Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part III

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

[SK's comments]

---

[249]

...

Part III
Identifying art

Definition and identification

Recent attempts to define art ... have proven thus far to be inconclusive. ...

And yet we are able

to identify art ... with a very

high degree of consensus.

" . . . , presuming of course
that nothing important is riding on the

consensus

itself,
for if there is, it will soon disintegrate. . . . "

Thus the question of how we manage to do it

remains pressing.

Well,
the apparent paradox given above establishes that

the question

is difficult,
not that it is

pressing

.

Those are two different things.

Moreover, this is not

merely an academic question.

Classifying artifacts as artworks is

central to our practice

of art. ... is integral to

determining how we should respond

to it. ... Should we attend to the expressive properties of a amalgam of crushed and mangled automobile chassis or

[250]

consign them to the junkyard?

How about

  first the one,

    and then the other

?

If art, these objects bear scrutiny and interpretation. If not, we call the Department of Sanitation.

". . . Quick, what's the number for Critics and Interpreters? . . ."

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part II (cont.)

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

[SK's comments]

[this post picks up where this one left off]

---

[226]

...

Neo-Wittgensteinianism has an obvious problem dealing with readymades and found objects. If In Advance of a Broken Arm is an artwork, then any snow shovel that is indiscernible from it, including yours and mine, should be an artwork as well. If we simply attend to the

[227]

perceptible features of the shovels in question, they should all count as artworks, since they are perceptually indiscernible. ... But this result is wrongheaded. ... The Institutional Theorist appeals to certain nonmanifest, relational properties that In Advance of a Broken Arm possesses and that my snow shovel does not, ...

The Institutional Theorist calls the relevant social practice "the artworld." The artworld, he claims, is

a social institution, like religion,

insofar as it is

underwritten by rules and procedures.

Candidates are artworks because they abide by the pertinent artworld rules and procedures. In other words, an artwork is

generated by

playing by

the required rules and procedures. These social rules are the underlying factors that

make artworks possible

(they are

analogous to the genetic mechanisms

that account for family resemblances).

The relation of the artwork

to the rules

is

not a manifest property

of the artwork—you cannot eyeball it ... ; it is

a function of

the social context

into which the artwork is inserted.

This seems not quite

genetic

so long as it is
not quite a

mechanism.

.

It approaches a "mechanistic" tractability only as scale and sample approach infinity.

i.e. It is tractable in this way only where it can be formulated as a problem of disorganized complexity and its surface thereby observed.

But
to land on these emergent

rules

you have to ignore all of the "rules"
which prevail at the organized level,

i.e.,
in this case,
at the so-called individual level.

If the discovery that humanity is a culture-bound superorganism merely becomes the latest rationalization for subjugating 'individuals' to 'the system', then it would be better to put this discovery on a rocket and shoot it to the moon.

Margolis—The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

---

[215]

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 215-223

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

---

The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

[SK's comments]

The philosophy of art may be doomed,
again and again
but always once and for all,
to define what it is to be
"a work of art,"
an "artwork,"
"art"
in the sense

best suited to "the fine arts."

Modern efforts seem to end
in exhaustion
or bafflement
or sheer scatter
or

a sort of bad faith

that assures us that it was never worth the bother in the first place.

But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel.

We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, ...

published ... only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953),

on which,

however inaccurately,

it claims to depend.

If Weitz's account is regarded
as
the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at once ...

it is equally plausible
to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay,
"The Artworld," published in 1964,
with
having confirmed
(by the absence of explicit mention,
so to say)
the single most-discussed version
of
the great complication
that
baffled all efforts
at
defining art
in accord with
the new spirit of rigor
that had just taken hold
in
analytic aesthetics.

I mean,
of course,

the trauma

produced by

Duchamp's devilish jokes

(especially the notorious Fountain)

transfigured,

in Danto's hands,
into

the sober metaphysics

of Warhol's Brillo Box.

