Interpretation
- Sherri Irvin: Are Artworks Constituted by Interpretation?
- Robert Stecker: Danto on Interpretation and Ontology of Art
- John Dilworth: How to Reform Danto's Vehicle Fetishism
- Scott Walden: Ethical Art
Excerpts from each paper below the fold...
Sherri Irvin: Are Artworks Constituted by Interpretation? (click to view the full pdf version)
Arthur Danto has argued persuasively that an artwork cannot be identical to a mere physical object. He holds that artworks are constituted by interpretations, which transfigure objects into works of art. The notion of interpretation central to Danto’s philosophy, and hence the thesis that artworks are constituted by interpretation, remains ill understood. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate that Danto’s concerns do not necessitate the view that artworks are constituted by interpretation; and, indeed, that given his other statements about interpretation, it should be granted at most a very restricted constituting role.
Robert Stecker: Danto on Interpretation and Ontology of Art (click to view the full pdf version)
Interpretation plays a central role in Danto’s philosophy of art. Probably his most famous claim regarding interpretation is that interpretations are elements in the constituting of artworks. “…[E]ach interpretation constitutes a new work, even if the object … remains… invariant under transformation. An object o is then an artwork only under an interpretation I, where I is a sort of function that transfigures o into a work: I(o) = W.” This passage, taken literally, implies that interpretations figure in the metaphysics of artworks, which, as Danto puts it, can be construed as wholes consisting of two parts – an object and an interpretation. We get a new artwork each time one or both member of the pair changes. Notice that if interpretations are constitutive in this way, it is hard to understand what a right or wrong interpretation would be. The response to I transfiguring o into w can’t be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It could be ‘I see’, ‘I don’t get it’ or something along those lines. To take an analogy, suppose certain classroom conventions “transfigures” the raising of an arm into a request to ask a question. That is, it allows one to make such a request by raising one’s arm. Now suppose an arm goes up in my classroom just with the intention of stretching it. My response can’t be: ‘wrong, you made a request.’ Rather, it’s ‘I see.” Danto suggests something similar when he imagines one of his sets of indiscernibles: a rectangular canvass bisected by a straight line. There is the interpretation which creates a work illustrating Newton’s first law, another which creates a work illustrating Newton’s third law, another which creates a landscape where the line is the horizon, But he doesn’t ‘get’ an interpretation in which the same design represents fate or and old man planting spring cactuses.
On the other hand, Danto also speaks of interpretation in a way that gives it a more epistemic role, rather than a metaphysical one. “To interpret a work is to offer a theory about what a work is about, what its subject is.” When one offers a theory about something, one is making a claim about its properties, properties the object of one’s theory already possesses. If one offers a theory about an artwork, one is not constituting it, but making a claim about something already in existence. Theories can be right or wrong, and hence interpretations on this epistemic understanding of them can be right or wrong. (Let me mention parenthetically that the scope of such interpretation goes well beyond identifying what a work is about, and further that often enough the identity of a work’s subject is not something that needs interpretation.)
Is Danto simply identifying two types of interpretation here – a work-constituting type and a work-understanding type?...
John Dilworth: How to Reform Danto's Vehicle Fetishism (click to view full pdf version)
Vehicle fetishism is a near-ubiquitous cultural attitude in theorizing about the arts. It commonly occurs as a background assumption, if not an explicit belief, that the physical vehicles, by means of which the artistic meaning or content of artworks is communicated, must somehow themselves be integral parts of the relevant artworks. Of course, such a primitivist or magical view about the power or centrality of vehicles has long since been abandoned in connection with linguistic communication. No one thinks that linguistic words or sentences, whether construed as types or as tokens, are somehow integral parts of the meaningful propositions that they are used to express. Their purely symbolic or representational role in communication is obvious to all. Yet, by contrast, virtually everyone who theorizes about the arts assumes that concrete artistic vehicles, such as painted canvases or musical performances, are either identical with artworks, or at least that they are integral parts of the relevant artworks. Thus is artistic communication fetishized, via a belief in obscure artistic powers of concrete vehicles themselves, mysteriously independent of their legitimate representational roles in expressing artistic meanings.
