A possible theory of art inspired by Plato's Ion

Could Plato have been suggesting the following theory of art in his Ion?  What follows is a possible theory of art inspired by Plato, although not necessarily his own.

For something to be art (in, for example, the Kantian sense of "fine art" which is to say, art of genius) it must be:

1.  Inspired. 
2.  Contain something god-like as the source of inspiration.  [The source of inspiration might not be an actual god but rather some person or thing, for example other art, that takes one out of oneself, that causes ecstasy.  This thing may be god-like not only in this but in that it has created a world.]
3.  The artist must be taken out of himself, must create in ecstasy.
4.  The artist enters into a fictional world (as Ion, a rhapsode, enters into the world of Homer) and, for example, feels emotions appropriate to that world. [This is part of what is meant by being out of one's senses.]
5.  The artist, in entering into another world, sees our world (or aspects of it) in a transformed way:  i.e. he/she takes elements from our world and gives them heightened significance (for example, the poet sees water as milk and honey).  In this way or sense the artist him or herself is "holy," i.e. god-like. 
6.   The artist breaks down the gap between human existence and the natural world in some way.  For example in seeing the creek as milk and honey the artist humanizes it, i.e. makes it more intimate.
7.  The artist recognizes the limitations of his/her self knowledge:  i.e. achieves a kind of Socratic wisdom.  This would involve recognition of those realms in which he or she does not have expertise, for example being a charioteer.  [This condition is not stated or even implied by Socrates.  Socrates, as a character makes a very strict distinction between knowledge based art and the arts of inspiration.  But Plato as the writer of this drama may be suggesting this in the end.]
8.   The artist does have a field of expertise.  For example Ion is able to imitate characters in Homer and knows how to influence audiences just as a doctor is able to influence a patient. [Socrates probably would not have subscribed to this.  But it makes sense.  Surely Plato was not unaware of this possibility, much as he disapproved of the actual influence of artists.]

for more on Ion see here
  

JAAC Special Issue on the seventy-fifth anniversary part 1

I had originally titled this blog "Aesthetics Today" with the idea that I would make comments on up-to-date material, and in reality it became a place for me to try out any ideas I had in aesthetics.  But today I want to comment on something quite up to date -- the special issue of the The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism titled "Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue."  There will be nothing terribly organized about these comments and I will not try to summarize the claims made by the various authors since these are readily available in the abstracts they have provided.  I will begin by saying that this issue is well worth reading.   I will proceed article by article. 

Kathleen Marie Higgins writes in "Global Aesthetics -What Can We Do?" on something very dear to me -  the idea that aesthetics should not just be limited to Western aesthetics but should include in a systematic way aesthetic theories from throughout the world.  Last year I taught a Philosophy of Art class for the first time with this emphasis.  Higgins had already been an influence on me by way of a textbook she put together several years ago called Perspectives on Aesthetics.  It was partly an interest in global aesthetics that led me to think more and more in the late 80s and early 90s about everyday aesthetics.  For instance, I early wrote a paper on gardens as art which was in response to a paper by Mara Miller (who later wrote an important book on gardens as art), and Miller is also a specialist in Japanese Aesthetics.  Yuriko Saito's work has also long had a very strong influence on my own not only in her interest in Japanese aesthetics and everyday aesthetics but also in her work on the aesthetic of the natural environment.  In my World Aesthetics class I also incorporated many articles on various aesthetic traditions form the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.  I will close with one quote from Higgins:  "We might take our expanded horizons as points of departure for new theories that relate to similarities and differences....If 'aesthetics' is interpreted as being global in scope, new theoretical discussions are likely to proliferate..."  (346)  Global Aesthetics, as described so well by Higgins, can only enhance aesthetics generally speaking.  Ultimately aesthetics should be global, and we are right now making baby steps in that direction.

Paul Guyer "Seven-Five Years of Kant....and Counting"

Guyer's work in aesthetics, especially on Kant, is very high quality.  I have been reading his history of modern aesthetics which has been a rich source for me of instruction and insight.  In this work Guyer explores the history of Kant scholarship within the JAAC.  Guyer, I believe rightly, places considerable emphasis on Kant's notion of "aesthetic ideas."  In this regard, it is interesting to think that there is a metaphysical dimension to Kant's analysis connected with Kant's thought that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good because, as Guyer puts it, "of analogies between the experience of beauty and moral experience, above all the analogy between freedom of the imagination and freedom of the will." (360)  I find something intriguing about this.  Perhaps there is a deep tie between the two in terms of the notion of freedom:  it seems that when we are truly creative in art, or feel fully engaged in the experience of art, or of nature, we experience ourselves as free.  I do not quite understand the relationship between this freedom and moral duty, but I suspect that behaving morally is a matter of treating one's life as an other-centered art, the "art of living" as Liu Yuedi puts it.  

I am not happy however with Guyer's second point, which basically advocates an idea of Kant's that the naturally beautiful provides a  sign that nature "has our own interests at heart."  This, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of metaphysics Kant tried to overcome in the Critique of Pure Reason.  Whereas Guyer thinks that "perhaps in fact...it is...natural for us to make such reflections" i.e. reflections that there is a God-like being who has our best interests at heart, I think that we need to avoid this illusion (as Freud rightly called it).  Nature does not care about us.  There is no evidence that it cares about anything.  At best the only thing we can say is that we cannot avoid thinking of the world as possibly guided by goodness and that this may somehow be an overlay on our feelings of freedom associated with creative activity and in the art of living.  Only the later can provide any grounds for self-improvement.