Kristeller—The Modern System of the Arts

Paul Oskar Kristeller
The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics
Part I
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1951),
pp. 496-527

[SK's comments]

[minimal excisions in main body]

[many Greek terms dashed out]

---

I read this a while back, once and quickly. It's good to come back to it. But I would not have thought that it would figure in the Definition Wars, and I'm still not sure that it should.

[496]

THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS:

A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I)

By Paul Oskar Kristeller

Dedicated to Professor Hans Tietze on his 70th birthday

I

  The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized.

To be sure, there has been a great variety of theories and currents within the last two hundred years that cannot be easily brought under one common denominator.

Yet all the changes and controversies of the more recent past presuppose certain fundamental notions which go back to that classical century of modern aesthetics.

It is known that the very term "Aesthetics" was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the "philosophy of art," was invented in that comparatively recent period

and can be

applied to earlier phases of Western thought

only with reservation. ¹

It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of

  ¹ ...

For music: H. Sahlender, Die Bewertung der Musik im System der Kuenste: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (thes. Jena, 1929). ...

[497]

modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century.

Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were

compared with each other

and discussed

on the basis of common principles,

whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with

technical precepts

rather than with

general ideas.

Finally, at least a few scholars have noticed that the term "Art," with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term "Fine Arts" (Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century.

  In this paper, I shall take all these facts for granted, and shall concentrate instead on a much simpler and in a sense more fundamental point that is closely related to the problems so far mentioned, but does not seem to have received sufficient attention in its own right.

Although the terms " Art," "Fine Arts " or "Beaux Arts" are often identified with the visual arts alone, they are also quite commonly understood in a broader sense.

In this broader meaning, the term "Art" comprises above all the five major arts of

painting,

sculpture,

architecture,

music

and

poetry.

These five constitute the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree.

On the other hand, certain additional arts are sometimes added to the scheme, but with less regularity, depending on the different views and interests of the authors concerned: gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature.

John Wisdom—Things and Persons

Symposium: Things and Persons
D. M. Mackinnon, H. A. Hodges, John Wisdom
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 22 (1948), pp. 179-215

[SK's comments]

[202]

III.—By JOHN WISDOM.

...

[206]

...

3. To return.
MacKinnon wants ethical problems taken seriously,
and perhaps we ought to say
that

he wants them taken seriously
not merely
by people who have a particular problem to deal with,
but also
by people who are dealing with a problem of some generality
even though,
as in a problem play,
the problem is presented through a particular case.

Connected with this
which is, I believe, his main concern
are two other points :

(1) He thinks that
many ethical problems are
better put

in terms of people

than

in terms of acts.

Thus he says that writers like Kierkegaard, Buber and Marcel raise the problem of the individual.

He also says that Butler,
as opposed to a utilitarian,
argues that
the proper subject of the moralist is the individual or person in his nature and in his relation with his fellows,
and that
he refuses consequently to allow that we can so to speak
"absorb

ethical reflection

in discussion of

the means of promoting good".

Beardsley, Morgan, and Mothersill—On Art and The Definitions of the Arts

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1961),
pp. 175-187

ON ART AND THE DEFINITIONS OF ARTS: A SYMPOSIUM

[SK's comments]

THE DEFINITIONS OF THE ARTS

Monroe C. Beardsley

THERE IS ONE VALUABLE—but inadequately appreciated—contribution that aesthetics has made to the growth of 20th-century philosophy in general.

Its generic concepts,
art and work of art,
have served as

paradigm cases

of most of the forms of

waywardness

to which

concepts

are subject:

they have worked overtime as Horrible Examples.

When philosophers were making much of the point
that
some important terms have

variable meaning,

and in some contexts are

ambiguous,

the term "art" provided a fine example,
especially of

the process-product type

of ambiguity.