Scott Walden: Ethical Art (click to view full pdf version)
In his reply to Jerry Fodor’s discussion of Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto correctly resists the idea that it is the mere intention on the part of the artist to make an object that is an artwork that makes the resultant object an artwork. He likens the metaphysics of artworks to the metaphysics of personhood. In the same way that it is not the intention of the parents to produce a person by producing an infant that makes that infant a person (accidental pregnancies lead to persons just as often as deliberate ones), it is not the intention of the artist to produce an artwork by producing an object that makes that object an artwork. What does make an object an artwork is a more complex social arrangement than this simple intention, a social arrangement which at minimum requires on the part of the audience the kind of cognitive activity involved in interpretation and, more specifically, the kind of cognitive activity involved in understanding a metaphor.
Danto is much less resistant to this more complex construal
of the artist’s intention…
Danto’s position thus construed exposes various rich veins of philosophical material to be mined.... For present purposes, however, I want to focus not on these (which, by the way, I do not think present insurmountable challenges for the position) but rather on the intersection between the reflexive-condition–attributing interpretation and an idea associated with Kant that is not the one ordinarily raised in the context of aesthetics. More specifically, I want to consider the extent to which incorporation of the reflexive condition satisfies the Kantian ethical stricture that we treat one another not as means but as ends...
SI raises a really central question, which takes us to the core of A's (my abbreviation henceforth) development. Some of the indiscernibles are imaginary, others are real, and so what is the artist's role? A has always contended: interpretation is grounded in the artist's intention. Though A likes to be polite, this view of course is what alienates him from fashionable styles of art history. Rudolf Wittkower on architecture, that always has been A's model of interpretation.
When we have an artist at hand, we can ask: what sort of intention would s/he have. Knowing Mangold and Scully, for example, we can envisage their interpretations. But when we get to Piero or Caravaggio, then things obviously are more difficult. Do we need hermeneutics? I hope someone will answer that question! Duchamp and Warhol are hard also, for it is difficult to know what to make of their statements. A's Warhol, what relationship does he have to the man whose writings we can read, well knowing that they were not exactly written by Warhol!
What I would add to SI's account: in some of the examples from TRANSFIGURATION (henceforth: T) we in effect have various descriptions of the same thing, not a succession of works of art. So here where does intention come in? When I recover from this present flu maybe I will be able to answer that question.
Posted by: davidcarrier | January 26, 2007 at 10:38 AM
RS, initials since it's been too long since I've seen Robert, asks whether interpretations can be wrong. Looking back to my comment on SI suggests one answer: yes they can be wrong when we have the artist at hand. That said, I don't accept RS"s distinction between two kinds of interpretations, for we understand the work of art by constituting it, at least in the cases at hand.
Maybe, as RS says, it's a little forced to speak of Duchamp as interpreting, but that way of speaking could be useful, I think. Duchamp was interpreting the concept of sculpture, that it seems to me is a plausible intuitive judgment. And that interpretation led him to pick out a ready made.In that sense he used the medium.
I agree that we need an account of the artist's activity. Something in my experience as critic like this: objects are made, they get discussed and by stages a theory emerges, which is checked against experience of the objects.
It casnnot be correct that works are art are objects plus interpretations, if only because picking out the object often requires interpretation. But here again I would urge considering the difference between A's imaginary and real examples.
Posted by: davidcarrier | January 26, 2007 at 10:49 AM
JD wants to tackle ontological questions. He nicely very economically reconstructs the basic argument. Here, writing as an art critic (and ex-philosopher), I am troubled by his characterization of studio activity, which feels too little caught in the physical activity. When I watch Scully working, I see someone very concerned with a particular canvas and paint. Maybe this account applies to someone with conceptual concerns.
Here I would urge JD gets into this problem because he collapses the contrast between A's imaginary examples in T, those many red seas, and actual works of art. That said, I would resist speaking here of fetishism for in the studio the physical stuff has an essential role. It's not at all mysterious to think that the media are essential, at least, again, for some sorts of artists, call them more traditional visual artists if that doesn't beg the question.
I wonder if this challenging essay does not raise another question: what is the relationship of A's aesthetic, which in practice is centered on visual art, to other arts. Literature or (Lydia-HELP) music for example.
Posted by: davidcarrier | January 26, 2007 at 10:58 AM
SW asks the right question: what has this discussion of intention to do with the way artists think. That said, I think this account of interpretation very hard to map onto my experience as art critic or art historians. One searches for the right words, and checks with the artist. Or, in the historical case, one reads the literature and tries to imagine: what was Nicolas Poussin thinking about. That it seems to me is very different from written communication even right here where I try to tease out SW's thoughts. For one thing, this is a purely verbal exchange.