Guyer's overall thesis, however, is well taken: as he concludes the paper:  "Kant's aesthetic theory ...combines logical and linguistic analysis, psychology and phenomenology, and metaphysics in both the older and the newer sense."  I would only argue that the metaphysics in the older sense problematic.  However, there is great value in Kant's metaphysics in the newer sense.      

Seeing as, seeing in, seeing plus

Here's a hypothesis.  I have been reading Paul Guyer's A History of Modern Aesthetics vol. 3, 20th century.  (Cambridge U. Press, 2014.)  Great book.  I can't wait to read the first two volumes.  There is a lot of talk about Wittgenstein's idea of "seeing as" and Wollheim's idea of "seeing in."  It strikes me that these may be both subcategories of something that is even more essential for aesthetics:  an umbrella concept for aesthetic seeing, one might say.  I will call this umbrella concept "seeing plus."  Seeing plus happens when you not only see an object but see it as with what I have called, adapting the word from Walter Benjamin (but not the concept), aura.  Seeing plus happens when you experience something with heightened significance.  Seeing plus can happen through seeing as and it can also happen through seeing in.  But neither seeing as or seeing in are required for seeing plus.  Nor is either sufficient for seeing plus.  So, you can see plus an item of everyday life even though you do not imagine that thing as something else or see something in it.  Seeing plus is very much like what the Buddhists call mindful seeing, and yet Buddhists do not tend to accommodate the aesthetic dimension of mindfulness.  Seeing plus might also be described as truly seeing the object.  There is of course hearing plus, smelling plus and tasting plus.  Seeing plus and its cognates are always attended by pleasure.  Wollheim was famous for spending hours looking at one painting.  What is the value of this?  Perhaps at a certain point he no longer sees in but also sees plus.  Seeing plus must also be involved with seeing as it is in itself, or at least seeing something as if you were seeing it as a thing in itself.  Seeing plus might be seen as seeing something not living as if alive.  But when we see the our beloved when in love we also see her plus.  Seeing plus is like seeing as in that it adds something.  But in this case what is added cannot be described:  we have more, but it seems that we have more of the same thing, of the thing itself.  Some Buddhists talk as though we do not really see thing until we have achieved enlightenment:  perhaps seeing plus is an intimation of enlightenment, a small fragment of heaven.  I have sometimes spoken of everyday aesthetics as having a high point.  This would be experiencing the world by way of seeing plus. Seeing plus is not limited to the everyday:   seeing something sublime in nature is seeing plus.   Seeing something beautiful, when you see it as beautiful, is seeing plus.  Pater thought that the goal of life was to have as many moments of aesthetic ecstasy as possible:  perhaps this is a matter of maximizing experience plus.  Dewey thought that great art should give us an integral experience.  Perhaps "integral" is just another word of seeing plus.   Seeing plus might be related to imagination except that an specific image is not required.    

Play and Everyday Aesthetics

I am reading vol. 3 of Paul Guyer's A History of Modern Aesthetics.  (Cambridge U. Press, 2014).  It covers the 20th century.  Guyer has a particular theory of role of play in aesthetic experience (not surprisingly, since Kant gives a big role to the free play of the imagination and the understanding in the experience of beauty).  In his discussion of Collingwood, Guyer quotes Collingwood on Schiller (also famous for his views on play and art) in a way that seemed suddenly relevant to the project of everyday aesthetics.   Collingwood writes:  "Schiller's identification has often been rejected because art is a high and serious thing and play a childish and trivial; or because art is a thing of the spirit and play a thing of the body, its source the mere exuberance of physical energy, its aim merely physical pleasure."  

This caught my attention because the same criticisms have been raised against the aesthetics of everyday life.  So perhaps the aesthetics of everyday life is in some way closely connected to the tradition of Kant and Schiller in the play theory of art and aesthetics.  

Collingwood goes on:  "But these antitheses are totally false.  Serious art is serious and trivial art is trivial; children's games are for children and men's games are for men.  But as children are naturally and instinctively artists, so they naturally and instinctively play; and as art for grown men is something recaptured, a primitive attitude indulged in moments of withdrawal from the life of fact, so play is for grown men something to be done as a legitimate and refreshing escape from 'work.'"  This all from his Speculum Mentis pp. 103-5.  

I would argue that there is a continuity between art and play and that the dichotomies suggested and traditionally held are false.  This is not to say that art is the same as play or even a species of play.  Surely art is generally more serious than play, but the aim of neither art nor play is merely physical pleasure.  So too, the pleasures of everyday life are not merely physical.   

Guyer speaks of both art and play achieve their goals of refreshment and relaxation "through their use of bodily energy without the conscious intention of solving any specific practical problem."  And this is also true for many aesthetic experiences of everyday life, for example taking a walk in the park.  Guyer's argument is intended to defend Collingwood against a common charge of excessive idealism.  He claims, I think rightly, that "the rejection of a rigid division between mind and body is essential to Collingwood's defense of both play and art and of the identification of the two"  (207)  although, again, I would hesitate to simply identify art and play.

Another quote from Guyer in this discussion of Collingwood is also relevant to our concern.  He quotes from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ch. 1V in support of Collingwood's rejection of rigid distinctions between childhood and adulthood as well as play and art :  "the character and privilege of genius ...[is to] ...carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day ....had rendered familiar..."  (207)    This seems relevant to the contemporary debate over everyday aesthetics.  The everyday may be seen in terms of "the familiar" but it can also be seen through child-like eyes.  Both Coleridge and Collingwood seem to be arguing for an approach to the everyday through a child's sense of wonder, which is what I, much later, called finding "the extraordinary in the ordinary."

