MORRIS WEITZ—The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[143]

The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

MORRIS WEITZ

[Pub. 1956, tho' a prizewinner in '55]

Theory
has been central
in aesthetics and
is still the preoccupation
of
the philosophy of art.

Its main avowed concern remains the determination of the nature of art which can be formulated into a definition of it.

It construes definition as the statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined, where the statement purports to be a true or false claim about the essence of art, what characterizes and distinguishes it from everything else.

Each of the great theories of art—Formalism, Voluntarism, Emotionalism, Intellectualism, Intuitionism, Organicism—converges on the attempt to state the defining properties of art.

Each claims
that it is
the true theory
because
it has formulated correctly
into a real definition
the nature of art;

and that the others
are false
because
they have left out
some necessary or sufficient property.

"This looks reads like a setup, Jim Morris."

By now, with several decades of shockingly robust pluralism in the rear view mirror, those -isms look more like affirmative declarations of intent, whether before or after the fact, than they do like negative boundary-drawing maneuvers. We've moved on to using art, and we dare any purported definitions to try to catch up to us and our using; we use art in whatever way feels correct to us in a given moment, this rather than casting about for some necessary or sufficient property that has been left out.

It turns out that art, seemingly, has infinite uses. It has too many uses to be amenable to a real definition. But that doesn't matter, because the outcomes of the uses are clear as day, and because we human beings are, for better and worse, moral creatures. That's why we actually do need to hear everyone's opinion, and it's alright if some of those opinions seem too moralistic and not sufficiently aesthetic. Here, for once, bad opinions are more valuable than good definitions!

No one would/could expect philosophers of art to be any but the last to notice. Our Man here is among the more acute. First, though, he has to set us up.

Many theorists contend that their enterprise is no mere intellectual exercise but an absolute necessity for any understanding of art and our proper evaluation of it.

Unless we know what art is, they say, what are its necessary and sufficient properties, we cannot begin to respond to it adequately or to say why one work is good or better than another.

We must say why!

We must never not understand!

If we are permitted the stoicism
of non-understanding and non-saying,
do we still need definitions?

Aesthetic theory,

(" . . . which is not comprised exclusively of the determination of the nature of art but is nonetheless extremely preoccupied as such . . . ")

thus, is important not only in itself but for the foundations of both appreciation and criticism.

Well, those are silly things to build upon such an insidious foundation.

...

Is aesthetic theory, in the sense of a true definition or set of necessary and sufficient properties of art, possible?

...in spite of the many theories, we seem no nearer our goal today than we were in Plato's time.

Each age,
each art-movement,
each philosophy of art,

tries

[144]

over and over again to establish the stated ideal only to be succeeded by a new or revised theory, rooted, at least in part, in the repudiation of preceding ones. ...

In this essay
I want to plead for
the rejection of this problem.

I want to show that theory—in the requisite classical sense—is never forthcoming in aesthetics, and that we would do much better as philosophers to supplant the question, "What is the nature of art?" by other questions, the answers to which will provide us with all the understanding of the arts there can be.
...

Aesthetic theory—all of it—is wrong in principle in thinking that a correct theory is possible because it radically misconstrues the logic of the concept of art.

Its main contention that "art" is amenable to real or any kind of true definition is false.
...

Aesthetic theory tries to define what cannot be defined in its requisite sense.

But
in recommending the repudiation of aesthetic theory I shall not argue from this,
as too many others have done,
that its logical confusions render it meaningless or worthless.

On the contrary,
I wish to reassess its role and its contribution
primarily in order to show
that it is of the greatest importance to our understanding of the arts.

Let us now survey briefly some of the more famous extant aesthetic theories...

In each of these there is the assumption that it is the true enumeration of the defining properties of art, with the implication that previous theories have stressed wrong definitions.

...consider a famous version of Formalist theory, that propounded by Bell and Fry. ...

The essence of painting, they maintain, is the plastic elements in relation.

Its defining property is significant form, ...

[145]

...

The nature of art, what it really is, so their theory goes, is a unique combination of certain elements (the specifiable plastic ones) in their relations. ...

To this the Emotionalist replies that the truly essential property of art has been left out. ...

Without projection of emotion into some piece of stone or words or sounds, etc., there can be no art. ...

The Intuitionist disclaims both emotion and form as defining properties. ...

Art is really a first stage of knowledge...

As such, it is an awareness, non-conceptual in character, of the unique individuality of things; and since it exists below the level of conceptualization or action, it is without scientific or moral content. ...

The Organicist says to all of this that
art is really a class of organic wholes
consisting of distinguishable, albeit inseparable, elements
in their causally efficacious relations
which are presented in some sensuous medium.

My final example is the most interesting of all, logically speaking. This is the Voluntarist theory of Parker. ...