Two years ago, at the Clark the art historian who also is an artist Jonathan Weinberg painted my portrait. You can see it on his web site. I didn't have any interesting idea what to expect and so, well this looks like me, but I didn't have any interesting desire about the situation. But I know cases where this didn't happen. Sir William Coldstream, famous for taking great care, did a portrait of a couple who had a problem, which I could see: the portrait didn't look like them. So they sold it. One style of interpretation.
Posted by: davidcarrier | January 26, 2007 at 11:26 AM
I read Robert Stecker’s paper with interest. My feeling, however, is that the paper, like a number of other recent ones I have read on the topic of interpretation, assumes as a methodological starting point that meaning in relation to works of art can be analysed and understood in the same way as meaning for any other object. (I think AD, like many others, starts with the same assumption.) That is, nothing in the argument appears to hang on any prior claims about the nature of art – the kind of thing it might be.
But what if this assumption is not correct? How can we be sure there is not a qualitative difference between works of art and other objects (a difference dependent on the very nature of art) that would render this ‘general’ method of analysis beside the point?
We know that works of art possess certain other properties (e.g. those relating to time) that other objects do not...
Posted by: Derek Allan | January 26, 2007 at 01:14 PM
I find JD's arguments against vehicle fetishism quite stimulating. It seems that Gregory Currie is one of the few writers in this area who is clearly not guilty of vehicle fetishism. (He holds, in An Ontology of Art, that an artwork is an action-type, where the action in question is one of discovering a structure through a certain process (which he calls a 'heuristic path'); and he says that any particular painted canvas, etc., is only an instance of the relevant structure, not essential to the work.)
I am not particularly moved by JD's arguments according to which abandoning vehicle fetishism would enable us to have a unified account of singular forms of visual art (painting, carved sculpture), multiple forms of visual art (most prints and cast sculpture) and works of literary art. It doesn't strike me as particularly troubling that a singular visual artwork might turn out to be a different sort of thing, ontologically, from a novel or print; indeed, the difference may be part of what motivates an artist to make prints rather than paintings, since it might enable the artist to make a different kind of statement (consider the way in which Warhol's repeated silkscreen images comment on the ubiquity of certain kinds of content in the media). It doesn't strike me as necessary, or even obviously attractive, to hold that the relation a painting bears to its associated artwork is the same as the relation a print bears to its associated artwork.
However, JD's observation about the contingency of association between a given artwork and some particular canvas covered with paint from some particular tubes is much more difficult to dismiss. I'm wondering if we can find a patch to AD's theory that doesn't require completely giving up the idea that the vehicle is an essential component of the artwork. AD treats the artistic vehicle as a "mere real thing," but could we construe it differently (e.g., as the *thing created or indicated by the artist*), so that its association with the artwork would no longer be contingent?
On the other hand, perhaps the contingency of association shouldn't worry us as much as JD thinks it should. (I am not at all sure that what follows is right; I'm just trying to get the ball rolling.)
Here's one way of construing JD's argument (assuming that, on AD's view, we should see the artistic vehicle as a part of the artwork):
(1) It is essential to artistic vehicle X that it is constituted out of this canvas and this paint.
(2) It is not essential to artwork AW that the artistic vehicle that is part of it have been constituted out of this canvas and this paint.
Therefore, (3) it is not essential to artwork AW that artistic vehicle X is part of it (it might have had as a part some indiscernible artistic vehicle Y instead).
(4) If object O is part of entity E, it must be essential to E that O is part of it.
Therefore, (5) artistic vehicle X cannot be part of artwork AW.
Something like (4) appears to me to be required to get to JD's conclusion. But is (4) correct; is every part of an entity essential to its numerical identity? It seems that a chair can maintain its identity over time if we replace, say, one of its legs. And if this is true, it seems that it could be one and the same chair in two possible worlds, even if it has leg L1 in one possible world and (numerically distinct) leg L2 in the other. If that is the case, and if the artistic vehicle is regarded as a part of the artwork, it seems not to be ruled out that an artwork could maintain its identity across possible worlds even if associated with numerically distinct artistic vehicles in those possible worlds.
Also, I am not sure that (3) follows from (1) and (2) as it stands. An additional assumption seems to be needed: If feature F is essential to object O, then feature F must be essential to any entity E of which O is a part. Is this assumption true? I don't know. I think it is probably false: each of my neurons is part of my brain, but some of those neurons die daily. This seems to rule out the possibility that each essential feature of each of my neurons is also an essential feature of my brain.
Of course, my observations are pertinent only if this is an apt construal of JD's argument, which it may not be. Suggestions?