In some contexts it certainly entails conscious skill,
but
we recall also Shelley's skylark pouring forth its soul
"in profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

When "emotive meaning" came into view,
with all its devious consequences,
the term "work of art" seemed to provide a fine example of "persuasive definition,"
however defined—

for it has widely been assumed to be

classifiable among

the normative or "emotive" terms.

Finally,

through the influence

(at first clandestine,
but after 1953 public)

of Wittgenstein, and others,

many philosophers gave up
the traditional idea
that
general terms are, or ought to be,
definable by necessary and sufficient conditions—

and then these aesthetic terms became

prime examples

of "family-resemblance" and "open-texture" terms.

Haig Khatchadourian—Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments

Haig Khatchadourian
Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments
Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 136 (Jan., 1961), pp. 30-48

[SK's comments]

[30]

I

IN an earlier paper
I have attempted to show,
among other things,
that the names (primarily) of

human artifacts

and

man-devised activities and processes

involve in their uses
the notion of
some

end-in-view,

function,

or use

(more or less different in the case of different names),
which partially regulates these uses.

In this paper I shall limit myself to a somewhat detailed discussion of one very important class of such common names which requires a separate treatment.

I mean art-names.

Haig Khatchadourian—Common Names and "Family Resemblances"

Haig Khatchadourian
Common Names and "Family Resemblances"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1958)

[SK's comments]

Maurice Mandelbaum:
"Haig Khatchadourian has shown that Wittgenstein is less explicit than he should have been with respect to the levels of determinateness at which these resemblances are significant for our use of common names."

This paper makes for utterly thankless reading. I think it's also completely wrong about the "determinateness" issue. Unfortunately, several art-philosophers of the day refer to it, including in the above case, where it serves as a means of reconstituting what Wittgenstein sought to dissolve. Hence we charge ahead at full-throttle.

[341]

COMMON NAMES AND "FAMILY RESEMBLANCES"

I

... we propose to give, first,
a brief analysis of Wittgenstein's notion ...

Next we shall try to show
that

whether or not "family resemblances" constitute a general feature of ordinary language so far as common names are concerned,

there are at least some common names
such that the things named by them

do have

one or more features in common,

though this feature or these features are not

a determinate or relatively determinate

quality or characteristic.

Whatsoever could be a

feature

without also being

a determinate

quality or characteristic

?

Whatsoever
could this "determinacy"
be

relative

to?

Maurice Mandelbaum—Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts

[219]

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Volume 2, Number 3, July 1965

V. FAMILY RESEMBLANCES AND GENERALIZATION
CONCERNING THE ARTS

MAURICE MANDELBAUM

[SK's comments]

In 1954 William Elton collected and published a group of essays under the title Aesthetics and Language.

As his introduction made clear,
a common feature of these essays was

the application to aesthetic problems

of

some of the doctrines

characteristic of

recent British linguistic philosophy.

... there have been a number of important articles which, in addition to those contained in the Elton volume, suggest the direction in which this influence runs.

...

"The Task of Defining a Work of Art"
by Paul Ziff,

"The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"
by Morris Weitz,

Charles L. Stevenson's
"On 'What is a Poem'"

and
W. E. Kennick's
"Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?"

In each of them one finds a conviction which was also present in most of the essays in the Elton volume:

that it is a mistake

to offer generalizations concerning the arts,

...

to attempt to discuss

what art, or beauty, or the aesthetic, or a poem,

essentially is.

In partial support of this contention, some writers have

made explicit use

of Wittgenstein's doctrine of family resemblances;

Morris Weitz, for example, ...

However, ... [he] made no attempt to analyze, clarify, or defend

the doctrine itself.

...

a husserlian interlude within a contemporary introduction (cont. #3)

 

PHENOMENOLOGY, ROLE, AND REASON:
ESSAYS ON THE COHERENCE AND DEFORMATION OF SOCIAL REALITY
By
MAURICE NATANSON
(1974)

[SK's comments]

---

Because the detonator on this discussion was the Institutional Theory of Art, and because I spent the second half of 2025 dabbling in Phenomenology, I can't resist bringing Schutz's sociological notion of "typification" into the current discussion of concept formation, just to see what (if anything) can be gleaned from it. This did open up plenty of new ground, far too much of it.

