16 May 2025

Ted Cohen—The Possibility of Art


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


[186]

10. The Possibility of Art:
Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie

TED COHEN
[orig. 1973]



... Like much of Dickie's best work, this essay ["Defining Art"] is brief, direct, and convincing ... This time, however, I think he has tried to make things more simple and ingenuous than they can be.

The definition Dickie presents ...

A work of art in the descriptive sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation .

... it may be helpful to note three special features of Dickie's thesis.


(1) The somewhat checkered history of attempts to define art is usually seen as a series of specifications of art-making properties.

These properties, though subtle and sometimes relational, have been understood to be properties the eye can descry. The definitions which require these properties of artworks are widely thought to have been discredited, if not by earlier examples, by the onslaught of problematic cases and counterexamples supplied by twentieth-century art.

The first question here for formulators of counterarguments: are these actually counterexamples? Or are they more problematic for certain observers and less so for others?

Each definition

(for example,
"Art is imitation,
or expression,
or significant form,
or symbolic feeling")

seems either to founder straightway,

since many obvious artworks do not display the allegedly necessary property,

or
to retreat into insignificance,

since the property it cites cannot be seen and is presumed to be

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present only because the objects are artworks.

Well . . . is the insignificance critique available against Danto and Dickie too?!

The suggestion that the old definitions (the "honorific" definitions, to use Weitz's term) also rest upon properties which cannot be seen suddenly strikes me as novel. Has Danto conveniently omitted this aspect of those theories in order to better distinguish his own from them? Or is Cohen's observation here simply hiding (from me) in plain sight in Danto's work?

"Imitation" clearly is not of this type: ostensibly it can be "seen." (Whether it is "noticed" may be another question.)

"Expression" ostensibly is a direct product of whatever is seen, though it itself cannot be.

Ditto "symbolic feeling," which I've never heard of before, at least not as a full-fledged definition.

"Significant form" may fail as a definition, but it seems daft to claim that it implicates something which "cannot be seen." It too is a second-order product of something seen; an artifact of see-ing which is not itself see-able.

Perhaps this is the clue to my perplexity at the above remark of Cohen's: what we see, in the sense referred to, is not what we experience (don't say "feel"). The "problematic" cases, then, are those where we don't experience "expression," or "significant form," or "symbolic feeling" because we don't "see" whatever first-order stimulus begets those second-order ascriptions: we don't see the "significant form" in a mass of jumbled wire or hear it in a free-jazz honkathon, although we do see the mass and hear the sound; and yet the work strikes us as, or just clearly is, an artwork, for reasons which . . . , well, just assume for now that we can find some freestanding reasons if we really need to.

And now, I think this points to the most glaring problem with Dantoism, and perhaps (if I understood it better) with Dickieism too: presumably something is seen rather than nothing. Or perhaps it is heard, or read, or yes, perhaps it is merely an "idea," communicated who-knows-how, but received as such and thereby experienced (we can only say) aesthetically as well as in whatever other [adverb]-ally manner. The Dantoist, by insisting even here that the art-conferring property has not actually been "seen," is then forced into arguing that a stimulus of the Duchampian type tout court does not entrain the receiver into even the first-order type of response, to say nothing of the second-order type; this despite the stimulus being presumed to be something and not to be nothing . . . and this argument cannot possibly be correct, not even in the case of explicit and literal language use. The literalness itself, like the vaunted Concept of the Conceptualist, can only be intended, and some problematic case of deviance or misprision can always be found for even the aridest stimuli; we can find it on the other side of the globe if we have to, but even that old saw forces a significant corollary to Dantoist theory, a corollary which begs all manner of important questions and leads thereby to conclusive objections.

Yep, I'm not above suggesting that (some) people who (like all of us, purportedly) do not "see" the art-conferring properties of Fountain nonetheless do see the "aesthetic" qualities of the urinal qua urinal. Of course this itself is no indictment of Dantoism: no instance of seeing-urinal where seeing-Fountain is intended can sink or exalt a Theory Of Art philosophically. What the example does, rather, is to point up more precisely what kind of social and moral action the making of a Fountain-work really is. It shows, precisely as the Dantoist/Dickieist says, that the conferral process and the seeing process have nothing necessarly to do with each other. What it does not show (what no Theory of Art can show) is that the actual, empirical divergence of the two processes is unproblematic, or even can be (ought to be) tolerated. This latter is nothing less than a moral question for anyone, artist or audience, seeking to live an "examined life." I'm continually surprised at how thoroughly so many theorists have "examined" Fountain without being willing to broach this side of the matter!

In short,
conferral is top-down;
seeing is bottom-up.

A broader faith in Bottom-Up as against Top-Down social action inspires the selfsame faith in seers and a corresponding lack of faith in conferrers.

Yep, the counterargument to the Institutional Theory of Art is . . . not much of a counterargument at all. Rather, it is a lack of faith institutions! How rude! And it is here that Danto's transhistorical bent has to be confronted, since he sees his Theory as accounting for something that has been going on for somewhat longer than the current crop of "institutions" has existed. And we have a journal paper somewhere in our files which purports to disabuse facile-minded pseuds of the notion that Danto's and Dickie's theories proceed at all along the same lines. And so we had better leave this thread alone for now and move along!


Now here comes special feature number (1) . . .

Dickie aims from the outset to specify a property which cannot be found merely by inspecting a putative artwork.

He says:

What the eye cannot descry is a complicated non-exhibited characteristic of the artifacts in question.

The idea is that the property required by the second condition of the definition is to be, as Dickie calls it, a social property, a non-exhibited status obtained within an institution.

This seems to isolate the issue well enough.

Is this What Art Is? Does this in fact define art?

It seems possible to point to works which have had no status conferred upon them whatsoever but which upon being put forward as candidates (for arthood, not for exaltation) would be all but impossible to deny.

This putting-forward is the conferral process, I assume the Dickieist argues. Merely by suggesting the hypothetical, I have transformed my counterexamples into exemplars. And so we are back to Danto's Time Machine and Wölfflin's Dictum. We can point to works, perhaps myriad works, which were never put forward but which, as soon as they are put forward, are impossible to deny. The theory, indeed, has by that time been revealed as (more properly) a Social Theory, in which connection "institutions" are merely one part and perhaps also "downstream" of the real action.

It should be possible to establish "institutions" where nothing is "put forward" or "appreciated" in quite this way. Those are transactional concepts at root. The ideal, rather, is some kind of fully voluntary coming-together, such that the validation-seeking artist and the sensation-seeking audience really accept each other, probably implicitly and temporarily, but authentically and without coercion. Typically, a skepticism of institutions either begins or ends in a skepticism about the possibility of precisely this kind of uncoerced intercourse; but really, only an "institution" of some kind or other can be the staging ground for this sort of thing. Communal ritual is not clearly better in this way, and it may well be much worse. Becker's account is apt as always: "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others." Institutions can facilitate some relatively frictionless working-out, but only along very narrow lines. It seems they are "purpose-built" and that corruption is essentially a process of creeping ulterior purposes (read: "problems and ambitions") coming eventually to dominate institutional structures which are ill-equipped to serve them. What we call "nepotism," e.g., is nefarious only in the context of an institution where such particularism and self-dealing is explictly against the rules; the "corruption" per se is in the duplicity and the tolerance of duplicity; it is not in the general notion of looking out for the best interests of one's kids and/or oneself. But these interests of kids-and-self, however legitimate, these are . . . well, these are "problems" to be "worked out", no? And if you determine to "work them out" on a youth baseball team or a music conservatory or a government office, then you have to some degree subverted the integrity of those institutions vis-a-vis their intrinsic structure and function. And that is corruption, whether or not it rises to any conventional legal standard per which that term could be invoked.

The basis for some degree of functional differentiation on all levels of society, from the institutional down to the individual, is in the necessity for purpose-built avenues of working out. I'm less concerned with the possibility that this is some kind of artifact of modern alienation, that it is a sign of something amiss. I'm more concerned with the evident fact that we don't seem very good at maintaining such purpose-built institutions, preferring instead to corrupt them at the first opportunity. If only they came with a user manual . . .

(2) Since the eighteenth century there have been a number of definitions of art in terms of something like appreciation.

Conceptions of appreciation have varied
and so has the strategy of the definition.

Usually some minimal requirement is given—for instance, that a thing be an artifact—and then it is held that appreciation of the thing is a necessary or sufficient condition of its being an artwork.

The principal refinements have consisted in making the condition more subtle—requiring that a thing be likely to be appreciated, or that it be intended to be appreciated, or that it should be appreciated.

And here comes special feature number (2) . . .

Dickie's second condition is subtle enough to transform the character of this kind of definition.

All questions of actual appreciation are waived. What is required is that a thing be a candidate for appreciation, and actually being appreciated is neither necessary nor sufficient for that.


(3) Dickie agrees with Morris Weitz in distinguishing two senses—or uses, as he sometimes says—of the term 'work of art,'

an evaluative sense
and
a descriptive sense.

Thus the initial qualification in the definition.

Dickie is interested in the expression 'work of art' only in its descriptive sense, and he has little to say about its evaluative sense.

He does invoke the evaluative sense as an explanation of the propriety of remarks like "This driftwood is a work of art" which precludes their being counterexamples to the requirement that works of art be artifacts.

Dickie
holds
that
the descriptive and evaluative senses are distinct at least to this extent,

that
both artifacts and nonartifacts can be works of art in the evaluative sense,

while
only artifacts can be works of art in the descriptive sense.

Furthermore,
works of art in the descriptive sense
need not be works of art in the evaluative sense.

So

special feature number (3) . . .

being a work of art in one sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for being so in the other sense.


The third feature of the definition is less novel than the others. I mention it because I will claim, toward the end of my criticism, that Dickie's determination to keep out of the definition everything he takes to be a matter of merit has left his conception of art too spare.

If so, then . . . yeah, one would think!


The definition falls short, so to speak, both formally and materially, and it is the second condition which is defective. Despite the careful reference

[188]

to candidacy for appreciation, and not to appreciation itself, we must be told something about appreciation—enough at least to give content to the notion of candidacy.

Materially,
what Dickie says about appreciation is too strong,
even though very general;

formally,
it lacks a dimension
without which it is not acute enough
to discriminate art from other things.

What Appreciation Is

Dickie first says:

The kind of appreciation I have in mind is simply the kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like.

One may wonder whether there is such a kind of appreciation, ... It seems to me it is already too much to suppose that there is a kind of appreciation characteristic of our experiences of, say, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Pollock, Olitski,
"and the like."

But
Dickie thinks this can be overcome.

Indeed,
if we mean by "appreciation" something like
"in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable,"
then
there is no problem about the similarity of the various appreciations.

This suggestion fails to meet the one case Dickie speaks much about, that of Duchamp.

Dickie calls Duchamp's "Fountain" a work of art with no hesitation, and I think he believes it a substantial achievement of his definition that it easily accommodates things like the works of Dada. But does it?

I agree that whatever Dada's practitioners thought, their accomplishment was not simply the creation of Un-art. It was, however, the creation of something different. In understanding this I am inclined to follow Michael Fried, who has said this:

the situation has been complicated still further by the calling into question, first by Dada and within the past decade by Neo-Dada figures such as Cage, Johns and Rauschenberg, of the already somewhat dubious concept of a "work of art." . . . It would, however, be mistaken to think of Dada—the most precious of movements —as opposed to art. Rather, Dada stands opposed to the notion of value or quality in art, and in that sense represents a reaction against the unprecedented demands modernist painting makes of its practitioners. (It is, I think, significant that Duchamp was a failed modernist—more

[189]

exactly, a failed Cubist—before he turned his hand to the amusing inventions by which he is best known.)

Now, now . . . let's keep our side of the street clean!

That said . . .

Of course my most anti-intellectual coworker did attend three colleges without graduating . . .

Of course it was recently revealed that my most anti-modern, anti-self-regarding, pro-self-loathing coworker did once apply for a NEA grant . . .

So . . . yeah, revisionist history is definitely a thing.

(Das es of my own intellectual and artistic adolescence is fairly well documented. You're already in the right place to find most of it, should you fancy a glimpse.)

[Fried, cont.]
But there is a superficial similarity between modernist painting and Dada in one important respect: namely, that just as modernist painting has enabled one to see a blank canvas, a sequence of random spatters or a length of colored fabric as a picture, Dada and Neo-Dada have equipped one to treat virtually any object as a work of art—though it is far from clear exactly what this means.

I suspect it actually is quite clear what this means to anyone who would/could write the above passage, but there is a reason why they do not want to share their opinion in this setting, fearing it is merely an "opinion."

Count me with Taleb: "opinions are the stuff of life." "Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs." Academic discourse now is no one's "affair." It is rather a collective, social affair where "arrogance" is just Arrogance, not to be tolerated; and then, this is quite literally self-defeating.

But really, that's what the learning is for! It's not just for achieving scientific objectivity (though we could always use more of that than we have). It's also for forming what has been quite aptly called Learned Opinion; quite literally: opinions rather than facts, but formed learned-ly; fast-brain outputs that are, nonetheless, every bit as conditioned by learning and experience as are slow-brain outputs.

May we all have the experience of getting learn-ed.

Whether or not one agrees with Fried, it seems clear that the "appreciation" of Dada was and is novel. If Fried is right, then to speak of Dada in terms of experiencing qualities one finds worthy or valuable is exactly wrong.

It does seem wrong, but I think we get tied in knots once we move to Rank and Becker's "existential" level of analysis. (And we must do this eventually!)

Reading the Neo-Dadaists as opposed to the notion of value or quality may turn out to be exactly the same misreading as opposed to art. Just as making art does not quite smell like an anti-art stance, it also doesn't smell like a skepticism of value and quality. We should probably be more willing to heed surface content in the value case than in the broader question of art. But even this kind of art is made by someone. To my knowledge, the Neos namechecked above certainly were not shy about putting their names on their work. I'm not sure what evidence we have to really suggest that the Dadas' disvaluation of "art" was matched by a parallel disvaluation of that projection of personal value which Rank finds already at the earliest stirrings of the artistic impulse.

Even if Fried is wrong, surely the one obvious point about Dada is that it is not the occasion for appreciation of the "kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like."

Of course Dickie is not referring to the same occasion as is Rank. But if he was we'd have a tougher time disputing his theory. When a work finds appreciators, so does its maker. Hence I fail to see the "renunciation" (Rank's term) in Dada. "Quality" is easier to renounce than is self-regard.

Of course
Dickie has not said that Dada
is, or is to be,
appreciated
in this way,

but that
it has acquired the status of being
a candidate
for such appreciation.

But
Dada in general, and certainly Duchamp's urinal, is virtually accompanied by an announcement that traditional appreciation (if there is such a thing) cannot occur.

This suggests two things:

(1) that being a candidate for appreciation in any but the emptiest sense of 'appreciation' (where it signifies any kind of apprehension appropriate to anything which is an artwork) is not part of what it is to be an artwork, at least not for some works,

and
(2) that possibilities concerning what can be appreciated have some bearing on what can be made a candidate for appreciation.

Sure. But if the art object is seen as a projection of the artist-as-person, then we confront the possibility that any such projection (any observable or ascribed action) is a candidate for "appreciation" as such. Artworks are a tiny sliver of a vast expanse called "action."

The second point is not considered by Dickie, and this is responsible for what I think of as a formal gap in his definition.

What Can Be a Work of Art

The second condition Dickie calls a "social property" of art. ...

There are two broad areas for questions about
how a thing acquires the social property
which makes it art:
in what circumstances and by whom can this property be bestowed, and
what qualifies a thing to receive this bestowal.

...


[190]

If part of what makes a thing a work of art issues from an "institution" or "social practice," then we need to be told something of the details of the institution.

There is merit enough in articulating the claim that art-ness is partly an institutional property—if that is true, ...

As he [Dickie] says,

lines of authority in the politico-legal world are by and large explicitly defined and incorporated into law, while lines of authority (or something like authority) in the artworld are nowhere codified. The artworld carries on its business at the level of customary practice.

... Dickie sees a difference between a plumbing equipment salesman displaying his wares and Duchamp exhibiting his urinal, ... :

The difference is analogous to the difference between my uttering "I declare this man to be a candidate for alderman" and the head of the election board uttering the same sentence while acting in his official capacity

But there is an ambiguity here:
whose enfranchisement are we concerned with,
some museum director's
or Duchamp's?

i.e.
That peculiar enfranchisement which is bestowed by the museum director is a decisive example of an explicitly defined line of authority.

i.e.
Museum Directors are not shining examples of the informal customary practice which is said here to prevail in the artworld. Actually they are counterexamples.

That Dickie means the former [the director], or at least that he does not mean Duchamp, is suggested by this—

The point is that Duchamp's act took place within a certain institutional setting and that makes all the difference. Our salesman of plumbing supplies could do what Duchamp did—

and by his remark concerning a different case, "It all depends on the institutional setting."


If Dickie is read this way, then his analogy is strikingly inept, for it is precisely not the case that our Dickie could do what the head of the election board did (make someone an aldermanic candidate).

What the analogy suggests is that
to make something art,
one first must be an artmaker.

I suspect that the analogy appeals to Dickie because it sets making-a-candidate-for-election beside making-a-candidate-for-appreciation.

But it is clear that one needs status to bestow status in the political case.

What about the case of art?


Yeah, what about it?!

... What if a urinal merchant or a junk

[191]

collector had attempted to carry out Duchamp's act, say with the very object Duchamp used, and had been turned away by the organizers of the show? ...

the urinal did not become art
because
it did not receive the requisite social property, ... ;

and the only way in which Duchamp's being Duchamp figures is contingently (since the organizers knew him, they accepted his urinal)?

Well,
then what if Duchamp had been rejected as well?

A plausible counterfactual! And . . . a mere counterfactual, but one which stands up to empirical scrutiny: We don't have to look very hard to find examples of art-rejection by art-authority, which rejection does not, nonetheless, seem to bear the least upon the art-ontological status of the rejected works.

If he had then just sulked, that might be an end to it.

But what if he displayed the rejected urinal in his own flat, set it out on a roped-off rug in the living room? Does that turn the trick? Then could the merchant do the same?

Well, definitionally there are no Institutions Of One, but this too could easily be accommodated to the extent needed to reconcile it with the "institutional theory." All that would be required is the occasional visitor to the apartment.

Whom among us has not been that visitor several times over?



...   Dickie notes that the ordinary salesman is presenting his wares for appreciation, but insists that he is not conferring on them the status of candidate for appreciation.

But he could be doing both things, couldn't he?

Couldn't Duchamp?

... since you may believe that Picasso's paintings were already art before he got to your house, suppose that he came and was commissioned by you to do a sketch directly on the wall in order to disguise some cracks in the plaster. That would be art, wouldn't it? And if it is when Picasso does it, why not when the neighborhood painter and plasterer do it?

...


Before his discussion of Duchamp and the salesman, Dickie offers an adroit remark to help in accepting the notion of a "conferral of status" when it is clear that for much art this cannot be said to occur overtly (some artists never exhibit).

What I want to suggest is that, just as two persons can acquire the status of common-law marriage within a legal system, an artifact can acquire the status of a candidate for appreciation within the system which Danto has called "the artworld"

Then how is it
that
Picasso's merest scribble and,
perhaps,
Duchamp's urinal
have a status not possessed by just anyone's mere scribble or spare urinal?

Perhaps it is like this:
one of the ways the "artworld" breeds Art is by way of enfranchising Artmakers.

...

[192]

...

[Perhaps] It is because he did "Nude" that Duchamp is an artist;

it is because he is Duchamp that "Fountain" is not just a misplaced urinal.


This idea suggests that art and its institutions are inbred and self-justifying in ways that are hard to untangle,

and I think that is plausible though I will not argue for it.

This does seem to be the case, and it does seem advisable not to argue the point to lustily. That is because we can find the same irrational basis lying at the root of most any human endeavor, institutional and otherwise.

In other words, calling some human endeavor "self-justifying" is not much of an accusation coming from some other (irrational) human, who in fact justifies theyself with precisely this act of critique. The occasion for legitimate criticism of instititions, rather, is when they have claimed a rational basis for their own own stucture and function, but this rational basis does not, in fact, exist. And even there, that may be the entire scope for valid criticism: simple hypocrisy, or simple failure to hold up one end of some bargain. But by the time we've drilled down to the existential level of critique, we're courting pot-and-kettle territory.