A final thought: JD mentions "authorized" prints on more than one occasion. But if we take his view to its logical conclusion, is there really any legitimate role for authorization here, given that even an unauthorized vehicle seems capable of conveying the same content as an authorized vehicle (when we start to see the contentfulness of visual art as analogous with that of language)?
Posted by: Sherri Irvin | January 26, 2007 at 05:00 PM
Thanks Derek for your comment. I agree with you that art interpretation is in some ways different from the interpretation of other objects. It is also in others ways the same. I attempt to identify the ways it is different and the other ways in the same in a book, Interpretion and Construction: art, speech and the law. The differences in my view have less to do with distincive features of the meaning of artworks but the role art plays in the culture and the aims of interpretation this gives rise to.
Posted by: Robert Stecker | January 27, 2007 at 11:47 AM
My thanks to DC for the thoughtful comment. I certainly agree that there will frequently be a gap between, on the one hand, what a theory predicts in terms of the thoughts that an artist or audience will have and, on the other hand, the thoughts they actually exhibit. But I don’t see this as necessarily constituting grounds for rejection of the theory in the way that failure of prediction by a scientific theory might be grounds for its rejection. Our methodology will have to be different here, as there is little reason to expect that artworld participants will exhibit the tidy patterns of thought that theories typically ascribe. We need a different methodology in this context.
What might an appropriate methodology be? One option is to say that a theory of the sort that Danto provides will accurately reflect some portion of actual patterns of thought. If so, the theory will be of value insofar as it helps us more fully to understand those patterns of thought, even if it falls short of comprehensiveness.
Another option is to say that there is a normative component to much of this type of theorizing. On this option, philosophers who develop such theories are implicitly suggesting that it would be good if artists or audiences were to exhibit patterns of thought with the structure ascribed by the theory, even if in fact they frequently do not. (This methodological assumption certainly applies to the second half of my contribution, which is in no way intended to reflect actual practice—as Danto makes clear in his essay, far from it).
This having been said, the point I was more interested in making in my contribution was much more general. I like the idea—embedded in Fodor’s suggestion—that an artwork is successful only if it is part of a project in which all parties treat one another as ends, not as means. This is consonant with my own experiences in the galleries. It may be, for example, that Soviet socialist-realist works typically fail—notwithstanding their frequent excellent graphical qualities—precisely because they aim to bring about changes in the minds of their audience members without necessarily having those members understand and participate in the process.
Posted by: Scott Walden | January 27, 2007 at 12:41 PM
My first comment is odd, so bear with me Sherri: Halfway through your paper it occurred to me that the questions you were posing very much echoed those of Nietzsche, and yet the language you were using to argue about them was so different as to strain comparison. That said, Nietzsche in analytical guise is probably appropriate to a conference on Arthur’s work.
Now to explain the weird comparison: The question you seem to pose is whether the interpretive activity undertaken by the artist in the process of making a work can reasonably be compared to the interpretive activity of someone viewing the work. (In Nietzsche, it is the problem of the “aesthetic listener”). As you rightly point out, it seems inadequate to simply lump them together under the term “interpretation.” Not distinguishing the two cases, as Arthur does, can’t help but lead to embarrassing questions as to how an artist’s interpretation produces (original) works and viewers’ only produces versions of works. Based on this problem it seems more promising either to strictly distinguish them, or (as you more nearly suggest) to strictly delimit interpretation’s role in art-making.
Nevertheless, there is a strength to Arthur’s approach that I think you overlook: namely, the role that interpretation plays in distinguishing artists from non-artists in the first place. Your unstated assumption is that there is a definable activity called art-making and presenting that artists are specialists in, and that if they engage in interpretation it is really only on top of this core professional activity. However, artists are only artists by convincing others to see certain forms of activity as ways of art-making, and certain forms of activity are seen as art-making only because someone convinces us that they are being an artist in undertaking them. It is not the case that they are artists first, and on the basis of this social or professional status they can then sanction art-making activities. And in the light of this dialectic, it is quite reasonable to wonder whether in order to become an artist today one must be exceptionally skilled at interpretation, not primarily of one’s own work (which is what you seem to assume an artist mostly interprets), but of that of other artists. Only by being able to position oneself with regard to one’s peers and their activities is one recognized as an artist, and to undertake such positioning one must interpret others’ work in such a way that the interpretation becomes inherent in one’s own.
