When I was in high school I wrote a paper about the character Iago in Shakespeare's Othello. He fascinated me and although I would never do any of the things he did (he is practically the embodiment of evil) I felt that I learned something just from getting into his head. This raises the question of ethical moralism. There are many versions of this theory, but the basic idea is that if a work of literature promotes or encourages immoral behavior, or even presents it without clearly condemning it, then it is a worse work than otherwise. Consider another example: Nabokov's Lolita. This is surely a great work of literature, but the moralist would bring it down a notch, or several notches, because it does not clearly condemn the actions of a pedophile. It might be seen by the moralist as degrading trash. What I want to suggest is that although it makes sense to rank works of literature in terms of artistic value it does not make sense to move them up or down these rankings based on whether or not the author clearly condemns immoral behavior in the characters or clearly praises moral behavior. I am not sure how to argue for this point here. It's just the intuition I will work with. For instance, it surely is not the case that Lolita would be a better book if the author in some way made more clear that what Humbert Humbert did was bad. One of the things that makes the book so good is that it forces the reader to enter into the consciousness of a teacher who seduces an under-age student. The great thing about literature is that it allows you to see the world from the perspectives of others, even others who do things that one would never condone in oneself.
I want now to talk about a specific current theory by Alessandro Giovannelli that defends moralism: "Ethical Criticism in Perspective: A Defense of Radical Moralism." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:4 (2013) 335-348. Giovanelli's piece is written in technical analytic style, but it is a very current defense of moralism and worth looking at for that reason. The abstract of the article actually makes the position very clear. I quote it in full:
"I defend the ethical fittingness theory (EFT), the thesis that whenever
it is legitimate ethically to evaluate a representational artwork for
the perspective it embodies, such evaluation systematically bears on the
work's artistic value. EFT is a form of radical moralism, claiming that
the systematic relationship between the selected type of ethical
evaluation and artistic evaluation always obtains, for works of any
kind. The argument for EFT spells out the implications of ethically
judging an artwork for its perspective, where such an ethical evaluation
is understood as an assessment of how well the work's ethical
perspective fits extra-fictional reality—how appropriate, correct, or
true the perspective is. The argument shows that the ethical legitimacy
of judging a work for its perspective ipso facto proves the judgment's
art-critical relevance. Hence, the argument effectively amounts to a reductio ad absurdum
of theories that admit the legitimacy of ethically judging artworks
this way, but deny or qualify the judgment's relevance to artistic
merit. Since EFT is stated conditionally, the argument need not indicate
how often artworks are subject to this type of ethical evaluation.
Nonetheless, I make a case for the relevance of EFT to actual art
criticism and contemporary philosophical debate."
The application of moral evaluation, according to Giovannelli only should happen when it is legitimate to evaluate the work. So presumably there are some cases where such evaluation is irrelevant or illegitimate in some other way. The theory also holds that works of literature, for example, sometimes (always?) embody a moral perspective. The work's artistic value should go down in our estimation if it embodies a bad moral perspective. (Note that this claim is not descriptive, but normative. It might be obvious that our estimation of the work will go down if it embodies a moral perspective of which we disapprove. That would just be a descriptive claim.) Giovannelli uses the term "radical" rather strangely to refer to the fact that the theory applies to all kinds of representational art. The theory assumes that it makes sense to say that works of representational art do in fact embody a single moral perspective. This raises interesting issues, since plays, for example, usually have the various characters represent different moral perspectives, the author seldom outright telling us which character he/she identifies with. Thus we could assume that Iago represents an immoral perspective (it is OK to deceive in fatal ways to gain revenge or power) as also Othello (it is acceptable to kill one's wife if suspected of adultery). So, does that mean that the play as a whole has an immoral perspective, or does the final death of both characters indicate that the author's perspective is moral?
Another issue is "how well the work's ethical perspective fits extra-fictional reality." By "extra-fictional reality" I take Giovenelli to mean that there is an extra-fictional moral reality, i.e. a set of objective moral truths. So, the novel is to be downgraded if its ethical perspective is contrary to objective ethical moral truths. This would be a problem for people who question moral realism, i.e. the belief that there are objective moral truths. Situation ethicists for example would wonder about this. Historical relativists might wonder whether the ethical perspective must match the accepted moral truths of 2013 or the accepted moral truths of 1913. But there is a further issue. Why should something that explores moral ambiguity (as literary works often do) be tied down in terms of evaluation of a moral realism of any sort? This seems a subordination of the meta-moral-perspective of representational art to the meta-moral-perspective of philosophy or religion.
Let's get down to specifics. Giovanelli encourages the art critic to praise Francisco de Goya's The Third of May 1808 (1814) for "the condemnation it embodies of the brutality of war and oppression." Since the Goya does not contain a sentence that indicates that it is condemning the brutality of war and oppression we may assume that this comes in large part from knowing about Goya's life and times. So, what if we found that we were wrong and that Goya took lurid delight in public executions? Would this mean that the artistic value of the work should be degraded? Maybe, instead of being one of the top ten pictures depicting executions it now becomes only one of the top one hundred. What sense can be made of this?
On the other hand, surely we are right to condemn a work of being racist, sexist, or for advocating pedophilia. That is, works that embody a point of view that in general causes significant harm to others are at least problematic for that. What I want to suggest, however, is that being concerned about whether works should go up or down in the hierarchy of goodness as works based on moral considerations may not be may be metaphysically suspect. We are back to the issue of realism...in this case not just moral realism but value realism, which also seems to be assumed by Giovenelli's position.
Returning to my additional issue, and to be fair to Giovenelli, he believes that his moralism "need not be committed to the claim that an immoral work would be improved artistically, other things being equal...by an alteration in the work's perspective." His position only says that the work would be "better artistically, other things being equal, if its perspective's ethical status were...not immoral." (346) By itself, this does not make much sense. But, when applied, the claim is that "If what Triumph of the Will glorifies were worthy of being glorified, then...the film would be a better film, artistically..." (346) So, Triumph of the Will glorifies the rise of Naziism and is also a widely recognized as a powerful documentary as well as a controversial, film. Could Triumph of the Will have been a glorification of the pacifism of Gandhi? Well, no: it wouldn't then be Triumph of the Will. Isn't Triumph of the Will necessarily a film glorifying a militarized hero-worshiping society? One could not make a film remotely like this glorifying Abraham Lincoln, to give another example. Triumph of the Will is a great film and it just doesn't make sense to talk about downgrading it from that simply because it, in this case clearly, promotes an immoral perspective. It just means that those of us who do not accept Nazi ideology will view it with a certain distaste or as morally disturbing. The value we get from it, though, will be in part through getting some perspective into how people with that ideology saw the world.
Also, in response to a concern I raised earlier, Giovannelli would argue that "often immoral views, presented within a work, may be instrumental to the emergence of a different overall ethical perspective, which is the one the work really embodies (as might be the case with King Lear)." (346) The, implication of this view, however, is that if we cannot match the ultimate perspective of King Lear (or Othello in my example) with objective unchanging moral truth then these plays are to be degraded. But let us say that we cannot? Let's say that Shakespeare had several moral views that we would disapprove of today (as he in fact probably did) and that his overall moral perspective did not match what we consider the objective moral truth. Does this mean we should not see his plays or love them? What are the real-life implications of the degrading action Giovannelli recommends?
In short, the main question I wish to raise is, what is meant exactly by "detracts from the work's artistic value": how is this cashed out in life experience, i.e. in a way that is coherent?
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
Are philosophy and literature continuous?
