Rob van Gerwen

Art and Experience.

Ph.D. Dissertation

Summary

This summary is available in Dutch as well.

This study has led us to the contours of a theory about the role of the imagination in the arts as we know these since a few centuries. This theory starts from two philosophical assumptions. First of all it assumes that our philosophical theory of perception of the world must be a direct realist one. This should eb so because our perception is polymodal and embodied. Secondly, it is assumed that there exists an asymmetry with regard to 'experience'. Having an experience entails being in some first-person privileged situation with regard to the experience--which is a privilege that ought not be understood cognitivistically. On the basis of these two assumptions it is argued that the arts that we recognize as such can be characterized by way of their task, which is: to represent experience (the having of one), that is, to present a second-person to the beholder of the work.

From the point of view of mainstream analytical aesthetics the approach presented here is controversial. It is this position within analytical aesthetics and the historical nature of our arts (as much as the historical nature of our thought about art) which generate the strategy of this study. The book is in three parts. In the first part a diagnosis is offered of the ability of mainstream analytical aesthetics to account for art and its task. In the second part two aesthetic theories that have (or should have) played a major role in the rise of modern aesthetics are analyzed for their answers to questions remaining after the first part. Lastly, in the third part concepts and suggestions from the second part will be introduced in the contemporary debates outlined in the first part. Please allow me to specify the details of my argument.

The diagnosis in part I aims at three analytical approaches which I name 'cognitivist' because of their theses, first, that we can and should understand the effects of art in terms of their conveying knowledge, and, secondly, that a third-person approach to the aesthetic domain can be complete. I argue that all three of the subjects that are discussed embrace an experiential dimension (of having the (relevant) experience), which, on the basis of the asymmetry of experience just mentioned, by definition will be passed over by a third-person approach

In Chapter 1 I argue that pictorial representation might best be understood as grounded in reproductive exemplification (as in photography), in that the understanding of representations makes ample use of (anticipations of) noticed resemblances. I diagnose, among others things, that there exist no analogues to discursive negation, or indexicals in pictorial representation. No picture can deny that something is the case, nor can it mean 'I' or 'you' or 'say' something in the past tense in the same token-reflexive manner that the relevant pronouns or verb phrases can. There holds no conventionally regulated relation between the meaning of a picture and the occasion of its utterance. Of course, we can construct a history of production which supposedly led to the picture one is confronted with, and this history will eventually lead back to the occasion of the picture's 'utterance'. However, this context of creation is contingent on the picture's representational significance. Also we found a general convention D, which specifies how we should treat such things as are recognized to be instances of depiction, but which does nothing to fix just what such pictures represent--we saw how D resembles the convention which supposedly rules over exemplification, and which is also strictly general. Specifications of what is represented in a picture are amassed by noticing resemblancesa. This conclusion posed no problems to my position since the sting was taken out of Nelson Goodman's semi-logical deflation of resemblance. We reinstalled the beholder's attempts to reconstruct the 'something' in the world that the picture is anticipated to resemble as theoretically the most basic element of depiction. It is of secondary importance whether this entity actually exists or has existed. Representation is not a species of denotation--but nor is it a species of reference, because it lacks the ability to situate its subject matter, to indexically point us to its spatio-temporal context of production. Being a representation means 'inducing the beholder to the mental action of noticing (anticipated) resemblances'. After having restored resemblance's necessity for depiction we confronted the last threshold of Goodman's rigid conventionalism: can anything whatsoever be depicted? We think not. Some resemblance must be noticed. However, Goodman was certainly right in dismissing this reply as vacuous. Resemblance may be a necessary condition for depiction, but it certainly isn't sufficient. We side-step this problem of definition, because depiction confronts a more serious problem once it is understood in terms of resemblance. This problem relates to the primary function of discursive indexicals of linking discourse to persons and their individuality. If indexically situating cannot be achieved by depiction we may have to conclude that depiction is unable to represent experience. Resemblance consists of unimodal reproduction of phenomenal properties--secondary qualities--and having an experience is not among these. If we say of some painting that it represents the experience of the sad person who is depicted on it, we do not mean to say that the painting produces this person's sadness in us, nor a pitying response to it, nor do we attribute an (artistic) expression of sadness to the painting. Instead, we claim that a sad experience is itself represented in the painting (just like the person is--and then some). How might we produce a claim to this effect and deny (as we do) that works of art possess a mental life of their own, and at the same time respect that the mental life of some depicted person actually is unavailable to the beholder? In short, if there exists no pictorial equivalent to discursive indexicality, the question surfaces how much of a person's 'haecceity' can be depicted.