---

[33]

Chapter III

Alfred Schutz on Social Reality
and Social Science

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.—Alfred North Whitehead

I

It has taken American philosophers and social scientists thirty-five years to catch up with the early work of Alfred Schutz.

His Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie was first published in 1932. ... It is clear that [this work] was closely studied by some of the ablest minds of the 'thirties and 'forties ...

[34]

...

Philosophy is inescapable for the social scientist who seeks clarity and rigor in his work, ...

Nor is it solely a question of interest in the logic of scientific inquiry, ...

Philosophy is rather concerned with

the phenomena of the social world:

men acting in the context of an intersubjective reality, shared and sustained by temporal beings aware of themselves no less than of one another.

...

In its historical focus, The Phenomenology of the Social World is an attempt to vindicate and deepen Max Weber's theory of social action by providing for it a philosophical grounding which derives from some of the central ideas of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson.

In its systematic aspect, the Phenomenology is an effort to establish the outlines of a conception of meaning whose constitutive character is grounded in the reality of inner-time consciousness.

In its programmatic dimension, the Phenomenology is an adumbration of

a philosophy of social reality,

[35]

not simply a methodology but

an anatomy of man's existence with his fellow-men in the midst of everyday life,

within what Husserl called

the "natural attitude."

The axis on which this threefold movement turns is phenomenology itself, ...

The social world is primarily the world of everyday life as lived and appreciated and interpreted by common-sense men carrying on the cognitive and emotive traffic of daily life.

"Common-sense men" includes all of us insofar as

we act in the world

rather than

observe it formally as disinterested scientists.

...

Philosophy is, in fact, a reversal of the underlying attitude of common-sense life,

a primordial glance at what the mundane eye has simply accepted without even the intimation of serious question.

It is possible to be swept up and thrown headlong into this

reversal

without asking for it.
In this sense, it is not the

eye

that is

mundane

(or not)
but rather that which is seen.

Just as our purported morals can be broken by constructing ever more outlandish hypothetical choices, so can our

common-sense

views be broken by encountering evermore outlandish situations wherein certain questions are forced upon us.

(For left-identified transplants like me, the homelessness situation in Los Angeles is an excellent example.)

Among those not asking for it, as among those who veritably beg, there must be a full gamut of (in)susceptibility. Still, desire and susceptibility are sold separately, and every man has his price.

Blogspot Bingo: Family Resemblance

google query, 11 dec 2025:
wittgenstein family resemblance site:blogspot.com

---

Philosophical Perspectives in Clinical Psychology
Essences and Family resemblances

perhaps even Wittgenstein - but certainly those who have taken his ideas to warrant talk of types of concepts called 'family resemblance concepts' - stray too far towards equating essences and necessary/sufficient conditions. Just because various instances of a phenomenon may have no one thing in common apart from their being instances of that one phenomenon - no one further thing in common, one might say - does not, I contend, imply that the phenomenon has no essence.

A worthy insight.

I think I know what necessary/sufficient conditions are. What is an essence? If I try to define it in a way that allows me to agree with the above, I can conjure only fanciful metaphors.

e.g. It's possible (likely, even) that the 'average' of a set of numbers does not itself appear in the set.

Here as always, the 'truth' of the average is a matter of what you're trying to do with it. So with essences, I would think.

In this metaphor of 'averages', essences are reductive. Is there a constructive version? I don't think so.

"It is far easier to analyze [someone] than to synthesize him."

(E.O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 83)

---

Find posts labeled 'Wittgenstein' here.

a wittgensteinian interlude to a contemporary introduction (cont. #2)

[SK's comments]

[These are the two papers mentioned by Bambrough (1961) in a footnote: "Of recent writings on this topic I believe that only [these] show a complete understanding of the nature and importance of Wittgenstein's contribution" to "the problem of universals".]