Bence Nanay's answer to this question is "yes." "Philosophy versus Literature? Against the Discontinuity Thesis." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:3 (2013): 349-360. I agree. Partly Nanay is simply claiming that philosophers would gain (as philosophers) from reading literature. He also suggests both that literature can do what philosophy is taken to do and that philosophy is not simply a matter of presenting logically valid arguments for precisely formulated conclusions. Both of these claims seem obvious to me. Another is that "literary works can count as real philosophy." I am not so sure about that, maybe just because I see philosophy as a distinctive genre of writing. But Nanay thinks that holding that the barrier between philosophy and literature is permeable is consistent with holding that there are important differences. I also find that acceptable.
It is interesting that although several moral philosophers, including notably Martha Nussbaum, have argued for the continuity thesis (she says that "moral philosophy requires such literary texts, and the experience of loving and attentive novel-reading for its completion." 353) aestheticians hardly ever go to literary works to learn about aesthetics. This is especially surprising given how often literary works deal with aesthetic matters, for example novels exploring the nature of art. Nanay says that "it is far from clear how [Nussbaum's thesis] could be generalized to other branches of philosophy" (354) and he speaks specifically of philosophy of science and metaphysics. I find metaphysical speculation to be a regular feature of literary works. But again, what about aesthetics?
I rather like Philip Kitcher's idea that literary works are philosophy when they (Nanay quoting Kitcher) "lead listeners and readers to improved perspectives on a...central philosophical question." (354) This is by way of providing "a rich delineation of possibilities - accompanied by a tacit injunction: Consider this." I would go a bit further since the possibilities are weighted: the novelist, for example, clearly favors some characters, actions and speeches (with their theoretical formulations) over others. For example George Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest has the country priest deliver a speech early in the novel which is then critiqued by his mentor. Although Bernanos is not clearly advocating the mentor's position it is clear that he himself is raising questions about the value of the country priest's position, i.e. as being naive. For one thing, this speech appears early in the novel, and the author's considered position is rightly associated with what how things turn out in the end, i.e. when the country priest in his dying moments finds God's grace to be everywhere. Although I am an atheist, I believe that Bernanos' book gives us a kind of knowledge, and knowledge that is different in kind from philosophical knowledge, although continuous with and related to it. It is not just knowledge of a possibility. Rather, Bernanos' book presents us with a vision of how things are, one that can be used as a tool, perspective or lens even by an atheist in the pursuit of wisdom. One way to do this is to put certain metaphysical concepts, for example "God" in brackets or under translation. In short, the claim that "grace is everywhere" can have deep significance even for the atheist when taken within the context of the development of the novel as a whole (the meaning of the phrase is not found in itself alone) and when taken under translation (allowing for what Gadamer called a fusion of horizons.)
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
It is interesting that although several moral philosophers, including notably Martha Nussbaum, have argued for the continuity thesis (she says that "moral philosophy requires such literary texts, and the experience of loving and attentive novel-reading for its completion." 353) aestheticians hardly ever go to literary works to learn about aesthetics. This is especially surprising given how often literary works deal with aesthetic matters, for example novels exploring the nature of art. Nanay says that "it is far from clear how [Nussbaum's thesis] could be generalized to other branches of philosophy" (354) and he speaks specifically of philosophy of science and metaphysics. I find metaphysical speculation to be a regular feature of literary works. But again, what about aesthetics?
I rather like Philip Kitcher's idea that literary works are philosophy when they (Nanay quoting Kitcher) "lead listeners and readers to improved perspectives on a...central philosophical question." (354) This is by way of providing "a rich delineation of possibilities - accompanied by a tacit injunction: Consider this." I would go a bit further since the possibilities are weighted: the novelist, for example, clearly favors some characters, actions and speeches (with their theoretical formulations) over others. For example George Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest has the country priest deliver a speech early in the novel which is then critiqued by his mentor. Although Bernanos is not clearly advocating the mentor's position it is clear that he himself is raising questions about the value of the country priest's position, i.e. as being naive. For one thing, this speech appears early in the novel, and the author's considered position is rightly associated with what how things turn out in the end, i.e. when the country priest in his dying moments finds God's grace to be everywhere. Although I am an atheist, I believe that Bernanos' book gives us a kind of knowledge, and knowledge that is different in kind from philosophical knowledge, although continuous with and related to it. It is not just knowledge of a possibility. Rather, Bernanos' book presents us with a vision of how things are, one that can be used as a tool, perspective or lens even by an atheist in the pursuit of wisdom. One way to do this is to put certain metaphysical concepts, for example "God" in brackets or under translation. In short, the claim that "grace is everywhere" can have deep significance even for the atheist when taken within the context of the development of the novel as a whole (the meaning of the phrase is not found in itself alone) and when taken under translation (allowing for what Gadamer called a fusion of horizons.)
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Paul Guyer "Monism and Pluralism in the History of Aesthetics"
Paul Guyer is probably our leading historian in Western philosophical aesthetics. He had just come out with his humungous History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes with 1700 pages costing a minimum of $300. All I can say is that I hope my library buys a copy. Easier to read quickly is his article "Monism and Pluralism in the History of Aesthetics" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (Spring 2013). This is a very illuminating overview of his project, including the moral he has drawn from writing his history. His basic point is that modern philosophy saw three main functions for art: cognition, free play of the imagination, and expression of emotion, and that although many in the history of aesthetics have argued that art should only serve one of these functions (monism), Guyer favors the idea, expressed from time to time, that art should (or can?) serve all three (pluralism.)
He begins by observing that the person who invented the term "aesthetics" Alexander Baumgarten in his Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry of 1735 defined "poetics" as the "science of the perfect presentation of sensory representations." He later (in his Aesthetica, 1750) defined aesthetics along similar lines and said that it was the "science of sensory cognition." I have always been puzzled as to the relationship between these definitions and aesthetics as we practice it today. I understand that what we translate as "science" can mean "study." The puzzling part is "sensory cognition." There could, for example, be cognition that is happens primarily through the senses (no reasoning involved) but without any art. Presumably what is being suggested is that the arts somehow present us with, evokes or manifests sensory knowledge. Also, is the claim that works of art perfectly present sensory representations? Is a poem supposed to be a sensory representation? Is it being said that perfect representation of the subject matter by way of the senses is the ideal?
Baumgarten's further explication of aesthetics (quoted by Guyer) as "the theory of the liberal arts, the doctrine of inferior cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason" does not help much. It seems like a mish-mash of different ideas. The theory of the liberal arts might just involve debates over what the liberal arts might be. That the arts provide a form of cognition inferior to, let us assume, the sciences, is a sad thought, if true. If there is an art of thinking beautifully it might happen in art, religion, science, philosophy, or everyday life. So why just associate it with the liberal arts? One can think beautiful thoughts about all sorts of things, although I am not clear what a beautiful thought is. And what exactly is the analogue of reason? As usual, I find myself wishing I had a good English translation of the entire text, or that I could read it in German. Guyer himself does not try to explicate this, but simply uses the quote to infer that Baumgarten was not a cognitivist but some sort of pluralist. The two other approaches (apart from the cognitivist approach) are described by Guyer as "the idea that the pleasure of such experience comes from the enjoyment of the emotional impact of art, and the idea that the pleasure of such experience comes from the free play of our mental powers triggered by works of art or nature", a free play that cannot be reduced to cognition. Wise aestheticians, on his view, recognize that "works of art and nature could please us in all these ways." (134) Heroes of the pluralist approach are Lord Kames in the 18th century, Wilhelm Dilthey and George Santayana in the 19th, and Monroe Beardsley and Richard Wollheim in the 20th. I was surprised the John Dewey was not included although such lesser figures as DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene and D. W. Gotshalk are.