Several notions developed in the aesthetic tradition--such as 'evocation' or 'expression'--might come close to answering this question. I argue that answers which make use of these notions are on a wrong footing. 'Evocation' is unhelpful because it does nothing to demolish the threat of local pictorial impotence by sustaining, or even fortifying, the distinction between the object and the beholding subject, and, moreover, it allows for a work of art to occasion an emotion in the beholder that is not in any way represented in the work, even though this response may be adequate to the representation, such as pitying a character's misfortune. 'Evocation' sustains an incongruity between the emotionality in art and its experiential effects. The question evocation poses is what psychological responses a beholder ought to have when confronted with such and such an understanding of events. Seeing sadness, loss, or death, for instance, ought to evoke in one who is psychologically normal a feeling of pity towards the sad person. The question, however, whether some scene also succeeds in intimating the experiential aspect of the main character's anger or sadness is a different one altogether: it is a question about representation, not one of psychology. We must, therefore, distinguish between the psychology of evocation and the aesthetics of the representation of experience. 'Expression' fails because it points in one of two wrong directions: either 'expression' puts us on the trail of the artist's intentions, which, as Beardsley and Wimsatt rightly argued, is irrelevant to an art work's representational meaning--or we are referred to the artistic treatment of the material the art work consists of. Pointing at the expressive way in which some person or thing or event has been pictured disconnects the affective from what is represented in the picture. So it seems that neither 'evocation' nor 'expression' can help us understand the extent to which depiction is able to represent experience.

Sibley treats aesthetic properties as descriptive, and understands the judgements containing aesthetic property-terms as truth-valuational, but our comparison in Chapter 2 of aesthetic properties with primary and secondary qualities has taught us the irreducible uniqueness of aesthetic properties and the irrelevance of truth values to our aesthetic ascriptions. The phenomenal awareness of aesthetic properties depends upon the subject's input in ways essentially different from that of primary or secondary qualities. This I argue on the basis of the arguments Locke provided for the very distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Some measure of projection is needed for the perception of aesthetic properties. Richard Wollheim made the promising suggestion that we should understand expressive properties as being projective properties. This suggestion seems to explain the severe limitations of a cognitivist approach to the representation of experience.

I use the concept of 'art' as a primitive throughout the first two chapters in order to stress certain effects of art works without having to answer the question of definition. In chapter 3 my theoretical reluctance made way for an account of art in terms of its production, ontology, and exhibition. 'Art' was divided into four specifiably distinct types of artistically relevant choices which were taken each in their own right to be more or less relevant for making a thing or event into art. I propose that a thing or event is art if and only if it is built from material exhibiting second order choices made on behalf of third order, aesthetic, evaluative, choices. In themselves, the procedures of museums do nothing to change this--pace Dickie. Secondary choices typically generate primary and secondary qualities--but more is needed for these primary and secondary qualities to form the basis upon which aesthetic properties supervene. The crucial question is whether the artist's secondary choices were made in the light of aesthetic choices. This reintroduces the questions we ended Chapter 2 with regarding the experiential dimension and the projective nature of aesthetic properties. But we then took it one step further: in order to adequately understand aesthetic properties we found that an account of aesthetic evaluation must be developed, one that meets the principle of acquaintance, next to reconciling the idea that aesthetic properties are irreducible to primary or secondary qualities. So we must account for at least two aspects of art's experiential dimension: first, we must account for art's ability to represent experience (which seems to presuppose the projective impact of the beholder's own experiences), and, secondly, we must account for art's internal intentional structure: how do a work's primary and secondary qualities relate to its aesthetic properties and, ultimately, to aesthetic evaluation?

To bring these problems together one might want to devise a theory relating aesthetic evaluation to the indexical depiction of experience. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, Kant's aesthetic subjectivism is of special significance in relation to these questions. The answers found were rather complex. First, we found that the aesthetic experience which supposedly founds our aesthetic judgements must be understood as an ideal of aesthetic discourse, rather than as an empirical event. Secondly, the aesthetic experience understood empirically seemed to refer within the Kantian theory to our moral make-up. How this reference must be understood, however, remained an open-ended question. We reconstructed a possibly Kantian approach to this question, which started from his notion of aesthetic ideas, but new questions emerged: how do we--or aesthetic ideas, for that matter--animate the represented world; how do we introduce soul in the world? And what is the relevance of this for the free play of the cognitive faculties which is alleged to transcendentally found our aesthetic judgements? We stopped short at the central role of imagination in all this.

