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Home , Tom Rockmore, Transcendentals

Volume 9, No 1, Spring 2014 ISSN 1932-1066

Review of Tom Rockmore, Art and After Raymond Langley Manhattanville College, New York [email protected]

Abstract: Art and Truth After Plato provides us with a powerful historical and epistemological sweep. changes and past , art and history no longer satisfies the human needs it once did. This is not to say , art and history is over or done with, lost, or dead. Contemporary philosophizing and frees man to know the truth of actual of this historical moment and no longer entangled by inherited dogmas and ideologies.

Keywords: Rockmore, Tom; Kant, Immanuel; transcendentals; ; aesthetics; Plato; ; empiricist; Marx, Karl.

My earliest aesthetic came from listening to choosing over pluralism. If the real is one, true the radio. In the exciting Western "tales of yesteryear" , then what is truth- can be assigned to many the virtuous Lone Ranger fought injustice until appearances and beauties. goodness triumphed. Like most children I was a The tripartite structure of the book is realized naive realist so I knew radio shows were fictional, but brilliantly. Rockmore weaves historicism with I also believed that I heard good, pleasing, and true an epistemological analysis of art and truth. The imitations of reality. Art and Truth After Plato by Tom conclusions of these two investigations become the Rockmore begins with Transcendentals.1 These primary premises for the final chapter containing Rockmore's descriptions of reality are used as predicates of ordinary thinking about contemporary aesthetics and objects. The One, True, Good, and (a late add on) philosophy—in speculations. The first structural feature Transcendentals that go beyond, surpass, or transcend is methodological. Each chapter provides a chronology single trues, , or beauties. The and of aesthetics from ancient Greeks onwards. Historicism eternal Transcendentals crisscross the border between shows the unique contribution of each culture, and and epistemology, i.e. whatever the real is, highlights what is changed in successive eras. As it is one, true, good and beautiful. Hence the "one the examples, the inherent within experience many" was the first metaphysical problem of Western is reflected palpably by medieval manuscripts, liturgy, philosophy. The first epistemological problem follows sacred music, illustrations, and cathedrals; whereas, the next history of reversed the necessity 1 Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth After Plato, Chicago, of theological revelation to supplement thinking to IL: University of Chicago Press 2013, 344 pages. a radical expansion of pure rationality. Second, the [Henceforth cited as ATP]