"  The assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence of some common nature present in all the arts. " 

"  All the so popular brief definitions of art— ... —all fallacious, either because, while true of art, they are also true of much that is not art,

and hence fail to differentiate art from other things;

or else because they neglect some essential aspect of art.  "

[146]

But instead of inveighing against the attempt at definition of art itself, Parker insists that what is needed is a complex definition rather than a simple one. ...

His own version of Voluntarism is the theory that art is essentially three things:

embodiment
of wishes and desires imaginatively satisfied,

language,
which characterizes the public medium of art,

and
harmony,
which unifies the language with the layers of imaginative projections. ...

Now,
all these sample theories are inadequate in many different ways.

Each purports to be in [sic] a complete statement about the defining features of all works of art
and yet each of them leaves out something which the others take to be central.

Some are circular, ...

Some of them, in their search for necessary and sufficient properties, emphasize too few properties, ...

Others are too general ...

Still others rest on dubious principles, ...

...even if art has one set of necessary and sufficient properties, none of the theories we have noted or, for that matter, no aesthetic theory yet proposed has enumerated that set to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Then there is a different sort of difficulty.

As real definitions, these theories are supposed to be factual reports on art.

If they are,
may we not ask,

Are they empirical
and
open to verification or falsification ?

For example, what would confirm or disconfirm the theory that art is significant form or embodiment of emotion or creative synthesis of images?

There does not even seem to be a hint of the kind of evidence which might be forthcoming to test these theories;

and indeed one wonders if they are perhaps honorific definitions of "art,"

that is,
proposed redefinitions in terms of some chosen conditions for applying the concept of art,

and not
true or false reports on the essential properties of art at all.

But all these criticisms
of traditional aesthetic theories ...

[147]

... have been made before.

"Oh?"

My intention is to go beyond these to make a much more fundamental criticism,
namely, that

aesthetic theory is a logically vain attempt

to define what cannot be defined,

to state the necessary and sufficient properties of that which has no necessary and sufficient properties,

to conceive the concept of art as closed when its very use reveals and demands its openness.

The problem
with which we must begin is not
"What is art?"
but
"What sort of concept is 'art'?"

Indeed,
the root problem of philosophy itself
is to explain the relation
between
the employment of certain kinds of concepts
and
the conditions under which they can be correctly applied.

If I may paraphrase Wittgenstein,
we must not ask,
What is the nature of any philosophical x?
or even, according to the semanticist,
What does "x" mean?,
a transformation that leads to the
disastrous interpretation
of "art" as
a name for some specifiable class of objects;

but rather,
What is the use or employment of "x"?
What does "x" do in the language?

Well, when I deployed "use" above, I had in mind the practical or ecological sense. "Use" of the language is, of course, its own thing, and I wasn't taking it half as seriously as a Wittgensteinian does.

...in aesthetics,
our first problem is
the elucidation
of the actual employment of the concept of art,
to give
a logical description of the actual functioning of the concept,
including
a description of the conditions under which we correctly use it or its correlates.

My model
in this type of logical description or philosophy derives from Wittgenstein.

It is also he who,
in his refutation of philosophical theorizing
in the sense of
constructing definitions of philosophical entities,
has furnished contemporary aesthetics
with
a starting point for any future progress.

... What is a game?
The traditional philosophical, theoretical answer
would be in terms of
some exhaustive set of properties
common to all games.

" ...—Don't say: "there must be something common, or they would not be called "games"' but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that . . . .  "

... What we find is
no necessary and sufficient properties
,
only
"a complicated network of similarities
overlapping and crisscrossing,"...

[148]

...

Knowing what a game
is
is not
knowing some real definition or theory
but
being able
to recognize and explain games
and
to decide which among imaginary and new examples would
or would not
be called "games."

The problem of
the nature of art
is like that of
the nature of games,

at least in these respects:

If we
actually look and see what it is that we call "art,"
we will also find no common properties—only strands of similarities.

Knowing what art
is
is not
apprehending some manifest or latent essence
but
being able to recognize, describe, and explain
those things we call "art" in virtue of these similarities.

From what I can tell at this early stage of my own Investigations, this apparently commonsense admonition to look and see seems to have led philosophers into something of the same quagmire as those economists who base so much of their theory upon the ascription of rationality to human beings. (I think I might be some species of "rationalist" myself, but stick with me.) If memory serves, the Sircello except later (much later) on in this anthology contains a real howler along precisely these lines. We can "look and see" all we want; we can note similarities and relationships to our hearts' content; but if what we see strikes us as perverse, we do not simply have to accept it as the way things are; this doubly so if mere strands of similarities cannot be decisive bases for definition: that suggests that we can change things for the better if we really want to! Or, at least: it's not de facto idle to suggest improvements. Proposed improvements need not conform to a definition, they just have to leave a plurality of "strands" in place.

i.e.
When we do call,
we do not always do so
in virtue of
anything particularly sturdy
philosophically.

