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

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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, ...

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...

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,"...

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...

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

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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

...