An interesting feature of Guyer's approach is that he is able to lump very diverse figures in aesthetics under what he calls cognitivism. The object of aesthetic cognition for Wolff is perfection, for Hegel spirit, for Schopenhauer the Platonic Ideas, for Heidegger "Being," and for Lukacs capitalism. Another group includes those who focus on the emotional impact of art, beginning with De Bos in 1719. Another interesting feature of the article is that although aestheticians will naturally associate the free play of imagination with Kant, Guyer traces the idea back to Addison's "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) Guyer associates Addison's idea of Beauty. He quotes from Addison "a spacious Horison is the Image of Liberty, where the Eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose it self amidst the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to Observations." The quote from Addison is fascinating, the eye anthropomorphized here as a kind of tourist who freely ranges, expatiates, loses himself and makes observations.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
He begins by observing that the person who invented the term "aesthetics" Alexander Baumgarten in his Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry of 1735 defined "poetics" as the "science of the perfect presentation of sensory representations." He later (in his Aesthetica, 1750) defined aesthetics along similar lines and said that it was the "science of sensory cognition." I have always been puzzled as to the relationship between these definitions and aesthetics as we practice it today. I understand that what we translate as "science" can mean "study." The puzzling part is "sensory cognition." There could, for example, be cognition that is happens primarily through the senses (no reasoning involved) but without any art. Presumably what is being suggested is that the arts somehow present us with, evokes or manifests sensory knowledge. Also, is the claim that works of art perfectly present sensory representations? Is a poem supposed to be a sensory representation? Is it being said that perfect representation of the subject matter by way of the senses is the ideal?
Baumgarten's further explication of aesthetics (quoted by Guyer) as "the theory of the liberal arts, the doctrine of inferior cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason" does not help much. It seems like a mish-mash of different ideas. The theory of the liberal arts might just involve debates over what the liberal arts might be. That the arts provide a form of cognition inferior to, let us assume, the sciences, is a sad thought, if true. If there is an art of thinking beautifully it might happen in art, religion, science, philosophy, or everyday life. So why just associate it with the liberal arts? One can think beautiful thoughts about all sorts of things, although I am not clear what a beautiful thought is. And what exactly is the analogue of reason? As usual, I find myself wishing I had a good English translation of the entire text, or that I could read it in German. Guyer himself does not try to explicate this, but simply uses the quote to infer that Baumgarten was not a cognitivist but some sort of pluralist. The two other approaches (apart from the cognitivist approach) are described by Guyer as "the idea that the pleasure of such experience comes from the enjoyment of the emotional impact of art, and the idea that the pleasure of such experience comes from the free play of our mental powers triggered by works of art or nature", a free play that cannot be reduced to cognition. Wise aestheticians, on his view, recognize that "works of art and nature could please us in all these ways." (134) Heroes of the pluralist approach are Lord Kames in the 18th century, Wilhelm Dilthey and George Santayana in the 19th, and Monroe Beardsley and Richard Wollheim in the 20th. I was surprised the John Dewey was not included although such lesser figures as DeWitt Parker, T.M. Greene and D. W. Gotshalk are.
An interesting feature of Guyer's approach is that he is able to lump very diverse figures in aesthetics under what he calls cognitivism. The object of aesthetic cognition for Wolff is perfection, for Hegel spirit, for Schopenhauer the Platonic Ideas, for Heidegger "Being," and for Lukacs capitalism. Another group includes those who focus on the emotional impact of art, beginning with De Bos in 1719. Another interesting feature of the article is that although aestheticians will naturally associate the free play of imagination with Kant, Guyer traces the idea back to Addison's "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) Guyer associates Addison's idea of Beauty. He quotes from Addison "a spacious Horison is the Image of Liberty, where the Eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose it self amidst the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to Observations." The quote from Addison is fascinating, the eye anthropomorphized here as a kind of tourist who freely ranges, expatiates, loses himself and makes observations.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Does art give us knowledge?
Derek Matravers in his new Introducing Philosophy of Art: In Eight Case Studies (Acumen, 2013) addresses the issue of whether art can give us knowledge. The case for knowledge does not seem strong by the end of his chapter "Art and Knowledge." He underrates it. Beginning with the art of literature, he quotes James Currie who holds that "Fictions can act as aids to the imagination - holding our attention, making a situation vivid for us..." For Currie, we can begin to feel what it is like to be certain characters. The skeptic, Matravers asserts, can always argue against this that fiction is unreliable and hence any imaginative project based on it is as well, and then it is not knowledge. (126-7)
I recently read Shakespeare's The Tempest and saw a performance of it. I also recently read an account of the life and work of Machiavelli which stressed the possible contemporary relevance of The Prince. The Prince and The Tempest are easily compared. But one is treated as non-fiction and the other as fiction. One is supposed to make stronger claims to knowledge than the other (although whether the philosophical truths it asserts are in fact true is open to much debate.) Instead of just comparing them we can see them as in a contest. We can see them as competing visions of the good society, i.e. of the ideal relationship between the leader of a society and his subjects. On this view, knowledge of these things is deepened if one reads the two together and thinks about their competing visions. They were in competition during their time and are still today, although less urgently so. Why assume that the vision presented in The Tempest is less reliable than that presented in The Prince? In The Tempest are we just rehearsing possible situations or are we doing something more? Rather than a mere set of true beliefs I believe that knowledge is a set of skills, beliefs, models, and narratives that coheres and gives power. Moreover, knowledge changes through history. An advance in knowledge is a further development of a vision, a model, a world metaphor. The Tempest advances knowledge insofar as it questions certain accepted relations between the prince and his subjects. Currie's idea that fiction allows us to "feel what it is like to be those characters" is true but does not go far enough. As Mactravers puts it, "Currie does not think our exercises of imagination provide us with knowledge of facts, but rather different patterns of behavior." (127) That does not tell me how The Tempest can contain within it the promise of knowledge. ("Knowledge of facts" is a oddity in the first place. If you have knowledge you have gone far beyond facts: knowledge is based on facts, it is not of facts.) Perhaps the notion of "patterns of behavior" comes closer to what I think of as knowledge, although knowledge must not just be a pattern of behavior, a vision, a model, a metaphor...it must also be true.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
I recently read Shakespeare's The Tempest and saw a performance of it. I also recently read an account of the life and work of Machiavelli which stressed the possible contemporary relevance of The Prince. The Prince and The Tempest are easily compared. But one is treated as non-fiction and the other as fiction. One is supposed to make stronger claims to knowledge than the other (although whether the philosophical truths it asserts are in fact true is open to much debate.) Instead of just comparing them we can see them as in a contest. We can see them as competing visions of the good society, i.e. of the ideal relationship between the leader of a society and his subjects. On this view, knowledge of these things is deepened if one reads the two together and thinks about their competing visions. They were in competition during their time and are still today, although less urgently so. Why assume that the vision presented in The Tempest is less reliable than that presented in The Prince? In The Tempest are we just rehearsing possible situations or are we doing something more? Rather than a mere set of true beliefs I believe that knowledge is a set of skills, beliefs, models, and narratives that coheres and gives power. Moreover, knowledge changes through history. An advance in knowledge is a further development of a vision, a model, a world metaphor. The Tempest advances knowledge insofar as it questions certain accepted relations between the prince and his subjects. Currie's idea that fiction allows us to "feel what it is like to be those characters" is true but does not go far enough. As Mactravers puts it, "Currie does not think our exercises of imagination provide us with knowledge of facts, but rather different patterns of behavior." (127) That does not tell me how The Tempest can contain within it the promise of knowledge. ("Knowledge of facts" is a oddity in the first place. If you have knowledge you have gone far beyond facts: knowledge is based on facts, it is not of facts.) Perhaps the notion of "patterns of behavior" comes closer to what I think of as knowledge, although knowledge must not just be a pattern of behavior, a vision, a model, a metaphor...it must also be true.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Shusterman on everyday aesthetics
"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to cave a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." Thoreau, quoted in Richard Shusterman Thinking Through the Body pg. 288.