Thus reading Collingwood and Coleridge could perhaps help in developing an everyday aesthetics. 

I will close with another quote, again taken from Guyer from Collingwood's Speculum Mentis.   "The true defence of play is the same as the defence of art.  Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual outreaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought externally sets itself a fresh problem.  So play, which is identical with art, is the attitude which looks at the world as an infinite and indeterminate field for activity, a perpetual adventure."  Collingwood concludes later that "the spirit of play, the spirit of eternal youth, is the foundation and beginning of all real life."  (107)   

This would mean of course that art and play are not entirely to be detached from the realm of the practical.   But it approaches the practical from the standpoint of this word "adventure."  If life is approached as adventure it is approached as drama, as something with heightened significance, as wondrous.  The playful approach to the everyday is more in line with what the artist does, hence the continuity between everyday aesthetics, nature aesthetics and art aesthetics.  

Interview of Thomas Leddy by Shawn Chong

What is the most memorable event in your life?

It is hard to categorize events as “most memorable” or not.  One of the reasons for this is that you remember different things at different times.  If by “most memorable” is meant the thing that one ought most to remember, that’s one thing.  If it means the one thing you remember the most, that is another matter.  Besides, when people ask this question they usually just want an amusing anecdote.

One thing I remember distinctly and think about from time to time is the day Prof. Brock informed me that I had been awarded a tenure-track position as San Jose state.   I had been teaching here as a temporary full-time lecturer and there was pretty tough competition for this tenure-track position.  Just yesterday I ran into one of the leading contenders for that position at an aesthetics conference.  I was so glad that the department chose me over him.   

What is the most noteworthy event you experienced while working at SJSU?

One wants to ask “noteworthy for whom, and under what circumstances?”  Sometimes we think of noteworthiness as equivalent to newsworthy.  I was in the news quite dramatically twice in my life.

There was the time that a tree fell on me while walking to my office.  It broke my right leg in two.  I was evacuated to the Valley Medical Center.  Thankfully no one else was under the tree at the time.  There is an article about the event in the campus paper archives. 

Another time I appeared in the news was when I was interviewed by the New York Times about our department’s famous stand against problematic use of MOOCS (massive online classes) in higher education.  This was a very important event in the history of the department.  We all contributed to a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the use of such courses.  It was a great moment for the department.  A number of the other faculty were also interviewed in the national media.  Recently we co-wrote an article incorporating our further thoughts on the issue.  This is the only time I have collaboratively written a paper with anyone. 

Who was your idol in philosophy when you grew up, and how have you tried to be like them?

In our society we have no really clear idea of what is meant by “when you grew up.”  I assume you mean something like the period leading up to my 21^st birthday, with greater emphasis placed on the later part of that period.   I had many heroes then.  I wouldn’t say they were “idols” since I never worshiped them as gods or god-like beings, but I certainly admired them.  You can look at my web page for a short autobiography in which I list the philosophers who influenced me at certain times in my life.   Under the age of 21?  Well Thoreau and Nietzsche were two philosophers who particularly affected me.  But I also read and was influenced by Descartes, Pascal, Bertrand Russell, Plato, Hume, Kant and towards the end of that period, Wittgenstein.  I was also much taken by some eastern philosophers including Krishnamurti and Lin Yutang.   

“Growing up” implies the process of coming to maturity and one can say that there is no clear cutoff point here.    Am I still “growing”?  Do I still have maturing to do?  I am not sure I know the answers to those questions.

I have been totally immersed in Plato, Kant, Hume, Ricoeur, Dewey and a number of others at different times in my life.   But when it comes to philosophy of life I think I probably draw more from the Stoics. 

During the period before I was 21 (I became 21 in 1970) it was not popular to pay much attention to women philosophers.  However, later in my life a number of women were added to my pantheon of heroes, both living and dead.  My advisor for my M.A. in Humanities was Sandra Luft, who I greatly admired and still do.  On my blog Aesthetics Today I have a list of the women aestheticians who have influenced me in my life.  

What belief or doctrine of philosophy had the most influence on you?

I am not much for accepting doctrines or even “beliefs” if, by that, is meant something someone accepts without questioning.   I have always been taken by skepticism and see doubt as central to philosophy. “Influence” is also a funny word since the relationship between writings one reads, classes, teachers, thoughts, and writings one writes is much more dynamic than can be described by the relatively passive concept of “influence.”  My initial response to this question was “Probably the American Pragmatist tradition had the strongest influence.  However I have also been much affected by both the phenomenological and the analytic traditions.”  But now I think that the strongest influence (assuming, for the moment, that I set aside my reservations about the word) was the dialectic of Christianity of Philosophy.   Christianity, which was an important part of my youth, really did present a doctrine and a set of beliefs that one was required to accept:  but I reacted against all of that.  I first began to think of myself as an atheist around the age of 15 and that was largely because of philosophy.  By the way, an important influence in this was a book I read by John Fowler called Aristos, which was based on the sayings of Heraclitus.   

How have the books you have favored changed throughout your life?

