Comments on Enjoyment and Beauty Complete.5

20.VII.2009 –

Comments on “enjoyment and beauty complete.5” Part 1

2-3, do we assume that there are typically reasons for a b-judgment, or do we try to show that in the next lines?

RW: Let’s change “assume” to “regard.”

(Maybe we’re now putting it forward as credible hypothesis. Subsequently we elaborate make it part of the theory.) … People like Dennett and Davidson would say that any judgment(-type) is one for which we typically have reasons— if ‘judgment’ means belief (or anything rather belief- like). Our reasons may turn out to be poor, but if there just are none, it’s a defective sort of “judgment”.

RW: I tend to agree, but I did not want to argue from the general thesis (why commit to one more thing?). Some will deny that we have reasons for “I am in pain,” and I thought someone might (implausibly) take this view about beauty. In any case, we end up arguing for a particular type of reason.

… This is as good a place as any for a question on “belief-universal reason.”

RW: Sympathetic with what follows. Note that we only use belief-universal in belief contexts. We never describe a reason as belief-universal, only as believed to be such. We never commit to this or that reason being belief- universal. Also, it is not really “universal”—one has to have the relevant belief, and in Section IV, we introduce further possible restrictions.

I have no problem with this as such, but my own thinking is closer to Republic I. If I think p is a reason for q, it’s at least initially open how far this thinking extends. I can’t just assume that every human, let alone every human, Vulcan, Klingon, Romulan, and Ferengi, not to mention Q, the Crystal Entity, and other strange, reasoning denizens of reality, will (would, should, can, shall) regard p this way. On the other hand I don’t want to define a separate category of universal reasons, as opposed to the other ones. To call p a reason for q is as such to generalize the relation beyond my consciousness: provisionally I expect, or hope, or assume, or… that anyone I can have conversation with will echo it, or alternatively should be capable of showing me that I’ve mis-reasoned. Now this expectation, or hope, or assumption, or… may run into trouble, or may seem to be running into trouble. Then admittedly, I will have to decide what to think. Several options are open to me (and very familiar to philosophers). This can be debated for a long time (has been, since ~ 500 BC), but in any case I, personally, would prefer something like an at once more provisonal and more inclusive, Platonic, formulation. 3, the premise of the alleged counterexample is obscure. Near-trivial psychological experiments will show what it is you’re enjoying about the ice-cream cone (taste tests in which we vary sweetness, texture, amounts of strawberry and amaretto, temperature, fat content etc.). Moreover these are features of which you’re conscious. You may not know how they a given one is affecting you, but the claim that there’s no particular aspect you’re enjoying is refutable. —Of course you are still enjoying the whole cone. This is how we enjoy the whole cone. —Preceding considerations harmonize with the Carol example.

RW: I agree with all this but was hoping to answer someone who might dispute it. Better to take the above line? I am often inclined to do so.

—Similar questions arise p. 8. Conscious attention is more or less by definition focussed on particular features! However attention can shift very quickly, then perhaps stabilize or perhaps not. Specification of features, verbal identification, is another matter; does the text confuse these?

RW: I hope there is no confusion. The text is supposed to be all about specification.

9, There is a famous Peanuts cartoon on cloud-reading. Brilliantly to our point. I’ve seen it in either an aesthetics or a psychology text. A very quick on-line search didn’t lead me to it, but if either of you can find it (public library?), it would be great to share, and maybe to use… We could elaborate a little more about free play of