"to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state...the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment" Richard Shusterman, (all quotes from Thinking) 288-9
"We fail to see things as they really are with the rich, sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning." Shusterman, 291
I would like to live philosophically, which seems an odd thing to say for someone who has been a teacher of philosophy for more than forty years. But then reading, teaching and writing about philosophy is not quite the same as living philosophically. Both Shusterman and I see the task of living philosophically partly in terms of Socrates. This, at least, is not surprising. Socrates was one of my earliest philosophical heroes, and that is probably true for most western philosophers. He taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I still believe that, taking it to mean something like: to make life worth living (to enhance value in one's life) one needs to reflect on the key concepts that guide one's perception and action, reflect deeply, constantly questioning, constantly coming up with hypothesis to test, never accepting one of these as the final answer, recognizing that the only thing worthy of the name "wisdom" comes out of this process. But this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the aesthetic life. Can the philosophical life and the aesthetic life work together?
Socrates also plays a leading role in Plato's Symposium where we get a different take on the philosophical life, one that sees it ultimately as aesthetic. As one engages in philosophical examination one is also in search of beauty. One travels up a ladder of love, where the object of love is always something of beauty. The final stage is apprehension of beauty itself, the eternal Form of beauty, which holds roughly the same place in the metaphysics of the Symposium as recounted by Socrates (in describing the views of Diotima) as the Form of the Good does in The Republic. I take this to mean that close attention to the aesthetic dimension of human existence can be one path to an awakened state of being. But I also recognize that it may seem arrogant, perhaps is arrogant, to see others as in a state of dreaming. We all live our own lives and do what we feel we have to do. As my students are fond of saying: what right do we have to judge others on this (as long as they are harming no one)?
The issue that Shusterman has raised is an important one for everyday aesthetics. In response to the question "what is the point of everyday aesthetics" his answer would be, not to simply catalog a new field of inquiry in philosophy but to help us learn how to live philosophically where living philosophically is not just a matter of examining concepts and arguments but is also a matter of paying attention to the phenomena. The question remains how these two things can fit together: they almost seem to be in opposition. How can you both examine life and also live life with the intensity of perception required by, for instance, Zen practice, or even by the Platonic philosopher at the top of the ladder of love? Shusterman observes that "the notion of awakening to a clearer, critical awareness of the nature of things is also extremely central to the philosophy of Buddhism." 292.
Shusterman's recommendation for living the philosophical life of heightened awareness is simplicity, slowness, and focusing on the here and now. Yet it is hard to understand what exactly simplicity means in this context, especially when we reflect on the life of Socrates. When we engage in Socratic dialogue (examining our lives) things become increasingly complex: simple things are no longer simple. We thought we knew what, for example, piety was, and then we discover that we are ignorant (the result of his dialogue Euthyphro). Instead of one definition for a concept we have several, none of which are fully adequate. So where is this simplicity? Of course Thoreau is right when (quoted approvingly by Shusterman) he says that our lives are frittered away in detail. At philosophy conferences one is often horrified by the great level of detail to be found in individual arguments centered often around very small corners of the field. Perhaps the life of the philosophy conference-goer is precisely what Thoreau argues against. Again, though, one can just see it as the goal of one who seeks a philosophical life to wade into all of that (even at a conference!) and try to simplify, to find the core of meaning, the essence of the issue.
Slowness and attending to the here and now are easier to understand as methods to the philosophical life. The first ("slow down!") is needed for the second. I recently read a piece of advice (can't remember the source) which is to say to oneself, every once in a while, "and so it all comes down to this!" I find this exercise reassuring and relaxing, although also a bit funny, depending on when you say it. It definitely brings one to focus on "the now." Shusterman quotes Thoreau again, that the "true and sublime...are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment...And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us" 298 from Walden. Shusterman adds that "the present moment - although fleeting - is...in a sense, beyond time, when it is apprehended in itself as fully present and thus outside the conceptual line of temporal extension that runs from past to future." 299 He adds, most relevantly to everyday aesthetics: "But apart from these sublime, quasi-mystical moments of grasping a timeless now, there is the simpler yet significant value of attentive awareness of our mundane experience, of being fully present in what we do and where we are so that we can more fully profit from what our surroundings actually offer." 299.
Recently I listened to a debate between a friend who is an atheist and one who is more of a spiritual seeker. The atheist felt that the word "spiritual" could have no meaning, and I wondered whether it could, to an atheist. I see myself as an atheist, and yet I find myself constantly attracted to the word "spiritual." Shusterman writes: "Mindful somatic discipline is not meant to destroy the body but rather to raise it to a higher level; for the body is not simply flesh....but a sentient soma that includes all the entrenched bodily dispositions that constitute our unreflective habits - what guides our unconscious 'sleepwalking' through life. By making our somatic life more conscious, deliberate, and controlled, we are spiritualizing it." (300) That makes sense to me. Since Shusterman rejects mind/body dualism, he is not tempted by notions of a literal soul or an afterlife. Thus his thinking can be translated into something like what I have called in earlier posts aesthetic atheism. He cointinues, "Through...heightened, appreciative awareness and the mindful movements and actions that emerge from it, one can achieve extraordinary aesthetic experience in everyday living" 302.
Shusterman further observes two very different conceptions of everyday aesthetics: "Although both are concerned with appreciating ordinary objects or commonplace events, the first notion stresses the ordinariness of these everyday things, while the latter instead emphasizes how such things can be perceived through a distinctively focused aesthetic appreciation that transfigures them into a more richly meaningful experience." 303 The second involves "focused or heightened experience ...appreciated as such." 303 I think that both approaches to everyday aesthetics are valuable: we need to recognize the ordinariness of everyday things, but we also need the meliorative approach that Shusterman stresses. Shusterman finds limitations to the first approach since it might lead us, for instance, to try to appreciate "dull weather with an ordinary, dull appreciation of its dullness, rather than a sudden spectacular vision...of its dullness." Dullness can become doubly dull with emphasis on the ordinariness of the ordinary, or it can become dullness enhanced (no longer really dull, actually.) And so, like me in my book (pg. 36), Shusterman takes inspiration from Emerson's speaking of "the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking" in simple things.
So, I join Shusterman in finding the second kind of everyday aesthetics "more promising, especially when aesthetics is conceived melioristically as a field of study aimed at enriching our lives by providing richer and more rewarding aesthetic experience." 304. He recognizes that this may seem paradoxical since "heightened perception renders the ordinary somehow extraordinary in experience" but he sees worse paradox in the first approach to everyday aesthetics in that if we experience the ordinary in the most ordinary way we risk "nor really perceiving anything aesthetically at all..." 304
However, there is a place where we also disagree. Shusterman contrasts his own conception of everyday aesthetics with the notion in art of defamiliarization or "making strange," an idea often used by artists, for example formalists (and surrealists too). Viktor Shklovsky saw this as a way to complicate form. The difficulty of perception would then "compel prolonged perception." Shusterman thinks that difficulty alienates art from life, confining art to the elite. This takes us back to the issue of simplicity vs. complexity. There seem here to be two ways to look at the idea of attentiveness. The classic view is that when one pays attention closely one sees a thing for what it really is, the essence of that thing emerges. But another way to look at it is that paying attention and slowing down allows for the work of the imagination such that a metaphor can emerge that gives that object perceived new life, making the ordinary extraordinary. Earlier I discussed the ways in which creating greater difficulty in the Socratic dialogues can produce an experience (as in the final grasping of Beauty or Good itself) that, paradoxically, has a certain simplicity to it: one gets to the simplicity through the difficulty. Similarly, one could say that "making strange" is just another word for what happens when a striking metaphor emerges, one that gives new life. I do not deny that there are problems with elitism in the contemporary art world, but at the same time, if one puts the work in, one can sometimes use contemporary art experiences to enhance everyday life experience through the process of "making strange." This would only undemocratically confine art "to the privileged elite" if the average person is deliberately excluded. But in truth our cultural world is full of in-groups, from motorcycle clubs to Chelsea gallery-goers. To dump on the Chelsea gallery-goers for not making their material accessible to the motorcyclists seems as strange as reversing the situation and dumping on the motorcycle enthusiasts for not making their aesthetic thrills more accessible for the Chelsea gallery-goers. So, although I am sympathetic to the "awakened-consciousness version of everyday aesthetics" I do not see it as an alternative to "high art's alienating difficulty and isolating elitism" but rather as as another path to intensity of awareness. The two paths, one focusing on making strange and difficult and the other on making simple and easy, are really just aspects of the same thing.