---

JOHN WISDOМ
PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
(1964)

---

 

[51]

METAPHYSICS AND VERIFICATION
(Reprinted from Mind, Vol. XLVII, N.S., No. 188, 1938)

a wittgensteinian interlude within a contemporary introduction (cont. #1)

 

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 7, 573-605 (1975)
'Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories'
ELEANOR ROSCH AND CAROLYN B. MERVIS
University of California, Berkeley

Six experiments explored the hypothesis that the members of categories which are considered most prototypical are those with most attributes in common with other members of the category and least attributes in common with other categories. In probabilistic terms, the hypothesis is that prototypicality is a function of the total cue validity of the attributes of items.
...

As speakers of our language and members of our culture, we know that a chair is a more reasonable exemplar of the category furniture than a radio, and that some chairs fit our idea or image of a chair better than others.

However, when describing categories analytically, most traditions of thought have treated category membership as a digital, all-or-none phenomenon.

That is, much work in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology assumes that categories are logical bounded entities, membership in which is defined by an item’s posses-

[574]

sion of a simple set of criterial features, in which all instances possessing the criterial attributes have a full and equal degree of membership.

In contrast to such a view, it has been recently argued that some natural categories are analog and must be represented logically in a manner which reflects their analog structure.

Rosch (1973, 1975b) has further characterized some natural analog categories as internally structured into a prototype (clearest cases, best examples of the category) and nonprototype members, with nonprototype members tending toward an order from better to poorer examples.

While the domain for which such a claim has been demonstrated most unequivocally is that of color there is also considerable evidence that natural superordinate semantic categories have a prototype structure. Subjects can reliably rate the extent to which a member of a category fits their idea or image of the meaning of the category name , and such ratings predict performance in a number of tasks.

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part II

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

---

[224]

Part II
Two contemporary
definitions of art

The Institutional Theory of Art

...

[225]

...

Institutional Theorists like [George] Dickie were

impressed

by a certain criticism of the family resemblance method ... Suggested by Maurice Mandelbaum,

the objection

scrutinizes

the central metaphor of Neo-Wittgensteinians

—family resemblance—

and finds it wanting.

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part I

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

---

[206]

5
Art, definition and identification

Part I
Against definition

Neo-Wittgensteinianism: art
as an open concept

... we have examined successive attempts to define art. ... each of them appears inadequate in turn. Undoubtedly, this has led some readers to suspect that maybe one cannot define art at all; ... Or, perhaps some of you thought this from the very beginning; ... you may feel reassured to learn that [this] is also a philosophical position, sometimes called Neo-Wittgensteinianism.

...   Probably one reason that Western philosophers have been preoccupied with defining art for the last century or so is that it is during this period that we have found ourselves confronted with a dazzling array of different kinds of art ...

And, ... during the same period, Westerners grew more and more familiar with the art of other cultures, ...

[207]

... Whereas for centuries art developed slowly and smoothly ... , by the twentieth century matters were getting confusing. ...

It is at least plausible to suppose that if we had assembled a group of informed art lovers at some imaginary point around the middle of the eighteenth century and paraded a selection of objects before them ... they would have been able to agree, to a surprising extent, about which of the objects were art and which were not. ... They possessed a shared, though often unarticulated, understanding ...

Artists, too, shared in this common understanding, ...

...

Identifying art became a pressing issue;

 

Not really. I mean, those few who did care, cared intensely. That is one way to measure pressingness. But if we also find that many of these people had something more riding on this issue, so much more than the comfort of shared understanding or the general human hatred of confusion, then the "pressing" quality of their discourse on the matter is more plausibly explained by self-interest than by anything more cosmic. But, do expect the case for the cosmic importance of x to be made in a book devoted to x!

 

...