Posted by: Julie Kuhlken | January 28, 2007 at 04:59 PM
Though I agree with DC’s critique of SW’s suggestion that there is a normative component involved with artistic creation and reception, it is only in the narrow focus of the example–that of an individual artist and the person posing for the portrait. The relationships involved with the artists and the beholders are rarely face to face. Nonetheless, SW makes a good point regarding the normative relations embodied within artworks that succeed. Though I shy away from connecting artistic creation to ethical action, SW’s point that artists must engage their audience in a way that includes them is at the root of the norms of communication. Artistic communication is not rational in the sense of prosaic communication (or rational discourse), but it may embody norms that are akin to the ethical norms of rational communication.
Posted by: Stephen Snyder | January 28, 2007 at 08:21 PM
I would like to comment briefly on Scott Walden’s extremely interesting idea that Fodor’s reflexive condition applied to art adds a “Kantian ethical dimension to Danto’s understanding of art.” First of all, I find the claim that part of the value of art is that the best art “importantly manifests our humanity” a rich and suggestive one. I also think that Kant himself held something like this view, though that is not what I will focus on here. What I would like to get clear about is how Fodor’s reflexive condition helps us to understand the moral dimension of the relationship between the artist and his or her audience. More specifically, I don’t see how making one aware that he or she is “having his or her cognitive capacities recognized and engaged, and that the change in epistemic status was contingent upon such second-order awareness” rules out the possibility that one is being treated as a means. As Walden points out, it is certainly possible to recognize and engage the cognitive faculties of another while at the same time “using him as a means rather than an end.” Why does the addition of the reflexive condition change this? Is it just that being mindful of the reflexive condition ensures that the audience member’s higher order faculties are being respected by the artist? This sounds plausible, but what about cases of in which I am aware of, and a willing partner in, my own emotional manipulation by a given artwork? I am aware, for example, when I watch Vertigo that Hitchcock is pushing my buttons. I am also aware that having my buttons pushed was part of what the artist intended, and that the film would not have its full intended effect if I were not aware of this. But what is specifically moral in all of this? I may be being treated as an end to the extent that Hitchcock wishes to engage my faculties and to provoke various reflections on this engagement. It is still the case, however, that I may be being treated as a means in other ways. The artist might, for example, relish imagining me squirming in my seat at a particularly anxiety producing moment in his film. Does my being reflexively engaged about my so squirming make the situation more morally praiseworthy? Or have I missed the point entirely?
Posted by: Jerome Langguth | January 29, 2007 at 12:55 PM
In my 'vehicle fetishism' article I claimed that a Dantoesque interpretation is only contingently associated with a particular vehicle A, since the artist might have used some other vehicle B instead, but that a putative ontological artwork structure--including both vehicle A and the interpretation--would necessarily include vehicle A, because of the numerical identity-conditions for particular physical objects. Hence, I concluded, artworks cannot be ontological structures that include a particular vehicle. Sherri Irvin has provided some very stimulating criticisms of this argument, the most basic of which challenges me to clarify its last step. Here is the clarification.
It is commonplace to claim that, in a physical universe, the identity-conditions for particular physical vehicles are metaphysically more fundamental than those of mind-dependent interpretations of them. So even if two qualitatively identical representations A and B were both to receive the same Dantoesque representational interpretation, they would remain numerically distinct physical entities. Consequently, I would claim, they would remain numerically distinct even if one is identified as a Dantoesque artwork (object plus interpretation) in one possible world, and the other as a Dantoesque artwork having the same interpretation in another possible world. So this ontological structure view cannot capture the contingency of association of the same interpretation-based artwork with different vehicles. Also, as I pointed out, things are even worse with multiple prints of a single artwork, since all of these simultaneously exist as numerically distinct vehicles, so that they could not be a single identical artwork if that artwork has to include the vehicles.
Sherri also wonders how Danto might accommodate such criticisms, asking: "AD treats the artistic vehicle as a "mere real thing," but could we construe it differently (e.g., as the *thing created or indicated by the artist*), so that its association with the artwork would no longer be contingent?"
This interesting suggestion might be developed as follows: perhaps some artworks might be argued to be partly about their own vehicles, and hence indicate them in that necessary manner. However, this wouldn't make the vehicle part of the artwork, but merely part of the subject matter of what the artwork represents.
Finally, Sherri queries whether artistic authorization is needed for prints on my view. Answer: yes, because Goodman's distinction between autographic versus allographic art forms must be accommodated in any account of the visual arts. An original artwork doesn't just convey content, it does so using an artist-authorized vehicle--which random copies aren't.