I hesitate to declare that there are no rational institutions at all, but it does seem (to me) safe to assume that our institutional ambitions have badly outpaced our really available means. To achieve rational institutions, we need to severely confine their roles and limit their size and scope. We can claim only those bases and roles for our institutions which institutions writ large actually are able to toss off. Government is of course the celebrated example, at least in the U.S., and that is the lens through which this general question has been endlessly relitigated. I hesitate, again, to draw too close an analogy, but I do think that we get the government and the art (institutions) that we deserve. Build better citizens and the scope widens for institutional mandates as reflections of what those citizens are capable of; but don't hold your breath for the first part.

It seems clear [however!] that Dickie does not agree with this.

He says, after all, that the salesman could do what Duchamp did, and there is no suggestion that to do this the salesman must first acquire a power Duchamp already has.

...

The creation of a political candidate ... seems an apt analogue of artmaking only so long as only one aspect is considered.

In both artmaking and candidate-making there exist constraints in terms of the objects.

The head of the election board cannot make just anyone a candidate.
...

Perhaps Dickie supposes his account of artmaking supplies an analogue for all this in the first condition, that the object be an artifact.

But something is missing.

There is nothing to match the connection between the qualifications imposed on a would-be alderman and the point in making someone a candidate for alderman.

The qualifications ... derive from considerations of what aldermen do or are supposed to do.
...

What connection of any kind is there between being an artifact and being appreciated?

Why is it that only artifacts can be made candidates for appreciation,

and, more important,
why suppose that every artifact can be made such a candidate?
...

If we are to get to the subtleties implicit in Dickie's suggestion,
we need a different analogue for the act of making something art,
one in which a distinction appears,

not

between
having a power
and
not having it
(as the head of the election board has a power not possessed by others),

but

between exercising a power we all have
and
not exercising it
(like Duchamp's act which Dickie thinks anyone could have carried out).

I believe that Dickie thinks we are

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all, or nearly all, in the artworld and that in the artworld everyone is empowered to make art.

A suitable analogue may illuminate what limits the exercise of this power.




I take the act of conferring the status of candidate for appreciation to be (or to be like) what Austin called an illocution ...

The analogue chosen by Dickie,
declaring someone a candidate in the uttering of certain words,
is an illocution.

To improve on it, we need a different illocution.

I will use the act of promising,
though it too is an imprecise analogue in some respects.

There are a number of obscurities in our understanding of the mechanics of promising,
but that is a help here,

for it exposes the complexities that arise when we move from formalized rituals and ceremonial acts like christening and political licensing to less canonical ones like promising and, as Dickie thinks, making things art.

...


The act of promising accomplished in the saying of "I promise . . . " in appropriate circumstances is an illocution.

Characteristically, this illocution precipitates various effects and consequences Austin calls perlocutions.

Among possible perlocutions are,
for instance,
the recipient's feeling gratified in some way,
his attributing to the speaker an intention to do what is promised,
...

... I ask you to think of all these consequences or effects as one perlocution, ... "accepting" a promise.

Promising is an illocution;
having a promise accepted is a perlocution.

In the case of promising and securing acceptance,
the illocution and the perlocution are associated,
I think,
on two levels:

as a relation between promising and acceptance in general,
and
as a constraint on promising in particular instances.


In general, the perlocution is something like the rationale, or part of the rationale, for the illocution. ... —it gives the act a point.

...
if there is no acceptance of promises,
then the act of promising becomes not merely a vain effort,
but it ceases to be that kind of act—
...


In any particular case it must be possible, or at least appear to those concerned to be possible, that the perlocution transpire. ...

[194]

... I cannot promise you something we both know, and know one another knows that I cannot deliver. ... 6

Note 6, in part:

"I leave some principal questions concerning the relations between illocutions and perlocutions untreated here, ... These questions— ... —are taken up in my "Illocutions and Perlocutions," forthcoming in Foundations of Language."

The paper is on JSTOR but is paywalled.



Sometimes I cannot do an illocution because the illocutionary act is not open to do. ... I cannot argue the point with you if you are already persuaded, or warn you of a danger to which you are already alerted, or point out something you already see. ...


I take it as a kind of rule of thumb that the availability of at least some illocutions requires the openness of their associated perlocutions. ...




Let me import these points about perlocutions
into Dickie's definition.

I construe the act of
conferring the status of a candidate for appreciation
to be like an illocution,

and I take the actual appreciation
of a thing with this status
to be like an associated perlocution.

Being appreciated is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for something's being a candidate for appreciation,

just as having what I say (about what I will do) accepted is neither necessary nor sufficient for its being a promise.

But
if
what I say
is a promise,
then
it must seem possible
that it be accepted.

And
(supposing Dickie's definition correct),
if I am to succeed in conferring the status of art
on an object,
it must seem possible that it be appreciated.

My utterance is not a promise
just because I say so, ... (I cannot promise that I was on time yesterday, or that it will rain tomorrow.)

And neither, I think,
is x a work of art
just because I say so.

There are substantive constraints on what I can promise ...
and there must be constraints on what I can make art.
But what are they?

Dickie names one—x must be an artifact.
But this is not enough.

What of an artifact

[195]

which clearly cannot be appreciated
(in Dickie's sense)
?

I say that there are such things ... and that if Dickie's definition were correct then these things could not be artworks because they could not receive the requisite status.

Duchamp's urinal is like that.

Things like that cannot acquire the status required by Dickie's second condition because it would be pointless or bizarre to give it to them.

An exceptionally fruitful discussion here, but it runs aground on the sulk that some things clearly cannot (while, presumably, others clearly can) be appreciated.

What is Dickie's sense of "appreciation?"

"in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable,"
(p. 188, subheading: "What Appreciation Is")

And what are Cohen's examples of things which fail even this minimal test?

ordinary thumbtacks, cheap white envelopes, the plastic forks given at some drive-in restaurants
(p. 195, excised above)

Now, is it pointless or bizarre to find the "qualities" of a "plastic fork" to be "worthy or valuable"? Not at all. Perhaps it is bizarre to find those qualities of equal value to, say, a one-hundred dollar bill, or to a Beethoven symphony; that is, this is highly unexpected in normal run of things; but perhaps we require only a sufficiently "bizarre" set of circumstances to validate what otherwise seems like a purely abstract and unpragmatic counterargument. (In elementary school we several times watched a movie based on the book Hatchet where the main character uses a twenty dollar bill to start a fire; the point seems to be: he realizes in the moment that a fire is worth more than the bill in his "bizarre" situation.) Or, perhaps it is indeed notably unpragmatic to hold out for circumstances so bizarre that the closest-at-hand example is a fictional movie; perhaps, then, Our Man's case here ought simply be accepted as is.

However, we also have heard nothing (here, at least) about which "qualities" may serve as bases for "appreciation"; this leaves unsettled all cases of purely functional qualities, which are, generally, precisely the salient qualities of the thumbtacks, envelopes and forks of the world, in all contexts other than that of art appreciation.

All of this aside (and it is already too much to push aside), the really difficult question is: Do we REALLY neglect entirely to "appreciate" the art-qualities of "ordinary" functional objects? Certainly we do not confer art-qualities upon the vast majority of them, and we would not do so even if we did better understand everything that is at issue in the above passage. The sticking point is that there is at least one whole family of qualities (aesthetic qualities) which may indeed manifest without being "conferred": the aesthetic qualities of a plastic fork may "force themselves" on us; or, I may be "susceptible" to seeing form and ignoring function, whereas Bob or Steve or Susie tend to fixate on function and not to notice form in all but extreme or outlier cases of forcing-upon. Seemingly there may be both circumstantial and so-called individual factors at play in such matters, and this is the basis for my own pet sulk: I'm far more prepared to opine on what should and shouldn't be appreciated than to arrogate to say what clearly can and cannot be . . . and that is not even philosophy, but it takes a sizable helping of philosophy to arrive there securely.

So, while Our Man at times seems admirably skeptical of the larger Duchampian project, he actually plays right into the Duchampians' hands with this insistence that thumbtacks simply cannot be appreciated; for, as his own exposition well demonstrates, it was precisely this boundary of "quality" which was ripe for subversion and exploitation; it was precisely this boundary which enabled the charlatans to insist that a found object could be exhibited without being in any danger whatsoever of evincing "quality," or beauty, or provenance, or any such art-value as might be ascribed to it by way of the then-traditional "critical canons." This is why Duchamp could be so arrogantly confident that his Bizarre Promise could only be accepted, i.e. that Fountain has no aesthetic qualities. But even the urinals on the walls of fully operational restrooms have aesthetic qualities . . . , at least, for certain people, in certain situations, sometimes. If you are not one of those people, I acknowledge that you do exist, and I much prefer not to live under the same community or government umbrellas as you.



Dickie's concrete mistake has been to suppose that Duchamp's "Fountain" has anything whatever to do with what Dickie calls appreciation.

If such eccentric works are art, then if that requires that they have something in common with traditional art, it is not a candidacy for what they were designed to forestall and disdain.

This material error is a symptom of a more formal, conceptual gap—namely, supposing that making something a candidate for appreciation can be altogether unilateral, ...

Again: Good point, but let's always keep in mind that crashing a party is a peculiar way of disdaining it. What is disdained this way, first and foremost, is the fact that you weren't invited.

In fact,
the untoward consequence of Dickie's suggestion
is that
it will rule out the very items Dickie is eager to accommodate.

I have managed to miss any whiff of this eagerness in the summation of Dickie given here so far.

But then what about "Fountain"? ...

I am not clear about whether "Fountain" is a work of art, ...

If Fried is right, in the aftermath of Dada we are able to count nearly anything a work of art—but, he says, this leaves unclear what it means to count something as a work of art.

What is wrong with Dickie's definition, I think, is that as Dickie takes it, it is clear and it clearly applies to "Fountain."

No definition should fit "Fountain" so comfortably.
Why not takes some explaining.


To say that an illocution must be "pointless" if its associated perlocution is not open is not quite right.

There can be a point in saying
"I promise to love you forever"
or
"I promise never to feel anger again."

Indeed, saying these things can be splendid ways, perhaps the only ways, of saying and doing some things. But that does not make these sayings promises (I think they cannot be promises because these things cannot be promised).

Similarly, there can be a point, I suppose, in invoking a formula for bestowing the status of candidate for appreciation on a thing which cannot be an object of appreciation.

But that will not give these things that status.

In both kinds of cases, as with "pointless" illocutions in general, the effect is to draw attention from the thing said (or the putative object of appreciation) to the act of saying it (or the act of exhibiting it).


Nota bene!

If Austin is right, we cannot entirely separate the saying and the said without distortion, but we can identify, so to speak, the locus of significance and import:

if the situation is normal and altogether unproblematic, the thing

[196]

uttered (or the object of appreciation) engages us;

if the situation is in certain ways remarkable, then however canonical the thing uttered seems, we will pass behind it to its genesis.

What significance we can find in "Fountain" we find not in the urinal but in Duchamp's gesture.

It is not that "Fountain" is simply
a candidate for appreciation which cannot be appreciated

(nor is "I promise to love you forever"
simply a promise which cannot be accepted);

its transparent resistance to appreciation is the sign that it is not simply a candidate for appreciation

(as the fact
that love cannot be promised
is the sign that this utterance is not simply a promise).


It is not only the questionable conception of appreciation which undermines Dickie's definition. Let us ignore that for a while. At the end of his essay Dickie says:

Now what I have been saying may sound like saying, "a work of art is an object of which someone has said, 'I christen this object a work of art.'" And I think it is rather like that. So one can make a work of art out of a sow's ear, but of course that does not mean that it is a silk purse [p. 256b].

What I have been arguing is that it cannot be this simple:
even if
in the end
it is
successful christening which makes an object art,
not every effort at christening is successful.

There are bound to be conditions to be met both by the namer and the thing to be named, ...

Austin's characteristic way of describing a kind of act or thing was to catalogue the dimensions in which it can be irregular.

Thus
a promise might be untoward, gauche, imprudent, impractical, ineffective, or unaccepted.

As we move through various departures from the normal, pedestrian cases, passing through all the gross irregularities Austin called "infelicities," we come eventually to cases which are no longer promises.

The boundary between non-promises and more or less failed promises is hard to locate,

but
(1) it exists,
and
(2) it is not identical with the boundary between utterances of the form "I promise . . . " and those without it,
for this form is neither necessary nor sufficient.

If artmaking is like an illocution, then a similar catalogue is in order, an account of the ways in which artmaking can be irregular.

I do not blame Dickie for not yet supplying such a catalogue. I do complain that he has not noted the importance of such a catalogue,

for if artmaking is simply a matter of informal illocutions, then the catalogue may be the only substantial definition we can get or need.

There must be a boundary,
however hard to chart,
between making art,
and trying but failing to make art.

After passing through all the familiar avant-garde battlecries, on one hand, and all the familiar Philosophical wrangling, on the other, do we not end up concluding that the avant-garde's actions speak lounder than their words here, and therefore that the avant-garde in fact only confirms (and ever re-confirms) the above stipulation rather than refuting it?

. . . and . . . that there's nothing wrong with the fact, but everything wrong with insisting it is not a fact?

As before, re: "institutions" generally: Leave the artworks alone; critiquing the hypocrisy is adequate to all possible purposes!

...

[197]

...


Duchamp's "Fountain" is a difficult case.
It is difficult in the adjustment it demands of us, but neither of the two adjustments likely to be suggested is in order.

One
is to give up defining art,
pointing to "Fountain" as an illustration of the inevitable failure of any definition.

The other
is to formulate a definition
which covers "Fountain" as neatly as "Nude."

Perhaps the most helpful part of Dickie's view is the implicit suggestion of a way to avoid this choice.

Instead of either of these responses, I think we must give up the compulsion to decide about "Fountain," to rule it in or out;

and I think we can do this by taking seriously the suggestion that whether "Fountain" is art depends upon whether and how a certain kind of act was performed.


Succeeding in getting "Fountain" under, or out from under, the term "art" is a delusive achievement: for the sake of a kind of ontological tidiness, most of what is interesting and instructive about "Fountain" is ignored.

What we need to discuss are the ways in which "Fountain" is very much like normal art and the ways in which it is altogether unlike normal art,

and then how this bears on the character of Duchamp's act of putting it forward and having it called art.

When that discussion is done,
nothing may be left to do.

So it is with promising.
Some cases are clearly promises,
some clearly are not.
Some are unclear.

The unclear cases illuminate the clear ones as they bring out parts of the conception according to which the clear cases are clear.

"I promise to wring your neck."

Not a promise:
I cannot promise what you do not want,
knowing you do not want it.

"I promise to keep all cigarettes out of your reach."

This is not clear.
Can I promise you something we agree you need
even if we both know you do not want it?

The hard thing to do is

to
hold onto the conviction
that

we know what art and promises are

while refusing to suppose
that we always

can decide
or need to decide .

We hardly ever truly need to! That is by far the most frustrating part of reading all of this Philosophy.

I would propose to label the need-to-know aspect of philosophical issues as the "pragmatic" aspect, but I gather that label is already spoken for . . .



Dickie and others have criticized earlier theories for having lost the good art/bad art distinction, often, as with Collingwood, willfully absorbing it into the very distinction between art and non-art.

Ironically, Dickie has effectively reversed this:

he has provided for room on the bad art side of the good art/bad art distinction for much of what is normally taken to be non-art. ...

Please remember that when I say "Fountain" is a work of art, I am not saying it is a good one. And in making this last remark I am not insinuating that it is a bad one either [p. 255b].

[198]

This is the view Dickie proposes to take of any object whatever.

From this view

the real difficulty,
the philosophical anguish,
will arise after the question of art has been settled,

and that question is never more than a nominal problem encountered occasionally because "lines of authority (or something like authority) in the artworld are nowhere codified"

and so it may be hard to discover whether the thing has been christened.

This view obscures too much.

The works of the painters Fried discusses (Stella, Noland, Olitski) are clearly works of art, and the serious questions about them concern what kinds of paintings they are, and whether and why they are good.

But there are very few such questions about "Fountain," most Dada works, and many contemporary works.

The questions about them concern exactly whether and why they are art, and how they become anything like art,

To make these questions easy is both to mistake the nature of these objects and to refuse to take seriously the question of the possibility of the creation of art.




Notes

...

[199]

...

8. In Danto's "The Artworld" (op. cit.) I find a suggestion of a way to treat artmaking as an extraordinary illocution, one whose constraints are always emendable.

In the last section of the essay, Danto ventures some remarks which, in rough summary, are to this effect:

there is a set of pairs of artwork-relevant predicates.

Each pair consists of two "opposite" predicates
(e.g., "representational"/"nonrepresentational," "expressionist"/"nonexpressionist").

Opposites,
unlike contradictories as usually construed,
do not sensibly apply to all objects;

but
with regard to any artwork
they behave as contradictories.

(It is not true that anything is either representational or nonrepresentational;
it is true that any artwork is either representational or nonrepresentational.)

A necessary condition for an object to be an artwork is that at least one pair of artwork-relevant predicates be sensibly applicable to it.

Danto remarks that an artistic breakthrough may consist in adding a pair of artwork-relevant predicates.


Then we might try to think of artmaking in this way: the constraints on what can be christened art are given by the condition that some artwork-relevant predicate pair be sensibly applicable to the object.

But it is possible to make art of an unqualified object not by altering the object but by adding to the set of predicate pairs a pair already sensibly applicable to the object.


In order to work out the details of this suggestion,
one will have to say something about how a predicate pair can be made a member of the set.

The project is complicated by Danto's ingenious observation that once an object is an artwork all artwork-relevant predicate pairs apply.

This means that after the fact, the new pair will be as definitive as the older ones of earlier artworks, and the older pairs will sensibly apply to the new work.

Indeed, just how can a freshly-minted predicate pair get itself invited to the Art Party?

If everyone is invited, it won't be much of a party.

i.e.
If we can force acceptance of our work as art simply by describing it sensibly, then perhaps the party is indeed over.



I should make clear that Danto's remarks are made in an altogether different context, and their adaptability to a discussion of the illocutionary act of making art is my own tentative suggestion.

In any case, the suggestion is of no use to Dickie, who seems to conceive the act as an ordinary illocution.

Indeed,
whereas Danto's idea
might at last give content
to Morris Weitz's somewhat dogmatic claim
that the conditions for a thing to be art are indefinitely corrigible ... ,
Dickie's essay is offered as an explicit refutation of Weitz.

This indefinite corrigibility itself is a hint that (1) we don't often truly "need" to have recourse to it, and (2) we ought to avoid having such recourse whenever possible.





03 May 2025

JACK GLICKMAN—Creativity in the Arts


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




[168]

9. Creativity in the Arts

JACK GLICKMAN
[orig. 1976]

I

What is it to be creative?

The answer usually given
is that there is a "creative process,"
and most writers on creativity have taken their task
to be a description of ... activity ...

... I will argue that that is the wrong way to go about characterizing creativity,
that one must attend to the artistic product rather than to the process.

Well . . . speaking again as a twice-over Music Major, immediately I see one obvious candidate explanation for why most writers on creativity would emphasize the process rather than the product: because they are teachers of prospective practitioners, not of prospective scholars; their prospective-practitioner students cannot learn the process directly from inspection of the product.

27 March 2025

The Dixieland Nightmare

"Keep it simple."

But there isn't a simple solution to the VI7(♭13 ) chord, i.e. in Bourbon Street Parade, Sheik of Araby, Whispering, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby, Wait 'Till the Sun Shines Nellie, and who knows how many other tradjazz warhorses.

This chord has been the bane of my existence for as long as my ears have been awake to it. In my nightmares and often in real life too, it goes down something like this:

If the melody player knows one note of the actual melody, it's probably the ♭13, because that's the highest, tensest note in the chart. So the cherry is always on top, no matter what kind of sundae is on the menu that day.

The bass player has been scolded to "keep it simple," and so given any G chord, the options are G and D. That's it. The language used to describe bass players who play notes other than G and D is even less flattering than the old joke about players who can do only this. So, "simply" put, this is a dominant chord, shit runs downhill, and payday is on Friday.

