Monroe C. Beardsley
Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism
(1958)
[SK's comments]
[1]
INTRODUCTION
There would be
no problems of aesthetics,
in the sense in which I propose
to mark out this field of study,
if no one ever talked
about works of art.
So long as we enjoy a movie, a story, or a song, in silence— [...] —there is no call for philosophy.
But as soon as we utter a statement about the work, various sorts of question can arise.
Got it.
T
alk
ing causes
problems of aesthetics
.
That's what I already think.
Do I still need to read the next 600 pages?
[... examples of criticism ...]
[2]
[...]
[3]
[...]
Aesthetics and Criticism
Most of the statements in the passages just quoted are about objects called "works of art."
For the present, we shall use the term in a rough sense that will have to be sharpened later.
Works of art
fall into
a number of readily distinguishable subclasses,
and so, correspondingly, do
the statements about them.
Statements about literary works are called "literary criticism"; there is also music criticism, dance criticism, and so on.
I will use the term
"critical statement,"
very broadly, to refer to
any statement about a work of art,
that is, any statement about such objects as poems, paintings, plays, statues, symphonies.
A critical statement is not necessarily critical in the sense of condemning the work [...] nor is it necessarily a statement made by a professional critic.
"Romeo and Juliet is in five acts";
"Smetana’s String Quartet in E Minor is autobiographical";
"Yves Tanguy's painting, Mаmа, Рарa Is Wounded! (1927, Museum of Modern Art, New York) has a sinister air"
—these are critical statements,
whether true or false,
and
no matter who makes them.
Thus critical statements are
answers to questions
like these:
How does the representation of space in Van Gogh’s Night Café (1888, Stephen C. Clark Collection, New York) contribute to its nightmarish quality?
Are there defects in the orchestration of the finale of Schubert's Symphony in C Major (No. 7)?
What metaphysical outlook is reflected in Shelley's Adonais:
The One remains,
the many change and pass?
Is The Cherry Orchard a better play than The Wild Duck?
Questions like these
are for the critic, amateur or paid, to deal with.
As always,
what we actually have been offered here
are
answers
in search of
questions
followed by
some of the
unsought
questions.
🤪 🤪 🤪
i.e.
Notice, in this particular exposition, that
(1) the "answers" literally come first, and the "questions" second. The answers come first in the unfolding rhetoric and on the page itself;
(2) the "answers" and the "questions" are badly mismatched: the given questions would have to receive entirely different types of answers than those given here; and vice versa. 'How many acts are there in X play?' is a very basic question, whereas the etiology of a work's
defects
writ large, just is much more complex. In this case it's actually just numerically much more complex, without entering into any more delicate qualitative matters at all.
(3) Obviously, for anything that minimally qualifies as a "critical statement", it will be possible to back-form a question to which it would be an answer. But this doesn't mean that defining "critical statements" as "answers to questions" is coherent with defining them, also, as
any statement about a work of art
.
Pragmatically, this is fully incoherent: it's quite simple and common to make a "statement about a work of art" that just is not an answer to any question. Of course, the back-forming-of-questions method seems to belong, yes, to a certain kind of analytic view of language, and maybe it's possible to argue for taking this view in the case of certain "critical statements". But then, this 'analytic' view runs even harder into (2), so it is insufficient rescue the account. We should still have to ensure that the questions really do 'analyze into' the answers from which they have been back-formed; this just is the whole point of the exercise. And it could easily have been done here! Why has Our Man taken points off the board?
If it seems like I'm making too much of this, I would say: it's impossible to make too much of it when someone this smart writes something this stupid.
When, however, we ask questions, not
about works of art,
but
about what the critic says
about works of art,
that is,
about his questions
or his answers,
then
we are on another level of discourse.
What can the word autobiographical" mean when applied to music?
By what method does a critic determine the metaphysical outlook of a poem?
What would be a good reason for saying that one play is better, or worse, than another?
Questions like these are questions of aesthetics.
So,
everyone's a critic,
and
Aesthetics
is Metacriticism.
As
a field of study,
aesthetics consists of
a rather heterogeneous collection of
problems:
those that arise when
we make a serious effort
to say something
true and warranted
about a work of art.
These
problems
simply
arise
,
eh?
If an
effort
is causing "problems",
Plan A is to
stop trying.
As a
field of knowledge
aesthetics consists of those principles that are required for
[4]
clarifying and confirming critical statements.
Aesthetics can be thought of, then, as
the philosophy of criticism,
or
metacriticism.
The aim of aesthetics may be clearer if we compare it briefly with two other fields [...]
[...]
[...]
we might ask,
"What does the word 'wrong' mean?"
or
"How can we know that a certain kind of act is wrong?"
These questions are about
the meaning and proof
of moral statements,
but
they are not themselves
moral questions.
[...] it is one task of the physical scientist to provide us with true theories about the properties of subatomic particles, electrons, protons, mesons, etc.
But as philosophers we are interested in other questions:
Do these particles really exist, independently of the human mind, or are they logical constructs?
Does the inquiry into nature presuppose any metaphysical propositions, [...] ?
[...]
These questions are about science itself; they are not physical, but philosophical, questions.
At a very fundamental level, of course,
all the fields of philosophy,
including ethics,
philosophy of science,
and aesthetics,
converge upon certain very broad and very fundamental problems.
[...]
But there is nevertheless a reasonable justification for
dividing up
philosophical problems, if the fences are not raised too high.
Whenever we think about anything, there are some very general principles of reasoning we take for granted, and it is the business of general logic to investigate these principles.
But besides the problems involved in this investigation, there are special problems that arise when we try to think hard and well about, say, right and wrong, or about unobservable physical entities, or about history, or God, or sense experience—or works of art.
If we ignore them, will these
special problems
go away?
Not if we are already
try
ing
to think hard and well about
them.
If this just is what we do, then I suppose we don't get to ask what it would be like not to do this?
If a "critical statement" is quite literally "any statement about a work of art", then there's certainly no warrant of good, hard thought in this domain; and the domain is so "broad" as to justify ignoring most of it, for reasons of practicality if not of sanity.