It's true enough that the all-too-human way of categorization via language is all (most?) of what we've got; on the other hand, it is precisely because myriad disjuctures are visible even from within the cultural illusion of language (whereas, now-conventionally speaking, so much else "cultural" is quite in-visible from within the culture) that we are justified in maintaining a healthy skepticism about exercises such as the above.

(Is this what Lacan is always on about? Does anyone want to just tell me "yes" or "no" so that I don't have to try to understand him directly?)

...certain (paradigm) cases can be given,

about which there can be no question as to their being correctly described as "art" or "game,"

but no exhaustive set of cases can be given.

I can list some cases and some conditions
under which I can apply correctly the concept of art
but I cannot list all of them,

for ... unforeseeable or novel conditions
are always forthcoming or envisageable.

A concept is open if its conditions of application are emendable and corrigible;

i.e., if
a situation or case
can be imagined or secured
which would call for some sort of decision on our part
to extend the use of the concept to cover this,
or
to close the concept and invent a new one...

If necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept can be stated, the concept is a closed one.

But this can happen only in logic or mathematics where concepts are constructed and completely defined.

It cannot occur with empirically descriptive and normative concepts unless we arbitrarily close them by stipulating the ranges of their uses.

... "Is Dos Passos' U.S.A. a novel?"
"Is V. Woolf's To the Lighthouse a novel?"
"Is Joyce's Finnegans Wake a novel?"

On the traditional view, these are construed as
factual problems
to be answered yes or no
in accordance with the presence or absence
of
defining properties.

But certainly this is not how any of these questions is answered.

...what is at stake
is
no factual analysis
concerning necessary and sufficient properties
but a decision
as to whether the work under examination
is similar
in certain respects
to other works
...
and consequently
warrants the extension of the concept
to cover the new case.

...

[149]

...

What is true of the novel
is, I think, true of every sub-concept of art:
...

"Art,"
itself, is an open concept.

New conditions (cases) have constantly
arisen and will undoubtedly constantly arise;

new art forms,
new movements
will emerge,
which will demand decisions on the part of
those interested, usually professional critics,
as to whether the concept should be extended or not.

... With "art" its conditions of application can never be exhaustively enumerated since new cases can always be envisaged or created by artists, or even nature, ...

What I am arguing, then, is that the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, make it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties.

Bit of a red flag here. On one hand, there is only change, and everything is subject to it. On the other hand, there have been lives and epochs alike during which "art" did not change very much at all. By the time we've noticed that the language has fallen behind or jumped ahead, we are tailgating rather than exploring. So, the mere pace of change cannot be the basis for ascribing openness or closedness of concept, can it? And we cannot assume that we observe change-in-art in metaphysical accordance with how we observe change-in-the-language, can we? i.e. Openness/closedness of concept can be rendered either synchronically or diachronically, and so we had better indicate which quadrant of this Punnett Square our analysis pertains to.

We can, of course, choose to close the concept. But to do this with "art" or "tragedy" or "portraiture," etc., is ludicrous since it forecloses on the very conditions of creativity in the arts.

Of course it does no such thing. What are foreclosed this way are certain avenues for self-styling, doubly so for those interested in matters of boundary-drawing or gatekeeping.

To show otherwise, one could try stretching Walton beyond the confines of his own argument to insist that Category is a pre-requisite to creativity. But that seems wrong: it is a pre-req only to exactly that function Walton says it is that Category performs; perhaps this function is substantial, but it is hardly coextensive with "creativity" writ large. If it was, there would be little change and the concepts du jour would indeed be closable.

Category seems to me to have more to do with reception than with creation, or at least with Rankian creation. (See Rank on the artist taking over whatever extant practice or tradition is close at hand.)

Of course
there are legitimate and serviceable closed concepts in art.

But these are always those whose boundaries of conditions have been drawn for a special purpose.

... for example, ... "tragedy" and "(extant) Greek tragedy."

The first is open and must remain so to allow for the possibility of new conditions, ...

The second is closed. ...

[150]

...

What is supremely important, if the critic is not to become muddled, is to get absolutely clear about the way in which he conceives his concepts;

otherwise he goes
from
the problem of trying to define "tragedy," etc.,
to
an arbitrary closing of the concept
in terms of certain preferred conditions or characteristics
...

... many critics and aestheticians ... choose a class of samples ... and then go on to construe this account of the chosen closed class as a true definition or theory of the whole open class ...

This,
I think,
is the logical mechanism of most of the
so-called theories of the sub-concepts of art:

"tragedy,"
"comedy,"
"novel,"
etc.

Hmm . . . Are these not also Walton's "categories"? But neither his "categories" nor Our Man's sub-concepts here are quite the same thing as "genre," although they necessarily (thanks to the vicissitudes of the language) so often go by the exact same names.

In any case, try telling Satch or Newk that a true definition or theory of the whole open class forecloses on the very conditions of creativity! Even within strict boundaries of songform, instrumental role/function, harmonic progression, etc., much creativity has been possible!