The chord player, meanwhile, has been playing these songs for decades and hasn't looked at a chart in years, but they know that G-B-Eb forms an augmented triad, hence that we are dealing here with a Black Sheep offshoot of the Augmented family, and that the remaining members of this clan are A-C#-F. And although the chord player is too tasteful to overdo it, planing is definitely a thing, and so planing there will be.

In other words, if everyone narrowly assimilates to their role, eventually there will be at least one C#-D-Eb pile-up, and probably more than one. This is especially likely in Sheik where the chord just sits there for two whole bars at medium tempo. If there are more than a couple of solos then there almost certainly will be a D-Eb-E pile-up too. This is the tradjazz version of thematic development.

I'm being extremely pedantic and a bit viscious here, but I promise there is a point to it.

The point is: the bass and chord players can't treat this chord as either a straight dominant OR augmented chord, because IT IS NEITHER of those things. By the most obvious analysis it is only one note away, but that analysis is so misleading as to deserve to be labeled actually "wrong." The functional diatonic weighting and countour of this chord are unique in tonal music. Hence there also is no point in everyone simply agreeing to treat it as straight dominant or augmented. That doesn't fit any of these melodies anyway, as parties to any such agreement will be quickly and viscerally reminded; but even if it did there would be much lost and nothing gained this way.

Technically, in the case of the above-named tunes, I believe this chordscale is best analyzed as "fifth mode of harmonic (or melodic) minor";

i.e. G7(♭13 ) = C harmonic (or melodic) minor starting on G;

but that is far too verbose to be useful, especially for tradjazzers who would rather live with the clams than bring this kind of talk into the band. So, I propose we label it the "Dixieland Nightmare" chord, in honor of an offhand remark that was once made to me by a bandleader.

In high school and college this chord used to drive me nuts as a listener, but now it drives me nuts as a bass (function) player. 

Staying with G7 as the working example:

If the melody shuttles between E-flat and D, then both of those notes are out; C is outest-of-out, as always; and there is an unresolved ambiguity even in what I consider to be the "correct" reference analysis of the chord, namely: are we using harmonic or melodic minor? i.e. Is it A or A-flat? So even there, one of the most obvious "simple"-but-hip solutions, the G-A-B walkup, comes with the same risk of a pile-up.

And so . . . buckle up, hornheads! The F is a really attractive option. The F is both minimally consonant AND minimally risky. So, we can walk DOWN, G to F; we can even do one full bar of each if we must; and this is a very elegant solution! Most days it seems to me like the ONLY elegant solution. The problem (for others, not for me) is that this lands us on the third of the impending C7 chord. Unless you're dealing with exceptionally hardheaded necrophile purists, this is also quite elegant against the resolution to D in the melody. There are two problems, though. (1) Those necrophiles ARE out there; and (2) generally putting the third on the bottom in this style IS actually pretty destabilizing, and people get annoyed with it when it happens all the time; that is why bass players are so often admonished to "keep it simple" even where doing so creates clams rather than preventing them.

So, as nice as this line is, you can't play it every time. Probably you can only play it once per song, and there are likely to be more choruses than there are unique workable solutions. You can probably get away with the G-A-B walkup, one way or another. I often find myself ghosting the dangerous note in those once-bitten-twice-shy moments. And again, "keeping it moving" IS a viable alternative to "keeping it simple": you can fill-ghost with G-A-B♭-B such that the NCTs really are placed and articulated like NCTs and the anchors like anchors; and this (I really REALLY mean this) usually leads to better results and happier sidespersons as compared with letting some necrophile talk you into "keeping it simple."

"You played a Bb under a G7 chord!" Sure did. If you want to fight about it, fight with Messrs. J.S. Bach and P. Chambers, for starters. Just realize that you're fighting the music that came BEFORE tradjazz at least as much as the music that came after it; you're not just damming the backwash, you're damming the headwaters too. That is really Somethin' Else!

22 March 2025

ARTHUR DANTO—The Artworld


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




[153]

The Artworld

ARTHUR DANTO

[orig. 1964]



Hamlet:
Do you see nothing there?
The Queen:
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4


Hamlet and Socrates,
though in praise and depreciation respectively,
spoke of art
as a mirror held up to nature.

As with many disagreements in attitude,
this one has a factual basis.

Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; ...
idle accurate duplications ...
of no cognitive benefit whatever.

Hamlet,
more acutely,
recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces,
namely that
they show us what we could not otherwise perceive—
our own face and form—

and so art,
insofar as it is mirrorlike,
reveals us to ourselves,
and is, even by Socratic criteria,
of some cognitive utility
after all.

Sure, why not?

Just make doubly sure you are actually looking at a reflection and not a projection.

21 March 2025

[sc]airquotes (ix)—in praise of dick-thinking


Herb Goldberg
The Hazards of Being Male
(1976)


[22]

3. The Wisdom
Of The Penis

...

The essence and ultimate joy of male sexuality lies in the experience of total arousal, the moment when nothing in the world exists except the woman beside him, ... —desire at such a peak that no fantasies could possibly intrude ...

... it is a state most men have experienced at some time in their lives before they allowed their sexual spontaneity to be mired in the intellectualizations about "sexuality," derailed by abstractions about "meaningful relationships" and "sharing," alienated from their own experience by a destructive emphasis on techniques, and numbed by scientific teachings about the physiology of the woman and himself. That, to my mind, is the essence of much of the so-called new sexual enlightenment—the "progress" and the problem.

While women's sexuality has been misunderstood and they've been confused and degrated [sic] by psychoanalytic interpretations ... men, I believe, have been seriously and negatively affected by such labels as "latent homosexuality," "fear of intimacy," "mother fixation," "repressed hostility toward

[23]

women," "fear of failure," ...

Undoubtedly these all contain a basis in truth, but instead of facilitating his growth, the major impact of these concepts and terms have been to propel the male into greater self-consciousness, guilt, and self-accusatory reactions. Belief in these ideas often causes him to distrust his own unique sexual responses.

The beginning of a new male consciousness in the area of sexuality will first require, along with being fully aware of his feelings, a different way of interpreting his responses. ...

... It is true that a boy is given more exploratory privileges and has traditionally been allowed a wider latitude in terms of sexual indulgence. However, cultural evaluations of his sexual behavior have been far more harsh.

Impotence

... In our culture the subject has become an almost maniacal preoccupation.

[24]

... While lip-service is paid to the fact that impotence is a two-way problem, it is the male who is in the majority at the sex therapy clinics. The image of the female's role in male impotence is still largely one of helper—a sometimes supportive, sometimes resentful spectator waiting for him to overcome his problem.

...



The psychoanalytic and psychiatric approach to impotence, which involves tracing back and exploring early experiences and traumas, has a basis in reality but is a little like treating

[25]

food poisoning by exploring early eating habits. It neglects the fact that the real cause may be in the present, with the body appropriately responding to something that is seeks to avoid.