Raymond Langley, "Review of Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth After Plato," Existenz 9/1 (2014), 11-15 First posted 4-24-2014 12 Raymond Langley methodology is tied to a rigorous examination of the privileged status Plato accords to the good as the mimesis, representative theories of and the supreme form confesses that Plato had no explanations doctrine of truth as correspondence. Arguments examine of or the logical conversion of universal, what and how we know connections between truth and necessary, and eternal forms. Turning to art, say art in support or denial of Keats' famous statement: poetry is closer to philosophy since its content is more "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on universal than the particulars of history. Specifically, earth, and all ye need to know" (ATP 233). Third, the tragic drama offers a true mimesis of character and life book summarizes current aesthetic possibilities together as acknowledged by the guilt and pity experienced by with thoughtful accounts of knowing, and the audience. The Platonic and anti-Platonic traditions interpretation as well as Rockmore's own version of denying or affirming a connection between art and truth categorical/constructivist epistemology. begins in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and extends Philosophers, like jurors, seek "the whole truth and for more than two millennia. That a picture is worth a nothing but the truth." , who lived before thousand words is a visible cliché in Raphael's painting, Plato, divided "the way of truth" or that is one, . Completed in 1509, the center true, and good from "the way of seeming" or world of depicts Plato pointing upwards and Aristotle pointing appearances. His predecessors argument is clear: Being downwards and the two thinkers are surrounded by is/ Non-being is not/ What is not is nothing/ Therefore, various schools of philosophers (including a selfie of all change or motion between what is and what is not Raphael on the Aristotelian side). is false and impossible. Plato's dialogues also contrast Epistemology studies the contentious true "really real" from appearances. Art objects are between objects and subjects. Waxing and waning demeaned as changing imitations of unchanging, but between claims that percepts and capture Plato occasionally provides accounts of transcendental objective truth or how subjectivity adds or subtracts intuitions. Diotema, in , describes "stepping from knowledge of extra reality. Modern philosophy stones" by which the rises from beautiful physical extended the theory of knowledge beyond mimesis to objects to internal beauties of character, to mastery of a representative theories of perception and all mental/ discipline of knowledge and to the largest encompassing material representations and the correspondence theory beauty of government harmonizing many interests. The of truth. In fact, the epistemological role of and dialectical assent culminates with an ineffable intuition is the narrative history of philosophy from the of eternal beauty in which the imperfect imitations seventeenth to twentieth centuries. participate. In the , a "divided line" of geometric Modern philosophy begins with a methodical and mathematical abstractions separates the world of doubt. René Descartes would give up skepticism appearances from intuitions of the "really real." The only if he knew with certainty that a sensation or task of contemplation is to incarnate universal forms had a true correspondence with an extra-mental into a conservative Republic of ruled over by object. Perceptual distortions and vague and the philosopher kings who minimize change and banish extraordinary assumption of an evil genius deceiving us mimetic art. The telling point of Rockmore's method about the true content of distinct ideas e.g. we think that and analysis in the first chapter is that the theory of two plus two equals four but in reality the sum is four forms and arguments against mimesis are not logically and one half. No indubitable object turned up until the connected. Despite criticism by himself and others, famous proposition, Cogito, ergo sum. Thinking entails Plato never offers a full account of forms. Hence, one the of a thinker. Even if I am deceived as to the can deny Transcendentals as universal and eternal objective content of all my thoughts, I am certain that I forms but the arguments repudiating mimesis remain: exist. The cogito is an innate idea arising from the power what do imitations imitate, what are the criteria to know of reason alone. A survey turns up other innate ideas. whether art or propositions are true or false? Most prominent is the idea of a supreme, perfect being. Chapter two names Aristotle as founder of the Descartes ontological proof of 's existence follows. Anti-Platonic tradition. Asserting that he loves his The idea of a supreme being is an effect produced by friends but loves the truth more, Aristotle questions a cause that actually possesses the power expressed the Transcendentals as recognition of true, good, and by the effect. Either I am God (the only known true beauty presupposes the existence of a rational . existent) or God exists. I am not supreme or perfect and The