The Commonplace Raised to a Higher Power
Arthur Danto
interviewed by Hans Maes
(excerpt)
This so-called 'method of indiscernibles'...arises, according to Danto, not only in the field of aesthetics but in all other areas of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to address its subject matter...by seeking the conditions that make the things under scrutiny the kinds of things they are. The appropriate way of seeking these conditions, Danto suggests, is to examine how the thing...differs from an object or event that is ostensibly indiscernible from it.
Ugh.
Could you forgive some of us, just maybe, for seeing in this merely an exercise?
Two objects rarely are well and truly indiscernible ; and if somehow they are indiscernible, then the indiscernibility is what matters and not the search for levers of discernibility. Or so says the "pragmatist," I would think.
Seems like it would be easy, also, to "pragmatically" demonstrate an audience's willingness to accept perceptually indiscernible art objects as ontologically indiscernible, even if philosophers, curators and dealers were quite un-willing to do so.
Failing that, we can demonstrate "rationally" that the stakes for the audience are very low here. i.e. Indiscernibility is only a problem if your livelihood and professional reputation hinge on your purported powers of discernment.
Actual indiscernibility arises only because of the limits of perception. Is there not always a (low) level of material detail at which objects become discernible? And perhaps also a (high) level where they become indiscernible?
The phrase kinds of things above seems quite problematic. I'm too far over my skis here but something must be said about this part of the argument.
A brown tabby and a mountain lion are both felines, but they are highly discernible in most every pragmatic way. The label "feline" attaches to an act of "discernment" which for non-taxonomists is strictly abstract. The two animals are truly "the same kind of thing" only to the taxonomist, or perhaps not even then in all instances. Pointing to this ostensible sameness is valid, and the reason why it is valid can be explained abstractly to the skeptic; but the sameness is only made relevant by certain very specific circumstances, and it is safe to assume that the skeptical inquirer would not be so skeptical in the first place if these were their circumstances too.
Now, consider two "indiscernible" brown tabby clones, Bubba1 and Bubba2. They are both felines and they are well and truly "indiscernible." I suspect that the salience of their shared felinity cannot be deduced abstractly here either; as with discernible felines, this salience must ascertained circumstantially or "pragmatically." Presumably the sociopathic dingus who placed an order for cloned cats was quite fixated on cat-ness, perhaps less so on felinity per se; whereas cloned-ness is most or all of what matters to the academic bioethicist.
But N.B., this hypothetical does permit another significant piece of abstract deduction, precisely the one which is so highly prized by the transfigurate: it establishes a new "kind of thing," BubbaΣ, a new type of which there was previously only/exactly one but of which there is now more than one. The question: "How many more than one?" seems not the least bit important epistemologically, no matter its ethical importance in the case of living things.
And so, a pragmatical moment-of-truth arrives that would break C.S. Peirce himself into a cold sweat: you sit down for tea at a friend's house and are gently accosted by two loving and truly indiscernible Bubbas. Are they Bubbas to you? Tabbies? Cats? Felines?
To whatever extent the ongoing "pragmatic" relevance of the higher-order ontological categories can be empirically demonstrated, to that same extent is the lie given to the conceit of "transfiguration." The old "kind" has not been eliminated! Innumerable other tokens of felinity remain highly "discernible!" Even if the Bubbas do not! i.e. If people continue to see "cats" first and "clones" second, then cat-ness has not actually been superseded by cloning; and if they don't, then it has.
In this hypothetical, we don't actually need any Ivory Tower philosophy to predict with confidence that it would take an absurdly brute intervention to begin to chip away at cat-human magnetism broadly by way of cloning. Time will tell, I suppose, if the bioethicists' worst fears will be realized on the ontological level and not merely on the pragmatic one, i.e., if orders for Bubbas and Fifis and Rovers start pouring in while demand for plain old cats and dogs stagnates.
With artworks there is less complexity in the ethics and much, much more complexity in the mere pragmatic parsing of the objects. That is certainly true. But then with artworks people can diverge on perceptual and ontological matters alike without the earth flying off its axis. That is also a difference.
To conjure this method of indiscernibles into arising not just in art but in all other areas of philosophy, we would need not merely to imagine but actually to be confronted by indiscernible material counterparts for just about every discrete object of human interest, material and ephemeral alike. It seems this cohort requires only that this be imaginable, not that it be the least bit likely, practical, or indeed sensible, desirable, beneficial, etc. It seems to me purely wasteful and destructive, actually, not less but more so in art compared to anywhere else. And though I admit it's a bad look, I do find myself unwittingly aligned with the Forces of Reaction here in entertaining the possibility that this wasteful-and-destructive aspect is in fact precisely the appeal of Warholism to the post-Warhol generations. It feels a bit like the Gamestop stock frenzy avant la lettre.
What the Brillo Boxes illustrate so well, Danto argues..., is that we can no longer rely on perceptual or aesthetic features to separate artworks from commonplace objects.
Indeed. And why exactly would we be quite so desperate to perform this separation?
For Danto, art is essentially a historical undertaking, in the sense that there are historical constraints on what sorts of objects can be considered art at given historical moments. This is an aspect of art that, in Danto's opinion, received its most illuminating expression in Heinrich Wöfflin's claim that 'not everything is possible at every time.'
Brilliant? Or too obvious?
In either case, it's just too easy to strike the essentially historical posture when you're looking back after "history" has already given you the answer.
Also, it seems safe to assume that within any given historical possibilities, narrow as they may be relative to the whole shebang, much more was "possible" than was realized, and it's awfully hard to sort that which was possible-but-elided from that which was elided-because-impossible.
the historicist nature of Danto's philosophy of art should not make us forget that he is also at heart an essentialist. ...while he does not claim to have nailed down the definition completely, he does propose two necessary conditions that any artwork needs to satisfy. 'Embodied meaning' is what sums it up. Something is art only if it is about something and only if it embodies or articulates whatever it is about in a suitable form.
We're calling that essentialism? Sounds more like the opposite. Meaning is, ironically, a totally meaningless concept here. We have no reliable basis for claiming its presence or absence in a work of art.
...there may be a thousand interpretations of [the Brillo Boxes]. But it's safe to say that, among other things, the work is about the commodification of art — a meaning it embodies, appropriately enough, by being indiscernible from a commercial object.
Hold that thought...
Arthur Danto: We were together at some conference and he [Nelson Goodman] said, 'Let me tell you what's wrong with your book, Arthur.' ... He just opened it up and started criticizing this and this and this. He was a killer in that way. You had to really think hard to get around Nelson. But I was constantly involved in that sort of thing with people because what I was doing was pretty different from anybody else.
...
SCIENCE
Hans Maes: ...some people think that aesthetics might eventually become just a branch of cognitive science. What's your view on that?
Arthur Danto: I don't believe that. Works of art need to be interpreted. ...
... The first thing that hit me [about the Sistine ceiling] was that the birth of Eve is in the middle. ... Suddenly you realize it's not Adam that's so important, it's Eve, because she divides everything in two. ... So I tried to work it out. But you could never have given this interpretation if you didn't live in a culture saturated by feminism. I don't think there was any whiff of feminism when Michelangelo was doing that, but living in this moment, in this culture, it suddenly becomes the first thing to strike the eye. So you never know where a new intepretation is likely to come from.
Hans Maes: And that is part of the reason why philosophy of art can never be fully reduced to science?
Arthur Danto: That's the kind of thing I have in mind.
Could philosophy, just maybe, remain "philosophy?" :^|
Seems to me that in a broader consilient sense, "science" and "philosophy" would be (1) symbiotic, and (2) of equal status. Which is to say: no, there is no "reducing" one to the other, and you can't have one without the other.
The aesthetic "cognitive science" that I've sampled so far raises, for me at least, more questions than answers, this precisely to the extent that certain concurrent "philosophical" issues remain unresolved. We should try to resolve them...philosophically! As best we can! And then go to lunch! Interpretation is more likely to make us lose our lunch. Interpretation never resolved anything. More like the contrary.