Posted by: John Dilworth | January 29, 2007 at 10:04 PM
Robert Stecker in his contribution suggests, following Levinson, that visual artworks might be physical objects "..structured to fulfill an artistic function or intention (typically) made possible by certain institutions or practices." But on Danto's account, the subject matter of an artwork--such as a sculpture being of Napoleon, or a red painting depicting Newton's third law--is a necessary feature of that artwork. However, physical objects as such can only have contingent properties, which is one main reason why Danto denies that artworks are identical with 'mere real things'. So this approach couldn't help to explain Danto's ontology.
Posted by: John Dilworth | January 30, 2007 at 09:51 AM
Thanks to JD for his comment. On mine, Levinson's, and Wiggan's view there can be more than one physical object at the same place atb the same time (the lump of iron and the wheel to take a pair of non-art objects that are in the same place at the same time.) This is so, I claimed in my piece, when we have a artwork that is a physical object. Such objects clearly must have different identifying properties, which will be necessary to them. In the case of artworks, these may well be meaning properties that fix what they are about. So such meaning properties, and a fortiori, a work's subject, matter, can be essential to the physical object it is.
Posted by: Robert Stecker | January 30, 2007 at 01:28 PM
Thanks to RS for his reply to my comment. Let me clarify my point: even if physical objects can have necessary intrinsic properties, arguably they can't have necessary relational properties, such as that of being about some independent subject matter, because it takes a contingent act of interpretation by an artist to confer a relational property of being about something upon a physical object. But artworks necessarily have such relational properties, according to Danto. Hence his artworks can't be 'mere real physical things'.
Posted by: John Dilworth | January 30, 2007 at 11:19 PM
Two general thoughts, one about this fascinating web, the other about Arthur's legacy.
I'm taking for granted that this is more like conversation than normal publication. At the start Lydia nicely raised the question: how do we use a new format. In writing, one checks, reflects, does references. But when talking one doesn't after all run to find the book, one just speaks. Long ago when he was still chair at Columbia, Arthur said, I have to be strong and fast. That's a model we might emulate, producing quick response, knowing that we might get things wrong, trusting in the good will of our readers, knowing that this site is not written in stone! A review is written in hours and appears in print soon after the show closes. Academic writing has a very different rhythm.
On Arthur's legacy. How does a grand writer inspire others? I would compare Clem Greenberg, who was nasty, even more famous, and unacademic. He pressed Ros Krauss and Michael Fried into becoming enemies, and they did splendid things; and later Tim Clark was also challenged. Arthur, a very different personality, is as everyone knows, generous and supportive. The critical question then is what this mass of commentary amounts to. My own subjective sense is, this material comes from philosophers who mostly have little experience of the concerns of working critics. The critics, on the other hand, however much they admire Arthur, simply don't get his philosophical arguments. What then makes Arthur's position unique is that as both critic and philosopher he produced an aesthetics which really drew upon experience of art. Now the unity of his system falls apart as, arguably, the unity of Marxism fell apart when the practice and theory became separate. What then is the function of a mass of commentary, more than anyone earlier received? (Compare the slow postal system which allowed Descartes to write replies to his critics!) I think, here Lydia is onto something, that technology is changing philosophical debate in ways we don't as yet understand, as BRILLO BOX changed aesthetics in ways, thanks to Arthur, we start to comprehend.
Posted by: davidcarrier | January 31, 2007 at 10:38 AM
My thanks to Jerome Langguth and Stephen Snyder for their thoughtful and helpful comments. The general question the comments raise is what it means to treat someone as an end rather than as a means. Kantian exegesis to one side, we are faced with a methodological issue: how will we answer such a question, and what form will such an answer take? I assume that all we have to go on are intuitions about instances in which we would say intuitively that someone is or is not being treated as an end, and that we will have to extract general answers from such instances. Given this, it is a near certainty that there will be a great deal of vagueness associated with any answer that emerges and, partly in consequence of this, whatever answer emerges might not at first blush seem very satisfying (also, there will likely be aspects of the notion—such as empathy or love—that are not very amenable to philosophical analysis). With such methodological caveats in minds, let me give it a try.
Danto and Fodor understand rhetoric differently, or at least emphasize different aspects of it. For Danto, rhetoric has value insofar as it moves the audience’s mind to action. He needs this aspect of the activity for his theory of art, since the interpretive activity of the audience (specifically, their unpacking of a metaphor) is essential to that theory. For Fodor, however, rhetoric is a largely negative activity. Yes, Fodor, says, in instances of rhetoric the audience’s mind is moved to action, but the rationale for such movement emerges from the aims of the rhetorician, not from the aims or needs of the audience. This is why, for Fodor, advertising is a species of rhetoric. The folks selling new cars, for example, might use their ads to move my mind to action (I draw a practical inference leading me to the dealership) but my aims or needs do not necessarily weigh in their thoughts—they simply want to get me to buy a car, and their rhetoric is successful if they get me to do so.