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 4—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

---

[182]

Part II
The aesthetic dimension

Aesthetic experience revisited

...   the aesthetic theory of art is not a comprehensive theory of all art. However, the notion of aesthetic experience pervades our discussion of art. ...

... the most popular conception of aesthetic experience claims that it is

the disinterested and sympathetic attention and

[183]

contemplation of any object whatsoever for its own sake.

... Our responses to artworks—let us call them art-responses—may encompass things other than aesthetic experience. Yet what is it when we experience an artwork aesthetically? ...

We can have what we call aesthetic experiences of artworks, or of everyday things, like nature. These experiences involve

attention

and

contemplation

as their most characteristic elements. ...

Moreover, what are called aesthetic experiences are

sympathetic,

at least in this sense

: that we

take cognizance

of the object in question and we attempt to let it

guide us where it will.

 

I think that, ideally, we would not attempt so hard. Ideally, we would only realize later (if at all?) that we had been guided.

If so, then we might as well go ahead and define 'interestedness' as 'whatever is preventing us from being "guided"'. And this, of course, includes trying so hard to be guided that we can't even breathe.

Yes, this all sounds too gooey and romantic. In one sense it is extreme. Why go quite so far? Because,

"Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

(Freud)

 

...   [The work] may be intended to lead us where we do not wish to go. It may

alienate our sympathies.

However,

our experience can still be called aesthetic

so long as we approach the work openly, ...

...

[184]

... We would not typically call an experience of a work aesthetic that altogether ignored the structures of the work and what they were intended to do.

 

I would hesitate to call an experience aesthetic if it made too much of intentions and not enough of structures . . .

 

... what of disinterestedness? Disinterestedness is generally regarded as the most important element of aesthetic experience. But is aesthetic experience really disinterested?

...   The existence of such a state is often inferred by considering certain examples and by proposing disinterestedness as the best concept for explaining them. For instance, if someone goes to a school play because her daughter is in it, and she spends all her time nodding beamingly at her offspring's performance, proponents of disinterestedness will suggest that we all agree that her experience is not aesthetic. What is wrong here? The proponent of disinterestedness explains: her attention is guided by her personal interests; it is not impartial; it is not disinterested.

Likewise, if a patron of the arts admires his recently acquired painting because he is sure it will make him world famous, his attention is motivated by his personal interests; ...

Finally, where a Bolshevik commissar reads a novel solely to confirm that all the references to Stalin are adulatory, he was not reading in a manner that most would call aesthetic. ...

Surely in these cases, there is something

wrong

or

deficient

about the way in which the audience members in question are responding to the relevant artworks.

 

As a friend of aesthetics, I ask: What tf is really, truly wrong with these cases as given? It's clear enough that they are deficient, if we insist on wording things that way. It's clear how they are "deficient," and in what they are "deficient." But what's really wrong with being deficient in just this way?

A parent may be smothering, a patron may be vain, and a commissar may be morally bankrupt and unfeeling, but of course this is not at all what Our Man means to suggest, and he is correct, presumably, that the (un)wisdom of these various stances is no more what is at issue in the diagnosis and consideration of "interested" attention than it is in the construction of ideals of "disinterested" attention.

What is at issue? It's a question of what is or is not happening. It's a simple question, really. The dialogue around it is so complex only because so many people, so much of the time, don't like the answers.

When the "happening" is cognitive rather than behavioral, it is extremely difficult to catch any glimpse at it at all; but that also is not what is at issue above. No matter on what side of the issue we have situated ourselves, by entering capital-P debate we presume to apply some deductive rigor to the problem as we see it; and if empirical investigation is difficult or impossible in the given case, that is no deterrent to such nonempirical methods as the capital-Ps deploy; if anything, a problem's intransigence to empirical methods actually validates the appeal to nonempirical methods.