The problem with interpretation, and the reason why it belongs at the rock bottom of a truly consilient disciplinary formation, is that it is not rigorous. Definitionally so.
"fall into place"
"work it out"
said of any given "interpretation"
as against all ("infinite") possible ones
So everything is "possible," but only some things "fall into place." What tf is actually meant by this? That an interpretation has merely to be plausible and convincing? Danto agrees that there are "an infinite number of interpretations," but adds that "It may be very difficult for anybody to think out more than one or two." What else could this possibly suggest but that "intepretations" are merely highly refined opinions?
The "reduction" of some lower discipline to something higher on the consilient formation so often seems motivated by the desire to (re)impose someone else's rigor, this rigor-of-another having become, somehow or other, conspicuous by its absence. And on the other hand, there are the periodic calls-to-arms demanding the imposition of greater rigor on the existing level. e.g. Danto here:
It may be very difficult for anybody to think out more than one or two [interpretations]. But if somebody is intelligent and motivated enough, they probably could do it.
This is the situation vis-a-vis "interpretation." But what do "intelligence" or "motivation" (or "creativity" or "style") really have to do with rigor? Not much.
"Rigor" is for some reason the word that pops into my head, and admittedly I recoil just a bit when challenged to say exactly what I mean by it. I think I mean: the following-out/following-through of some discipline to its full extent of possibility under the circumstances.
For present purposes, Science seems to me more or less the "empirical" and Philosophy the "rational" side of "rigor." It's the rigor and not the -ALs or -ISMs that land science and philosophy at the apex of consilience. It's not a question of any tyranny of some disciplines over others, but rather of just how doggedly the nexus (empiric-rigor or reason-rigor) is followed-out. e.g. The imperative for "scientists" not merely to find support for a theory but also to rule out alternative explanations. That is very different from twisting and bending one's own "interpretation" of an artwork such that some post-hoc ascription of aesthetic cause-and-effect "falls into place" thereby. Not just "different," perhaps, but entirely contrary; anathema.
There is an expression in Philosophy of Science, "researcher degrees of freedom," which I can't be sure I've understood correctly (or at all), but which seems (also) to get at the problem of defending the validity of any/all "interpretation." And of course I say this with no desire to reduce nor to exalt "interpretation" to the status of a "science." And I'm way out over my skis again. But anyway, the point is: the "empirical" element of "interpretation" is not only not scientific in the strict sense, it is not even rigorous in the broader sense of that term. Danto seems to hold that the process involves some rigor, or at least some difficulty. I cannot sit here and deny that x, y or z historian did not work very hard on their interpretation. I think the problem is that they've skipped a step, or perhaps several, and are therefore chasing ghosts. The final step of saying "how the stylistic choices of the artist embody the meaning" of the work can certainly be carried out "rationally" and "rigorously," but the "meaning" has already been empirically apprehended in a ridiculously haphazard fashion that no "scientist" could accept; and yet when the rubber meets the road this initial apprehension of meaning must be actually "scientific." "Meaning" cannot be just whatever bullshit someone thought up over scotch and cigars with the museum curator. Once the interpreter decides upon a meaning they can, from there, proceed rigorously; but in this they are merely whistling in the dark. The initial error poisons the well, like an arithmetic mistake at the beginning of a long math problem.
Could interpretation become rigorous? Should it? The mere suggestion (this is the suggestion I am taking Danto to make above, though it is merely implied, and also immediately contradicted) seems to rest on very flimsy premises. For this cohort, the Brillo Boxes crystallized, in an instant as it were, a problem of the sort intellectuals particularly revel in: a seemingly new question which could have been asked almost any time before yet wasn't asked until a particular moment had arrived. That posing this question was one of those "things" which was not "possible at every time" is undoubtedly true, but that is not terribly rigorous thinking either. We can easily agree with Wöfflin in the abstract; we can easily imagine true scientific proof of the literal maxim that 'not everything is possible at every time,' because this requires only "negative empiricism," which is likely to be more available and more reliable than the "positive" kind. As it is formulated, we can rule out the affirmative answer to this question all by ourselves, almost anywhere and anyhow. e.g. As of today, I was not able to travel to Mars; at this time , for me, traveling to Mars is not possible . But we must maintain a suitably high standard of proof in any newly-arising concrete and positive question as to what was and was not in fact possible in a time-and-place, such granular and positive proof being of course actually impossible to obtain the vast majority of the time.