Given Fodor’s understanding of rhetoric, I assume we all agree that there is a difference between art and rhetoric. In adding the reflexive condition to his understanding of art, Fodor distinguishes between the two. For Fodor, it is a primary intention of the artist that the change in the epistemic status of the audience comes about and that it comes about contingently upon their recognition that the artist is attempting to get them to undergo such a change. If this does not happen then the action is unsuccessful, which is to say that the artwork is not (fully) successful. Clearly matters are different with the folks selling new cars insofar as they would be happy if my trip to the dealership was contingent upon my awareness that they are trying to get me to go there, but this is by no means essential to the success of their endeavor.
Now, my own addition to this discussion is that I claim that this difference between art and rhetoric tracks the difference between treating someone as an end and treating them as a mere means. I think all would agree that in advertising the audience is being treated merely as a means. What needs to be argued—and what Jerome Langguth rightly presses me on—is that the addition of the right conjunct to the content of the primary intention elevates the relationship between the artist and the audience to one in which the former treats the latter as an end, not as a means.
Arguably it does in at least the following two ways: (i) It acknowledges the capacity for higher-order thoughts in the audience and thereby acknowledges that they are entities with a quality frequently associated with personhood. And treating someone as a person, I assume, is part of what we mean when we say we are treating them as an end, not as a means. (ii) It makes the audience’s willful participation in the communicative activity essential to the success of that activity, and in general willful participation between two parties is likewise one way in which parties treat each other as ends, not as means.
As warned above, I can’t offhand make the conceptual connection between the reflexive condition and treatment as an end rather than a means tighter than this. But if this isn’t enough then I am left wondering what would be enough, and even what form an answer to the question would take. I think our commonsense understanding of the difference between treating someone as an end and treating someone as a means is vague and that, therefore, the analysis cannot be taken much further than this (although I’m quite open to suggestions).
Posted by: Scott Walden | February 01, 2007 at 06:51 PM
Thanks to Scott Walden for his helpful reply to my earlier comment. I think that I see much more clearly now what it would mean for the artist to treat her audience as an end. Would it make sense to interpret "willful participation" to mean "uncoerced participation"? The successful work of art,then, presupposes and actively engages the capacity for higher order thought in its audience, and in so doing elicits the free (in the sense of uncoerced) participation of the audience in the communicative exchange.
Posted by: jerome langguth | February 02, 2007 at 06:52 AM
Artworks and Physical Objects: John Dilworth and Vehicle Fetishism
Robert Kraut
If the goal is to understand actual artworld practice, it should be acknowledged that paintings are physical objects, musical events are changes in sound pressure over time, and so on: that is only a small part of the story, but it is nevertheless part of the story. Put another way: artworld participants customarily treat "...concrete artistic vehicles, such as painted canvases or musical performances, [as] either identical with artworks, or at least [as] integral parts of the relevant artworks." John Dilworth calls this view "vehicle fetishism" [hereafter 'VF'] and claims it to be a "near-ubiquitous cultural attitude in theorizing about the arts."
This makes VF sound like an artifact of theoretical reflection upon the arts, when in fact it is a view endemic to actual practices of artistic creation, evaluation, interpretation, and commodification. Thus the task of an aesthetic theorist should be to understand VF, not to replace it with something else.
What Dilworth calls "Danto's Vehicle Fetishism" is not a metaphysical pathology deserving of reform; it is an essential aspect of ordinary artworld practice: one that must be understood and accommodated rather than criticized and improved upon. Quite apart from the substantive details of Dilworth's criticisms and proposal, we have here a fundamental issue concerning the goals of artworld ontology--and ontology generally--and the criteria by which rival ontologies should be assessed. Revisionism is fine but it has its limits; I fear that Dilworth's strategy loses sight of those limits.
Dilworth's paper is very rich, and merits extended discussion. One aspect of his presentation is an argument that Danto's contextualism entails the falsity of VF. The argument rests on various modal assumptions about contingent vs. necessary properties, the possibility of transforming (by providing an interpretation) a physical object into one that possesses necessary relational properties, etc. Notorious subtleties lurk here--I do not find the argument at all compelling--but that is not my target in this brief note.