There must be a reason, then, why certain critical statements command our "serious effort" while others are ignored; and it seems that we ourselves must be part (if not all) of the reason, whether or not this reason betokens a choice.
[...]
If we conceive of aesthetics in this way, we can, in principle, make a clear separation between aesthetics and criticism.
Studying ethics may not make you more moral than you were before, [...]
So, too, studying aesthetics does not make you a critic, and still less a painter or a poet.
Yet it is demonstrable that
neither aesthetics nor criticism can be carried on independently of the other;
though each has its own tasks, they depend upon each other.
Hmm.
The mere ability to make "critical statements" clearly doesn't
depend upon
having a well-developed
philosophy of criticism
.
Any such dependence arises from the imperative that "critical statements" be coherent, logical, supportable, true, . . . i.e., that we ought "to think hard and well about" what we say before we say it.
There's good reason to demand this as a stricture of public discourse, and even better reason to reject its infiltration of private life. Particularly where this infiltration is prescribed as a vehicle of progress, it should be strenuously rejected. If people reject it for the wrong reasons, that is of no concern. What happened here, I suspect, is that already in the nineteenth century, much private life was 'going public', and it became historically apparent that pretty much everything was pushing in this direction and nothing was pushing back. Concurrently, the trauma of ever-accelerating change couldn't help but be expressed in "statements" of various kinds, and thus couldn't help but reveal a conspicuous absence of good, hard thought.
This leaves us with
(1) a voracious public sphere comprised almost entirely of the thoughtless thoughts of no one in particular; and,
(2) a trembling private sphere, dominated by fear of loss and jealously guarding its last rations.
If we're neither going to curtail freedom of expression nor revert to Neolithic technology and social organization, then we have to figure out some other, better way of ignoring each other. Wilful ignorance is the natural, legal, humane, and effective way of deplatforming thoughtless thinkers. All of the other methods are either unnatural, illegal, inhumane, or ineffective!
In the first place,
we can't do aesthetics until we have some critical statements to work on.
'. . .
we can't presume that questions have been asked until we have been inundated with answers, so we had better go looking for some
. . .'
In this book we shall have to make assertions about particular works of art, in order to raise questions about the criteria of their meaningfulness and the tests of their truth.
Hence there will be
[5]
discussion of рarticular arts, drawing upon what has been discovered by critics.
But just because the arts themselves are so interesting, we must be careful not to lose sight of our main purpose, which is not primarily
to increase our knowledge
of the arts,
but
to improve our thinking about them.
Well, indeed we are in a peculiar domain here.
The peculiarity of
the arts
so called, is that
(1) the better path for a general/Liberal education which includes "the arts" just is
to increase our knowledge
because "knowledge" is portable, while "thinking" is domain dependent;
(2) knowledge of the arts comes from doing as much as possible while
thinking
only as much as is absolutely necessary for doing.
i.e. The way to
improve our thinking
is to think about what you've done. You can't only ever think about what someone else has done; and you can't just skip over the doing and go straight for the "thinking". (This is why artists have always spent lots of time "doing over" things that other artists have already done.)
Of course we meet again here with the public/private problem: 'public knowledge' is convergent, decomposable and transactable, whereas 'private knowledge' is none of these, and knowledge-by-doing is largely of the 'private' kind unless and until it is further 'thought about' by the doer with some public purpose in mind. The progressive intellectual mandate to "improve our thinking" is scoped to the peculiar demands of the Liberal public order, as if the public order were where good thinking comes from rather than where it ends up (and, usually, where it goes to die). But what public intellectual hygiene demands is appropriate procedure, so that we know what (collectively) to do; what good (private) thinking demands is something to do, from which procedure can emerge; and what both public and private life demand is some differentiation and protection from each other such that public procedure resists erosion by personal claims, while private practice resists collapsing into mere 'internalization' of whatever the going thing happens to be.
Increasing your knowledge doesn't automatically improve your thinking, but your thinking won't improve without it.
Thus if someone says that
Bruckner was earnest and honest,
and
you don't agree,
there is material here for a lively argument; [...]
But the aesthetic problems involved are of a different order.
Not:
Was Bruckner honest?
But:
How do you tell whether a composer is honest or not?
Is biographical evidence relevant here, or is the honesty audible in the music itself?
And if we could prove that he was honest, would it have anything to do with the value of his symphonies?
Once again, the questions follow from the answers. I'll hold the emojis this time and try to argue this earnestly and substantively.
It's not a mere artifact of literary exposition or English syntax that the "answers" appear higher on the page and the "questions" somewhere below them; it's a substantive element of the theory being presented.
Look at how this all gets started:
someone says
something so mystifying that the truth-value of the statement can't be assessed at all without pausing for good, hard thought about what the criteria of truth would be in the given case;
the need for assessment itself ensues precisely because two (or more) people
don't agree
about the statement's truth, which means that each of them has already reached a verdict (of some sort!) without stopping to consider their own reasons.
It doesn't take a Wittgenstein to see that the result of the inquiry into
the aesthetic problems involved
is not likely to touch either the statement itself or the disagreement over it, but rather to manufacture a 'theory' or a 'criterion' that no one has ever held or is likely to hold.
The "aesthetic" question is not even a trailing question, it's the question that is asked upon noticing that the trailing question is incomprehensible. This is a kind of doubling-down on 'nonsense', and it is doubly seductive to the intellectual precisely because it presents an intense intellectual challenge.
The best that can be said for this project is that
How do you tell . . .
is a rhetorically effective rejoinder to faux-intellectual claptrap. But when I say 'rhetorically effective' I mean only that this is a good way to shut people down, when they realize that the words just sort of popped out of their mouth and that criteria are not as close at hand as it feels like they should be. Less claptrap, better for everybody, I presume. But if W is correct that all such demands for criteria inevitably run aground, then the victory here is indeed merely a tactical one, subsequent to which we have to hope that no one thinks to turn the tactic on us; for we cannot have had any more or better reasons for saying what we have said.