2 the imagination, but maybe this isn’t the place. The interaction with the beautiful object—or with any hard problem which, as we say, calls for creative thought— involves experiment and hypothesis, the search for novelty, semi-random association, feedback, dead ends, the pleasure of discovery, … All aptly meriting the title “free play”. 11, indeed faces illustrate something that seems puzzling for the Taj: unambiguous agreement on the features without (fully) shared enjoyment. (Compare Jones on 18-19, who, apparently at least, does see what you see in the Taj, and yet…) I had a friend who was just crazy about high cheekbones (on women and men). Myself I feel that I do appreciate them, but she’d indicate someone’s face and say something like, “don’t those just knock you over?” Me: “They’re nice, they’re even very nice, but…” She did respond, as in our theory, with “what’s the matter with you, how can you see that and not…?” 11, I’ve not compared the passages as carefully as I should have, but I feel that Learned Counsel is close to speaking with forked tongue on the question of disinterest. Suppose I say, “you can’t [entirely] see how beautiful this is unless you’ve ever lost a child / returned home after years away / really broken your head over the Liar paradox / …” Are these “idiosyncratic taints from my wants, aspirations, dreams, values, and the like”? One could rightly reply that they’re not idiosyncratic, but still… (Probably, lots of people would find the Liar example idiosyncratic to the point of being weird.). I recall either Robert Fagles or Bernard Knox on a passage in Homer’s Iliad (this was in the context of Fagles’s translation, to which Knox wrote the introduction, so I don’t recall which one said this). The point was that these lines, certainly pleasing to any lover of poetry, were superbly and unforgettably beautiful to anyone who has ever, as a soldier, made camp at night between battles. Happily this rules out most of humanity, even if the remainder is still obscenely high. —There are also cases like “I thought he was a ‘frog’, but after years, as I came to love him, I saw that he was beautiful.” (Alexander Nehamas used this example in a generally unexciting lecture at Urbana a few years ago.) … I find “Joe Hill”, as sung say by Joan Baez, a beautiful song. Besides the obvious need (which our theory recognizes) for at least some socialization into European folk/popular music in order to enjoy it so, I may think that to really sense its beauty you must yourself be capable of believing in a better world of a certain kind. Surprisingly few people are … my

3 judgment is not free of my wants-aspirations-dreams… are these idiosyncratic? RW: This is critical. My reply is that it is not beauty or enjoyment that is “disinterested” but the recognition of the normative reason.

13-14, indeed, much of the social science literature on after-the-fact rationalizations concerns identifiable classes of cases that systematically, and sometimes surprisingly, generate whole or partial errors. E.g., members of divorced couples explaining why they broke up. People who, due to suitably engineered circumstances, attributed an action/attidude to emotion E rather than E’. Etc. References are missing passim (OK for now); n. 14 contains a couple of mistakes. 16-17, Robert himself might well agree [or: regardless of what he says, it might well be true that] were it not for his (weirdly) heroic self-understanding, his friends’ arguments would have force for him. This is not easily separated (philosophically, let alone empirically) from their having some genuine motivational force now, just a force soundly defeated by his dominant vision. Similarly… It’s true that ‘reason’ is ambiguous in this way—although strictly, I suspect it’s a case of indexical shift, not lexical variation. As an anthropologist I can say “the shaman has good reason to sacrifice the chicken”, yet also tell the shaman (if I’m on good terms with him, and perhaps feel strongly about innocent chickens), “look, there’s no reason to sacrifice any chickens. This illnesss is…”. But the active-normative distinction is partly just pragmatic, and each side partakes of the other. To credit you with an (actual or counterfactual) active reason to y, as opposed to just some motivation or other (a whim, an urge, a… ) is to provide some normative endorsement, perhaps to say that given certain views, values and perspectives of yours that are understandable and not easily changed, y accords with the demands of reason.

RW: The last sentence may go too far I think. An active reason is a belief that plays the motivational- justificatory role of a reason. I agree that seeing someone this way involves seeing some normative endorsement, but not a whole lot since I can think the belief should not play that role.

4 To say that p gives you normative reason to y is to say that p can give you active reason, and would if… (where the blank may specify some near counterpart of yours, or some not wholly implausible evolution of your thought and character).

RW: Yes, but I am uneasy about “p gives you a normative reason.” We just use “a normative reason exists” and “believe a normative reason exists” in the text.

18, the definition has a seeming redundancy. (I assume there’s a ‘one’ missing from clause (2).) If I regard p as a normative reason to y, then for me it is thereby an active reason, right? So (3) appears to entail (2).

RW: Thought about this too. True, except for weakness of the will cases; I believe there is a normative reason to stop drinking, but my belief there is a glass of wine before me serves as an active reason to drink.

—But (2) also semi-entails (=?) (3). If I am conscious of p’s being an active reason to y, then I’ll either regard p as a normative reason or stop holding it as a reason.

RW: I can fulfill the definition without being conscious of the active reason, and I can have, and be aware of, an active reason to stare at the woman without regarding it as a normative reason (at least not without qualification).

We should think about the most elegant and illuminating ways to set out the position.

RW: Yes, I have had the same reaction. But the exposition leading to the definition requires treating (2) and (3) separately. Would love to simply after however!

