An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art In this book Richard Eldridge presents a clear and compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and significance of art. Drawing on materials from classical and contemporary philosophy as well as from literary theory and art criticism, he explores the representational, expressive, and formal dimensions of art, and he argues that works of art present their subject matter in ways that are of enduring cognitive, moral, and social interest. His discussion, illustrated with a wealth of examples, ranges over topics such as beauty, originality, imagination, imitation, the ways in which we respond emotionally to art, and why we argue about which works are good. His accessible study will be invaluable to students and to all readers who are interested in the relation between thought and art. richard eldridge is Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. His previous publications include Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (1996), The Persistence of Romanticism (2001), Stanley Cavell (2003), and many journal articles. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art RICHARD ELDRIDGE Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521801355 © Richard Eldridge 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 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Contents Acknowledgments page viii 1 The situation and tasks of the philosophy of art 1 Who needs a theory of art? 1 Philosophy as articulation 4 Art as a natural social practice 5 Action, gesture, and expressive freedom 7 Schiller on art, life, and modernity 12 Identification versus elucidation 17 What may we hope for from the philosophy of art? 21 2 Representation, imitation, and resemblance 25 Representation and aboutness 25 Aristotle on imitation 26 Visual depiction, resemblance, and game-playing 31 Representing as natural, human, world-responsive activity 37 Functions of artistic representation 41 3 Beauty and form 47 Beauty, absorption, and pleasure 47 Kant on natural and artistic beauty 51 General versus individual form 56 Beardsley’s theory of individual form 57 Criticisms of formalist-aesthetic theories of art 60 Defenses of the aesthetic interest of art 63 4 Expression 68 Feelings about subject matters in life: Wordsworth, Tolstoy, and Collingwood 68 v vi Contents What is expressed in art? Hegel versus Danto 74 How is artistic expression achieved? 84 Why does artistic expression matter? 96 5 Originality and imagination 102 Genius and the pursuit of the new: Kant 102 Hegel’s criticisms of subjectivism 107 Why originality matters: Adorno on free meaning-making 109 Criticisms of the pursuit of originality: postmodernism and feminism 114 Originality and imagination within common life 119 Creativity: Scruton and Coleridge on artistic imagination 122 6 Understandingart 128 Sixstrategies for understanding art 128 The natures of thought and action: Hegel, Baxandall, and others 131 Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish, and Derrida 135 The special importance of elucidation of formal-semantic elements 142 The possibility of agreement in understanding 146 7 Identifyingand evaluatingart 150 Why we go on arguing about which works are good 150 Subjectivism and the sociology of taste: Smith and Bourdieu 153 Dickie’s institutional theory 156 Historical and narrative identifications: Levinson and Carroll 159 Objectivism: Mothersill and Savile 161 Hume on feeling and judgment 164 Kant on feeling and judgment 170 Personal and/versus discussable: Isenberg, Scruton, and Cohen on taste 178 8 Art and emotion 183 Some varieties of emotional response 183 The paradoxof fiction 185 Contents vii Hume on tragedy 187 Making-believe and quasi-emotions: Walton, Levinson, and Feagin 190 Metaphorical Identification: Danto and Cohen 195 Aristotle on catharsis 198 Artistic making and the ‘‘working through” of emotion 200 9 Art and morality 205 Some controversial cases: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, and others 205 Autonomism and experimentalism 207 Moralism and the clarification of thought and feeling 214 Art, propaganda, advertising, and cliché 222 Ethical understanding and working through puzzlement 225 10 Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 231 The reproduction of social life vis-à-vis ‘‘infinite satisfaction” 231 Art and modernity: Schiller and others 233 Lukács, Marcuse, and Adorno 239 Structuralism and structural opposition in social life: Lévi Strauss and Althusser 241 Foster’s postmodern sociocultural criticism 245 Can artistic beauty still matter? What about fun? 246 Art and social aspiration 248 Some contemporary practices of art: primitivism, avant-gardism, vernacularism, and constructivism 249 11 Epilogue: the evidence of things not seen 259 Bibliography 264 Index 277 1 The situation and tasks of the philosophy of art Who needs a theory of art? For almost all people in almost all cultures, either the fact (as in dance) or the product (as in painting) of some commanding performance that is both somehow significant and yet absorbing in its own right (rather than as an immediate instrument of knowledge or work) has raised strong emotions. The dramatic rhapsode Ion, in Plato’s dialogue, reports that when in performance he looks ‘‘down at [the audience] from the stage above, I see them, every time, weeping, casting terrible glances, stricken with amazement at the deeds recounted.”1 Richard Wagner finds nothing less than salvation in the experience of art. I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven . I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art . I believe that through this Art all men are saved, and therefore each may die of hunger for Her . I believe . that true disciples of high Art will be transfigured in a heavenly veil of sun-drenched fragrance and sweet sound, and united for eternity with the divine fount of all Harmony. May mine be the sentence of grace! Amen!2 Yet such commanding performances, their products, and their effects in their audiences are puzzling. They often seem to come into being, so Socrates claims, ‘‘not by skill [techne] but by lot divine.”3 Mysteriously, poets and dancers and composers ‘‘are not in their senses” when they do their work and ‘‘reason is no longer in [them].”4 Whatever considerable thought is involved in making art, it seems to be not exactly the same kind 1 Plato, Ion,trans.LaneCooper,inPlato,The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 535e, p. 221. 2 Richard Wagner, ‘‘Ein Ende in Paris,” Sämtliche Schriften 1:135, cited in Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3 ibid., 536d, p. 222. 4 ibid., 534a, 534b, p. 220. 1 2 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art of thought that is involved in solving standard problems of trade, manu- facture, or knowledge. Different audiences, moreover, respond to very different performances and works. The temple of Athena on the Acropolis, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and J. M. W. Turner’s Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands do not, on the face of it, seem to have very much to do with one another. They were produced in strikingly different media, for different audiences, in different cultural circumstances. Do they or can they or should they all matter to larger audiences in the same or similar ways? What about such further efforts as the body-performance art of Karen Finley or art student Matthew Hand’s flipping and catching of a beer coaster 129 times in a row, a ‘‘human in- stallation” intended to explore ‘‘our perceptions of success and our desire to be recognized as achievers”?5 What about woven baskets, video art, and sports? Is art then a matter centrally of more or less local interests and effects? Perhaps art is, as the English philosopher Stuart Hampshire once remarked, ‘‘gratuitous,”6 in being connected with no central problems or interests that attach to humanity as such. And yet, again, works of art -- products of human performance with powerfully absorbing effects -- are there in all human cultures, and some of them have seemed to some of their audiences to be as important in life as anything can be. In response to these facts, it is natural -- for a variety of reasons -- to wish for a theory of art, or at least for some kind of organizing account of the nature and value of artistic performances and products. Aristotle, in one of the earliest systematic accounts of the nature and value of works of art in different media, seems to have been motivated by curiosity about his own experience. His remarks on tragic drama in the Poetics are presented as an account, developed by abstracting from his own experience of plays, of how the trick of engaging and moving an audience is done and of its value. He suggests that similar accounts can be developed for the other media of art. In contrast, Plato in the Republic seems to be motivated centrally by a combination of fear and envy of the seductive power of the arts, together with a wish to displace the narrative art of Homer in the job of orienting 5 Matthew Hand’s work, ‘‘part of his final studies in contemporary art” at Notting- ham Trent University in the United Kingdom, is reported in David Cohen, ‘‘Pop Art,” Chronicle of Higher Education 47, 41 (June 22, 2001), p.

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