Ironically, despite his attack on elitism, Shusterman exemplifies his so-called democratic path with the intensely elitist experience of being a student at a Zen monastery. This kind of experience is hardly available to your average working-class individual! Moreover, it is perfectly appropriate to say that Zen experience is extremely difficult, even though searching for an experience of simplicity. When Shusterman attacks high art for its "alienating difficulty and isolating elitism" one wonders why these terms do not apply to the very monastic experiences he describes. I think that on a deeper level, Shusterman is unwilling to accept the deeply imaginative nature of the experience of the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the role that metaphor plays in this.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
"to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state...the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment" Richard Shusterman, (all quotes from Thinking) 288-9
"We fail to see things as they really are with the rich, sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning." Shusterman, 291
I would like to live philosophically, which seems an odd thing to say for someone who has been a teacher of philosophy for more than forty years. But then reading, teaching and writing about philosophy is not quite the same as living philosophically. Both Shusterman and I see the task of living philosophically partly in terms of Socrates. This, at least, is not surprising. Socrates was one of my earliest philosophical heroes, and that is probably true for most western philosophers. He taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I still believe that, taking it to mean something like: to make life worth living (to enhance value in one's life) one needs to reflect on the key concepts that guide one's perception and action, reflect deeply, constantly questioning, constantly coming up with hypothesis to test, never accepting one of these as the final answer, recognizing that the only thing worthy of the name "wisdom" comes out of this process. But this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the aesthetic life. Can the philosophical life and the aesthetic life work together?
Socrates also plays a leading role in Plato's Symposium where we get a different take on the philosophical life, one that sees it ultimately as aesthetic. As one engages in philosophical examination one is also in search of beauty. One travels up a ladder of love, where the object of love is always something of beauty. The final stage is apprehension of beauty itself, the eternal Form of beauty, which holds roughly the same place in the metaphysics of the Symposium as recounted by Socrates (in describing the views of Diotima) as the Form of the Good does in The Republic. I take this to mean that close attention to the aesthetic dimension of human existence can be one path to an awakened state of being. But I also recognize that it may seem arrogant, perhaps is arrogant, to see others as in a state of dreaming. We all live our own lives and do what we feel we have to do. As my students are fond of saying: what right do we have to judge others on this (as long as they are harming no one)?
The issue that Shusterman has raised is an important one for everyday aesthetics. In response to the question "what is the point of everyday aesthetics" his answer would be, not to simply catalog a new field of inquiry in philosophy but to help us learn how to live philosophically where living philosophically is not just a matter of examining concepts and arguments but is also a matter of paying attention to the phenomena. The question remains how these two things can fit together: they almost seem to be in opposition. How can you both examine life and also live life with the intensity of perception required by, for instance, Zen practice, or even by the Platonic philosopher at the top of the ladder of love? Shusterman observes that "the notion of awakening to a clearer, critical awareness of the nature of things is also extremely central to the philosophy of Buddhism." 292.
Shusterman's recommendation for living the philosophical life of heightened awareness is simplicity, slowness, and focusing on the here and now. Yet it is hard to understand what exactly simplicity means in this context, especially when we reflect on the life of Socrates. When we engage in Socratic dialogue (examining our lives) things become increasingly complex: simple things are no longer simple. We thought we knew what, for example, piety was, and then we discover that we are ignorant (the result of his dialogue Euthyphro). Instead of one definition for a concept we have several, none of which are fully adequate. So where is this simplicity? Of course Thoreau is right when (quoted approvingly by Shusterman) he says that our lives are frittered away in detail. At philosophy conferences one is often horrified by the great level of detail to be found in individual arguments centered often around very small corners of the field. Perhaps the life of the philosophy conference-goer is precisely what Thoreau argues against. Again, though, one can just see it as the goal of one who seeks a philosophical life to wade into all of that (even at a conference!) and try to simplify, to find the core of meaning, the essence of the issue.
Slowness and attending to the here and now are easier to understand as methods to the philosophical life. The first ("slow down!") is needed for the second. I recently read a piece of advice (can't remember the source) which is to say to oneself, every once in a while, "and so it all comes down to this!" I find this exercise reassuring and relaxing, although also a bit funny, depending on when you say it. It definitely brings one to focus on "the now." Shusterman quotes Thoreau again, that the "true and sublime...are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment...And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us" 298 from Walden. Shusterman adds that "the present moment - although fleeting - is...in a sense, beyond time, when it is apprehended in itself as fully present and thus outside the conceptual line of temporal extension that runs from past to future." 299 He adds, most relevantly to everyday aesthetics: "But apart from these sublime, quasi-mystical moments of grasping a timeless now, there is the simpler yet significant value of attentive awareness of our mundane experience, of being fully present in what we do and where we are so that we can more fully profit from what our surroundings actually offer." 299.
Recently I listened to a debate between a friend who is an atheist and one who is more of a spiritual seeker. The atheist felt that the word "spiritual" could have no meaning, and I wondered whether it could, to an atheist. I see myself as an atheist, and yet I find myself constantly attracted to the word "spiritual." Shusterman writes: "Mindful somatic discipline is not meant to destroy the body but rather to raise it to a higher level; for the body is not simply flesh....but a sentient soma that includes all the entrenched bodily dispositions that constitute our unreflective habits - what guides our unconscious 'sleepwalking' through life. By making our somatic life more conscious, deliberate, and controlled, we are spiritualizing it." (300) That makes sense to me. Since Shusterman rejects mind/body dualism, he is not tempted by notions of a literal soul or an afterlife. Thus his thinking can be translated into something like what I have called in earlier posts aesthetic atheism. He cointinues, "Through...heightened, appreciative awareness and the mindful movements and actions that emerge from it, one can achieve extraordinary aesthetic experience in everyday living" 302.
Shusterman further observes two very different conceptions of everyday aesthetics: "Although both are concerned with appreciating ordinary objects or commonplace events, the first notion stresses the ordinariness of these everyday things, while the latter instead emphasizes how such things can be perceived through a distinctively focused aesthetic appreciation that transfigures them into a more richly meaningful experience." 303 The second involves "focused or heightened experience ...appreciated as such." 303 I think that both approaches to everyday aesthetics are valuable: we need to recognize the ordinariness of everyday things, but we also need the meliorative approach that Shusterman stresses. Shusterman finds limitations to the first approach since it might lead us, for instance, to try to appreciate "dull weather with an ordinary, dull appreciation of its dullness, rather than a sudden spectacular vision...of its dullness." Dullness can become doubly dull with emphasis on the ordinariness of the ordinary, or it can become dullness enhanced (no longer really dull, actually.) And so, like me in my book (pg. 36), Shusterman takes inspiration from Emerson's speaking of "the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking" in simple things.