24, the Vicki-Guanglei example is felicitous, both for its point and for its limitations. Reading “Sunday Morning” (as I just have again, to get the sense of our example), I may feel: “what is going on here is so important, to being human, that ideally—but ‘ideally’ in some non-vacuous sense—anyone who can read or listen ought to enter into its beauties.” (By the way, I sympathize with the opaque half of Guanglei’s judgment. There are some details I don’t pretend to understand at all, not to mention numerous reactions along the lines of, “yeah, I

5 think I pretty much get that…” Sorry to disappoint my co- authors!) The poem is as much pagan as it is Christian, and as resonant with themes and tensions in the long development of Buddhism, and Chinese ethics, as in the long development of Christianity, and Euro-American ethics.

RW: Agree.

So that if Vicki had time, and enough philosophical vocabulary to communicate what she is responding to, she would be able to sit down with Guanglei and show just how intimately the poem speaks to him. At the end of the session it would be no more opaque to him than it is to me (i.e., still in many particulars opaque!). It should also be no more boring, i.e., Stevens’s stunningly crafted fabric of doctrines, perceptions, associations, feelings, … will impress Guanglei equally (assuming Vicki and I are right to be impressed). Now after all that he may still miss some of the beauties: things accessible to people only with long experience with English, or with European culture and geography. So he may not find the poem as beautiful; in the way that I might not be as moved, even by skilled translations from Akhmatova or LaoTzu, as a Russian or a Chinese might. Still. It would therefore be far from vacuous for Vicki to claim that Guanglei should find “Sunday Morning” beautiful.

RW: Tend to agree. Tried to aside step this with, “Perhaps, if one eliminates the constraints of time, the press of practical demands, the limits of memory, and understanding, and the like. But surely not if one imagines Guanglei in the midst of his pursuit of a life to which the Christian background of Sunday Morning is utterly foreign and completely irrelevant.” OK?

By the same token, if Vicki has enough knowledge and power of observation to enjoy the Stevens, then Guanglei should be able to show her how the landscape paintings join in her own inner dialogues about nature, humanity, and self; the visible and the unseen. Vicki could start by reconsidering Euro-American treatments of line, perspective, and positive/negative form/space that are closer to the Chinese (sometimes in part derived from the latter) on the artistic side, Christian mysticism and Spinoza on the philosophical side. —Of course all this depends on Richard’s specific characterization of Vicki and Guanglei as each being a scholar in their own realm. I don’t dispute the general idea. But I do suggest that for

6 the cases that really count, we needn’t be too shy about our “ought to enjoy”. 24 (and similarly elsewhere), some of our causal idioms are ambiguous when we need to be absolutely clear, if necessary even at the cost of a little grace. ‘… causes you to regard your belief that the Taj has array A of features as a universal reason to…’ means, if I understand our own theory correctly(!), that what I regard as a reason is: that the Taj has such-and-such features.

RW: Right! A mistake that should not be hard to correct.

Roughly, it’s the proposition [or whatever; ignore this problem for a moment], not my believing it that should serve you as a reason. —This may seem obvious and harmless, but sometimes in the paper it’s not quite so. If I recall, these contexts usually involve enjoyment, because there my psychological state and the features of the object are both causally efficious (and far from interchangeable). We should check all of these formulations. If I sometimes hesitate, the less initiated may stumble. Compare 43, ‘the belief that x has a uniform shade of blue’. This really is ambiguous, and the resolution is not quite simple. 28, one point about how the definition works: Suppose I regard my belief(-content) as a universal reason to enjoy x as having A, thus to perceive (e.g. look at) x in a manner suited to extracting features A (clause (3)). Since I fall within the scope of my own universal quantifier, and since that manner is my present manner, and since my regarding p as a reason to Y causes me (ceteris paribus) to Y, (3) causally sustains my continuing to perceive x. Since perceiving x (in the appropriate manner) causes enjoyment, (3) in this way [as well as possibly in others] causally sustains my enjoyment. So this part of (4) is (or looks like) a consequence of (3). —Now part of what the wording of (3) may imply [cf. my worries ad 24], and what is coming on 29-31, is that one thing I’m enjoying is having reasons of a certain kind(!); and since this is quite properly to be enjoyed (31) (36, “one has a compelling reason to have such reasons”), this having of reasons generates reasons. So this is (a) intricate enough to demand that we spell everything out utterly clearly; (b) I would say, a bit of real philosophy(!)—if it works out, we can pat ourselves on the back a little

7 (and particularly, Sean and I can pat Richard on the back a little).

RW: Thought about this, but did not get nearly so far. Expositionally, (4) should be a separate requirement; then the question arises if it is already entailed.

So, 31, “You’ve found something worth lingering and dwelling on, in a special way, a way that stands out from banal or ruthless existence.” —Yes! —If desired one could connect this to the politics of Wilde, Dewey, and Guevara on the one hand, core Buddhism and Daoism on the other; or see all those things combined in the thinking of William Blake. (!) Doesn’t have to be in this section, but it’s certainly part of why we’re bothering with all this. So at some point we step up and say so. 32, and from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology of course it’s possible to say that you enjoyed the sculpture very briefly, that our mechanism did operate, if only for say 600msc. 46, the Paul-Barbara wine case, I’m not convinced, indeed I find this mistaken.

RW: Sean is not convinced either. I will make one more try as I still think there is something in what I am saying, but I am not wedded to the idea. It struck me when I was reading Dewey, and then I found an echo in Murdoch (both discussing art, however).

The argument about privacy fails both ways. On the one hand, of course the features of a wine are public. That’s why wine experts (n.b.) can more or less agree that “the ’95 Bonhommie has structured fruitiness with a slow finish of asphodel overlaid with an effluence of weed” (or whatever, you know, winespeak). True, the features aren’t ones you can readily point to, but neither are lots of things that music and dance critics notice, for example the depth of the Vienna Philharmonic strings or the rare cohesion and animation of a Balanchine corps de ballet. On the other hand, beauty and art extend, incontestably, into the (nearly enough) by-definition-private. Here is Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina (full quote, in Hofmann and Shultes, yes, the Hoffman, Plants of the Gods, is alive with further brilliant detail):

8 The more you go inside the world of Teonanacatl [psilocybe aztecorum], the more things are seen. … stolen horses and buried cities, … an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secret of Teonanacatl can even see that infinite clockwork.

So the argument here is no good. I stand by my opinion that only a substantive theory, which need not be adumbrated in this chapter and which is at the moment quite beyond us anyway, distinguishes wine from Wyeth. (Here I may disagree with Sean, who finds me bookish and neurasthenic.) I suggest, (1) There are questions about beauty beyond the scope of this chapter. It’s not a weakness of the account to leave open some cases that are in fact difficult. (2) Without (straightforwardly) deciding the wine case our account puts the question where it belongs: on whether those enjoying the wine regard the enjoyable features as defeasibly-universal reasons for enjoyment. Several more observations: Whether there’s beauty is not the same question as whether there are enjoyment and a sophisticated, vivid descriptive vocabulary. I love an expert massage (it’s been far, far too long since my last one). A masseur receiving one could be as articulate as any wine connoisseur about its features, its delights, the many things distinguishing his/her experience from massages by other practicioners, even those with similar training. Still, I would not (nor would most of us) call a massage beautiful or otherwise aesthetic/artistic. This is part of what I meant by the “substantive theory” bit just now (as you know from my emails already). We are in danger of running together several problems, obscuring which one we mean to solve at a given point. 1, limitation of audience/interlocutors because the appropriate reasons depend on specific expertise/experience. Illustrated by “Sunday Morning”, the Fischer games, ,,Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (not just in Tori Amos’s acoustic setting; Nirvana’s grunge version has beauty too), and Japan’s cherry blossoms—which anyone may find beautiful, but whose greatest beauty, namely just at the start of their decline,

9 is accessible only if in your own soul you’ve grasped mono no aware, the truth that consciousness, itself, is inseparable from loss. —For reasons in this letter, I think we can handle this well. 2, relativization due to other human differences, cultural or personal—obviously not sharply distinct from 1, but not simply the same either. You make lack the patience for a movie like Tokyo Story (Ozu, exquisitely slow), Die Walküre, a classic gamelan concert (very static and repetitious, makes Philip Glass seem like Jerry Lee Lewis), or Chen taiji’s 48-pattern form (a friend of mine said something like “no, forget it, it takes too long for anything to happen”—which amused me not because I find this false, although it is, but because he makes subtle, minimalist, semi-abstract oil paintings …!) You may be color-blind or tune-deaf (in which case the counterfactuals are also problematic; it may be unclear what you would like if you had normal vision or hearing). Your culture and history may be preoccupied with honor, pain, and suicide, in a way that I understand very well but cannot at all identify with. Consequently I cannot speak of a beautiful seppuku ritual, even if carried out with the greatest physical and psychic perfection. This is not lack of expertise on my part, in contrast to my failure to appreciate your go classics, noh dramas, and the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. —Etc.; since I am somewhat a relativist about beauty/art (I’m basically not one about ethics), I have no particular problem with this. … We can negotiate this in our joint work as needed. I’ll add that the aesthetic-moral human community survives differences of this sort, since there are so many ways to bind us, so many potentially open channels.