... The vast majority of men are of course capable of becoming erect under certain conditions and with certain women. So-called impotence is almost always a pair-specific phenomenon, that may be making a powerful statement about the man's feelings about the relationship toward the particular woman he is in bed with. Ironic as it may seem, most men, would rather feel they have a medical problem than say very simply to their intimate, "I don't want to make love to you." In other words, acknowledging impotence and claiming, "I've got a problem," is easier than expressing the feeling, "I'm not turned on by you." Therefore, instead of seeing himself as impotent, I would encourage him to say "I don't want to have sex with you." I would have him translate "premature ejaculation" into, "I want to get this over with as fast as possible." I would encourage him to explore and understand his negative responses to the particular woman or situation rather than assume the burden and then try to overcome the "symptom."

My clinical experience indicates that the man who diagnoses himself as impotent is often experiencing something within his relationship or about his partner that is killing his desire. However, the feeling message is only being telegraphed by his body response and is not being recognized in his conscious brain.

A colleague of mine is treating a forty-one-year-old man who became impotent after he lost his job. The patient previously was informed by one well-meaning doctor and had also read in several magazine articles that his inability to achieve erection had something to do with the fact that he associated his job with his masculinity ... An in-depth interview with his wife revealed that she was secretly deeply resentful about his unemployment and blamed

[26]

him for his lack of foresight. Out of guilt, however, she never told him, but she did say to the therapist, "He knew it was bound to happen and he could have done something about it in time, if he had really wanted to." The man's penis was perceiving her unspoken anger and her attitude of rejection toward him and was refusing to "make love" in the face of her anger and rage.

...

A different form of the wisdom of the penis is illustrated by the responses of a twenty-six-year-old recently married engineer. ... The twenty-nine-year-old wife had had two years of psychology courses and had convinced him that he was really angry toward women because of the way his mother had treated him. ... That sounded plausible to him and he came to therapy wanting to be "cured." Several private sessions with his wife, however, brought to light the fact that she had married him primarily because she was approaching thirty and was concerned that she'd never get married. She revealed that she had never been attracted to him physically and had been faking her sexual excitement right from the beginning. ... His penis was aware of her basic lack of true involvement with him. ...

[27]

...

An associate of mine told me of a patient who had recently gone to bed with the wife of a friend of his and found himself impotent. As he explored his reaction he realized that she probably was only using him to precipitate an end to her own faltering marriage. His body sensed this and wisely kept him out of a potentially explosive and dangerous relationship.

In another instance, a forty-two-year-old man became completely impotent with his wife of seventeen years. However, he was extremely potent during occasional visits to prostitutes. When I first spoke to him he was in an extreme anxiety state regarding his inability to perform sexually. He wanted to be "cured" as quickly as possible. ...

As we spoke at greater length however, it readily became apparent that internally he had been experiencing rage toward his wife for many years. ...

He acknowledged that he felt smothered and engulfed by his wife whom he felt resented him and tried to block his every autonomous move. He had been unable to assert himself with her. Instead he had given up his own activities— ... He simply went to work and came home.

While consciously he rationalized his wife's demands and stated that he felt she was justified in her expectations and requests to have him at home with the children, his penis registered his innermost feelings. It was protesting the annihilation of his real self. It was his "truth teller" and it said that he did not really want closeness and physical intimacy with a woman he felt was destroying him.

There are other examples, some so transparent that they are amusing. For example, an obviously hostile woman who was always putting down men, recently asked me if I could confirm her experience that "just about all men today have impotency problems." Clearly, she was not aware of the impact her

[28]

hostility toward men had on her lovers. She apparently believed that erections automatically appear under all conditions. Her underlying assumption was that men have no emotional reactions when it comes to sex, and that a "normal" man will automatically have an erection when there is a naked, willing woman.

Men are not impotent today. They only are impotent with some women under some conditions and their non-responsive reactions reflect important truths that they must learn to trust and understand.

... Certain kinds of contemporary conditioning techniques and "helpful" and "supportive" advice ... would have done these men great disservice. Their basic distrust of the wisdom of their body responses would only have been reinforced.

... I don't believe that an erection, no matter how achieved, is a good thing simply because it reduces a man's anxiety for the moment. I feel that this attitude robs him of the necessity of owning up to his real feelings about his partner or the relationship in which he's involved. The man who gets his erections by cheating on himself through fantasizing sex with other women, arousing himself with pornography, or using various and sundry mechanical devices is demonstrating disrespect for himself and rejection of his real emotions.

... The penis is not a piece of plumbing that functions capriciously. It is an expression of the total self. In these days of over-intellectualization it is perhaps the only remaining sensitive and revealing barometer of the male's true sexual feelings.




Arthur Danto
Analytical Philosophy of Action
(1973)


[116]

5

GIFTS

i

'We are not able to move all the organs of the body with like authority',
Hume observes,
'though we cannot assign any reason besides experience, for so remarkable a difference between one and the other.'

'As we are now',
wrote St Augustine,
'not only do our articulate members obey the will — our hands or feet or fingers — but even those that are moved only by small sinews and tendons we contract and turn as we list, as you may see in the voluntary motions of the mouth and face . . . and the lungs do serve a man's will entirely, like a pair of smith's or organist's bellows.'

Like Hume,
Augustine supposed it merely contingent that our 'authority' should be circumscribed as we find it to be,
for there are men capable of doing odd things: 'We see some men's natures far different from others, acting those things strangely in their bodies which others neither do nor hardly will believe.'

So
we could have been framed
with our authority differently seated:
'God could easily have made us with all our members subjected to the will',
he writes,

adding the possibility
which obviously haunted him as a man,
as we might recall from the Confessions,

'even those which now are moved by lust'.

I italicize the word 'now', which occurs twice in this passage. For it was Augustine's curious view that Adam, in paradise, indeed was so framed that he could perform what I have termed basic actions with his sexual organ, and hence achieve the sexual act immune from the contaminations of sin.

It is thus not sex but lust which is the root of sin, and hence the domination by the flesh of us rather than the domination by us over our bodies, which is the fallen state. Paradise accordingly is a condition we may get some glimpses of from our present powers of direct action, executing intentions without the concomitant torment of desire.



I am not at all certain that
it is a merely contingent matter
that voluntary erection
lies outside the boundaries of direct action.

For curiously enough,
a man who were able to erect at will
might in fact be impotent in the received sense,
which is an incapacity for genuine

[117]

sexual response;

where response implies
precisely the absence of
that order of control
Augustine supposes our first parent
to have exemplified.

A man who had direct control, or who was obliged to exercise direct control, would be a man without feeling, erection being the common expression of male sexual feeling.

And it is in some measure a logical truth that if erection were an action it would not be an expression, and the entire meaning of sexuality would be altered were tumescence something over which we had 'authority'.

Hence feeling,
or lust, if you will,
is not so contingently related to erection
as Augustine's argument implies.

But
perhaps it is his claim that there would in fact have been no sexuality in paradise:
a wry conjecture in the light of post-Freudian sexual romanticism.