So, I join Shusterman in finding the second kind of everyday aesthetics "more promising, especially when aesthetics is conceived melioristically as a field of study aimed at enriching our lives by providing richer and more rewarding aesthetic experience." 304. He recognizes that this may seem paradoxical since "heightened perception renders the ordinary somehow extraordinary in experience" but he sees worse paradox in the first approach to everyday aesthetics in that if we experience the ordinary in the most ordinary way we risk "nor really perceiving anything aesthetically at all..." 304
However, there is a place where we also disagree. Shusterman contrasts his own conception of everyday aesthetics with the notion in art of defamiliarization or "making strange," an idea often used by artists, for example formalists (and surrealists too). Viktor Shklovsky saw this as a way to complicate form. The difficulty of perception would then "compel prolonged perception." Shusterman thinks that difficulty alienates art from life, confining art to the elite. This takes us back to the issue of simplicity vs. complexity. There seem here to be two ways to look at the idea of attentiveness. The classic view is that when one pays attention closely one sees a thing for what it really is, the essence of that thing emerges. But another way to look at it is that paying attention and slowing down allows for the work of the imagination such that a metaphor can emerge that gives that object perceived new life, making the ordinary extraordinary. Earlier I discussed the ways in which creating greater difficulty in the Socratic dialogues can produce an experience (as in the final grasping of Beauty or Good itself) that, paradoxically, has a certain simplicity to it: one gets to the simplicity through the difficulty. Similarly, one could say that "making strange" is just another word for what happens when a striking metaphor emerges, one that gives new life. I do not deny that there are problems with elitism in the contemporary art world, but at the same time, if one puts the work in, one can sometimes use contemporary art experiences to enhance everyday life experience through the process of "making strange." This would only undemocratically confine art "to the privileged elite" if the average person is deliberately excluded. But in truth our cultural world is full of in-groups, from motorcycle clubs to Chelsea gallery-goers. To dump on the Chelsea gallery-goers for not making their material accessible to the motorcyclists seems as strange as reversing the situation and dumping on the motorcycle enthusiasts for not making their aesthetic thrills more accessible for the Chelsea gallery-goers. So, although I am sympathetic to the "awakened-consciousness version of everyday aesthetics" I do not see it as an alternative to "high art's alienating difficulty and isolating elitism" but rather as as another path to intensity of awareness. The two paths, one focusing on making strange and difficult and the other on making simple and easy, are really just aspects of the same thing.
Ironically, despite his attack on elitism, Shusterman exemplifies his so-called democratic path with the intensely elitist experience of being a student at a Zen monastery. This kind of experience is hardly available to your average working-class individual! Moreover, it is perfectly appropriate to say that Zen experience is extremely difficult, even though searching for an experience of simplicity. When Shusterman attacks high art for its "alienating difficulty and isolating elitism" one wonders why these terms do not apply to the very monastic experiences he describes. I think that on a deeper level, Shusterman is unwilling to accept the deeply imaginative nature of the experience of the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the role that metaphor plays in this.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Danto on "Metaphor, Expression, and Style" concluding comments
What are we to make of this? Can it really be true that he is not taking sides? Is not Rembrandt's portrayal of his wife something of a paradigm of something for Danto as opposed to Fry? Is it more art, or perhaps greater art? It is noteworthy that Cezanne's work is the ancestor of Warhol's Brillo Boxes where it seems that all expressiveness has disappeared (although Danto would deny it), and yet most would say that Brillo Boxes was Danto's own paradigm of art. It is instructive that in the penultimate paragraph of the book, Danto argues that Brillo Box is art because it propounds the metaphor brillo-box-as-work-of-art, and this is the transfiguration of a commonplace object which, once it could be made, is such that "there was no reason to make it" - which makes Warhol engaged in pointless activity...(208).
Is there another side to Danto, a Dr. Jekyl to Mr. Hyde? (Remember our previous reference to Danto's characterizing Cezanne as monstrous.) Is Danto deconstructing himself a bit? Note, on another but related point, that Danto's theory entirely erases the importance of the senses from the constitution and meaning of art. For him, that two paintings look exactly the same to the sense of sight means nothing as to the meaning of each, or even as to whether one is art or one is not. (Of course, as I have said, this depends on the sense of sight being reduced to something totally denuded of meaning.) Danto insists that art must be embodied, but it does not really matter how it is embodied. The body practically disappears. Danto even disappears our own bodies when he says that "we are systems of representations" (204) and that his view is an expansion of Peirce's that man is the sum total of his language and that we are just signs (205) And yet the other side of Danto takes up a portrait of a woman whose body is object of concentrated sensuous apprehension, and which portrait shows her as seen through a deep and compassionate love. Could it be that Rembrandt in looking at his partner saw her with a certain aura, the aura that compassionate love gives, and then was able to capture that in his painting? But that would mean that a non-art object, a "mere thing" in Danto's language, was not a mere thing at all, but rather something rich in meaning. Could it even be said that Rembrandt saw something aesthetically powerful in looking at his partner while painting her, that he was able to see her as Bathsheba, and hence that the aesthetic predicates of art are applicable to non-art things too under some circumstances? Could it be that the commonplace can be transfigured in perception and not just in being represented in art? Is there perhaps no strong cut-off point between what the artist sees as he paints and what he paints as he looks? For Danto, sensation is denuded, stripped of all of its imaginative and cognitive power, something merely passive. But that can't be! Perhaps Danto's interpretation of the way Lichtenstein's interpretation of the way Cezanne saw his wife is Danto's own nightmare of what art becomes when sensation is stripped of emotional power and aesthetic presence per his own theory.
When Danto comes to discuss style he sees is as a matter of the relationship between the representation and the person who makes the representation and notes that, as with rhetoric, the representation does not "penetrate the content." He then recognizes that "only in an act of ruthless but necessary abstraction can we sunder style from substance" (198) which is so telling since ruthless abstraction is precisely what Cezanne, and even more, Lichtenstein has done. Danto goes on to explain the difference between style and manner as being one in which the former is a gift, coming from a person's character, and a "basic action," but the later is by knowledge or art, except that, ironically, the first is characteristic of art and the second is not. The distinction is fine. But the problem is, going back to Goodman's example of Hiroshige, that one cannot tell which is the master and which has style when you are talking about two paintings that are indiscernible. I am not talking about "nearly indiscernible" since there are monochrome paintings that are masterpieces of style and subtlety (for instance all-white paintings by Robert Ryman) as well as ones that are boring, trite, and mannered. Near-indiscernability tells us much more about style than actual indiscernability. The fact that a replication of a work of great style does not itself usually have style is because of the subtleties that the work of great art has that it does not. (This should be obvious, a touchstone fact without which we cannot do philosophy of art.) If the replication is really good (as in a good digital image of a Rembrandt) it is just false that it does not have style and only shows style, as Danto would have it. (204) Rather, it just operates as one way of seeing the original Rembrandt with the very style qualities that Rembrandt himself put into that work. If the painting disappeared but the exact digital rendering of it did not we would not have lost Rembrandt's style. It would still be possible to fall in love with the painting just as we can fall in love with Greek works of which we only have Roman copies.
Danto ends his book by saying that Brillo Box does what artworks have always done, externalize "a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings." The last comment is a reference to Shakespeare, whose Freud-like imitation theory Danto accepts while vigorously rejecting Plato's. But again, if art does externalize a way of viewing a world then the way of viewing the world can trace aesthetic properties in the world. (I have no problem with Danto's idea that there is both an outward and an inward side of personality and of cultural periods.) The expression of the cultural period can already be there in the models portrayed and the way they are seen, which would mean, to use Heidegger's language, that the thingly nature of the thing and the equipmental nature of equipment is unconcealed when truth happens in the great work of art. So, it turns out that they two philosophers are much closer than we previously thought, although only if the body and the aesthetics of the everyday are brought back along with the continuities between art and life that can be found in the creative process itself.