Along the way Dilworth invokes an unfortunate linguistic analogy, claiming (more than once) that "no one" regards specific lexical item tokens as integral to the semantic information they convey. But even if we grant that "any number of distinct linguistic tokens of the same sentence type can express one and the same proposition," it hardly follows that actual utterance- or inscription-tokening events are no integral part of the larger communicational story. Perhaps the tone with which my wife uttered those words is essential to the message conveyed, and a concern with "propositions expressed" provides too course-grained a picture of the linguistic situation. As before, notorious subtleties lurk in Dilworth's assumptions concerning propositions and the syntactic vehicles that express them.
The upshot of Dilworth's critical discussion is that Danto's views about contextualism and aboutness require, on pain of inconsistency, abandonment of VF. Dilworth advocates a reform of Danto's theory according to which "...[we] view artworks as being proposition-like interpretations only, rather than as interpreted vehicles." Dilworth proceeds to sketch various "theoretical benefits" that a "pared-down, interpretation-only ontology" might offer.
This brings me to my main point: there is irony in Dilworth's philosophical method, given that this conference celebrates Arthur Danto's contributions to aesthetic theory. Danto is gloriously en rapport with the realities of artworld practice: unlike some theorists who theorize in a relative vacuum, or generalize prematurely from too narrow a data base, Danto's goal is to make sense of actual artworld practice: any artworld ontology he endorses must be seen as serving a larger systematic effort to do precisely that. If some ontology portrays customary artworld practice as somehow illegitimate and/or misguided (e.g., regarding Picasso's Demoiselle as, inter alia, a physical object), that ontology must therefore be rejected as inadequate. An adequate artworld ontology must be consistent with individuative procedures implicit in actual artworld practice. The job--even the ontologist's job--is to make sense of the practice, not to reform it. Analogy: imagine an ontology of natural number according to which most mathematicians are mistaken in their insistence that every number has a unique successor; surely such an ontology must be rejected as inconsistent with actual mathematical practice! Similarly: if Dilworth offers an ontology in light of which customary artworld valuation of specific physical objects (viz.: paintings, sculptures, and other art objects) rests on a metaphysical mistake, so much the worse for that ontology.
Artworld ontology must confront the tribunal of actual artworld practice: Danto's ontology does precisely that; Dilworth's does not.
Posted by: Robert Kraut | February 02, 2007 at 05:31 PM
My thanks to Robert Kraut for his stimulating comments on my 'vehicle fetishism' view of Danto's ontology. Here are some brief replies to his quoted comments.
"Danto's goal is to make sense of actual artworld practice: any artworld ontology he endorses must be seen as serving a larger systematic effort to do precisely that. If some ontology portrays customary artworld practice as somehow illegitimate and/or misguided (e.g., regarding Picasso's Demoiselle as, inter alia, a physical object), that ontology must therefore be rejected as inadequate."
But Danto himself denies that Demoiselle is a 'mere real thing'. I simply point out the implications if we take him at his word. If there's something wrong with my arguments, then that's what needs to be addressed, rather than worries about nonconformity.
"What Dilworth calls "Danto's Vehicle Fetishism" is not a metaphysical pathology deserving of reform; it is an essential aspect of ordinary artworld practice: one that must be understood and accommodated rather than criticized and improved upon."
If it really is an 'essential aspect of ordinary artworld practice', but nevertheless it is, in Danto's version, confused and self-contradictory, we would have no choice but to attempt to reform it. By contrast, my own preferred view is that all artistic cognition depends on concrete physical representations, such as canvases or musical performances, whose function is to represent, or have as their content, the relevant artworks. (See my book _The Double Content of Art_ for more details). This view fully respects the essential epistemic role of concrete vehicles in our enjoyment of artworks, and it is inconsistent only with rival ontological views, not with everyday understandings of art.
"But even if we grant that "any number of distinct linguistic tokens of the same sentence type can express one and the same proposition," it hardly follows that actual utterance- or inscription-tokening events are no integral part of the larger communicational story. Perhaps the tone with which my wife uttered those words is essential to the message conveyed, and a concern with "propositions expressed" provides too coarse-grained a picture of the linguistic situation."
Yes, this is definitely a good point, which I couldn't address in my short conf. paper. It is specifically addressed in a forthcoming AJP paper (final draft is available on my website as http://homepages.wmich.edu/
~dilworth/
In_Support_of_Content_Theories
_of_Art.pdf)
Posted by: John Dilworth | February 02, 2007 at 10:25 PM