be healthy than not....but is this really a matter of aesthetics?  If we broaden aesthetics to include the right to water we might unnecessarily intrude into the domain of ethics.  I have sometimes been tempted to combine ethics and aesthetics into one discipline but it is tricky to do this and aesthetics stands a good chance of being overwhelmed by ethics in the process, for example, by being reduced to ethics.

Berleant thinks that aesthetics or "the aesthetic" is charged with creating a new world and a positive culture free of negative mythologies and sociality based on self-interest.  Why the aesthetic?  His answer is "the aesthetic offers the means for clear, unclouded vision."  But when has the aesthetic ever been exclusively associated with clear, unclouded vision?  He ends his section on this matter by saying that the ideal new perceptual landscape "is designed, appropriated, and populated concerns everyone, and it allows many possibilities, both aesthetic and political" in contrast to the current exploitative use of the commons  This is fine, although I am still nervous about treating the physical commons and perceptual commons as one, since it would then treat ethics and aesthetics as one, and that is a pretty hard trick to carry out.

Denis Dutton and Mapping the Field of Everyday Aesthetics

Denis Dutton’s effort to give a naturalist definition of art provides some interesting material for our effort to understand everyday aesthetics, particularly those aspects that are very close in character to art.[1] Dutton gives a list of criteria for something to be art, none of, and no set of which, are necessary. He adds that if something meets none of the criteria it is not art, and if it meets all of them it must be art. It is also part of Dutton’s scheme that none of the criteria are sufficient for something to be art. Because of this, at the end of each discussion of a criterion he speaks of phenomena which are not art but which meet the criterion. This gives a nice list of properties of non-art phenomena that are worth paying attention to aesthetically.

It is useful for the purposes of developing a theory of everyday aesthetics to go through his discussion of each term in his list and observe each of his comments about non-art applications of these terms.  The reader should understand that, unlike Dutton, I do not intend to say anything here about the nature of art. Rather, I am using Dutton’s criteria of art as a way of mapping the field of everyday aesthetics. This may seem off if one feels that art aesthetics is radically different from everyday aesthetics, but less so if one believes that aesthetics is a general field of which art aesthetics, natural aesthetics and everyday aesthetics are parts, and that there is a continuity between art aesthetics and everyday aesthetics in that many features of art depend on aspects of the world that would exist even without art.  In what follows, Dutton’s name for each property is in italics.

Here then is Dutton’s list of features of art connected with his comments about non-art applications of these features. (1) The art object is typically valued as a source of immediate pleasure, and this is also true for sports and play. (2) High skill is valued not only in art but in other areas, for example in sports. (3) Style is found not only in art but in most other human activities that are not merely reflexive. (4) Novelty and creativity are admired in plumbing and dentistry as well as in art. (5) Criticism is found wherever the activity is complex. (6) Realistic representation is found in scientific illustration (not mentioned by Dutton) as well as in art. (7) Religious rite, ceremonial pomp, political activity and advertizing all try to make something special by giving it a theatrical character. (8) Any activity with a creative element, including designing a company newsletter, may have expressive individuality. (9) Many non-art activities are saturated with emotion. (10) Like art, puzzles and many games give us intellectual challenge. (11) All organized activities have institutional and traditional backgrounds. Finally, (12) there is an imaginative experience dimension of much that is non-art, although Dutton agrees with Kant that art takes imagination to another level, away from practical concerns, logic and “rational understanding.” However, it could be argued that art is not the only thing that can do this. Everyday aesthetic experience also often takes imagination to a new level.

It seems, in short, that one could map the aesthetics of everyday life precisely in terms of the various criteria of art each of which, Dutton has observed, art shares with other aspects of life. There is another way that Dutton’s call for a naturalistic aesthetics of art can be helpful in the construction of an aesthetics of everyday life.  Drawing from the writings of various anthropologists and linguists, Dutton makes a list of “innate, universal features and capabilities of the human mind.”  Each one of the items in the list is something that one can take pleasure in.  When we do this we see that the list can be of primal human pleasures that can provide the basis of aesthetics. I will add the term “pleasure” to the items on this list:

• pleasure in keeping track of how objects fall, bounce, or bend
• pleasure in taking an interest in plants and animals in their species division
• pleasure in making tools, in flaking things, in attaching objects to one another
• pleasure in observing the operations of the minds of others
• pleasure in imaginative mapping and spatial understanding
• pleasure in body adornment
• pleasure in manipulating numbers
• pleasure in estimating probabilities
• pleasure in reading facial expressions
• pleasure in being able to throw objects precisely
• pleasure in organized pitched sounds, rhythmically produced by the human voice or by instruments
• pleasure in exchange of goods and favors
• pleasure in a sense of justice
• pleasure in the operations of logic
• pleasure in learning and using language[2]

Not all of these are aesthetic pleasures if such pleasure must be sensuous.  For example pleasure in a sense of justice, in the operations of logic, in manipulating numbers, in estimating probabilities, and in exchange of goods and favors are not aesthetic in that sense.  However, it is hardly new to suggest that these things can have aesthetic properties, for example beauty.  To that extent they belong to the aesthetics of everyday life.  

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[1]  Denis Dutton. “A Naturalist Definition of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism  64:3 (2006) 367-377.  Also see his The Art Instinct:  Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. (New York:  Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

[2]   Dutton, The Art Instinct, pp. 43-44.