Interested in learning more? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 32 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it from Broadview.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Chapter 7 "Metaphor, Expression, and Style."
What fascinates me about Danto these days is the relationship he sees between the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of life. Considering the way he has set it up, you would think that he would keep the two always separate. But towards the end of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace there appear cracks in the wall, although the cracks can even be seen in the title. Art, for Danto, does have something to do with commonplace things. Its "transfigures" them. So, how detached can it be from the everyday? A lot hangs on this. For example, if what Christopher Dowling has called "weak" Aesthetics of Everyday Life theory, which holds that the aesthetic predicates of art can be applied to everyday life (and with which I have been associated), is to hold, then something must be wrong with Danto's overall theory of a radical separation between art and life. If Danto himself undercuts this radical separation in the last chapter of his own book then there is hope for weak AEL, or to put it more positively, for a unified aesthetic theory in which art and everyday life are dynamically interactive (the kind of thing I advocated in my book).
At the end of the sixth chapter Danto tells us that in the final chapter (chapter seven) he will engage in "intense analytical scrutiny" of the features that he began to stress in the sixth chapter, getting insight into the concepts of style and expression by way of studies in "the language of mind" whereby art is seen as externalizing consciousness or the artist's way of seeing. The concluding comment of the sixth chapter surprisingly asserts that Canaletto's paintings of Venice capture Canaletto's way of seeing in such a way that they are "as magical as the city" and this because "they are the city, raised to self-consciousness, perhaps because the city itself was a work of art in its own right." (164) But if that is the case then expression is a matter not just for works of art but also for life, i.e. for the cities in which we live and the lives we live in those cities. So much for the radical separation of art and mere things! (It scarcely helps his theory of radical separation to turn cities, and later, persons, into works of art.)
But, to play this out, we need to turn to his last chapter. Here again, what is surprising to any reader of Danto who has spent much time on the first parts of his book is that in the last chapter he turns out to hold that works of art not only are about things but also express something about those things, that expression is a necessary condition for art. He is not quite an expression theorist since he does not hold that expression is a sufficient condition, and he further understands the concept of expression in terms of its relation to style and rhetoric (by which he mainly means metaphor) which is a novel approach. I think it interesting, however, that, whereas we commonly associate Danto with Warhol's Brillo Boxes, the set of paintings that play the central role in the last chapter of this, his philosophical masterpiece, consists of Rembrandt's paintings of his wife Saskia as flower goddess. (There are several such paintings, one of which is at the Hermitage from 1634. It is not clear which flower painting Danto was thinking of specifically. This makes him somewhat like Heidegger who never makes clear which one of Van Gogh's paintings of shoes is at issue in his analysis of art. As we shall see, he also shares with Heidegger an interest in what makes great art great and in how this is related to the quest for the essence of art.) He uses the Saskia paintings to explain "metaphoric transfiguration" as distinct from "transformation" since the subject retains her identity in transfiguration: we see both Saskia and Flora in the paintings, not just Flora. Similarly when Napoleon is represented as a Roman emperor we have a metaphor, Napoleon as (is, metaphorically, a) Roman emperor, which is not just a representation of a Roman emperor with Napoleon as a model or simply of Napoleon wearing a toga. All of this is supposed to show (Danto believes) why the differences between the Loran diagram of a Cezanne and the Lichtenstein painting that looks identical to it is not one of content.
I keep feeling as I read this that Danto must mean something different than I do by "content" since I would generally see metaphorical seeing as a matter of content (i.e. the content of our perception), whereas he does not. Why, I wonder, can't the difference between the picture of Napoleon as Roman emperor and a picture in which Napoleon is a model for a Roman emperor be a matter of content? It must be that Danto thinks of content as having to be just whatever is literal, and that there is no such thing as metaphorical content. This relates to the larger issue of what is meant by "seeing" where Danto tends to see seeing as a matter that excludes whatever we "see as," and I have trouble seeing it this way.
So, on Danto's view, Lichtenstein's painting takes or treats Cezanne's painting Portrait of Madame Cezanne (which is the subject of Lichtenstein's painting, according to Danto) as a diagram. So the metaphor, spelled out, is "PMC is a diagram" (It is not clear, by the way, why it isn't "This diagram is PMC.") Cezanne's portrait is "transfigured." Of course, in this case, it is an art work that is transfigured and not, at least directly, something in everyday life. However, we shall see that indirectly there is a transfiguration of Cezanne's wife, and hence more indirectly yet, the way women or more generally humans are seen, in all of this too. (This could all be seen as an instance of feminist critique of male perspectives exemplified by Cezanne but deconstructed by Lichtenstein.)
Now there is another theme in this which we have to keep track of, which is that, to put it crudely (but certainly in line with the idea of feminist critique of the male gaze), Danto favors Rembrandt's humane treatment of his wife over Cezanne's dehumanizing treatment of his. This is important, and we can't lose sight of it. So, our eyes are directed rhetorically by Lichtenstein to Cezanne's painting so that we see it as a diagram, and then we see something else, i.e. Cezanne "as seeing the world as a schematized structure." As I said in my last post, it is a metaphor of a metaphor, and perhaps of a metaphor again.
Important also in all of this is that in order to see the Lichtenstein as art we must not only have a concept of art and be able to see it in the way intended by the artist (required by Danto's other writings) but know something about the associations people in the 1960s had with diagrams so that the portrait can be infused with those. Danto sums up the point: "the artwork is constituted as a transfigurative representation rather than a representation tout court" and this is true, he believes, for all artworks. Thus to grasp the artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is there, for example to see the women in Gainsborough's painting as transfigured into flowers, and also, through this, the painting is seen as "a metaphor on time and beauty." (172) That is, for Danto, artworks are such as to make us see another metaphor on a philosophical level (much like Kant's notion of "aesthetical ideas"): Gainsborough's painting as time (or again, time as Gainsborough's painting.....it is not clear whether or not the metaphor goes both ways.) It looks like the tranfiguration is metaphor contains within it usually (or always?) a philosophy of life, for example a feminist one in Lichtenstein's case (critiquing the male gaze).
Danto further writes: "the greatest metaphors of art I believe to be those in which the spectator identifies himself with the attributes of the represented character" (172) for example seeing oneself as Anna Karenina, or perhaps as Saskia. In this case "the artwork becomes a metaphor for life and life is transformed." (172) Fine, but that means that not only is Saskia transfigured but so too is the viewer and life itself. The metaphor reads "the Saskia painting as life" or perhaps "life as the Saskia painting." Further, Danto writes that "to see oneself as Anna is in some way to be Anna, and to see one's life as her life," not obviously in being a Russian woman but in possibly being "a victim of duty and passion" (173) (As Aristotle said, tragedy gives us knowledge in giving us what is probable or possible and in bringing us to catharsis over this). So the wall between art and life that Danto tried so much to build up and make firm dissolves right here. He goes one: "the experience of being taken out of oneself by art....is virtually the enactment of a metaphoric transformation with oneself as subject: you are what the work ultimately is about, a commonplace person transfigured into an amazing woman." (173) This sounds so much like Heidegger. So much is packed into this it is hard to parse it out. If transfiguring is also a matter of self-transcendence, of identification with (following Aristotle once again) something nobler than ourselves, or with someone amazing at least, then a lot more is happening here than one would suspect if one saw art as simply a class of things made art by some act within the context of the artworld or even as a matter or seeing something as art because one as art historical knowledge (a nice way to characterize Danto without taking into account the significance of these pages.)