(How To Hasten Change Of The Rules: mindlessly enforce the rules. But you can bet that artists of the first rank have been mind-ful of their own compliance and noncompliance; pointing it out to them isn't going to teach them something they don't already know.)

...

The primary task of aesthetics
is not to seek a theory but to elucidate the concept of art.

Specifically, it is
to describe
the conditions
under which
we employ
the concept
correctly.

... What, then, is the logic of "X is a work of art"?

As we actually use the concept,
"Art" is both
descriptive (like "chair")
and evaluative (like "good");

i.e.,
we sometimes say, "This is a work of art,"
to describe something
and we sometimes say it
to evaluate something.

Neither use
surprises anyone.

... What are the conditions
under which we would be making [a descriptive] utterance correctly?

There are no necessary and sufficient conditions
but
there are the strands of similarity conditions, ...
none of which need be present but most of which are, ...

I shall call these the "criteria of recognition" ...

All these have served as the defining criteria

[151]

of the individual traditional theories of art;
so we are already familiar with them.

...

None of the criteria of recognition is a defining one, either necessary or sufficient, because we can sometimes assert of something that it is a work of art and go on to deny any one of these conditions, ...

If none of the conditions was present,
...
we would not describe it as [art] .

But,
even so,
no one of these
or any collection of them
is either necessary or sufficient.

... the descriptive use of "Art" creates little difficulty.
But the elucidation of the evaluative use does.

For many,
especially theorists,
"This is a work of art" does more than describe;
it also praises.

Its conditions of utterance, therefore, include certain preferred properties or characteristics of art.

Ok, well . . . this kind of praise seems to me especially out of bounds for theorists, actually; and they seem unusually weary of being (mis)understood in precisely this manner.

But maybe the point, even so, is that there is always a valence to such utterances as this one, even when we are deep in the academy; and with that I am inclined to agree. It's just impossible ever to prove that this is (or is not) what has happened; we have nothing even so flimsy as the Eco-Cognitivism of "mindreading" and "artifactuality" to assist us is parsing academic and critical statements, even as it remains acceptable (somehow) for artists and artworks themselves to be parsed according to any number of tenous Cognitivist methods.

(For whatever reason, in sports I associate the colloquial "art form" laudation with Marv Albert, so let's label the evaluative deployment as the Marv Albert ontology; this, as against the ostensibly descriptive (though tacitly evaluative) Phil Jackson ontology, as when he called Andrew Bynum's midair shoulder-tackle of J.J. Berea a "non-basketball play.")

I shall call these "criteria of evaluation." ...

What is at stake here is that "Art" is construed as an evaluative term

which is either
identified with its criterion
or
justified in terms of it.

...

[152]

...

[But] "This is a work of art," said evaluatively,
cannot mean [e.g.]
"This is a successful harmonization of elements"
—except by stipulation—
...

"This is a work of art," used evaluatively, serves to praise and not to affirm the reason that it is said.

...

There is nothing wrong with the evaluative use;
in fact, there is good reason for using "Art" to praise.

But what cannot be maintained is that theories of the evaluative use of "Art" are true and real definitions of the necessary and sufficient properties of art.

Instead they are honorific definitions, pure and simple, in which "Art" has been redefined in terms of chosen criteria.

But what makes them—these honorific definitions—so supremely valuable
is not their disguised linguistic recommendations;

rather it is the debates over the reasons for changing the criteria of the concept of art which are built into the definitions.

In each of the great theories of art,
whether
correctly understood as honorific definitions
or
incorrectly accepted as real definitions,
what is of the utmost importance is the reasons proffered
in the argument for the respective theory, ...

The value of each of the theories resides in its attempt to state and to justify   certain criteria which are either neglected or distorted by previous theories.

This much seems undeniable. It actually follows directly from Danto's "essentialism," and especially from his . . . Wölfflin-ism, that certain things are quite literally un-imaginable in certain times-and-spaces; but thankfully we have records of other times and other thoughts-about-times, and we may hold our thoughts up to them and ask questions. (We may even wonder, then, whether we actually can draw a coherent distinction between what was not possible and what was not realized.)

That said, I think the perennial debate over these criteria of evaluation usually is not much fun, it mostly just raises everyone's blood pressure, and there really isn't much at stake for the principals, which means they are free to conduct the exercise without rules of engagement or best practices which typically apply to human questions that actually matter; and that chronically produces outcomes which, yes, perennially fall short of the ideal. That's why it's so difficult to have faith in the above outlook.

Look at the Bell-Fry theory again.

Of course, "Art is significant form" cannot be accepted as a true, real definition of art; ...

[153]

...

But
what gives it its aesthetic importance
is
what lies behind the formula

:

In an age in which literary and representational elements have become paramount in painting,
return to the plastic ones since these are indigenous to painting.