In the two-step critical imperative "to find out what a work is about" // "and then explain how the stylistic choices of the artist embody the meaning of that work" (Maes), rigor is implied in both steps, but in reality there is none in the first part. It's not that you can't study and reflect upon a work deeply and thoroughly. The problem is that you are just one person, and you share The Artworld (not to say the planet) with a lot of other people. An unseemly relativism here? Danto himelf agrees that there are infinite interpretations possible. How could a statement like that not rest on the assumption that meaning is ephemeral? Even if you don't believe your own interpretation (and woe to you in that case), even if you are merely engaging in staged debate rather than the pursuit of knowledge, you at least were able to imagine your interpretation, you were able, apparently only with great skill and effort, to "work it out." Meanwhile, the field of interpretations which did not occur to you, or which in your hands did not "fall into place," this field is literally "infinite." "There's something to what Derrida would say, that there is an infinite number of interpretations." (first Danto response under heading "science") He said it, not me! These ungrasped interpretations are among the things that were possible and yet, somehow, did not happen!! How are we to deal with that quadrant of the square?
It is doubly apt, I think, to refer to the "degrees of freedom" each of us enjoys in trying to say "what a work is about" to us and what it is "about" universally. They are different degrees. If the first is construed as a sort of fundamental individual right, then it is precisely this construal which mediates directly how far we are able to take the second (i.e. not very far without infringing upon someone else's freedom-from our own pretensions).
It is also apt, then, to embrace the scientific-political double entendre created by the appropriation of the above phrase. And though it pains me to say so as a third-generation Nation reader, it is therefore apt to question the political consciousness of any such incorrigible interpreters of artworks, even of the venerable Nation staff critic. Viewed this way, the transfigured commonplaces of heroic-phase Conceptual Art, though perhaps they were truly impossible before, nonetheless start to look just a bit eighteenth-century. Suddenly we have lost even our "freedom" to "rely on perceptual or aesthetic features" when we look at an artwork. Instead, silent and invisible ontonlogical features carry the day, and they are rejiggered endlessly and imperceptibly behind the scenes. It's hard to think of an art-ontology more "readymade" for the deployment of elite priestcraft than this one.
Whither "philosophy?" Why tf did Danto answer that "Works of art need to be interpreted"? Why didn't he say, "Dumb shit! A 'branch' of Philosophy cannot simply become a 'branch' of Science, nor vice versa,... Here's why..." Why didn't he say, "Perhaps Science indeed sits at the tippy-top of a consilient formation, but the Philosophers are the first and often the only ones to notice precisely where and why the Scientists have screwed up..." There are a lot of things he could have said to exonerate "aesthetics," his own bailywick, the subfield which he, at the outset of the excerpt, more or less takes credit for rescuing from "logical positivism." One way to perform that rescue, certainly, would be insist that "Artworks need to be interpreted." But in saying so he seems merely to fall into the trap of what is, frankly, a totally asinine leading question, one which ensures the generation of sufficient provocative material for later publication but does not ensure that anything constructive will (or can) be said in response to it.
Danto's implication in any case is that "interpretation" is part of "aesthetics." That could not be more wrong. The enterprise served by interpretation is criticism, which is another kettle of fish.
Danto spake as if he himself doesn't quite accept "aesthetics" as a Philosophical enterprise in the first place, despite being anxious to claim his share of the credit for advancing it there. "The profession here in the United States was basically logical positivist. There wasn't a lot of room for art." Rather than accepting the limits within which we can positivistically churn over various questions in "aesthetics," the urgent task instead was to retrench from the prevailing "logical positivist" tyranny so that something as woolly (unrigorous!) as "art" could at last be considered (quasi-)philosophically. "Works of art need to be interpreted." In other words: "I need to be able to tell you about myself as I also tell you about this work of art which is important to me." Paraphrasing Kahneman: "I need to be able to tell you about what is most interesting to me, which is the dynamics of people's mental lives; foremost among them, my own."
It is of course unfair and ill-advised to parse an interview as if it were a philosophical monograph. But in the face of such parsing it would also be unfair to conduct interviews with prestigious academic people, publish them with a prestigious University Press, and then deny the validity of a thorough parsing of these remarks on the sole basis of their off-the-cuff-ness. So let's keep going, shall we?
Arthur Danto: ...there may be some aesthetic ideas that will be hit on [by science]. But the most important fact is that the human body hasn't changed for millions of years and yet people like David Hume were totally different in their way of thinking about beauty and art than people living today. ...
When Marat was assassinated,...,they said, 'Take up thy brush, David, take up thy brush!' They would never have said, 'Pick up your Bunsen burner,'... ...they felt that David would say something of very deep meaning. You wouldn't get that out of science at that time. Meaning in terms of human life: that comes from art, I think. ...
...
Arthur Danto: ... You know, at the beginning of my career, I was very involved with the philosophy of science,...
Well, ya really got my attention now!
I knew this once but had forgotten. Being reminded of it in this context is...unnerving.
...I thought that way for a while. I don't know just when I changed. ...
Change away, everybody! Just don't expect philosophy to change along with you!
Later:
Ok, here's another try: usually you can make what you want of something, even "cognitive science." Sometimes you can make anything you want out of it, even if its "scientific" conclusions are very severe. That's "interpretation." The trick is to make the/a right thing of it. That's "philosophy."
e.g. Vessel and Rubin (2010) discussing their finding of "Highly individual taste for abstract, but not real-world images":
Our results... show that the major effect of increasing semantic associations is not to universally increase preference, but instead to increase the degree to which different observers agree in which images are liked or disliked.
Makes sense to me! So wtf are we doing insisting that artworks "need to be interpreted" and that "logical positivism" and "art" don't mix? In a consilient formation with science and philosophy as symbiotic co-rulers, this little ripple of "science" really ought to (though I doubt it will) beget a small philosophical earthquake. More importantly, without any subsequent "philosophy" being performed upon it, this sort of scientific result, provocative as might be, won't end up provoking much of anything at all.
e.g.
The angle I would emphasize, obvs, is that this result strikes a body blow on a century's worth of decidedly unrigorous faux-populist anti-modernism, wherein "agreement" and "preference" are habitually (it sometimes seems knowingly) confused for each other.
e.g.
The low level of agreement on abstract images could be parsed as an inherently divisive phenomenon, or it could be parsed as a tightly circumscibed area of personal freedom that an otherwise unified culture can in fact afford to offer its subjects.
The point is: we still need things like Philosophy and History to "interpret" these results, provided we operate within the epistemological boundaries of those disciplines. There is no sense in denying the laboratory work. Ignoring it is akin to denying it.
Instead Danto, gallingly, and following in a long line of critic-philosophers, insists on "interpreting" the artworks themselves for individual "meaning in terms of human life," of which there are "infinite" versions. But again, what really needs to be "interpreted" is the contention, from Vessel et al, e.g., that "agreement across observers" is highly domain-dependent, or, e.g., that "commonly-shared semantic associations" are the source of any agreement. It is not "reducing" aesthetics to cognitive science to notice that these results, if we do take them seriously, begin to channel any subsequent Philosophy only in certain directions. Yep, our "degrees of freedom" are contracted. But we ought to be thankful for that.
(Most people inclined toward any reflection at all upon these matters shouldn't and wouldn't have any trouble parsing what words like "agreement" and "shared" indicate here. Whether by luck or by prescience, folk wisdom and personal experience will bring most of us into direct touch with this shared-ness even if "philosophy" does not. So much the better that "science" would have something to say about it too, but that contribution is incremental rather than revelatory. The real problem is, you cannot hold "agreement" or "semantic associations" in your hand; and so the question of "ontological nominalism" vs. "ontological realism" raised by Supek in connection with "society" needs to be raised here too. Yet another task for Philosophy!)
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