Danto worries in the next paragraph about the exalted nature of these reflections and then says that we must think about "what makes art an exalted activity" that is universally respected. Great art for Danto is not exalted because it makes objects of beauty, but this is largely because he limits the concept of beauty to something more like what we mean by "pretty" and tries to keep it isolated from anything deep, unlike Plato, for example, who makes it the deepest thing of all.
No wonder that Danto finds it "intoxicating" to "ponder the masterpieces" after discussing "squares of bare canvas" so much in this book, even though one risks the danger of sounding portentous. (173)
I plan to write one more blog entry in which I discuss the last part of Danto's last chapter.
At the end of the sixth chapter Danto tells us that in the final chapter (chapter seven) he will engage in "intense analytical scrutiny" of the features that he began to stress in the sixth chapter, getting insight into the concepts of style and expression by way of studies in "the language of mind" whereby art is seen as externalizing consciousness or the artist's way of seeing. The concluding comment of the sixth chapter surprisingly asserts that Canaletto's paintings of Venice capture Canaletto's way of seeing in such a way that they are "as magical as the city" and this because "they are the city, raised to self-consciousness, perhaps because the city itself was a work of art in its own right." (164) But if that is the case then expression is a matter not just for works of art but also for life, i.e. for the cities in which we live and the lives we live in those cities. So much for the radical separation of art and mere things! (It scarcely helps his theory of radical separation to turn cities, and later, persons, into works of art.)
But, to play this out, we need to turn to his last chapter. Here again, what is surprising to any reader of Danto who has spent much time on the first parts of his book is that in the last chapter he turns out to hold that works of art not only are about things but also express something about those things, that expression is a necessary condition for art. He is not quite an expression theorist since he does not hold that expression is a sufficient condition, and he further understands the concept of expression in terms of its relation to style and rhetoric (by which he mainly means metaphor) which is a novel approach. I think it interesting, however, that, whereas we commonly associate Danto with Warhol's Brillo Boxes, the set of paintings that play the central role in the last chapter of this, his philosophical masterpiece, consists of Rembrandt's paintings of his wife Saskia as flower goddess. (There are several such paintings, one of which is at the Hermitage from 1634. It is not clear which flower painting Danto was thinking of specifically. This makes him somewhat like Heidegger who never makes clear which one of Van Gogh's paintings of shoes is at issue in his analysis of art. As we shall see, he also shares with Heidegger an interest in what makes great art great and in how this is related to the quest for the essence of art.) He uses the Saskia paintings to explain "metaphoric transfiguration" as distinct from "transformation" since the subject retains her identity in transfiguration: we see both Saskia and Flora in the paintings, not just Flora. Similarly when Napoleon is represented as a Roman emperor we have a metaphor, Napoleon as (is, metaphorically, a) Roman emperor, which is not just a representation of a Roman emperor with Napoleon as a model or simply of Napoleon wearing a toga. All of this is supposed to show (Danto believes) why the differences between the Loran diagram of a Cezanne and the Lichtenstein painting that looks identical to it is not one of content.
I keep feeling as I read this that Danto must mean something different than I do by "content" since I would generally see metaphorical seeing as a matter of content (i.e. the content of our perception), whereas he does not. Why, I wonder, can't the difference between the picture of Napoleon as Roman emperor and a picture in which Napoleon is a model for a Roman emperor be a matter of content? It must be that Danto thinks of content as having to be just whatever is literal, and that there is no such thing as metaphorical content. This relates to the larger issue of what is meant by "seeing" where Danto tends to see seeing as a matter that excludes whatever we "see as," and I have trouble seeing it this way.
So, on Danto's view, Lichtenstein's painting takes or treats Cezanne's painting Portrait of Madame Cezanne (which is the subject of Lichtenstein's painting, according to Danto) as a diagram. So the metaphor, spelled out, is "PMC is a diagram" (It is not clear, by the way, why it isn't "This diagram is PMC.") Cezanne's portrait is "transfigured." Of course, in this case, it is an art work that is transfigured and not, at least directly, something in everyday life. However, we shall see that indirectly there is a transfiguration of Cezanne's wife, and hence more indirectly yet, the way women or more generally humans are seen, in all of this too. (This could all be seen as an instance of feminist critique of male perspectives exemplified by Cezanne but deconstructed by Lichtenstein.)
Now there is another theme in this which we have to keep track of, which is that, to put it crudely (but certainly in line with the idea of feminist critique of the male gaze), Danto favors Rembrandt's humane treatment of his wife over Cezanne's dehumanizing treatment of his. This is important, and we can't lose sight of it. So, our eyes are directed rhetorically by Lichtenstein to Cezanne's painting so that we see it as a diagram, and then we see something else, i.e. Cezanne "as seeing the world as a schematized structure." As I said in my last post, it is a metaphor of a metaphor, and perhaps of a metaphor again.
Important also in all of this is that in order to see the Lichtenstein as art we must not only have a concept of art and be able to see it in the way intended by the artist (required by Danto's other writings) but know something about the associations people in the 1960s had with diagrams so that the portrait can be infused with those. Danto sums up the point: "the artwork is constituted as a transfigurative representation rather than a representation tout court" and this is true, he believes, for all artworks. Thus to grasp the artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is there, for example to see the women in Gainsborough's painting as transfigured into flowers, and also, through this, the painting is seen as "a metaphor on time and beauty." (172) That is, for Danto, artworks are such as to make us see another metaphor on a philosophical level (much like Kant's notion of "aesthetical ideas"): Gainsborough's painting as time (or again, time as Gainsborough's painting.....it is not clear whether or not the metaphor goes both ways.) It looks like the tranfiguration is metaphor contains within it usually (or always?) a philosophy of life, for example a feminist one in Lichtenstein's case (critiquing the male gaze).
Danto further writes: "the greatest metaphors of art I believe to be those in which the spectator identifies himself with the attributes of the represented character" (172) for example seeing oneself as Anna Karenina, or perhaps as Saskia. In this case "the artwork becomes a metaphor for life and life is transformed." (172) Fine, but that means that not only is Saskia transfigured but so too is the viewer and life itself. The metaphor reads "the Saskia painting as life" or perhaps "life as the Saskia painting." Further, Danto writes that "to see oneself as Anna is in some way to be Anna, and to see one's life as her life," not obviously in being a Russian woman but in possibly being "a victim of duty and passion" (173) (As Aristotle said, tragedy gives us knowledge in giving us what is probable or possible and in bringing us to catharsis over this). So the wall between art and life that Danto tried so much to build up and make firm dissolves right here. He goes one: "the experience of being taken out of oneself by art....is virtually the enactment of a metaphoric transformation with oneself as subject: you are what the work ultimately is about, a commonplace person transfigured into an amazing woman." (173) This sounds so much like Heidegger. So much is packed into this it is hard to parse it out. If transfiguring is also a matter of self-transcendence, of identification with (following Aristotle once again) something nobler than ourselves, or with someone amazing at least, then a lot more is happening here than one would suspect if one saw art as simply a class of things made art by some act within the context of the artworld or even as a matter or seeing something as art because one as art historical knowledge (a nice way to characterize Danto without taking into account the significance of these pages.)
Danto worries in the next paragraph about the exalted nature of these reflections and then says that we must think about "what makes art an exalted activity" that is universally respected. Great art for Danto is not exalted because it makes objects of beauty, but this is largely because he limits the concept of beauty to something more like what we mean by "pretty" and tries to keep it isolated from anything deep, unlike Plato, for example, who makes it the deepest thing of all.
No wonder that Danto finds it "intoxicating" to "ponder the masterpieces" after discussing "squares of bare canvas" so much in this book, even though one risks the danger of sounding portentous. (173)
I plan to write one more blog entry in which I discuss the last part of Danto's last chapter.
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