So, speaking for a theory in which he does not personally believe, a theory which he has in fact made a career of opposing, Our Man Here professes surety that the Aesthetic Theorist thinks there is something wrong with "interested" attention paid to an artwork which (let us just presume) also affords the attention-payer the opportunity for aesthetic satisfaction. But how could there really be some big-picture moral principle at stake here? If there is such a principle at stake, then pretty much everyone who believes in a Judgment Day is in for a much tougher time than they realize, since pretty much everyone has been "wrong" about art in precisely this way, if not all the time then at least some of the time. Why? Because we are profoundly interested creatures. It's necessary, actually, that we reset ourselves to "interested" in certain situations! The above-given examples, each in their own way, suggest a few of the more salient human situations in which "disinterest" would be pathological.

Where I think friends of aesthetics have erred most often and most egregiously is in characterizing the effort to achieve "disinterest." For the longest time it seems this was construed as an effort of the aesthete to achieve some stance vis-a-vis the object of interest. I've never been sure how that would even work, since it seems . . . very "interested," explicit, and self-conscious to put forth just that much effort toward the taking in of some artwork. It seems possible to me only in the abstract that "effort" could be "disinterested"; in reality, I don't see how I could evince "effort" and "disinterest" together in a single thought or action: should this be demanded of me, then the demand itself has simply created an "interest"; or, if there is no real demand, then there can be nothing like "effort" either.

But the artist, conventionally speaking, makes an effort too: the artist can make an effort to entrain the subject into so-called "aesthetic" subjectivity; or they can make no such effort, or they can make some other effort, or (this one really caught on for a while) they can make great, valorous effort to entrain the subject into non-aesthetic subjectivity. If we really do think we can place a given artist on such a continuum, then we have surely identified one kind of "intent"; and then, for any "intentionalists" among us, there is the semblance of a principled reason for declaring there to be "something wrong" with the doting mother or (Urmson's example seized upon by Dickie) the greedy impresario. Something seems intuitively "wrong," or at least unfair, about all that noble art-effort coming to nothing on account of such base motives as attachment or greed.

Our Man does seem to believe in intent, and in intent-ional-ism. He seems actually, i.e. personally and professionally, to believe in it.

I do not believe in intentionalism.

I do believe that "disinterestedness" and "interestedness" both happen, and that the distinction between them is a coherent distinction, both abstractly and empirically.

I believe that "disinterested" aesthetic experience has an indispensible social function. However, this does not simply stipulate by implication that its "interested" counterpart is "wrong," either in general or in given cases, as above.

What is wrong? Intentionalism is wrong. Stuffed-shirt art-papistry is wrong. Calling a mother "wrong" for being unable to "distance" herself from her young daughter's school theater production is definitely super wrong! Labelling her connoisseurship of kid-theater as "deficient" is closer to the capital-P truth, but this is a bit rude and misdirected even for my tastes.

What can we say about the latter case? We can say much that will get us in equally hot water with a whole other department of the institutional Boomersphere leviathan. That is, we can refuse to agree that "disinterest" is in evidence when we have good reason to think otherwise, and we can refuse to agree that "interestedness" is not in evidence when it very clearly is.

We can simply notice

that this silly little example actually is fully paradigmatic;

that mother-to-daughter is only the most powerful of many particularistic attachments;

that these attachments do not need to be half this powerful to be, nonetheless, fully destructive of "disinterest" and constitutive of "interest";

that culture is "a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value" (Becker again), and that this is an "interest" that lives in every single human being, sometimes sublimated, other times exploding above the surface;

BUT, all the same, that such "interest" does not simply come and go at the same time, to the same degree, with same consequences, for everyone alike;

that every particularlistic attachment, every self-conscious tribal identification, every pang of hunger for "a feeling of primary value," every single one of these is a tidal wave of explicit "interest" countervailing any implicitly "disinterested" practice;

and that it is not possible for "disinterest" to simply push back with equal force, since the very essence of "disinterest" is that it is implicit, unspoken, and yes, therefore intensely fragile.