Thus,
the role of theory is
not to define anything
but to use the definitional form,
almost epigrammatically,
to pinpoint a crucial recommendation ...

It's a peculiar example, actually, because this is an uphill recommendation.

(Doctrines of return can head uphill. Also peculiar!)

Beyond the epigrammatic angle, there's a whole uphill-downhill conversation to be had about the history of these theories; which necessarily entangles us in sociology; which is an unfortunate direction for a philosopher to be pushed in; but it seems necessary, eventually.

[Later]
What I mean is: when something has indeed become paramount it is odd to find so many people advocating for more of it, as if there still were not enough. Rank documents and explains brilliantly the tendency to "reproduce something absent." But what about the agitation for more of what is already present?

Once we, as philosophers, understand this distinction between the formula and what lies behind it,

it behooves us to deal generously with the traditional theories of art;

because
incorporated in every one of them
is a debate over and argument for
emphasizing or centering upon
some particular feature of art
which has been neglected or perverted.

True dat!

If we take the aesthetic theories literally, as we have seen, they all fail;

but
if we reconstrue them,
in terms of their function and point,
as serious and argued-for recommendations
to concentrate on certain criteria of excellence in art,
we shall see that aesthetic theory is far from worthless.

Indeed, it becomes as central as anything in aesthetics, in our understanding of art, for it teaches us what to look for and how to look at it in art.

"Eek, a mouse what to look for!!"

. . .

"On account of you I almost heard the opera knew what to look for!!"

What is central and must be articulated in all the theories are their debates over the reasons for excellence in art—debates over emotional depth, profound truths, natural beauty, exactitude, freshness of treatment, and so on, as criteria of evaluation—the whole of which converges on the perennial problem of what makes a work of art good.

Hmm . . . so we do seem destined here to end in Dantoism after all, with formerly naive audiences having become as critics. I was hoping for the reverse.

I'd rather skew functionalist and just be super-duper skeptical and exacting about it. Other people can decide what makes a work of art good.

To understand the role of aesthetic theory
is not to conceive it as definition,
logically doomed to failure,
but
to read it as summaries of seriously made recommendations
to attend in certain ways to certain features of art.

I do have some recommendations!

Notes

...

MARGOLIS—The Definition of Art

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[137]

Part Two

The Definition of Art

...

The trouble with any effort to fix the basic category-term, "work of art," is that it will depend on what counts as an aesthetic point of view.

But
what counts as an aesthetic point of view cannot itself be decided by some simple inspection of actual usage.

Philosophers seem to decide,
more than to find,
what the boundaries of aesthetic interest are
...

Fingerprints or Mushroom Stamps?

This is my Goodreads review of Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity.

---

Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.

Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.

I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.

This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine.

GEORGE DICKIE—The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

What to do with this, knowing that it comes not at the end but at the beginning of a long series of refinements, abandonments and reformulations?

I only know how to do one thing, so that's what I'll be doing here.

---

[100]

The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

GEORGE DICKIE

[orig. 1964]

Some recent articles¹ have suggested the unsatisfactoriness of the notion of the aesthetic attitude and it is now time for a fresh look at that encrusted article of faith.

Note 1 lists two articles:

Marshall Cohen, "Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude" (1959)

Joseph Margolis, "Aesthetic Perception" (1960)

This conception has been valuable to aesthetics and criticism in helping wean them from a sole concern with beauty and related notions. However, I shall argue that the aesthetic attitude is a myth...

TIMOTHY BINKLEY—Contra Aesthetics

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[80]

Piece: Contra Aesthetics

TIMOTHY BINKLEY

[orig. 1977]

I. What Is This Piece?

1. The term "aesthetics" has a general meaning in which it refers to the philosophy of art. In this sense, any theoretical writing about art falls within the realm of aesthetics.

There is also a more specific and more important sense of the term in which it refers to a particular type of theoretical inquiry which emerged in the eighteenth century when the "Faculty of Taste" was invented. In this latter sense, "aesthetics" is the study of a specific human activity involving the perception of aesthetic qualities such as beauty, repose, expressiveness, unity, liveliness.

I think I prefer the first sense to the second, even though it often appears semantically imprecise or even outright deceptive.

Later in the Anthology we encounter some powerful arguments against conflating "aesthetics" with "philosophy of art"!

Although frequently purporting to be a (or even the) philosophy of art ,

aesthetics so understood is not exclusively about art :

This is exactly what I don't like about the second sense.

. . . in relation to the unknown

My dad once said to me that philosophy is "highly destructive of certainty." Thus prompted, I want to enumerate some (possibly novel) observations about certainty which come from outside philosophy's academic silo. In doing so, I affirm the above remark as a serviceable mandate for philosophy proper, on top of whatever more parochial application it may find day-to-day; but I suggest, also, that the "destructive" bent is not philosophy's alone, and that, in fact, this oft-hidden "philosophical" potential of so many other intellectual and cultural practices is precisely what redeems them beyond their parochial circumstances of origin. In fact we may be "doing philosophy" while we're doing something else, whether we realize it or not; but this can be the case only if certain peculiar conditions are met therein.

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Christopher Lasch's chapter "The Soul of Man under Secularism," which is the final chapter of his The Revolt of the Elites, contains the following passage:

In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, not as a challenge to complacency and pride. Its ethical teachings are misconstrued as a body of simple commandments leaving no room for ambiguity or doubt. Recall Jung's description of medieval Christians as "children of God [who] knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves." . . .

What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people in the past were unacquainted with existential despair. The famous collection of songs written by medieval students preparing for the priesthood Carmina Burana would be enough in itself to dispel this notion; . . .

Or consider the varieties of religious experience analyzed by William James in his book of that name, . . . Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion.

(pp. 242-243)

For Lasch here, "religion" may be "a challenge to complacency and pride." Is it also destructive of certainty? He says only that certainty is not something that religion necessarily provides. Above all, he sees suggestions to the contrary as a kind of motivated slander issuing from the apostles of "secularism"; in other words, from his book's eponymous "elites." That is more so what is at issue in the above passage.

I happen to think he has a fair point here, despite being a deeply "secular" person myself. Still, it is curious to return to his previous book, The True and Only Heaven, and find the following:

The scientific worldview, [William James] argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. . . . Science . . . had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. . . . Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. . . . It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life.

(p. 289)

Now, if what today's mandarin technocrats "long" for is "to live in a risk-free world," perhaps they are not doing a very good job; perhaps they have become irreverrent of "verification" in precisely such matters as verification ought apply to most rigorously; perhaps they have found the sheer scale and scope of their scientific problems unamenable to control, and so simply given up on "verification" wherever insistence upon it threatens to slow their advance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for one, has powerfully argued this about forecasting and forecasters; and this, anyway, is what so often appears to have happened most any time a new technology is released into the world without its behavior being fully predictable or its effects fully foreseeable. (And how could they be?)

This latter book of Lasch's is subtitled "Progress and its Critics"; but the legitimate critique of scientific progress seems to me to issue from within science's own walls: the whole problem is an irreverence for "verification," not an over-reverrence for it.

But of course science cannot really be about "certainty" either, because true certainty doesn't exist. How often have all of us non-scientists (and non-doctors and non-economists) been scolded to that effect in recent decades? And, how selective and unidirectional this scolding has been!

The reality is that some houses of worship are full of bullheaded hypocrites, just as some institutions of higher learning give safe harbor to sloppy methodologists and bad-faith polemcists. As my undergraduate Music History prof, David Grayson, aptly put it, "It is the destiny of great music to be played badly."

It would be overstating the case to say that "science" or "religion" (or "philosophy" or "music") are necessarily "destructive of certainty," but all can have this effect, depending on how they are practiced. It is the element of practice, as conspicuously absent from Lasch's remarks as from those of his retrospective adversaries, which is ultimately determinative of such outcomes as he is concerned to examine. The Jamesian notion of "quality of belief" can never get us quite all the way to practice. That quality and that belief have to be realized somehow, realized in earthly deed and not just in thought or word. I think that "conduct of life" is not quite the same thing as what I mean to denote here by "realized."

The historical baggage of (and inherent tensions between) religion and science, so-called, make it nearly impossible to parse the issue of practice without adopting a certain degree of methodological philistinism. Again, a high "quality of belief" is of no help here; it more easily blinds us to some otherwise obvious conclusions if we do not take pains to circumvent it. But if we can manage at least this much, then we need not abandon any particular beliefs of our own in order to see, more broadly, that "quality of belief," when it is "realized" in "practice," can (and probably will) lead to the destruction of myriad easy certainties that had taken root prior to the "conversion"; we can see, in other words, that "philosophy" in its certainty-destroying capacity can be practiced through almost any cultural medium, but that not just any quality of belief or of practice will get us all the way there; in yet other words, a high quality of belief realized in exemplary practice can transfigure a seemingly benign earthly pursuit into a fully "philosophical" one; and of course, a low quality of belief or merely perfunctory practical activity makes this exalted outcome impossible, even when the "music" being "played" this way is widely conceded to be "great."

By "methodological philistinism" I mean merely to suggest a way of getting past the obvious fact, inconvenient for both sides of any fraught cultural conflict, that the belief and practice of most exponents, most of the time, is very low. The fallacy of incomplete evidence is always available to those wishing to show that their adversaries have sought mere "intellectual and emotional security" rather than the "challenge to complacency and pride" that comes from commitment and struggle. It would be notable if an author of Lasch's persuasion could show in more detail that this or that commitment to this or that lifeway really did coax a higher "quality" out of its exponents. Failing that, I have only my own haphazard experiences and anecdotes to fall back on, whereby all signs point unequivocally to Jung's purported caricature of Christians being, actually, quite a servicable portrait of every form of ostensible commitment I have run across face-to-face. It is very rare for anything else to be the case. I am suggesting, though, that there are certain commonalities among the committed exceptions, even though they may belong to incommensurable cultural forms, even to the most infamously incommensurable forms, "science" and "religion."

The aim here is not to deny the incommensurability but merely to notice what is wrong with Lasch's remarks, in spite of all that is right with them. James-as-rendered-by-Lasch has badly mistaken the scientific "respect for facts" for heedless worship of them. But to really "respect" facts is something else entirely. This is neither the exclusive burden nor the exclusive privilege of science. Respect per se is precisely the precondition for adeptness at any cultural practice.

Of course in a culturally pluralistic environment one had better be quite careful about paying such respect, about daring even to speak of such minimum "facts" as are necessary to establish preliminarily. How to handle this? There have been entire libraries filled with that kind of advice, and with chronicles of its refinement through practical application. There is nothing "childish" about this literature! Quite the opposite.

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The thing about rationalism that leads the same word to denote a properly philosophical school or lineage, a Silicon Valley subculture, and a potentially deal-breaking trait on dating apps, is precisely that it is destructive of certainty. It may be possible for certain entrepreneurial types to outwit others by reasoning their way to near-certainties which remain opaque to normie-brained competitors, but I'm not sure that this practical application, with its positivistic orientation and narrow scope, serves as a good proxy for everything that a good-faith social actor is confronted with in today's world-at-large. Lack of certainty is one thing, surfeit of illusion is quite another. Human beings are illusion-generating machines. Illusion is constantly being created anew, faster and in greater quantities than any proper "science" or "philosophy" can address it. Only the most pressing or salient matters can be addressed, or (eventually) address themselves; the rest of it skates.

Lasch's chapter of course begins in his dissent from those "1960s revolutionary" slogans which were "much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx"; in dissent from "the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, . . . leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art" (p. 234); from Wilde's notion that Christ was himself the "most supreme of individualists" (p. 232); and so on.

Lasch holds that "this kind of message" merely "confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd." "In place of self-denial and self-control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familiar, or religious obligations." (p. 233) "The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual's growth from childhood to maturity . . . made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition." (p. 237)

Wilde's particular rhetoric may well be worthy of the criticism, and so too may be most of the "artists" who have attempted to make good on it, but it seems, also, that this same criticism cannot apply equally or in the same form to any-and-all ways of being an "artist." Already in the suggestion that life-as-art might be "unconstrained" by any "obligations," something is very wrong. (Recall once again Dr. Grayson's quip.) Much great art of the past seems, at least in hindsight, to have been hatched under severe "constraints," a point which "cultural conservatives" and antimodernist critics never miss an opportunity to reiterate. If Lasch did intend to cast his lot with this tendency, he has buried that intent beneath myriad contrary innuendos.

The Danish radical artist Asger Jorn made a distinction between "art" and "critique" which is very relevant here. Jorn called art "primary action in relation to the unknown," whereas "critique" is "a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists." Of course another way of saying that something "already exists" is to say that its existence is certain. All certainty is precious! The mere "existence" of an artwork is unlikely to be an outright illusion, Warhol and Duchamp notwithstanding; but artworks bring along with them into existence all manner of illusions about the intent, meaning, and value of the work. Intent, meaning, and value are most of what matter about art to most people, but they are often inscrutable, even if the mere existence of the work and certain observations about its formal properties are beyond question. Hence disputes over intent, meaning and value account for most of what goes under the heading, Philosophy of Art.

I think it is because of this inscrutability and not in spite it that these aspects, far more so than the mere artifacts or formal properties themselves, are the customary bases of critique, even long after academic art criticism has contrived an identity for itself as "objective." A mere homage or counterfactual to the form-and-content of an existing artwork is hardly a critique at all unless it bleeds into questions of intent, meaning, or value. That is precisely what is "secondary" about a "secondary reaction," and what is "primary" about "primary action": the bases of critique are epistemically very tenuous, but they are taken as given "facts" about the artwork and about the artist. Conversely, the object of "primary action" is "the unknown," the un-certain; art as primary action pleads uncertainty about the intent, meaning, and value of its antecedents, even as it also is, as all contemporary art must be, a "reaction" to some already-existing forms and artifacts.

What would it mean for someone to underdraw the boundaries of their own certainty based on an illusion? It's not clear that this has any ramifications for Jorn's formulation. If an artist is truly uncertain in the moment of creation, and if that uncertainty is truly their object, then there is the possibility of "primary action." (Of course if a critic interviews them about their state of mind, or tries to read the resulting work for psychological tells, expect the illusions to come at you fast.)

What would it mean to overdraw the boundaries of one's certainty? This is more familiar, and it does, plainly, come to bear on "critique."

What is wrong with Lasch's chapter, then, is that he has merely presented the reverse caricature of the one he is writing against. He has committed the same fallacy of incomplete evidence. The fallacy is the same because certain contours of the problem are the same in religion, science, philosophy, and art: it is easy enough for outsiders to form a certain uncharitable view based on the lowest common denominator of practitioners; at this, the adepts are bound to cry foul, but there is little they can do to compel a higher quality of belief in their cohort.

It's a bit of a stretch (but only a bit) to rephrase Lasch in Jorn's terms: Wilde claimed to be extolling life lived as a work of art, but what he (or at least his postmodern pseudo-followers) ended up extolling, instead, was life lived as a critique of all the lives which had come before, a critique of the "common herd" toward which they now felt a "sense of superiority."

In yet other words,

disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modern pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets.

(pp 241-242)

Now, what is so wrong with a little bit of well-justified "disillusionment?" One problem, at least, with this "modern" form, besides its pridefulness, is that it is too knowing; it can only amount to "critique," to "secondary" rather than "primary" action. What does the knee-jerk Pollyanna rejoinder to "disillusionment" come down to but the suggestion that perhaps the pessimist does not fully know the good side of everything at issue? I tend to be pessimistic, that is, to think precisely the opposite; but I also tend to think that we do not actually manage to dig up very much of everything that is down there, good or bad, no matter how hard we try; hence the irreducible "unknown," what Donald Rumsfeld infamously called "known unknowns," in relation to which we "act" . . . if in fact that is how we understand ourselves to be acting . . . not even if but especially if we are "artists."

Conventionally the reversion to critique is parsed as a postmodern inevitability, the curse of life after-the-fact: too much has been done, too much is known too well; not enough is uncertain. But again, this can refer only to the mere existence of artifacts and formal properties. That is all that we really know about. We do not really know much about intent, meaning, or value. Most of what we know is that those things do not remain stable over time. We know that we ourselves may feel or react differently each time we confront the same inanimate physical stimulus, but we do not know exactly why. Instrumental musicians come to know this especially intimately through our peculiar kind of "practice." Yet when we encounter people who themselves do not have that kind of intimacy with the artworks or with the instruments, we constantly find them driven to desperately deny any uncertainty about intent, meaning, and value, because it is precisely (and perhaps paradoxically) these epiphenomena of artworks that people care most about. Here of all places is where audiences demand certainty, precisely where it is least forthcoming. Understandably, people are not too keen to simply abandon their most cherished intuitions to the undertow of passing time and the ever-accelerating churn of cultural relativity. But it is precisely this denial which imprisons us in critique. It is nothing about how much we really know, nothing about the instability of popular taste or about the arbitrariness of signification. Rather, it is our desire to know all, and to think that we already do. It is the old "childish desire" again. And so Lasch, though he overcorrects, also provides an indispenable piece of advice for artists and audiences, even for those of us who will never believe in God. Of course we cannot (must not) simply forget what we know; but given what precious little certainty is available to us, there really is no shortage of "unknown" arenas for "artists" to "act" in "relation" to. In fact there is an abundance of "unknowns," the more so the more exemplary our "practice" can be made. What is not abundant? The courage and intellect required to face up to it all; the same in art as in religion, philosophy, and science.

As usual, Ernest Becker has a passage which ties all of these disparate ideas together beautifully:

In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away, . . .   If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? . . .   We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.

. . . there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending. I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers.   . . . the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it.   . . .   There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.

(The Birth and Death of Meaning, pp. 120-121)

Scientific materialism, in other words, furnishes an ever lengthier and more detailed chain of proximate causes without ever quite landing on an ultimate cause. There is no danger here of going wanting either for "facts" or for "uncertainty," or for "existential despair" if that's more your bag. It's all in the mix. Blanket ascriptions of "childishness," then, just like blanket ascriptions of adept enlightenment or religious profundity, cannot really be made, at least not to entire academic fields or cultural institutions. These ascriptions can be made only to individuals. There is no social theory of art that can modulate the epistemics of that question. The "great music" of science can be played "badly" or it can be played well; a hobbyist group can give a jagged but rousing rendition, or a celebrity professional group can give a soullessly "perfect" one. Choose your own adventure.

William James cannot serve as proxy for the sum total of modern religious practice, because there have not been very many William Jameses (perhaps there has been exactly one) in the "modern" era. There was, however, at least one, just as there have been a few model rationalists, and indeed also a few (only a few) modern artists who have insisted, always, on acting in relation to the unknown, in Jorn's sense; or perhaps what these artists have done is merely understood, as good rationalists also do, when this is actually what they are doing, and when it actually is not.

Wolterstorff—Kissing, Touching, and Crying

Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)

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[17]

I

From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the Times regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,

imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.

The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the Times regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,

The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.

One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."

How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this attendee's pronouncement to the scrutiny of analytic philosophy!