Reassessing in Chapter 6 Kant's critique of rationalist aesthetics, Baumgarten's aesthetics was seen to provide a better formulation of a mix of our problems (of representation of the experiential, aesthetic properties, and aesthetic evaluation). Baumgarten's answer: aesthetic evaluation (preferably in terms of beauty) is based on the perfection of phenomenal awareness. And Baumgarten's specifications proved illuminating: such perfection of phenomenal awareness shows itself in the aesthetic qualities of the representation that it is the awareness of--such as its moral magnitude, its extensive wealth (which provides the representation with a kind of indexicality), its moral dignity (which incorporates the moral implications of the beholder's experience into the aesthetic value), and aesthetic light (the work's rhetorical abilities, which too must be understood in terms of experiential effect). These aesthetic qualities are all based on a subject-object interdependence. As such these notions are typical instances of the aesthetic properties that--at the ending of Chapter 2--we characterized as projective.

In the third part the arguments assembled in previous chapters are employed to develop a theory that accounts for the experiential workings of art works starting from the contemporary aesthetic arguments. In Chapter 7 I introduce the--technical--notion of 'intimation' to specify exactly what distinguishes representation from exemplificatory reproduction. If ever 'having a specific experience' was represented then this must have been an effect of intimation, not of pictorial recurrencea of the visual--not of reproduction. Intimation typically works where the strictly causally reproduced visual is absent: in style, framing, editing, metaphor, etc. There are three elements in a work of art's representational efficacy: there is its reproductive basis which informs the audience as to the work's contents, then there is a measure of artistic presentation (expression) which ought to be understood as stylistic, and which furnishes, thirdly, the intimatory effects which make a thing into the representation of an experiential dimension. I call this art's threefoldness (cf. Podro, Wollheim). In terms of this threefoldness we are better equipped to understand artistic expression and distinguish it from evocation. Next, intimation's non-natural nature is established in an analysis of the relation of intimation with convention and natural sensibility. As an illustration the matter of musical representation is discussed with the help of this terminology: in music there is hardly an analogue of exemplificatory reproduction which explains why we should have as much trouble establishing the exact subject matter of a musical work as we do. Because the reproductive basis in music is so meagre (if not totally absent most of the times) the intimatory effects of music tend to be vague or general rather than specific. I then elaborate this argument into an account of aesthetic properties, and explain why aesthetic properties differ ontologically from primary and secondary qualities. I propose to call them represented tertiary qualities, and argue that these tertiary qualities explain why we can refer to aesthetic properties when explaining our aesthetic evaluation, notwithstanding the fact that the so-called grand aesthetic terms, such as beauty, are not informative about the works they are used to evaluate. One might conclude from this lack of information that any and all reference to properties in the object would be irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation, which is plainly absurd. The consequent, conceptual question regarding the relevance of tertiary qualities for aesthetic evaluation will be the subject matter for Chapter 8.

Because strictly causally reproduced visuality is insufficient to represent an experience (of the subject conveyed), we need more than our natural input of the senses to appreciate it accordingly. We need a mental faculty distinct from our senses, and this faculty, I suggest in Chapter 8, is the imagination. In order to specify exactly what type of imaginative activity is needed I distinguish perceptual from empathetic imagination. To establish these points an analysis is proposed of perception in terms of its polymodal embodiment--taking up arguments from the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It is argued that contrary to normal perception works of art address a restricted number of sense modalities and as a consequence we need empathetic imagination to adequately establish whether in some work of art 'experience' is represented: empathetic imagination is necessary to perceive--even constitute--the tertiary qualities that are represented. Following Kant, I then argue that in aesthetic evaluation it is the activities of the imagination themselves that are judged reflectively. Thus it is the animation of empathy which is valued aesthetically, which, secondly, explains the moral relevance of the aesthetic domain. Art may be morally relevant irrespective of the explicit moral justness of some representation. Instead, its moral relevance lies in its activating our empathy. Lastly, in this chapter I look into the problem of what theory of aesthetic evaluation must be developed. I argue for the acceptance of a subjectivism, but one that doesn't base all evaluation on our feelings, but on the reflective judgement of empathetic imagination, and call it: imaginativist subjectivism.

Further options: Inhoudsopgave van dit boek; this summary in Dutch; the glossary to my book.