A more optimistic path here is: in some sense we do understand the Bruckner-statement, perhaps perfectly, provided only that it is not subjected to precisely the sort of interrogation recommended here, i.e., as an "aesthetic problem" to be 'solved'. After all, it is not only philosophical critics who say such things; more that such things are problematic specifically when philosophical critics say them, since this comes with an expectation of, well . . . philosophical grounding that cannot (and need not) be expected of the Man in the Street.
What stands in the way of this sort of resolution, presently, is that the example indeed does proceed from the prior fact of disagreement, which is to say that the statement has already caught just the scrutiny it needs to dodge in order to remain innocuous. From there, either the public fact of Bruckner's honesty simply must be litigated, or else ensues a permanent state of disagreement, so to speak.
Nothing worthwhile or even coherent can come of this. Instead we have to back up all the way to the beginning: If the Liberal public order just is a social technology for transfiguring divergent interests into convergent social actions, then
aesthetics
qua
the philosophy of criticism
ought to be the easy case; but what this example shows is that really it is the hard case, the one where we only sink deeper into the morass the harder we writhe. That is the important point. Criticism can wait.
Second,
it is clear that,
for the sake of
reasonable criticism,
these aesthetic questions
must be asked.
To be a good critic,
it is not enough to
accumulate a vast amount of information
about,
and
a rich experience of,
the art you are interested in: you must be able to
organize those data in a fruitful way,
and you must
formulate them
so that they can be
understood.
And this is where aesthetics comes in.
[...]
for example,
[...]
Two art critics who have known each other for years may develop such intellectual sympathy that
when one speaks
of a "profound sense of reality" in a painting,
the other understands
exactly what he means.
Much more often, I am afraid, people think they understand what is meant when they really don't at all. And sometimes they don't really care whether they understand what is meant, if they have
a vague feeling
that something profound is being said.
The critic himself may be more concerned to express the fact that his words are symbols "than to make these symbols symbolize something specific."
Well, here we meet with a kind of recursion of the central "problem": someone says something about an artwork, and now we have the problem of figuring out what this means, whether or not it is something 'that can be said', and so on. (Whether the question to which it is an answer is a question which could or should be asked.)
Perhaps it's too obvious to say: Meaning just cannot be nailed down so precisely. That is true, but it's too easy, for one thing, and for another, it doesn't sufficiently discourage the ongoing proliferation of these eminently avoidable "problems". If anything, it encourages them.
The metaproblem (the recursion) is a familiar one: now, someone has got to say something further in order to try to situate the original statement. By the time this has 'recurred' for a while,
vague feeling
s
start to look pretty good in comparison. Why not stick with them? Because someone (prior to everyone else realizing what is happening) has arrogated to put their feeling to words, and this creates the illusion of having expressed something precise, no matter how "vague" it really is; and then the circle of critical life repeats itself.
When we leave the feelings vague, no false precision is created. And when we leave them private, the public realm is not burdened with unvaguening them.
It seems that our ideal "critic", whom we are constructing here atom by atom, is someone who seizes upon such tandem violations and tries to clean up the mess that someone else has made. I do want to argue that it is a mess. What I want to deny is that it affords any opportunity for transfiguration into
responsible
anything. Where metacritics seek a cure, I say we should be seeking prevention. If this is not to be the mere 'prevention' of free expression, on the sender's end, then it has to be the prevention of a certain kind of reception, i.e. the kind where some idiot, somewhere else, makes some careless remark, and we, here and now, take the remark to bear so heavily and directly on us that something "responsible" must be done about it.
[...]
[6]
[...]
[...]
[...]
It is quite possible to be a good scientist without ever philosophizing about science, but
the progress of science
depends upon
someone's pausing
at some times
to think deeply
about its methods, the meaning of its basic terms, and even its role as a human enterprise among other enterprises.
This imperative to
progress
definitely doesn't apply to
the arts
.
Why should it?
If the scientist himself does this, he is at that time asking philosophical questions;
in the long run, the clearer scientists are about what they are doing, and why, and how, the better our science will be.
Here is a particularly apt occasion for the cliche that technical advance has proven unable to drag politics and morals along with it into the great and bold future.
Again, it is possible for a person to lead a morally blameless life without asking himself what is the nature of the ultimate good, or what is the basis of moral responsibility;
but in the long run
the clearer we are about what makes life worth living,
the more successful we can be in pursuing it;
and
the sounder our conception of the correct way to decide what is right or wrong,
the more rational our decisions are likely to be.
Dubious.
The effort to be
clearer
seems itself to create all of the "problems" it is then prescribed to solve.
(I still haven't read Kant. Is this Kant? Is this why so many people hate Kant?)
In the same way, it is indispensable, in order to keep criticism from degenerating into sheer burbling, nonsensical jargon and maverick evaluations, that someone consider, and consider with care and persistence, the foundations of criticism.
And now, here is an apt occasion for Postman's theory of junk.
"I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do."
(Amusing Ourselves To Death, 16)
Why the particular "danger"? Because "television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric" (17). i.e. Because it's a medium which is a message.
But then, Postman also is saying here that the message either amplifies or attenuates the danger. The message will have its revenge after all.
So how is this all supposed to work?
Criticism being a print genre, is it therefore above danger? Is "no one or nothing seriously threatened by it"? Does it gain or lose from junkiness?
I think the answers, if there are any, must have to do with who is reading, and that the elevated reader that Beardsley's elevated criticism seeks cannot elevate himself above certain universal human frailties.
In particular, the elevated reader is supposed, somehow, to suspend belief-formation until belief-evaluation has finished running. He is not to come out the other side of a print adventure simply believing any and all propositions that were made along the way, especially not the rhetorical passagework, literary displacements, the strawmen and steelmen, etc.
I get the sense that some have tried to deny that there are propositions here at all, preferring instead some form of the 'you don't believe everything you read' defense. Here I think the Analytics may be vindicated in the end, for only a fully decontextualized, fully 'analytic' account of a text fully reveals (forgive me) the propositionality of the text.
Where this fails, still, is in predicting exactly what the resulting 'propositional knowledge' will be. Nosy neighbors that we are, that's what everyone really wants to know, and Analysis can't deliver it. What Analysis can show, however, is that a profligate reader of elevated print is cognitively bathing themselves in propositions.
After saying that we can't know the effect of this, I am going to go ahead and guess what it is: a reorganization of our 'propositional knowledge' that proceeds by way of semantic drift rather than explicit belief.
It has to be a 'reorganization' rather than a revision; it has to be 'semantic' rather than syntactic; and it has to be a 'drift' rather than a shift; all because I presume anything here properly called structural to be very stable. e.g. I presume that studying Beardsley has already begun to shift the ground under whatever constructed concepts of "internal" and "external" have previously emerged for me. If these happen to be metaphors I live by, then I must be 'living by' something slightly different right now than previously I have, since I've rarely if ever applied these modifiers to "evidence", and I've only occasionally thought of drawing "evidence" from a poem or a symphony. Making these applications frequently and thinking hard about the issues the ensue, my concepts begin to drift. Of course we call it 'learning' or 'hard thinking' (or "important cultural conversations") when we think we can see the changes happening and approve of what we think we see. But because the artifacts of 'change' are emergent rather than structural, the harder we look for them, the less of them we see. We can only look for them (look at them) to any extent at all on a 'high level', and on that level, what emerges (emerges at us) is heavy on effect and light on cause.
(I've just learned that Deleuze has mounted some version of this?)
We must ask what presuppositions critics make about perception, about value, about knowledge, about reality, and we must examine these presuppositions to see whether they are justified.
We must consider the meaning of their basic terms, and the logic of their arguments, and subject them to analysis and test.
It is not up to the critic to justify his own assumptions, but
he must believe
that they
can
be justified
or he would be
dishonest to make them.
Dubious.
To what object does this
honest
y
attach?
Not to the
assumptions
themselves!
Rather to the belief that the assumptions
can be justified
.
This is the impersonal, public imperative at work again. Elsewhere I may have no confidence at all that a thought of mine can be justified, yet to report it truthfully is the "honest" way vis-a-vis reporting 'what I think'; whereas to burnish the thought without ceasing to believe to unburnished version is dishonest.
Something has to supersede 'what I think' as the reason for giving my statement. Otherwise honesty remains oblique to the justifiability of the statement.
(The divergence collides in democratic political life, if and when the imperative really is to say what you believe rather than to guard yourself against error. Interestingly, the finding that people more readily leave their conspiracies and radicalisms at home when engaged in the old-fashioned Town Hall-style caucus is not pure cause for optimism, not if this merely betokens a loss of "honesty". And interesting further to consider whether that makes this an inherent feature of democratic deliberation; the perverse contemporary vestiges of that institution certainly will support the finding that it is. You may be led through democratic deliberation to 'find out what you think', but perhaps others don't really learn this about you, nor you about them.)
In the course of this book, then, we shall think of
aesthetics
as a distinctive philosophical inquiry:
it is concerned with
the nature and basis of criticism
—in the broad sense of this term—
just as criticism itself is concerned with works of art.
Now it must be admitted that this way of staking out the boundaries of the field does not correspond exactly to that of all other aestheticians.
Indeed, it is one of the inconveniences in this field that its scope is subject to so much difference of opinion.
The chief difference is this:
it is customary to include among the problems of aesthetics the nature of the creative process itself;
I presume he means something broader; more like: the causes of the work. In TIF 'cause' is actually used this way.
('Cause' appears on the next page . . . along with effects . . .)
[e.g.] what social and psychological conditions move the painter and poet, and how they go about their work.
Now, I do not consider all the problems one can raise about art and artists as problems of aesthetics;
I take as central the situation in which someone is confronted with a finished work, and is
trying to understand it
and
to decide how good it is.
He will encounter many problems, if he reflects with persistence on what he is doing, but probably he need not inquire into the psychology of artistic creation.
The question,
What makes the artist create?
is a psychological ques-
[7]
tion,
in my view,
not a philosophical one.
Sure.
Of course this
psychology
does have a 'metapsychology' which is a proper and comparable
philosophical
project.
It's clear that the choice is being made to bracket all of that. The actual reason why still is not so clear.
The
situation
thereby
take
n
as central
invites more questions than answers.
How hard are we supposed to
try
to understand
?
Does anyone really
decide
how good
a finished work
is
?
When's the last time you "decided" this?
This isn't what we do merely on our own behalf. It sounds like less of a 'judgment' and more of a verdict. The reason there are extra steps involved, beyond simply 'being present', is that we're not "deciding" only for ourselves (and perhaps not at all for ourselves).
And it is, I think, useful to make a distinction between
psychological aesthetics,
which deals with
questions about the causes and effects of works of art,
and
philosophical aesthetics,
which deals with
questions about the meaning and truth of critical statemenents.
"Aesthetics" in this book is an abbreviation for "philosophical aesthetics."
Nevertheless,
we shall see that
we cannot ignore psychology;
Well,
philosophers
never can
ignore
'the empirical literature',
not even if they try.
That said,
given this exposition,
and given our
philosoph
ical
orientation,
why don't we just go straight for the
meta?
its data and conclusions will bear upon ours at many points.
For example, when we consider the logic of evaluation, we are led to ask about the nature of aesthetic experience, and this is a psychological question.
Where the psychological data are as yet too sparse to answer the question decisively, we can at least analyze the question, and formulate it as clearly as possible, so that we can see what sort of psychological data would be required in order to answer it.
The Problems of Aesthetics
It would be possible to make out a case for saying
that
it is neither necessary nor desirable for people to talk about works of art.
😲 😲 😲
Such talk can be harmful.
Some books about poetry are so interesting that
they distract people
from reading
the poetry itself.
Excellent diversion.
It not only
would be possible
to
make out a
much better
case
,
it has been done!
(Perhaps some assembly is required, however.)
Sometimes the remarks of critics, even bad and ignorant critics,
have enough prestige-value
to spread false conceptions
of painting and music, so that people miss what is most precious in these arts because
they go to them with the wrong expectations.
This did happen to me once, and it's most of the
cause
of my arch-skeptical view of criticism. This is a bias that I have.
What I've learned from this, most of all, is that what 'biases' do is cause you to notice things that people lacking in the bias tend to overlook or ignore. That's what bias is.
We should all be more 'biased'.
For example, much that is put into the usual notes given out at symphony concerts would be better left unwritten, for it leads the audience to sentimentalize over the composer instead of listening attentively to the music.
But something can be said on the other side, too.
There is considerable evidence that teachers of literature, fine arts, and music
can help people
increase the pleasure
they get from poems, paintings, and concertos.
Call this the pleasure imperative.
Means or end, this
pleasure
?
(Didn't Beardsley later express some skepticism about this?)
Perception can be sharpened, and taste refined.
Even some parts of the creative process can apparently be taught in fine arts and music schools, or at least usefully encouraged by instruction.
Well, it's the resources and the structure of the
schools
not the
instruction
that gets these (or whatever other) results.
It's the form, not the content.
It was just becoming possible to see-and-say this in 1958. Paul Goodman said it well, a few times, over the next few years.
(Means or end, this
perception
and this
creative process
?)
The newspaper reader has reason to be grateful to the reviewer who warns him away from poor plays.
This is several imperatives smashed together:
i.e.,
appointed expert casuist of leisure-time matters
.
And, quite apart from all these considerations, a work of art, like a rare plant, a pile of prehistoric bones, a revolution, or the human brain, is
a phenomenon in our environment
of some considerable interest in itself, about which we may legitimately
feel a persistent curiosity.
The best reason yet. But you don't have to publish your findings.
'Going to paper' and 'going public' marks a further choice: to transact not only in one's own curiosity but in that of others.
The great critics have wanted to know, pretty much
for the sake of knowing,
what makes a poem work, what general features distinguish good melodies from bad, what are the possible modes of visual representation.
In any case,
people won't
stop making statements about works of art.
Quite the consequentialist deflection to follow in the wake of so much striving toward principle! And an equivocation to boot: we have stipulated that one need not be a
great critic
in order to make "critical statements"; if it is the target of the
statement
rather than the source that determines this, then of course it's safe to assume that
people won't stop
,
for there are far more artworks than people in the world; but by then we have stopped demanding greatness of our talking heads and are content to expect and hope for it.
The whole thrust of this exposition just is to compel certain people to stop making certain statements. It seems the
curio
us
reader must then be entitled to have their own subset of people in mind here.
The question is not
whether we shall talk,
but
whether we shall do it well or badly.
Touché.
"People won't stop" with the
bad
talk
,
hence this cannot really be
the question
.
The questions are:
How cleanly can the bad and the good really be distinguished?
If we think they can be distinguished cleanly, then shouldn't we be able to say what the criteria of goodness are?
Bearsdley does not lack for criteria. And we do not lack for "questions".
We must try not to talk too much or too soon, or trivially, or incorrectly, or irrelevantly, or misleadingly.
Godspeed.
🤐 🤐 🤐
If it is true, as I
[8]
believe it is, that
the arts have a place in the best human life
—a question to which we shall return in the last chapter—
then
they are worth a good deal of effort.
Don't try too hard!
🥵 🥵 🥵
The form-and-content of the
effort
is all-important.
That it is an "effort", of some kind or other, matters not in the least.
We cannot all be poets or composers, but we ought to take some pains to ensure that what we say about art helps, rather than hinders, the fulfillment of its purpose.
Silence never really seems to help, does it?
But if the choice to do nothing is a choice, then it is, in essence, an action-taken, is it not?
And this is a continuing task.
For
new kinds
of painting, new kinds of poetic speech, new sounds in music, are always coming into existence, and they provide the critic with
new problems.
What's new?
At the risk of getting very navel-gazy, this question has a domain-specific contour in the arts, where the fact of the new is generally acknowledged. Along with it, we have then to acknowledge what exactly it is that is new about the new.
As long as we are calling the latest product
painting
or
music
then its painting-ness or music-ness cannot be the new part.
What really has changed? Something certainly has. Form? Content? Intent?? Or what?
And then, . . . what exactly is the
problem
thus created?
"I take as central the situation in which someone is confronted with a finished work, and is trying to understand it and to decide how good it is." (6)
I have worked at showing, so far only obliquely, that these are pseudo-"problems". This conclusion is more secure, re: "deciding". A decision has a time before and a time after; I am skeptical that the judgment of "good"-ness which comes of a "decision" can be spoken of interchangeably with that which comes of naive experience.
As for "understanding", I tend to think that it's almost always the wrong word to denote what it's aiming at, but that the target is something real which is not easily disposed of. The bottom line is: we cannot proceed as if "new" works, a priori, simply never are "understood". Something can be unmistakably and unequivocally "new" and yet "understood" perfectly; and I would venture that where we find starry-eyed partisans of the new, we find people who have experienced just this. Needless to say, for these people, there are no "new problems" for criticism to solve on behalf of the yet-to-be-enlightened rabble. Problems of understanding are therefore parochial problems rather than universal ones.
One wonders, then, if even
the great critics
are in some measure trapped addressing their dispatches to the least "great" audience members; indeed, if we're especially excluding intention from figuring in public evaluations of artifacts, then the intent of these critics to address the elevated as well and the naive is a conceit that must fall by the wayside. But then, "effect" is merely the flipside of "cause", and so the fatwa against intention has to be taken, in this sort of case, also as a fatwa against defining the work by its effects. From here, what is left standing? Perhaps a joke that a few people have caught the first time, but which must be explained to everyone else, and which has flown so far over some people's heads that the explanation requires full gory detail to make any headway at all.
Moreover, there are always plenty of silly, stupid, or vicious things being said about art, things that need clearing up and clearing away.
An interesting parallel here with crime and poverty:
. . . 'the poor
(and the
stupid
)
will always be with us' . . .
vs.