RW: Like the examples. Working on addressing relativization more directly in the next draft.

3, whether something surely enjoyable—in fact a pleasure; recognized as a worthy, valued one—is beautiful, or is (or partakes of) art. Quite a different question! To me the really fascinating one. Doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with relativization, nor with expertise. Yet it can… compare what happens when I agree that something is pretty cool, or nice, or interesting (provocative, thought-provoking), but cannot follow you in thinking it’s art. —We’re not foolish enough to try to resolve this one, but as stated, I think we can gesture

10 towards some things on which the question(s) depend(s). Such as how reasons enter and operate. 4, dependence on aspirations, hopes, feelings, and such. This can overlap with the others, but it’s specifically the question of detachment. One might frame it in terms of divisions or operations within a single person: whether I still enjoy x in the same way once I do, or if I were to, set certain attitudes aside. … Let’s worry a little more about detachment. Here is a poem by Lady Izumi of the Heian court (the original is syllable-counted):

Why did you vanish into empty sky? Even the fragile snow, when it falls, falls in this world.

Possibly you think that’s a nice lyric, although some context has obviously been presupposed. If I supply that: a child of Izumi’s, a daughter, died; in winter; Japanese court funerals were by cremation—you may begin to be impressed (is it sad enough for you now?); by beauty, conceptual elegance, and other elements of art. Now things might end there, but as it happens… … I came across the poem, in the collection The Ink-Dark Moon (Ladies Komachi and Izumi) at a certain point, some years in the past, and much enjoyed and admired it (esp. given my love of Japanese forms, even, alas, in translation). Subsequently it came to pass that I found myself, quite nearly although thankfully I have lost no children, in Lady Izumi’s place. I would say that this increased the poem’s beauty for me. (Wasn’t worth it, though!) Should I want to put that aside? —I say that not to disparage the detachment idea. Just, we need to be careful. As a hint, I think it’s best handled under the heading of reasons, though I’ll not directly pursue that now. More of this anon. 47-48, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rembrandt”, correct but. Suppose you and I find the same painting beautiful, but the operative features turn out to differ. —They are extremely unlikely to be disjoint, but we can differ somewhat on selection, emphasis/salience, and organization. —Then we have a shared finding-beautiful, hence community— but less community than meets the eye. This limitation can be very important critically. Imagine a German nationalist

11 and a Jewish socialist both enjoying Wagner’s parts for Siegfried. Yet the difference need not be limitation, quite the contrary. Antigone is worth discussing [I’m slipping from beauty into merit here, but the point is the same] because different readers/viewers do enjoy it differently not because they don’t (a commonplace of aesthetics). Thus the rich conversation, never-ending if the work is rich enough. Therefore… Part of we’ve said about both the David and the Rembrandt is correct within a simplified model. In fact community arises from overlapping perceptions across a great many instances, as when Carol and Mason find something to love together in the David even (Mason does not find it utterly without beauty) and in any case take a long tour of the Italian Renaissance gallery together. It’s never really about a single piece. —Although someone once wrote that the closest European civilization has come to unity since the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna was the week in 1967 when the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper album. I can attest to this. Thus our model of community resembles Arendt’s agonistic concept of democracy, in which unending contestation of the right kind(s) is essential to continually-creating a flourishing collective identity. (Indeed Arendt, who doesn’t seem to have liked Plato much at all, perhaps unconsciously echoed him with her language of rebirth —“natality”.) Another model is the sane, important version of Paul Feyerabend’s “anarchistic philosophy of science”. Which I believe is the one he really believed, despite all the pleasure he took in playing the charlatan, or better—and Paul would have liked this much more—the Trickster. Compare also Sean on Keats. More of this anon. 54, the Grünewald altar piece, ‘picture’/’pictures’. It think it is one triptych. 56, basically agree with the curator case, but it’s also just worth mentioning that the b-enjoyment mechanism operates in virtue of certain of the perceiver’s dispositions; in no way is it ad hoc to suppose these overridden in a given circumstance, for example through memories, sorrow, and a diminished curiosity. More of this anon.

12 Coming soon to an ivory circus near you:

The wrong analysandum! A partly clumsy analysans too! Much consequent upon this, muchly to our relief, perhaps occasionally to Richard’s chagrin.

The empirical claim? The hypothesis? The conjecture? The mumbletystance? Or what? —What. —Performers of course, Henry the Horse, dancing the waltz!

The horror? The East Asian opportunity of the flesh- eating bacteria!