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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Reply to Jerome Langguth
Posted by Robert Kraut on January 2, 2008 at 10:23 AM | Permalink
Robert Kraut
Jerome Langguth has posted some initial questions and reactions to my Artworld Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). I appreciate his interest in my work; his remarks are precisely to the point. Some of his queries are addressed later in the book; and some merit more compelling response than I have. But here are some preliminary reactions, just to get the conversation going. Hopefully others will be drawn into the discussion.
Jay says
>>My main question concerns the relationship between what aestheticians properly do and the theoretical activities that belong to the artworld. Kraut seems to believe that it is a clear methodological error for a philosopher of art to lapse into art criticism. But where (exactly) are we to draw our methodological line, and, more importantly, why is it so crucial that we do so?<<
This is a fair question, and I am not sure how to answer it, except that it manifests my own sense of what it is to do philosophy as opposed to doing other things--all of which might be important. Disciplinary boundaries are often superficial: I used to hear lesser-trained colleagues complain that certain work "wasn't really philosophy," but was rather linguistics, mathematics or psychology. I offer no formal definition of 'philosophy' that would underwrite my claims in Chapter One, nor do I think such a formal definition is required to legitimize my claim--which purports to be, in part, diagnostic of aesthetic theory's "marginalization". If you agree that it's marginalized, some explanation is required. What I say about losing sight of the boundary between X and the philosophy of X is intended to be part of such an explanation. It isn't intended to be the whole story.
Moreover, it is not my goal (or place) to offer imperialistic edicts about "what aesthetics ought to be". I guess it should be what people want it to be. But I suggest that philosophers working in my own tradition are likely to discern--for example--important differences between substantive moral dispute and "higher-order," meta-ethical reflections on the semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics of moral practice. This contrast is itself controversial: writers like Nagel, Dworkin and McDowell doubt that it can be sustained. But I rather like the contrast, and I seek to apply it to aesthetic theory.
2) Jay says:
>>Why is the claim that music has nothing to do with the emotions, which Kraut endorses, any different from the claim that music is not in any sense a language, which he labels a methodological error? Both might be part of critical discourse, but they are also doing philosophical work. Why is it so bad to find them together? <<
Clive Bell reminds us that "The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion." He might be wrong about the "emotion" part; but he is surely right about where the theorist starts: from his or her own experiences of engagement with the arts--either as producer, consumer, or critic. I experience music as language; I do not experience music as expressive of emotion. As a player, performance and collective improvisation feel precisely like conversation. Yet I do not, for the most part, experience music as expressive of emotion. So that's where I start. This leaves me with two substantive challenges: (1) to determine whether, in the case of emotion, I'm missing something that's there. The metaphysical question is whether music does, in fact, have the touted emotional-expressive properties. Perhaps it does, in which case my failing to discern those properties is analogous to a color blind person's failing to discern the real colors of objects. Or perhaps it doesn't, in which case we theorists need to explain why so many people think otherwise. But there is nothing simple about the problem. Concerning (2)--the music as language paradigm--I devote substantial portions of the book to considering costs and benefits associated with the view.
One thing I've found vexing about (1) is that many writers simply begin with the assumption that music expresses emotions, and then proceed to theorize about how, precisely, this is possible. I see that as analogous to a theorist beginning with the "datum" that numbers and functions are abstract entities and trying to sculpt an epistemology to explain how knowledge of such items is possible. Surely it is fair to go back to the "starting data" and ask whether numbers and functions are indeed abstract, or whether there might be another description of the metaphysics of the situation that doesn't lead to such horrendous epistemological puzzles. If music expresses emotions, whether or not certain people discern it, it should be possible to show that it does. That is the burden of my Chapter 4, wherein I conclude that there is no good reason to think of music as having emotional-expressive properties.
But then I must provide explanations of other people's experiences of music. Analogy: I do not experience the world as inhabited by a Judeo-Christian Deity, but it is incumbent upon me to provide explanations--whether in Freudian terms, or Marxist terms, or whatever--of the prevalence of such beliefs and experiences. I try to provide an explanation of why so many people are drawn to "expressionist" theories of music. My explanation might or might not be adequate. And--to move to the music as language theme that Jay broaches--I try to offer an explanation of why so many working players experience music as a form of linguistic behavior. My explanation might or might not be adequate, but it is an effort to engage the way music presents itself to me.