. . . 'it's all structural, man' . . .
Probably,
over-
curious
overtalking oversharers will continue to be both born and made. Here is a meta-meta-critical "problem".
If you ride public transit in a big American city, ca. 2026, I trust you've seen plenty of meta-transit PSAs in amongst all the ads, admonishing riders to silence their phones and keep their feet off the seats. No one seems to have realized (or perhaps accepted) that the people who most need the reminder are the least likely to read or heed it.
Exactly once have I summoned the 'bigger man' in me and asked someone to comply with a transit rule. For my trouble, I got shrieked at before I could finish the sentence. That is likely to be the last time I take that tack.
The problem of
silly, stupid, or vicious
"critical statements" is the same kind of problem, different only in degree rather than kind, and demanding the same sort of remedy.
For example,
a fourteen-foot bronze sculpture,
[...]
in a new police facilities building in Los Angeles.
The figures are attenuated, small-headed, faceless; [...]
A City Councilman, [...] calls it "probably the most scandalous satire and caricature of the American people that I have ever seen," [...]
The Hollywood Association of Artists urges that the group be composed of "easily recognizable figures" modeled from actual police personnel, and executed by an artist who has taken a loyalty oath.
It can easily be seen that though this complex issue is partly political, there are also woven into it
disagreements about
the nature of sculpture,
its values, and its place in the life of the community.
If we could
straighten out these disagreements,
the conflict would at least
become more manageable.
Dubious!
The
agreement
which results from
straighten
ing things
out
is purely formal; it leaves the etiology of the conflict untouched.
The strongest possible argument in favor of this as a broad 'politics of accommodation' says nothing about its transfer out of politics proper and into other domains . . . unless of course there is just one domain (politics) and literally everything simply gets referred there.
With passages such as this one, we seem headed for a capital-L Liberal politics which has arrived at the Everything Is Political mantra well in advance of the heady '60s, by an entirely different route, with entirely different objectives, rationales, and outcomes.
If this sort of conflict is real, and if it is not simply to be referred, cattle-call style, to generic processes of formal 'accommodation', then where is the fault, and how is it to be prevented?
The fault is in the pretense that 'public art' can ever be a pure credit with no serious tradeoffs. In fact the tradeoff is so severe that it by far outweighs the credits: everything is up for negotiation and
manage
ment,
not least our
values
themselves.
This is not the exaltation of democracy, it is its death knell. A 'politics of accommodation' is for reconciling interests, not "values". There is, of course, a point beyond which the two can't be so neatly distinguished; but, for one thing, we aren't in danger of running into that problem with mere
sculpture
,
and for another, when I speak of referring "values" for reconciliation as if they were "interests", I mean to suggest that a yet more fundamental pillar of Liberalism (freedom of thought and expression) simply goes to seed this way, and by that time we have entered crisis mode, with two foundational assumptions pitted against each other in zero-sum fashion.
[...]
The problems of aesthetics are opened up by
the basic question that can be asked of any statement about a work of art,
as, indeed, it can be asked about any statement whatsoever:
What reason is there to believe that it is true?
This question, as we shall see more fully later, leads to subordinate questions, e.g., What does the statement mean?
What sorts of thing do we
want to say
about works of art?
I do not wish to raise here the question,
What is the function of criticism?
—whether it is more important, say, for critics to judge works of art, or promote and puff them, to act as a barker or as an entrepreneur between artist and public.
The critic, if he has any use at all, may play several social roles, and at a late stage of our inquiry we shall be able to discuss these more effectively.
Most critics, I suppose, would in the end justify their activity by the claim that it is
auxiliary to appreciation,
to the full or proper enjoyment of art, whether or not it assists artistic creation.
In any case,
whatever the critic may have in mind
as an ultimate purpose,
[9]
he tries to achieve that purpose
by telling us something about the work,
I don't know how we can
ask
anything about the
reason
to believe
any statement
without having any understanding of
function
in hand.
I think that criticism is essentially phatic, no matter what erudition is thereby displayed. I hesitate to say that the epistemic
question
simply
can
not
be asked
,
but to direct it at phatic dialogue certainly is more likely to compound any confusion than to clear it up.
I hope that we should
want to
be as truthful as possible with our public statements about artworks, and to save the small-talk for private audiences. If so, then obviously there should be no "function" for criticism which is irreconcilable with this stricture, and obviously phaticity is just such an irreconcilable function.
I think Beardsley would say that truthfulness is a quality rather than a function: truthfulness may be necessary to enable a function but does not alone justify the function. He means that there is some other functional end in view here; often enough it is
appreciation
.
It takes a pinch of bad faith simply refuse to believe that this could really be the goal, even where people have vehemently insisted that it is. That much granted, once you open your mind to watching what people do rather than what they say, then further open it to the possibility that this old chestnut applies as well when the do-ing just is say-ing as when it is a purely physical behavior, it becomes hard to take seriously any standard functional interpretation other than the phatic one, which is a "function", certainly, but which is not indentured to sense, even, let alone to truth.
This is just
one more reason why
putting the reader through a scenario
that
begins
with
the brute fact of
a sense- and truth-bearing "statement"
already made
just is not very nice.
and it turns out that there are
three basically different kinds of thing he can tell us,
each of which raises aesthetic problems peculiar to itself.
First, we must distinguish between normative statements and non-normative statements about works of art.
Normative statements are critical evaluations.
[...]
I know no thoroughly satisfactory way of defining "normative statement," but for the present it will be sufficient to indicate the class in a rough way:
critical evaluations are those that apply to works of art
the words "good" or "beautiful,"
their negatives,
or
other predicates
definable in terms of them.
The problems that arise in considering the meaning and logical justification of critical evaluations are the hardest problems we have to face,
and
they will be reserved for the last chapters of the book.
[...] ;
the task ask of dealing with them will be much easier if some other matters are taken up first.
In this sector we encounter the most puzzling and unsatisfactory concepts.
For example, we can approach the problems of critical evaluation by asking
what sorts of reason people give
for praising a work of art.
One reason often given is that the work is beautiful: [...]
But suppose one person says it is beautiful and another says it is not;
how can the question be settled,
or,
short of violence,
is there any way of settling it?
The first question is surely
what is meant
by "beauty," for perhaps the two disputants are using the term in different senses.
[...]
A second distinction should be made
between
two kinds of non-normative statement,
those that interpret
and
those that simply describe
works of art.
A critical interpretation, for the purposes of this book, is a statement that
purports to declare the "meaning"
of a work of art
—this is not to be confused with the quite different sense in which, for example, a pianist is said to "interpret" a sonata in playing it a certain way.
I use the term "meaning" for
a semantical relation
between
the work itself
and
something outside the work.
Suppose it is said
that
a tone poem contains a joyful affirmation of life,
or that
it "refers to" something in the life of the composer;
or that
a dance "represents" the awakening of young love;
or that
[10]
a bridge in a novel "symbolizes" or "signifies" the crises of life;
or that
a modern office building "expresses" the functional efficiency of modern business.
These statements are critical interpretations.
This is quite a varied collection of
semantical relation
s,
none quite like any of the others.
If we nix the s-word entirely and say instead that
"meaning"
consists in some "relation", of whatever kind, between w and x, have we said anything different from what Beardsley says here?
Are we to think that there simply can be no "meaning" in all those "relations" of the type that may be, but need not be, pointed to?
e.g.
The piece was completed on a Thursday.
The number of quarter-notes contained in the piece is 42 less than the number of traffic fatalities nationwide during the year 2013.
And of course, the old standbys,
The composer owns three siamese cats, enjoys hiking, had cottage cheese and fruit for lunch today, . . .
Are these simply meaning-less? I don't think so. All of them "mean" something, this meaning being comprised by the same sort of "relation" between w and x as Beardsley is concerned with. All are "semantical", as that term is deployed here, just because this deployment of "semantical" is not a degree term. So, I don't think we can say (coherently and conventionally) that what the composer had for lunch is a "meaningless" factor in
critical interpretation
.
Rather, it means something, and it is precisely because we haved grasped its meaning that we then find this meaning to be, say, unimportant, or perhaps uninteresting, unenlightening, misleading, irrelevant, or whatever; whereas the more salient stuff about what a work
represents
or
expresses
is the stuff that means something important.
These, of course, are textbook
normative
evaluations
.
They are distinguished from each other neither by what they mean, nor by the mere fact that they mean; rather, by the normative principle that we evince when we pluck one or the other of them from the infinite flux of relational space.
Though the act of
interpreting a work
is less complicated
than the act of
evaluating it,
🤣 🤣 🤣
it is
complicated enough,
and raises its own set of problems.
Consider, for example, the term "express."
How do we determine
whether
a building "expresses" something?
Or, like, . . . why?
Because some blowhard has said that it does? And because we are somehow obligated to take his small-talk as if it were big?
What,
if anything,
does this term imply
about
the experience of the architect in designing it,
about
the relation between the qualities of the building and the purposes it serves,
and
about
the experience of the observer?
What connection,
if any,
is there
between
the expressiveness of the building
and
its beauty as an architectural design?
But before these questions can be considered, we must deal, more briefly, with some problems that arise
merely in describing
the characteristics
of works of art.
Statements that inform us about the colors and shapes of a painting, or summarize the plot of a motion picture, or classify an operatic aria as being of the A B A form, are
critical descriptions.
The central problems in this sector of the field involve
the concept of form.
Probably no word occurs oftener in the language of criticism.
The given example of
A B A
certainly points up the 'theory-bound' aspect of
description
.
How to distinguish the 'theory' in which this "description" is 'bound' from that which enswathes
plot
or, yes, even
colors and shapes
?
I suppose there is a danger in thinking that nothing so elemental as "color" could possibly be 'bound' as such, in the manner of some professor's contrivance. I want to say that the danger attaches to the practice of "description" writ large, and not to any 'pre-descriptive experience': the
operatic aria
may have an 'elemental' life, whereby any so-called 'theory' which enswathes it simply is not the product of profession. What is it the product of? Perhaps: of everything else. And we don't call that a 'theory', except when "Aesthetics" spits us out just here, always at the doorstep of this same dive, which is not where we hoped to end up but, alas, just is where we are.
From this vantage, the only way we can say anything at all even about "colors and shapes" just is for those concepts to be 'bound' up with some 'theory', our theory, whatever it is. It's always a 'theory', because that is the word that professors use for it.
I am the son of a professor; yet the "A B A" 'theory' is not mine, and I do not call my version a 'theory'.
It ["the concept of form] is opposed, in different contexts, to "expression," to "representation," to "content," to "matter," to "meaning."
A telltale sign of cross-purposes.
But which 'purpose' is it that has us all crossed-up?
Are we all trying
to describe
different things?
or
to describe
the same thing differently?
The possession of form is regarded sometimes as a distinguishing feature of works of art in general, and sometimes as a mark of artistic excellence within this class.
But again:
How is the term used?
Which of its uses are worth preserving and which must be rejected as misleading?
Well, it's perfectly imaginable, even to me, that no such
uses
are inherently
misleading
but that people may be misled (or, more likely, may mislead themselves) nonetheless. i.e. 'There are no bad dogs, only bad owners.'
The ultimate conclusion remains deeply pessimistic: the kind of unanimity of culture and experience which underwrites Wittgensteinian 'holism' simply does not exist anymore; and perhaps it disappeared first from his own milieu, and was already gone by the time he made his breakthroughs.
It no longer seems sufficient merely to live in the same place, speak the same language, and so on. Those are always already 'holistic' constructs anyway, so it's not a stretch to think that the real action, the 'variables', were always more granular, and therefore extremely fragile.
(Alternatively: the 'holism' is, ultimately, an illusion, though we might still say: it took a singular genius to find the vantage from which it could be seen.)
[...]
Plans of Attack
The problems of philosophical aesthetics,
then,
however various,
fall into
three main groups, to which there is a natural order of approach.
The problems raised by descriptive statements are the simplest ones, and their solution is presupposed by the rest, so they must be taken up first, [...]
[Next,] The more debatable problems raised by interpretative statements [...]
Finally, [...] the problems raised by the critic's value judgments.
Now this last set of problems is undoubtedly the most interesting of all;
these are the problems that critics would most like to see solved.
🥱 🥱 🥱
[...]
[...] often critics are interested in
describing and interpreting
works of art because
[11]
they want to evaluate them;
they
use
the descriptive and interpretative statements
as reasons
for, or partial rereasons for, normative statements.
[...]
However, I do not want to suggest that description and interpretation are important only as grounds for evaluation. Even if we were able, or willing, to refrain from all value judgments about works of art,
it could still be interesting and useful
to analyze
their qualities and inner relations, and to discover what they mean or signify
—for, after all,
describing and interpreting
are
the two halves of understanding.
The aforementioned problem with the word 'theory', now made (unnecessarily) a problem with several more words.
One always
understand
s
within one's own resources. In this sense (a highly attenuated one, I concede), it is impossible not to "understand".
What Beardsley says here applies, I think, only to life lived according to Professor's Theory; only where there is some overriding objective of the type that Professors are compelled to have theories of.
'Theory-bound' as all of our everyday
describing and interpreting
may still be said to be, it cannot be bound up in any purposes that are not ours.
(It's too easy to say, but simply cannot be ignored: the Professor's most pressing day-to-day problem is to obtain proof of understanding. So, how else to discover whether or not someone has actually looked at something than to have them "describe" it? And if they've not just looked at it but really "understood" it, then they should be able to "interpret" it also. Hence the Professor's Understanding is born, and common understanding gains an upstart sibling rival.)
It can be seen from the sample problems reviewed a moment ago that our task will require a certain amount of verbal analysis [...]
This concern with the meanings of words, though it may at times seem remote from our main goals, is by no means trivial.
It is for the sake of the more substantive problems.
[...]
Indeed, aesthetics has long been contemptuously regarded as a stepsister within the philosophical family.
Her rejection is easy to explain, and partially excuse, [...]
[...]
We have come to accept her backwardness, not demanding as much of her as we demand of her brothers and sisters
—in fact,
we demand too little,
much less than with coaxing she can be made to perform.
At the same time, we must be prepared to put out more care and effort than we do with a normal child, just to teach her her ABC's.
[...]
[12]
[...]
I have [...] tried throughout to be as clear and rigorous as I can,
but without passing up opportunities to reach toward a promising idea even when I could not formulate it exactly.
[...]
[...] at all times one eye must be kept on the object that really matters most: the work of art itself.
Well, there are different ways to
matter
.
For "critics", so broadly construed as here, it's the 'public'-ness of
the work
that makes it, in the words of TIF, 'available'.
One might just as well say, though, that the 'person' (the artist, the audience) also is 'available': the person constitutes a public object of sorts; and even for an arch-Formalist, the person is and must remain, as our Humanist gluttons of relationality like to say, always 'at the center' of our concerns, else we should slide into vulgar inhumanity of one sort or another.
The immediate "problem" seems to be, not that of determining what
really matters most
and being sure to 'center' it at all times; rather, that of knowing-and-saying what exactly the 'relation' between person and work consists in.
For this purpose,
the object
side of the relation "really matters" no more nor less than the person side. It's all about the relation.
Now, for Beardsley, there is a substantive reason for centering he public object. See TIF for this. But don't expect to be satisfied with this aspect of TIF. There's nothing at all foundational in TIF. The question of what exactly the 'public order' is (or ought to be) and how it's supposed to work (or ought to work, if it can) has been assumed rather than opened for inquiry. TIF's prescriptions for criticism are entirely downstream of this; under a different regime than the one which the paper seems to assume, its various imperatives may entirely fail to follow. (And similarly, let's just say, if you find yourself objecting strenuously enough to those imperatives, maybe you are not quite the loyal devotee of their foundations that you think you are.)
What happened in order to arrive just here, I contend, is that the Liberal public order, if I may speak of it as an agent, discovered that: if art were to continue to matter in the way it way it was thought to matter (and to matter that it matter, and . . .), then it had to be explained; and if any public object was to be explained, this had to be done in accordance with the foundations of the public order itself.
This is one way, anyway, to land on the stricture that no cause of a work can be taken de facto to generate a standard for judging its worth. (TIF, sec. I, no. 1) I gather it has been pointed out repeatedly ever since, from a variety of philosophical persepctives, that this really is something we do all the time; if it is not exactly normal to do this, it certainly is abnormal to forbid it. All true, and all beside the point. A Liberal public order cannot permit anything and everything 'natural' to simply run its course. Liberalism seeks to minimize certain social constraints, according to certain foundational directives. It cannot efface constraint altogether; that is some other ism.
In this light, the bracketing off of intent-as-cause from intent-as-standard is not a novel proposal. What it is, is an application-of-principle that fails to generalize across Liberal social questions. The real question is: where to apply it, and where not? Where does it work, and where not?
No matter how coolly analytical and abstract critical discourse must sometimes become if it is to be apt and warranted, it must not lose affection and respect for the things it is about.
No matter how proud we may become at unraveling a particularly knotty and annoying bit of terminological or logical confusion, we must remain basically humble before the work itself, and before that precious human power that brought it and all its characteristics, meanings, and values, into existence.
This is the modesty.
[...]
The "Notes and Queries" at the end of each chapter should generate further reflection upon the problems dealt with in the text, and also related problems that are barely touched upon.
[...]
It is a good idea, before beginning Chapter I, to collect some examples of critical writing, like those cited at the beginning of this Introduction, [...]
Analyze them carefully, looking for words that need further clarification and for statements that need further logical justification.
I presently lack both the desire to do this and the faith that it is worth the effort.
As with political systems themselves . . . if the answer, perennially, is that we're just not doing it right, how much time has to pass before we're allowed to conclude that the problem is with the system itself?
[...]
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