It may seem too obvious to say this but the books that I favored under the age of ten were children’s books often involving adventure.  In my teens I was eager to read the great classics.  My grandfather gave me a list of such books and I was happy to work my way through that.  I was a big reader of novels and history books in my teens, but later in my life I focused more on philosophy.  I still read about twelve novels a year, mostly in connection with a literary fiction reading group that I have belonged to for over thirty years, although sometimes I read mystery and science fiction.

As for individual books, Brother's Karamazov was one of the reasons I became an atheist.  I loved reading the great classics including such works as The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and of course the plays of Shakespeare and the Greek plays.   However during my professional life I have pretty much focused on whatever books I have been teaching.  This semester it has mainly been books on the aesthetics of film, but also, just this week, Suzanne Langer's Feeling and Form.

What time and place would you like to live in?

It seems like a silly pastime to imagine living in another time and place.  But perhaps an indicator of the choice I would make would be what sorts of novels I like to read, including historical fiction, as well as the history books I like to read and the historical sites I like to visit.  Perhaps my choice of novels and history books and sites reflects whatever time I would like to live in (if I had a choice) since to read a novel or to visit a historical museum is to vicariously live in another time.  In this regard I have always favored the 19th century.  It was a time of great possibility and we had not yet discovered that we were about to destroy the planet.  I prefer Sherlock Holmes stories when they are placed in the 19^th century, and I love Jane Austin.  Growing up in California, history was mainly the 19^th century.  My second choice would be the 18^th century.  In both cases life would only be acceptable if in a major city and if one were comfortably well off.  My third choice would be Athens during the time of Plato. 

If you have a chance to meet someone, who might that be?

If dead people are included I would certainly like to meet Socrates.  But I probably would not do very well in the debate.  I don’t really have a list of living people I would like to meet.  It is not so much meeting people that would be interesting but talking with them at length.  But it is hard to know who you would really enjoy talking to at length.  Most great men and women I have known are egocentric and to talk with them you have to be pretty tolerant of that. 

What is your most proud achievement in philosophy?

Pride involves positive feelings of accomplishment.  I have that mainly towards my career as a philosophy teacher at SJSU.  A great source of pride is the accomplishments of my past students.   Another source of pride is my publications…the academic part of my professional career.   I was one of the founders of a new sub-discipline of philosophical aesthetics called Everyday Aesthetics.  My book The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life was published in 2012 and I am proud of that book.  Yesterday I attended a talk in which my work in this field was referred to positively, and that made me feel proud. 

Do you consider your work unique?

Uniqueness is a pretty common property.  Everything is different in some respect.  On the other hand, usually when people use the word “unique” they mean particularly unusual.  So, let’s assume that we are talking about this sense of “unique.”  People often associate the word with something positive:  it is considered a complement to say that someone’s work is unique.  But it can be used as a put-down, i.e. uniquely stupid or uniquely incompetent.  My philosophical writings (“my work”) reflect a distinctive voice that is my own.  Whether or not it is unique, in the sense of particularly unusual in a positive way, I might not be the best to say.  If someone other than me decided to read all of my writings and then compared them with the writings of someone considered to be more typical perhaps it could be determined how unique my work is.   But I suspect that the conclusion would be that we were both unique. 

There are some philosophers who simply accept a doctrine and apply a standard method without trying to think very deeply about assumptions.  Such people, and people who are followers of one philosopher, might be less deserving of the accolade “unique.”  I am not that sort of philosopher.  I have tried in my career to derive inspiration from every philosopher I read and I would never say that X is true because philosopher Y believes it is true.  However, that, in itself, does not make me particularly unique. 

What would you change about yourself?

In a way this is a very strange question.  What is the point of talking about changing oneself?  I am not sure I can answer this.  If the question is something like “If you could retroactively modify your DNA or your history what would you change?” how could I possibly answer that?   If I changed myself in this sort of way then I would not be myself.  There is a paradox here. 

Nietzsche argues for saying “yes” to your life including your entire past, and presumably your genetic makeup too.  He sees this as the basis of the only worthwhile optimism.  You should strive to say “I will it thus.”  I agree with this.  So, in a way, I wouldn’t change anything.   There is a paradox here too:  if I try to follow Nietzsche’s advice more often, then perhaps I am not saying yes to a part of myself that says no to myself.   But that paradox does not bother me.

Change is about the future.   One always makes plans and all plans are about change.  Usually this question is directed, however, to what personal habits one wants to modify, for example “do you want to eat more vegetables and fewer saturated fats?”  I do not want to talk about those kinds of projects since that kind of thing is not appropriate for public discourse.

What philosopher's writings have you agreed with the most?

My initial response to this question was “Richard Rorty's writings constantly gave me that sense, although I probably have agreed even more with the writings of Joseph Margolis.”

Thinking about it more I imagine that among my contemporaries I have usually agreed with Yuriko Saito the most.   However, I am not sure how important it is to agree with someone or how important this category really is.  I sometimes have written “I agree” with regards to some claim by some philosopher:  but who cares how often I do this?  In philosophy it is often much more interesting to disagree with someone than to agree with them.  I suspect that I have also disagreed the most with Saito. 

If you could change one period or stage in philosophy, what might that be?

"I would let Descartes disappear:  he did not really do any good for philosophy.  The value of his work is mainly to provide something to argue against, although I admire his dedication to truth.”  This is what I initially wrote in response to this question.  But, thinking again about Nietzsche’s idea of saying yes to life, I would say that I would not change anything about the history of philosophy:  why would I want to?  Even Descartes has value for me.  The debates between Descartes and his contemporaries are particularly fascinating. 

A second possibility would be to have had Heraclitus and Parmenides travel to India or China and have some serious discussions with the philosophers there.  Or Plato.. Or Aristotle:  definitely Aristotle.

Do you believe philosophy is a subject-matter capable of being understood only by a few?

My initial response was “Not at all:  anyone who cares to learn can sink into the world of ideas created by a philosopher.”

I am not sure that philosophy is one subject-matter.   There is philosophy as a practice and philosophy as a collection of writings and talks.  Also some people argue that there is philosophy in literature and film, maybe even in painting and music.  One should not forget the philosophy in one-to-one dialogues such as those described by Plato.   Each work of philosophy presents its own challenges.  If you are reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra you need to learn how to read it.  It is a different think to learn how to read John Dewey’s Art as Experience.  That is why we have seminars and professors.

“Understand” usually means being able to appreciate and explain.   Only a small number can currently appreciate and explain Nietzsche’s great books.  But potentially almost anyone can do so if you are willing to put in the work.   Of course there is a distinction between superficial and deep explanation.  Perhaps the deepest form of explanation (and the deepest form of appreciation) is when someone creates his or her own philosophical work in response to the work in question.  Plato was possibly the deepest reader of Socrates, as Aristotle was of Plato.   As a practical matter, not everyone can read and understand on that level.  There are also multiple possible equally good understandings of a philosophical writing.  There are many other readings of Plato than that offered by Aristotle.  Yet some really good philosophers are not very good readers:  they are perhaps best as coming up with their own theories and may even be engaged in creative misreadings of others.

Do you think philosophers are wrongfully viewed and represented by most people?

“Yes.  But we philosophy teachers are constantly trying to correct that.”  That would be my initial reply.  A better way to answer this would be to survey adults on the question “How do you value philosophy?”  That is, this would be a good question if, by “philosophers rightly viewed,” one means “philosophers rightly appreciated.”  Maybe, however, it means “philosophers rightly appreciated and understood.”  OK, so we generate some questions, ask them of a representative sample of most people and then analyze the responses. But how would you determine the representative sample?

Since most people have not read a lot of philosophy we already know that most people will not have much understanding of philosophy and hence will not view philosophy rightly, if by “rightly” is meant “with understanding.”  One way to answer this question would be to look at popular sayings about philosophers and philosophy.  It might be popularly agreed that “Atheism necessarily implies immorality.”  That would be a wrong view of atheism.  To check this, one would have to read most of the great atheist philosophers and most of the great works defending atheism.  Some people rightly view some philosophers largely because they have read them and understood what they have said.  Some people can do this simply by listening to lectures about the philosopher or reading secondary sources.  Most people wrongly view most philosophers simply because any partial understanding of a philosopher is an incorrect understanding.  I am not entirely comfortable, however, with the dichotomy “right view” vs. “wrong view.”  Maybe we should speak instead of better and worse views of philosophers.

Shawn Chong was a student in my Introduction to Aesthetics class and he uses these questions to write an interview for another class.  I want to offer my thanks to Mr. Chong for posing these questions and getting me to elaborate on my original responses. 

Suzanne Langer and the virtual space of everyday aesthetics

Suzanne Langer might not be the first person one would associate with everyday aesthetics.  Her fundamental ideas are all associated with the word “virtual”:  virtual object, virtual space, and virtual time.  But the virtual is deliberately disassociated from the everyday.  Unlike Dewey, (and she is like Dewey in many respects) the virtual is not continuous with everyday life.  In this respect she is more like Clive Bell.  One could say that her overall position combines Bell and Tolstoy:  significant form and art as expression (she uses both terms) although unlike Tolstoy and more like Collingwood, Langer favors a cognitive approach to the expression of emotion.  More on this later.  In any case, she clearly believes that art is autonomous, and this would seem to exclude everyday aesthetics.  In fact, the autonomy position insofar as it radically separates everyday life from art, makes everyday aesthetics difficult.  It is thus not surprising that Langer is dismissive of everyday aesthetics.  She considers music, for example, radically distinct from pleasurable non-musical sound,  and associates the later with the pleasures of the senses of touch, taste and smell.  She says, for example, that sound “as a sheer sensory factor in experience, may be soothing or exciting, pleasing or torturing;  but so are the factors of taste, smell, and touch.” (Ross 233)  She sees all these as “somatic influences” and believes that exploiting them is “self-indulgence.”  This approach would not be friendly, for instance, to the ideas of Sherri Irwin.  Langer strictly separates people who work in these areas, whom she calls “mere epicures,” from artists whom, she believes, are “torchbearers of culture” and “inspired creators.”  So, “If music, patterned sound, had no other office than to stimulate and soothe our nerves, pleasing our ears as well-combined foods please our palates, it might be highly popular, but never culturally important.”  (223)   Cooking schools should not be rated as highly as music conservatories. 

Langer, then, constantly stresses the discontinuities between art and everyday life.  Consider how she sees a picture:  “a picture …is an image, created for the first time out of things that are not imagined, but quite realistic – canvas and paper…”  (226)  Here we see how Langer is naïve about the phenomenological space of the studio, where canvas and paper are seen by the artist as having potential for creation and hence as part of a virtual space, the virtual space of the working studio.  The image in the painting, to be sure, is created from this things which can be very easily seen as without meaning content.  They can have a double reality, can be seen in one way or the other.  They could not however be used in creation if they did not have this phenomenological side.  Langer herself admits that the distinction between image and actuality is functional:  “real objects, functioning in a way that is normal for images, may assume a purely imaginal status.”  (227)

So what then is an image?  She says that a building “becomes an image when it presents itself purely to our vision, i.e. as a sheer visual form instead of a locally and practically related object.”  (227)  “We abstract its appearance from its material existence” and then it becomes “simply a thing of vision” and “acquires a different context.”  There is some truth in this, and yet it is more complicated than she makes out.   One can say that its practical relations for example are themselves transformed and carried up into the aesthetic realm and so it is a mistake to think that material existence is always completely distinct from imaginative experience, since material existence can be imaginatively perceived and worked,  and acquiring a different context does not mean entirely losing the original context.  So there is something problematic when Langer says that the painted canvas is not a new thing among the things of the studio:  it is indeed a new thing, but let us not think of the other things of the studio as themselves merely the objects of scientific or mathematical analysis.  They too are not mere things.  To be sure, imagination is more evidence in the image:  there is a kind of intensification of imagination in the area of the image.  The mistake can be seen in this quote:  “even the forms are not phenomena in the order of actual things, as spots on a tablecloth are;  the forms in a design – no matter how abstract – have a life that does not belong to mere spots.”  (227)  What is deeply wrong here is that the spots on the tablecloth are not at all mere spots.  They are pot there as part of a design, and so they too have a life, although no doubt not as pronounced as the version of them we see in a painting by Matisse.   So of course Langer is right that “something arises in the process of arranging colors on a surface, something that is created, not just gathered and set in new order:  that is the image” but yet the new image in a Matisse piggybacks on the new image on a less scale in the designs he uses as subject matter.  There is a continuity between everyday life and art.  Langer is right that the painter is not just taking an arranging elements, that she/he is creating a virtual space, and even that there is bracketing from the realm of the practical, but not complete isolation or discontinuity. 

Langer does not go as far in the direction of artistic autonomy as, Clive Bell and the formalists however.  Bell argues that art has nothing to do with our everyday emotions.  It only has to do with that special aesthetic experience that we get from appropriately apprehending something with significant form.  Art expresses emotion, not just the aesthetic emotion, but emotion in general.  But, unlike Tolstoy, art does not express the particular emotion of the particular artist:  it is  “not the symptomatic expression of feelings that beset the composer but a symbolic expression of the forms of sentience as he understands them.”  So the composer is not interested in expressing his/her own feelings but rather what he/she “knows about” the inner life.   The idea is to make a statement about human sensibility in general through music (and art in general) as a symbol.  Now that point I want to make here is that Langer, in discussing individual art forms, begins to deconstruct the radical discontinuity between art and life.  She already begins to move away from the formalists like Bell simply by observing that art has to do with emotion.   Keep this summary in mind as we proceed:  “music is ‘significant form,’ and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensuous object, which by its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey.”   (226)  So “significant form” is not here tied to the special “ecstatic” aesthetic experience in the way it is in Bell’s formalism.  Bell says that this experience is like that of a mathematical discovery, or like religious experience.  It is transcendent in a Platonic-like way.  But for Langer significant form is tied to the actual structures of our emotions.  She is more like Aristotle:  it captures and expresses universals, not Platonic Forms.  But she is very unlike Dewey.  Whereas Dewey stresses continuity, she, again, stresses discontinuity.   Now for my deconstruction.  But please do not think of deconstruction as a negative thing.  I believe that Langer provides us with help in solving problems in everyday aesthetics by way of this deconstruction.  Heidegger does something similar, especially when he talks about the Greek temple, but Langer’s formulation has the advantage of not being saddled with the Nazi baggage that unfortunately Heidegger carries.  Also, she is not given to the often off-putting mystification we find in Heidegger.  I am beginning to reveal my hand.  My argument in short will be that Langer, through her discussions first of Sculpture and then, even more so, when she discusses Architecture, re-establishes continuity at least on one level.   And again she does so in a way that can help us with what has been called the dilemma of everyday aesthetics.   Sculpture as with painting creates what Langer calls virtual space, however unlike with painting, the virtual space does not stop at the physical boundaries of the art object.  The volume created “is more than the bulk of the figure;  it is a space made visible, and is more than the area which the figure actually occupies.”  (229)  In emphasizing the negative spaces and the spaces around the sculpture Langer essentially expands the virtual space that she seeks to keep separate from everyday life.  Interestingly she is willing to use the word “continuity” here, where she would not earlier:  “The figure itself seems to have a sort of continuity with the emptiness around it, however much its solid masses may assert themselves as such.”  (299)  And further “the void enfolds it, and the enfolding space has vital form as a continuation of the figure.”  (299)  My point here is going to be related with an ongoing debate I have been having with other everyday aesthetics.  My stress has been on the close relation between art aesthetics and everyday aesthetics.  What happens to the space around the sculpture:  it is brought into the world of the work of art.  This is a problem in a way since the space then can be constituted in two ways, for Langer, one as physical space of everyday life and one as virtual space.  But her understanding of physical space is actually discursive, logical, scientific, and really not the space in which we live.  Whereas her virtual space is the phenomenological (using Husserl’s sense of that term) space in which we live:  one that has emotional import.  It is here I want to say something about Langer’s actual closeness to Dewey, and this is by way of her notion of “vital form.”  One could say, in defense of Langer, that the sculpture does not really move into the realm of the everyday even though it goes beyond the physical object:  the empty space it “commands” is “part of the sculptural volume.”  Let’s grant this.  But things will be different when we come to architecture.  Here is an aside, related to Dewey.  Previously we observed that Langer is closer to life than Bell in that she is committed to significant form as having to do with the actual structure of our emotions, which surely are tied to our lives.  Further, she emphasizes the “semblance of organism.”  Dewey stresses that we are live creatures interacting with our environments.  Langer tries to keep the two radically separate, but interestingly the value of art is that it reflects us by resembling ourselves as live organisms.  “Living organisms maintain themselves, resist change, strive to restore their structure when it has been forcibly interfered with….organisms, performing characteristic functions must have certain general forms, or perish.” (229)  Following Aristotle, once again, she stresses that life has necessity, that only life “exhibits any telos” and that the acorn strives to become the oak.  Now she stresses that there is “nothing actually organic about a work of sculpture” (230) and yet is gives us “semblance of living form.” 

Now for architecture.   The actual theory is a bit more complicated:  “Architecture creates the semblance of that World which is the counterpart of Self.  It is the total environment made visible.”  It is not clear here how the environment made visible is to be distinguished from the environment.  The introduction of “Self” may indicate a phenomenological point of view:  we are talking about the world as perceived by a self.  And as she observes that the “Self is collective” which probably simply means that we perceive the world according to certain shared worldviews.  This would explain why “the World is communal.”  But if this is so then the World (ironically very like Heidegger’s concept of "world") really is the world of everyday life experience.  Thus continuity is re-established.  The only world that is cut off is the world understood not phenomenologically but discursively, i.e. the world as understood by science.  That is a problem, I think, since it relies on a continued dualism which would be unacceptable to a Dewayan, but we will not address that here.

But things do get a bit confusing as when Langer says “as the actual environment of a being is a system of functional relations, so a virtual ‘environment,’ the created space of architecture, is a symbol of functional existence.”  (230)  What exactly can this mean:  isn’t the virtual environment, the symbol of functional existence, exactly the phenomenological world in which we actual live and act:  the world as we experience it?  Here is an interesting implication:  if that is so then the world surrounding architecture, basically the built environment, basically most of the world in which we live, is one that is infused with the spirit of architecture.  But if that is true then the everyday is a collection of virtual spaces constituted by various architectural entities?  Langer wants to stress the non-practical aspect of this space:  “symbolic expression is something miles removed from provident planning or good arrangement.”  (230)  This seems to me just plain false.  My architect brother, William Leddy, of Leddy, Maytum, Stacey designed the Roberts Campus for disability services in Berkeley, California.  The work is both symbolically expressive and arranged well for people with disabilities:  part of the symbolism is to accomplish this very arrangement.  But I think that Langer is right when she says that symbolic expression “embodies the feeling, the rhythm, the passion or sobriety…by which all things are done.”  Buildings create what she calls an “image of life” which is also “the visible semblance of an ‘ethnic domain’ by which I take her to mean not the domain of some ethnicity, like the Irish-Americans, but rather the domain of humanity since, for her, architecture is a “symbol of humanity to be found in the strength and interplay of forms.”  What is ironic and strange here is that what is symbolized is identical with the symbol:  for the symbol just is the virtual space created by architecture which is our space as expressive and lived.  The two are both separate and dissolved into each other: and so we have a paradox…one might call it the paradox of architecture.  Architecture, as least where we are talking about spaces constituted by architecture, is the space of everyday life.  It is designed to accommodate everyday life aesthetics.  As Langer puts it “the human environment, which is the counterpart of any human life, holds the imprint of a functional pattern; it is the complementary of organic form” which see sees in terms of the “metabolic pattern” of our both our feelings and our physical acts.  But again as opposed to Langer, it is not just complementary or a counterpart;  it is just exactly also where we live.  To put it briefly:  human life is in the human environment  I do not deny that buildings create an illusion.  In my book I described what I called the aesthetic aura.  When we perceive our surrounding environment as having an “aura of significance” this can be called an illusion, if you wish, although this implies that what is seen is somehow less real:  whereas in fact it is experienced as more real.  So “illusion” is not my preferred term here.  Instead of speaking as Langer does of creating “the illusion of an ethnic world” we should speak of creating an experience or way of experiencing the world in which there is heightened significance and in which the world, paradoxically, exemplifies itself.  (See Nelson Goodman for further discussion of this.)  Given this I agree with Langer that in architecture the place is “articulated by the imprint of human life” and that such a place “must seem organic, like a living form.” (230)   The great modernist architects she mentions:  Sullivan, Wright, Le Corbusier, all succeed in re-visioning the world through architecture in this organic way (although, to be sure, Le Corbusier, also like the machine metaphor, as when he spoke of a house as a machine for living.)   I cannot agree however that life has “no relevance..to builder’s supplies.”  As Dewey clearly showed, and also Heidegger, builder’s supplies are taken up into the virtual space of architecture and transformed by it.  Let us not forget the thingliness of the thing, as Heidegger would put it.  All of this said, I am in perfect accord with Langer’s idea that the place in this sense is destroyed when the work of architecture is destroyed.   I will end by noting some of the ways in which Langer allows the work of architecture to reach out even further into the world, in terms of continuity with everyday life, than the work of sculpture.  As she puts it:  “its virtual domain may include terraces and gardens, or rows of sphinxes…” and further “sea and sky may fill the intervals between its columns and be gathered to its space.”  This point is, of course, remarkably similar to Heidegger on the temple.   The “ethnic domain” is perhaps better described by her as an “atmosphere” created by architecture.  I just cannot accept her separation of the utility of the building from its “semblance.”  Or her conviction that hot water heaters are irrelevant to architecture. 

Emotional Identification in Film: The Floating I

The floating I.   Here's a hypothesis.  A question is constantly raised as to how we engage in films emotionally.  Some speak of identification with the characters, some of empathy, some of sympathy, and so forth.  But the question I want to ask is: Where am I when I am looking at a film?  The giant shark attacks and I jump in my seat, but I do not run from the theater.  It seems that I am there in the fictional world but also not there.  My hypothesis is that the I (my I) floats, attaches, and then floats again.  Momentarily the two worlds collapse and I, in my seat, jump with fear, but then quickly I enter back into the world, and feel no need to escape the theater. 

What about empathy?  The giant shark is about to attack a swimmer.  I do not feel empathy for the girl since she is still having a good time.  I am as if an observer in that fictional world, although in a protected space since I do not fear for myself.  I am fictionally there as Walton would put it.  But sometimes, as with other humans in the real world, I feel deep empathy with a character:  I am fictionally identifying with the character.  

I am also interested in a certain conflict between Carroll and Walton.  Carroll believes that the director uses "criterial prefocusing" to lead us to the water of emotional response.  The viewer is supposed to "cognize the film" in the way the director wants.  A problem with this is that there is no particular reason for me to emotionally respond to events in the film if I am just cognizing and categorizing.  

Walton in "Fearing Fictions" (originally published in 1978:  I am looking at the version in the Carroll and Choi anthology) offers something very different.  I think the signal interesting thing about Walton's theory is that in viewing a film we enter into the fictional world.  Of course this is a phenomenological point.  "We and Charles feel ourselves to be part of fictional worlds, to be intimately involved with the slime....or with whatever constituents of fictional worlds are, make-believedly, objects of our feelings and attitudes."  Carroll has us outside the fictional world but busy cognizing it and categorizing things within it.   We just have feelings because we are engineered to do so in the context of this cognizing activity.  Walton has us inside the fictional world in the sense that we feel ourselves to be part of such a world.  This seems much more plausible to me.

There is one problem with Walton's account.  When I think of make-believe I think of something active.  But we do not actively make-believe that we are in the fictional world in the way someone might actively pretend that she is a movie star while walking down a street in Hollywood or in a way that a child can actively pretend that a mud paddy is a pie.   We go to a movie and we are automatically entered into a fictional world (or alternatively into a non-fictional rendering of the world in a documentary). 

Combining Carroll and Walton  might help.  One could say that the director sets it up (Carroll) but that the world is entered into (Walton.)  I do not have to make-believe that Huck floated down the Mississippi:  I see that he did and know that he did insofar as I am immersed in the movie.  But I have no big problem with Walton's overall use of the term "make-believe" which I think is just, for him, a technical term that helps him make a point that is basically right.

Again, what is interesting about Walton, is that "we end up 'on the same level' with fictions."  Further "this enables us to comprehend our sense of closeness to fictions, without attributing to ourselves patently false beliefs."  (243)  

Moreover, this is not just a minor point, for example a point about fearing fictions.  It has to do with the function of film and literature.  As Walton puts it "we are now in a position to expect progress on the fundamental question of why and how fiction is important" and why it is not "mere fiction."  (243)  

It also connects up with the much maligned theories of Suzanne Langer and F. E. Sparshott (and yes Nietzsche too) that there is an important similarity between our experience of film and our experience of dreams.  See especially "A Note on the Film" by Langer (I posted on this previously.)

The I floats as well in dreams.  Walton says "people are usually, perhaps always, characters in their dreams and daydreams."  Sometimes we only observe, but even then, we belong to the fictional world of the dream.

Further:  "much of the value of dreaming, fantasizing, and making-believe depends crucially on one's thinking of oneself as belonging to a fictional world.  It is chiefly by fictionally facing certain situations, engaging in certain activities, and having or expressing certain feelings...that a dream, fantasizer, or game-player comes to terms with his actual feelings..."  (243)  and people derive something similar from novels and films.  Again:  "it is fictional that they themselves exist and participate (if only as observers) in the events portrayed in the works..."  (244)  The important point is that we do not "merely stand outside fictional worlds and look in" (244).  

It is not required that the I be in a specific place in the fictional world.  It is only required that the I be somewhere capable of observing what we actually see on the screen and hear in the theater as coming from the movie.  The I here is relatively empty.  Of course, ultimately, it is identical with myself who is sitting there in the theater.  

Walton speaks of a girl hearing Jack in the Beanstock for the umpteenth time:  "she is engaged in our own game of make-believe during the reading, a game in which make-believedly she learns for the first time about Jack and the giant as she hears about them."
Further, "it is her make-believed uncertainty (the fact that make-believedly she is uncertain), not any actual uncertainty, that is responsible for the excitement and suspense that she feels."  (245)  She does not have to actively pretend anything.  But what is important is that she is once again an observer in the world with a certain degree of knowledge.  Of course, over time, the knowledge that she really has will make this process less enjoyable, and adults, notably, seldom enjoy reading mystery novels a second time.  We carry something with us into the fictional world.

This idea of entering the world might be seen as related in a strange way with Danto's idea that an artwork is something that leaves the world and enters into the artworld.  It is as though Danto were right but that in order to experience the artwork we had to enter its fictional world as well.  "Something becomes art when we enter with it into the artworld."  That's an interesting hypothesis.