3) Jay says:
>>Kraut uses the example of a jazz musician during playback to capture the movement in theoretical stance between practitioner and theorist, which is a fascinating metaphor for aesthetic theorizing. But this doesn't seem to work as an image of the kind of theoretical distancing Kraut wants. Isn't the musician during playback still working in the artworld? Granted, the stance taken on the work in this case involves distancing oneself from the performance situation, but such distancing seems to me to be part of what it is to be an artworld practitioner of this specific kind.<<
This is an excellent challenge and I am still thinking about it. Hopefully I'll have something useful to say about it in the near future.
But here is a tentative thought (one nice feature of blogs is that obsessive caution is not mandatory). Jay is surely right that critical listening and editing are part of the musician's practice, not some activity "external" to the practice. Still, there are differences here that make a difference. Consider a linguistic analogue: speaking about language is a use of language; talking about the way one talks is itself an instance of talking. Of course. Still, there is a difference between the "first-order" linguistic practice and the "higher order" reflective practice of exploring the syntax and semantics of one's own speaking. The difference between "mere" participation in linguistic practice, and participation in the specialized, reflective, "higher order" practice of semantic theory seems to me important--though perhaps I do an unconvincing job of relating it to aesthetic theorizing.
I hope to
offer more compelling reactions to Jay's comments. For the present I wish to express my appreciation for his thinking
about my book and taking the time to formulate his concerns.
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Posted by: jerome langguth | Jan 15, 2008 8:41:05 PM :
Many thanks to Professor Kraut for his careful and thought-provoking rely to my initial questions. Here are a few additional, not by any means fully worked out, thoughts on Artworld Metaphysics.
1. I certainly sympathize with your intuitions about the important differences between theories about the artworld and artworld practice, but I am less sure than you seem to be about the implications of those differences for "doing aesthetics." As I recall, you made two criticisms of current practice in the field of aesthetics:(1) aestheticians don't always seem to recognize the crucial distinction between practitioner theory and art-criticism and philosophical aesthetics, and consequently their arguments slide into art-criticism or artworld theorizing, and (2) aesthetic theory too often makes speculative generalizations based on data originating in a narrowly circumscribed region of the artworld (philosophy of music countenances Schubert and Schoenberg but not Pantera and Ayler). I see the second issue as more worrisome than the first. It is right, I suppose, to insist on a strict division of labor between critics and philosophers of art. It seems true that when doing philosophy of art our main interest is ideally not whether a given artist's work is worth hearing, seeing, or reading. So being a "critic" in this narrow sense is not the job of the philosopher. At the same time, it seems to me that a good philosophy of art need not always be completely "neutral" on matters of aesthetic worth (is this even possible?). Not being "neutral" might just mean that I find much more to think about in the music of John Coltrane or Lee Konitz than I do in the latest pop tune. This in not necessarily a "critical" judgment in the ordinary sense. My writing will not take the form of a critical assessment of various Coltrane performances, etc. At the same time, there is a sense in which by the simple act of deciding what is philosophically interesting I am inevitably drawing on my own experience, and even taste. I can pretend to objectivity here, but I don't see what that gets me. The upshot of which, I guess, is that there will always (it seems to me) be some degree of critical reflection involved in doing philosophy of art-- and we need not be embarrassed by that. As for the second problem you discuss, the one about narrowness, I couldn't agree more. The field of aesthetics, and especially perhaps the philosophy of music, continues to be afflicted by a tendency to draw from a very narrow range of examples for its data. There have been some works—l am thinking about Ted Gracyk’s book on rock aesthetics-- that attempt to remedy this, but they remain in the minority. And maybe this is the problem with allowing one's own taste to intrude too much in one's philosophy of art: taste and a limited exposure to the wide variety of art-forms and practices that exist can blind us to the really interesting problems. We spend all of our time worrying about problems like whether music expresses emotion, when it is plausibly the case that only a small subset of the world's musical practices aim for anything like this in the first place. And to broach another topic dealt with in your book, it’s amazing how little attention has been paid to jazz in mainstream analytic aesthetics.
2. As far as the music and emotion question goes, I would agree with you that the importance of “expressing emotion” has been overstated in the philosophy of music. I do think, however, that the intuitions of artworld practitioners about this are going to depend upon the style of music in question. Stravinsky is predictably hostile to the notion, but Duke Ellington was not (“I like big ol’ tears”). Somewhere in here the fact that the paradigm musical form for a great many western listeners is the song seems relevant. It is natural (or so it seems to me) to think of the song as expressing the emotions of the singer (if not the composer), and for many listeners instrumental music is “songs without words”. Of course, the further one moves from language and the song form the less relevant the “expression of emotion” becomes. And non-western song forms might demand another approach to analysis altogether. It is telling that modernist rock musicians, like Brian Eno, deliberately try to undercut the connection between singing and expressing emotion by vocalizing in a “removed” or distant way, or by using voice distortion technology of some kind; but this only serves to underscore the point that songs are most often experienced by western audiences as expressive of both thought (sometimes) and emotion (often). Is it even possible to talk in an informed way about the music of Otis Redding, for example, without mentioning the emotional power of the music? Which is, of course, not to say that Otis had to be feeling blue himself to convey the feeling of the blues to his audiences. For the listener, however, what matters is that the song is blue, not that Otis is. I would like to say more about this, but I will save it for another time.
3. A provisional thought on playback: the degree of theoretical abstraction involved in playback will vary according to the style of music of the practitioner. Some instances of playback will focus simply on what “succeeded” and what “failed” in the performance reviewed. Others might be focused on more abstract concerns such as the “place” of the music with respect to various idioms or influential figures (that solo sounds too much like Coltrane, so I’ll work on changing that). Still others might be incipient philosophies of music (Ornette working out the principles of Harmolodics). All of this activity is in the artworld, which seems to suggest that some practitioner theory is also aesthetic theory in the strictest sense—in spite of the fact that relatively few jazz musicians are also philosophers (lamentably).
Posted by: foad najmedin | Jan 19, 2008 8:52:36 AM :
In search of a universal aesthetic system, you propose that:
1- There is an attitude of judgment of artistic value.
2- That is common among mankind.
a. There seems to be no objections against the first premise, since the articulative attitude of the human is no way a neglectable point; we keep articulating things and phenomena all the time through different windows; through their size, their colors, their weight, even more abstract through their price, their meanings to us, and perhaps through their artistic value. The objection that puts beauty aside as a subjective notion would not be acceptable here because many other aspects like worth would be subjective too, and there I see no reason why subjective aspects could not be criteria of articulation. You might delightfully say "this second hand half torn one eyed doll worths a world to me since it is the only thing left of my mom." Actually it would be equal to the state that you say "this wrecked house is the most beautiful scene to me."
In both phrases the speaker puts herself as the centre of the judgment and articulates an object or a seen considered to her own. Here comes the Kantian objection especially to the 2nd phrase, and says that what she expresses as beauty is not the real beauty but her own expectations.
So far as I know there have appeared many theories of aesthetics that have rejected the Kantian ground from different bases i.e. Nietzsche, Marx, Freud etc. which attack it epistemologically, socially, psychoanalytically, structuralistically, semantically, sexually, discursively and so on. Therefore let's say at least Kant's is not the only voice heard in this debate, and there are excuses to say that subjective judgment of beauty might not be rejected at all.
But leaving giants of epistemology fighting together, I see a more clear and guaranteed way out of this mess I have made; and that is the first statement does not argue about the justification of the articulative attitude of man, but about the existence of such an attitude, and I see that it's the existence of such a thing that concerns Kant in justifying it. It seems that human possessing a attitude of judgment of beauty and artistic value would be accepted naturally through a simple introspection.
b. Focusing on the 2nd premise you find it the most troublesome part of this inquiry. I think we should first enlighten the meaning intended of the expression "common". I would rather take the commonness of an articulation system in two grounds: 1. consistency of judgments based on one or a group of non-paradoxical principles in a member of the class of human, and 2. identity (being the same) of the (group of) principles among all members of the class of human.
Let us assume that the first option is true and possible, so any single man or woman would judge an object beautiful in consistency with his or her other aesthetic evaluations. There we get to the main question of the universality of the evaluation system.
Assuming the evaluation system similar among human, means that all people around the world and through history have got same aesthetic judgments free of their age, race, gender, literacy etc.; so if it's true, then there should be something about nature and instinct principles of human. This assumption will simply lead into a more physio-psychological theory of aesthetics. Actually it has and we can see how naturally the Kantian theory of aesthetics generates formalism which tries to give a convincing explanation of similarity in aesthetic judgments. Formalism has rejected all semantic connections of content with beauty and has taken the most objective, non-inductive position to reduce any matter of social, personal etc. grounds. Therefore in a Kantian approach, the formalist theory has enforced the mechanical process of non-cognitive judgment; judgment without semantic content. Actually the mechanicality of non-cognitive judgment – as Kant proposes – makes it possible to count on the universality of judgment. As an instance we can see the obedience of this approach in Bauhaus School which now has dominated art analysis for over a century. Bauhaus Art principles are a group of non-paradoxical rules to generate and analyze plastic arts which thoroughly refers to non-semantic reactions of human mind against different compositions of plastic elements like dots, lines, colors etc. I think we could take it as an almost complete physio-psychological theory of art. – A complete theoretic account of the theory could be found on Arnheim R.'s works i.e. "ART & VIASUAL PERCEPTION". –
c. There we get to the objections to the pan-aesthetic formal theory; cultural differences in aesthetic taste have been mentioned as a group of counterparts, but heading for the route, we have to take a more universal look that dominates either cultural and non-cultural counterparts.
I see the problem exactly in the Kantian approach of the theory; the theory divides judgments to cognitive and non-cognitive and aesthetic judgment belongs to the latter; Calmness in horizontal line, sharpness in triangles, growth in frequent enlargement of an object etc. are instances of many plastic notions the theory admits. It even encourages you to use such rules in your composition and expect others to experience the same impact.
How has it been discovered? Actually it's a generalization of experiments about the impact of visual elements on human mind, approved by psychological theory of Gestalt.
How do we expect people have the same impact while many are not aware of these rules? This is not a language to learn, nor an instruction manual to read and understand; It's a summary of scientific observations on the unconscious reaction – mechanical impact – of the mind, therefore it's not to be learned, but it's just the way it is…
I am not about to reject the truth of these principles, but I think what has been tragically neglected is the semantic power of the objects. Let's put two objections fore:
1- the theory tries to rely on the non-cognitive aspect of perception and neglect the cognitive side; But taking a closer look at the perception process you see there is no clear boundary between perception and cognition (Brendtson Arthur, ART EXPRESSION & BEAUTY). Even from the very first steps of sensation – including visual – human brain starts to make connections between the new entry and the stored which leads to abstraction and cognition. So it would not be possible to point at a specific moment that the entry has affected your mind all non-cognitive. This objection could be approved through referring to more scientific sources of neurology and psychology of cognition.
2- Even if the boundary of cognition would be possible, the cognitive side would have a deeper impact on the human mind. If taste was something totally natural and instinct, then every kid would rather listen to a Mozart's or look at a Michelangelo's. Taste is to be taught and it's being to be taught means it is at least partly based on understanding and cognition. Non-cognitively yellow is just yellow with not such an important impact on human mind, but cognitively it would symbolize divinity for a Christian, and green which might just be a color to him, might symbolize divinity to a Muslim. Impact of blue on the French would be similar to the impact of yellow on a Romanian. Even more basic elements of art appreciation like representation, expression, space etc. have got into challenge. (More profound notions of semantic aesthetics would be found on Goodman Nelson, LANGUAGES OF ART)
d. As a summary I think a truly functional theory of aesthetics should be based on both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects while the cognitive side is secondary in order of appearance and perception, but primary as a matter of lasting and depth. Therefore any functional aesthetic theory could not be universal.
Posted by: lonely god | Jun 29, 2008 3:21:03 PM :
great! thanks very much for sharing!