participation of finite things in universal forms, and therefore God is. Other innate ideas include scientific http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Review of Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth After Plato 13 and mathematical propositions but the evil genius could signal a weakness?"2 Sensations are mental pictures deceive me as to their objective correlative. But a perfect of outside objects outside the mind. Every idea is a being could not deceive me. Therefore, God guarantees contingent example of a particular object. But there is an exact object for every distinct idea even in instances no universality or necessity derivable from singular where there is no sensory experience for empirical matters of fact and real existence. Even worse there confirmation. Modern science and technology follows is no possible escape from our interior experience of Descartes realization that insofar as the external world impressions and ideas to see if representations have is reducible to quantity or number it can be known with objective validity. What argument could prove that complete certitude. is more indebted to reality has to conform to human percepts and concepts? God than any and contemporary The opposite of every of fact and real existence is astrophysics makes the same assumptions but without conceivable without contradiction Hume's skepticism God's hands on epistemological certification. For asserts that beyond bare particulars, the intelligible , reality is one, infinite substance that world is a product of the human imagination. can be called God or . Knowledge is about the The narrative of knower/known relations has causal relations of the psychophysical parallelism of been plagued by epistemological arguments over the attributes of and extension. To Gottfried the truthfulness of imitations, representations, and Leibniz, reality is a living dynamic equation of analytic corresponding ideas "inside" the mind and the objective propositions in which the predicate is pre-contained referent "outside" the mind. Pure had been in the subject and this is the reason why it exists rather the gold standard of truth and certitude. Like Aristotle's than another possibility. description of the mind as a "blank tablet," intellects were Empiricists retreated to the actuality of ordinary loci for the passive inscription of images and concepts. experience. claimed that if we shut and Rationalists expanded the scope of the knowing subject reopened our eyes and the furniture remained then to include the intelligibility of the universe. But the we are not hallucinating but perceiving. His modest benefits to science and technology were checked by account of sensation, memory, imagination, and the deflationary accounts of experience as vagaries cognition derived from simple ideas is sufficient of sensations, limited memories bundled together by to "muddle through" life, i.e. slightly better than speculative imaginations. probability but nothing close to rationalist certitudes. has an epistemological advantage over Successive British empiricists offer best argument for rationalism and in demonstrating truth and best refutation of representative perception and as between idea and real. Chapters 4 through the true correspondence of subject and object. George 6 deal with the history of eighteenth and nineteenth Berkeley argues that if reality is a dualism of mind and century philosophy, a period dominated by idealist matter; then, matter cannot be represented, as it is by thinkers. A full reading of the text is recommended since definition unperceivable and inconceivable. But if we Rockmore is a much-published scholar in this area. This accept that matter signifies nothing then, esse est percipi review cites only a few examples of radical re-thinking expresses the true correspondence between ideas in of epistemology and ontology from the mind and physical ideas outside the mind. After to and beyond. This uniquely complex and this epistemological solution Berkeley retired from creative philosophizing has a Promethean dimension— philosophy at age twenty-six. Prometheus defied the and gave man the gift of could not refute Berkeley but he did fire as a power of domination. Philosophical systems not believe the argument. In A Treatise of Human Nature appear in which subjects create knowable worlds Hume offers an analogy between skulls on the water of objects or the universe creates subjects in order and representative knowledge. When the rowers stop to become self-conscious or reality as an unfolding the boat's momentum carries it forward. He compares historical process in which subjects and objects become this momentum with a propensity of the imagination one, true reality. to feign connections found chiefly in children, poets, and philosophers. "We must pardon children, because 2 of their age; poets, because they profess to follow David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Project implicitly the suggestions of their fancy: But what Gutenberg EBook 2010, Book I, Part IV, Section III, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705- excuse shall we find to justify our philosophers in so h/4705-h.htm#link2H_4_0008, last accessed 4-24-2014.

Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 14 Raymond Langley

Kant agrees with Hume that there is no proof that temporal process in which the real becomes rational subjective knowledge corresponds to extra-mental and the rational becomes real. reality. The "Copernican revolution" asks if it is possible Karl Marx earned a doctorate degree in that objects must conform to subjective understanding. philosophy and he was influenced by the idealist In the Kant argues that subjective tradition from Kant through Hegel. But he replaced the forms of intuitions and of understanding epistemological claims of subjects and objects with a are universal and necessary conditions for the humanistic anthropology of embodied men in a material possibility of all appearances. Thus object X appears in world living under the real necessity of producing a particular space at a given time; that quantitatively and reproducing their existence. Marx's absolute is X shows up as one, some or all; that X presents itself economic production and its capacity for revolutionary as affirmative, negative or unknown ; that X transformation. Man transforms nature through labor. is seen in reciprocal, causal or non-causal relations. But man, in turn, is transformed by nature. Marx's All this knowledge is a priori and independent of account of this transforming/transformed process whatever X is but these empty forms and categories are is historical . The end of history is a new universal and necessary conditions for the possibility human living in a communist society that ends class of any X appearing or being understood in declarative, conflict and abolishes private . In the new disjunctive, or hypothetical judgments. society the surplus profit from the production and sale There is a difference between the constituted world of commodities is taken from the capitalist owners of of appearance and the world as it is in itself. We do not industrial means of production and restored to workers understand the world-in-itself because of antinomies who created its value. Boom and bust cycles caused by or seeming contradictions. We can think about reality conflicts between capital and labor are the economic in contradictory pairs as created/uncreated, and base that determines individual consciousnesses and consisting of substantial/relational entities, which are superstructures of religion, philosophy, government, free/determined and susceptible to theist/atheistic law and art. According to Rockmore, socialist realism interpretation. This dialectic is the history of philosophy is derived mainly drawn from ' in subject/object terms. Logically we know one side of dialectical materialism. This reductivist aesthetic sees each antinomy must be true and the other false. But art as a passive reflection of actual historical conditions there is no sensation of the whole world and human or creative propaganda about future tractor pulls. experience is the same whether the world is created Contemporary Marxist aesthetics is significant and or eternal and the subject is theist or atheist. Therefore, Rockmore discusses George Lukács and others. philosophy ends with irresolvable contradictions. There are several conclusions to Rockmore's The future of reason is to abandon philosophical historical and epistemological analysis of art and truth. speculations about thinkable but not understandable The most significant is abandoning truth as universal reality in favor of disputes in science that can be settled and eternal. If all are merely contingent and finite by experience. then ontology can fall into and epistemology Kant's successors offer opposing . For can become . A worst case is the meaning of the ego is absolute reality and history. In the absence of complete truth, history cannot the I posits or creates nature as all that is not itself. guarantee human continuation or even a reasonable Friedrich Schelling uses one of his several philosophical outcome. The absence of absolute truth dethroned systems to suggest that nature creates subjectivity philosophy from its privileged position as guarantor in order to become self-conscious. G. W. F. Hegel of all lesser scientific, societal, and cultural truths. It incorporates all the idealisms above into a historical took centuries of arguments to come to terms with the process showing that reality is "subject as well as thought that there is no whole truth available to any man substance." Kant's antinomies are not the last but the or historical period. Another conclusion is that none of first genuine statement of philosophy. Reason issues the myriad arguments for mimesis, representation, or in contradictions because reality is a contradictory correspondence wins the prize. Logical constructions process. Spirit is the negative element, and truth is the offered as criteria for truth that are based upon ideas whole together with the process of arriving at it like designated as inside or outside human heads lack the total money for groceries is the abstract result for Cartesian indubitablity. A final result is that aesthetics the many separate objects purchased. History is the fared better in the loss of truth. Only in the heyday of http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Review of Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth After Plato 15 grand philosophical narratives was it assumed that Contemporary aesthetics divides cognitive or artists needed truths imprimatur to create art. Currently propositional knowledge from non-propositional but representation has lost the philosophical argument and meaningful truths. For example, Phillip Larkin's poem its possibility for interpreting art. "Aubade" catches an old man looking back on his life In the final chapter Rockmore considers and seeing only regret for "the good not done, the love contemporary philosophizing and aesthetics. If there is not given." Magritte's painting of a smoking pipe is no universal truth it does not follow that there is no truth titled "This is not a pipe." Art forces ordinary experience or meaning. Truth has to be re-defined as perspective, or to feel, see, and say what could not be expressed contextual with hypo-theoretical, pragmatic, analytic, scientifically. psychoanalytic, and artistic emphasis. Varieties of truth Art and Truth After Plato provides us with a and meaning may force new ontological configurations. powerful historical and epistemological sweep. Time For example, Rockmore cites the Marxist Christopher changes and past thoughts, art and history no longer Caudwell. His major work Illusion and Reality was first satisfies the human needs it once did. This is not to say titled "Verse and Mathematics" and draft sketched a sort philosophy, art and history is over or done with, lost, of Bergsonian aesthetic of two sources of knowledge. or dead. Contemporary philosophizing and aesthetics Later he came to think of ideas as illusions. Many ideas frees man to know the truth of actual reality of this are goals, lures, values and desires in contrast with historical moment and no longer entangled by inherited material reality. But in Caudwell's version of historical dogmas and ideologies that Mrs. Gradgrind with her materialism illusions become reality through individual dying gasp described as "all those ologies." and collective action while like cultures die and become illusions.

Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts