Nicholas Wolterstorff -- 1987 -- \'Philosophy of Art after Analysis and Romanticism\'

Philosophy of Art after Analysis and Romanticism Author(s): Nicholas Wolterstorff Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, Analytic Aesthetics (1987), pp. 151-167 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431272 . Accessed: 22/06/2012 21:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Blackwell Publishing and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. http://www.jstor.org NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF hilosophy of Art After Analysis and Romanticism IT IS BEYOND DISPUTE that the glory of twentieth- century analytic philosophy is not revealed in the field of the philosophy of art. If one is on the lookout for analytic philosophy's greatest attain- ments, one must look elsewhere. Why is that? Most of the major figures of analytic philos- ophy spent no time at all reflecting on the arts. As for the remaining ones, their reflections on art were rarely central to their philosophical work. The cultivation of the analytic philoso- phy of art was left almost entirely to figures of the second and lower ranks. Mainly, they ap- plied to art lessons learned elsewhere. Nobody tried to apply elsewhere lessons learned in thinking about art-with the exception, per- haps, of those who applied lessons learned in thinking about poetic metaphor. The busy hive of analytic philosophy was never located in the field of philosophy of art. Why is that? The answer cannot be that the priorities of the analytic philosopher mirrored the priorities of our culture, for in modern Western culture, art is no minor matter. So is it perhaps that what determines philosophy's attention to some com- ponent of culture is not prominence but crisis? Not that either; for in our century, art has not lacked for crises. It must be something in the character of analytic philosophy which accounts for art's minority status there, or strictly, some- thing in the relation of the character of analytic philosophy to the character of art, or to the character of our modern ways of thinking about art. Perhaps the fit is poor. I. In a good many of his writings over the past decade or so, Richard Rorty has expounded the NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF is professor of philosophy at Calvin College. thesis that analytic philosophy, when it was still a movement and not merely a style, was a version of neo-Kantianism. That interpretation seems to me correct. Or at least what seems to me correct is that the "ideal type" (using Max Weber's concept of ideal type) of analytic philosopher was a neo-Kantian with empiricist predilections. Philosophers hold and defend theses. But deeper in their thought than the theses they hold and defend are the pictures and images which govern and guide their holding and defending. Analytic philosophy has been governed and guided by the Kantian image of structure and content: a scheme of concepts applied to a given content. Kant regarded the content as "intu- itions" -Anschauungen. Some analytic philos- ophers agreed. But others thought that what is given is not just our intuitions but also items in the world; and even more held that among our concepts are to be found some that apply not to our intuitions but to items in the world-to entities independent of our subjectivity. Kant also held that concepts structure intuitions and that experience is constituted by those struc- tured intuitions: to experience a table is (under the appropriate circumstances) to take one's intuitions as a table; it is to conceptualize them as a table. Probably most analytic philosophers did not accept this structuring/constituting the- sis concerning the working of concepts. But the conviction that in thinking and speaking we apply (some part of) our conceptual scheme to some content or other has been common coin- age, as was the Kantian conviction that ul- timately the content is given to us and that we provide the concepts. The human mind exhibits a duality of receptivity and spontaneity. Thought-and perhaps even experience-rep- resent the interplay of these two dimensions: ri-r&-nfivitv snn. cnnntan,-ifu the.- nLi,,n inAl the, ?) 1987 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 152 WOLTERSTORFF contributed, content and structure, awareness and concept. Obviously there is much about our concep- tual schemes and our intuitions that is contin- gent. But beneath the contingency there is-so argued Kant-necessity. There are connections of logical necessity among the concepts. In addition, it is necessary that human beings-or more generally, finite knowers-intuit space and time. And it is necessary that they concep- tualize the intuitional given in certain ways. These modes of necessity constitute necessity's full scope. Beyond de dicto necessity, and de re necessity concerning the powers of intuiting and conceptualizing of finite knowers, there is no necessity. Further, de dicto necessity is not a feature of the metaphysical structure of things independent of finite knowers. It too has the status of being a limit on the powers of finite knowers; it is impossible for us to think of a proposition of the form p & -p as true. The laws of logic are the rules of thought. All necessity, then, can be thought of as pertaining to how we think and experience. Necessity is the limit on human spontaneity. This, I say, was Kant's view. Within analytic philosophy there was powerful impetus toward following Kant in this subjectivizing of necessity. Necessity repre- sents the limits on thought, or language, or whatever. This picture made available to Kant and the neo-Kantians an elegant way of delineating the task of philosophy among the "sciences." Phi- losophy deals with our conceptual scheme as such; the other sciences deal with the applica- tion of one and another part of that scheme. In philosophy, as Wittgenstein remarked, the scheme idles. More specifically, philosophy deals with the necessary structure of our con- ceptual scheme. Now necessity is ascertainable a priori; conducting experiments and taking polls is irrelevant to the discerning of necessity. Philosophy is thus an armchair enterprise. Philosophical knowledge is a priori knowledge. Rorty says that neo-Kantians regarded philo- sophical knowledge as apodictic (certain). And some did indeed not only regard genuine philo- sophical knowledge as a priori but as certain. What questions do philosophers pose as they stand back to discern necessity in our concep- tual scheme? Here one finds a sharp difference between Kant on the one hand and the analytic philosopher on the other. Kant's preoccupying concern was to establish that every conceptual scheme of human beings will necessarily con- tain certain specific concepts, such as exist- ence, necessity, and causality, and certain types of concepts, such as those of enduring objects and of qualities. In addition, he endeavored to show that there is an ineradicable dynamic in the constitution of us human beings which leads us to think of the intuitions given to us as reality putting in its appearance to us, and which leads us to think of that reality along certain quite definite lines-this in spite of the fact that knowledge of that reality is in principle unat- tainable for us. These views on Kant's part contain and produce deep paradoxes. Of these, the analytic philosophers were well aware. Accordingly, they did their best to keep the Kantian preoccupations at arm's length. They simply avoided the question of the extent to which we human beings can do our thinking with alternative conceptual schemes, insisting only that any viable conceptual scheme will satisfy the laws of logic. With the Kantian preoccupations thus re- nounced, what was it that remained for philos- ophers to do? Philosophers would concern themselves solely with the internal necessities of our conceptual schemes, i.e., with the nec- essary relations holding among concepts. They would offer necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts. They would analyze concepts. Philosophy would be the analytic of concepts. Philosophy would be con- ceptual analysis. As such, philosophy would finally become scientific. Its days of wandering in the sloughs of indecisiveness would be over. It would now at long last join the other sciences in the algorithmic settling of disputes.' At the core of the philosophical enterprise would be the activity of looking to see whether P does or does not entail Q. What would be the point of this enterprise? What values would conceptual analysis serve? Two things especially were emphasized. The cause of clarity would be served; never has there been a philosophical movement which so prized clarity. We do not discern the logic of scientific discourse, do not discern the logic of moral discourse, do not discern the structure of one and another sort of fact. These structures are obscured from us. Language, especially Philosophy of Art After Analysis and Romanticism 153 language outside of science, serves other pur- poses than to display for us the structure of the facts. One of the consequences of its service of those other purposes is that it conceals from us that structure. The task of the philosopher is to undo that concealment, to make the hidden manifest. It was widely held, however, that this at- tempt to uncover the concealed would show that some of our language, instead of stating facts obscurely, states no facts at all. It is without sense: nonsense. Eventually analytic philoso- phers acknowledged that some of such language might nonetheless serve valuable human pur- poses. It might be useful for expressing our emotions, useful for marrying people, etc. But even then the conviction remained that some of it served no useful purpose whatsoever. Espe- cially some of the talk produced by traditional philosophers was seen as nothing but nonsense, parading, however, under the guise of sense, hence obfuscation. Traditional philosophy con- tains "metaphysics." And so, just as in Kant, the problem of demarcation became central in analytic philosophy. Usually it took the form of trying to demarcate "genuine science" from "metaphysics." For it was assumed without question that mathematics and the hard sciences are paradigms of sense. There, rationality rules. There, rationality is embodied. If, on one's analysis of rationality, the hard sciences prove not to be rational, that is to be taken as evidence against one's analysis of rationality and not as evidence against science's rationality. The cen- tral version of the problem of demarcation became that of trying to demarcate genuine science from the pseudoscience of metaphysics. If one knew nothing directly of the move- ment itself, the image evoked by my description of analytic philosophy would probably be that of the philosopher wandering about aimlessly in the field of concepts, analyzing whatever struck him as unclear. In fact, analysis was not a directionless enterprise. In the first place, it was, above all, three areas of thought and discourse that drew the attention of the analytic philosopher: scientific discourse, the discourse of private morality, and discourse about knowl- edge and rationality. Secondly, in the first and last of these, especially, two deep assumptions determined the direction of attempts at analysis. For one thing, attempts at analysis were di- rected by pervasive adherence to founda- tionalism with respect to knowledge. Knowl- edge, it was assumed, has a foundational structure: some of what we know is known immediately and everything else that we know is known because we know it on the basis of that. What we know immediately, we are cer- tain of. And we are certain of something be- cause at that point we are directly aware of reality. This is the given. Secondly, attempts at analysis were directed by what may be called concept constructivism. All concepts, it was widely assumed, either apply to what we are directly aware of or are constructed out of such concepts by simple logical operations. The direction of analysis was foundationalist and constructivist. II. Analytic philosophy as I have described it has now almost entirely disappeared. Images central to the project have been widely dis- carded; assumptions fundamental to it have come under attack and have been widely re- jected. Rorty, especially, has offered a narra- tive of the demise-a narrative which argues that analytic philosophy deconstructed into pragmatist-Hegelianism. Shortly I shall discuss the Rortian narrative. But first, let us return to our question as to why it was that analysis never flourished in philosophy of art. Ever since the early romantics, it has been a commonplace that high culture in the West has a science side and an art/humanities side, and that these two coexist in tension. C. P. Snow's well-known writings on the matter served to express, for our own times, a thesis already a century and a half old. Analytic philosophy emerged from the science side of our culture; almost all of its great figures were trained in science or mathematics. It was about that side of culture that they were knowledgeable, and it was in that side of culture that they were interested. Often they went so far as to express the conviction that the primary business of philosophy was to uncover the "logic" of science. And, as already mentioned, many of them embraced the goal of making philosophy itself finally scientific. Analytic philosophy was to be "scientific" philosophy. Hans Reichenbach in The Rise of Scientific 154 WOLTERSTORFF Philosophy caught the spirit. In the preface he said that: The present book . . . maintains that philosophic spec- ulation is a passing stage, occurring when philosophic problems are raised at a time which does not possess the logical means to solve them. It claims that there is, and always has been, a scientific approach to philosophy. And it wishes to show that from this ground has sprung a scientific philosophy which, in the science of our time, has found the tools to solve those problems that in earlier times have been the subject of guesswork only. To put it briefly: this book is written with the intention of showing that philosophy has proceeded from spec- ulation to science. Given these attitudes, it was entirely to be expected that the standard advice given to fledgling philosophers would be to study more science and math. Nobody counseled studying more art. And likewise it was entirely to be expected that graduate departments would be especially welcoming to those who already had extensive training in science and mathematics. Beyond this, there was something plainly ill-fitting-so it would appear, at any rate- between the project of analytic philosophy and the reality of art. The goal of the analytic philosopher was to uncover the structure of our conceptual schemes. Now in fact science con- sists of a great deal more than a conceptual scheme-even more than a body of theories expressed with a conceptual scheme. But at least theories and concepts are prominent in science. Art is different. Buildings, paintings, string quartets, sculptures, dances: How is the analytic philosopher to get a purchase on these? Where are the conceptual schemes? Where are the languages? In poetry and fiction and drama there is of course language, in the most straight- forward sense. But the romantic tradition had long warned that here language works differ- ently, so differently that it isn't even referential. In short, it is not evident that the philosopher committed to conceptual analysis has much of anything to do when it comes to art. Two different strategies were adopted for coping with this difficulty. Of one, Monroe Beardsley was the most noted practitioner. Beardsley's strategy was to call attention to the difference between art and art criticism, and then to propose that aesthetics, instead of re- maining the philosophy of art or the philosophy of the aesthetic dimension, should become the philosophy of art criticism. For in art criticism, one has that on which the analytic philosopher can practice his craft, i.e., a conceptual scheme. Thus Beardsley gave to his major book, Aesthetics, the subtitle Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. 3 He said, in the open- ing paragraph of the introduction, that: There would be no problems of aesthetics, in the sense in which I propose to mark out this field of study, if no one ever talked about works of art. So long as we enjoy a movie, a story, or a song, in silence-except perhaps for occasional grunts or groans, murmurs of annoyance or satisfaction-there is no call for philosophy. But as soon as we utter a statement about the work, various sorts of questions can arise (p. 1). And in summarizing his delineation of the field he said that, In the course of this book, then, we shall think of aesthetics as a distinctive philosophical inquiry: it is concerned with the nature and basis of criticism-in the broad sense of this term-just as criticism itself is concerned with works of art (p. 6). Philosophical aesthetics, he said, "deals with questions about the meaning and truth of critical statements" (p. 7). To conceive of aesthetics thus is to place it at a remove from the phenomena of art and the aesthetic. To all but the most hardened analytic philosopher that will already give pause. But perhaps it is more important to observe that the foundationalism and constructivism which gave point and direction to the work of analysis in philosophy of science had only a rather weak grip on the "Beardsleyans" in aesthetics. For example, vast amounts of time and energy were devoted to devising analyses of the concept of work of art. For sheer boringness, the results of these endeavors have few peers. Something interesting might have turned up if philosophers had looked into the emergence of our (modern) concepts of the arts and works of art. When and where did these concepts emerge? Why? What intellectual and social purposes did they serve? Do those purposes remain viable? Have the concepts attached to the words "an art" and "a work of art" remained steady over the years or have they altered? If they have changed, why have they changed? All such historical inquiries would, however, be regarded by the neo- Kantian analytic philosopher as mucking around in the contingent. The analytic Philosophy of Art After Analysis and Romanticism 155 philosopher of art, like his fellow analytic philosophers, practiced his craft with resolute ahistoricism: slicing into the conceptual scheme of art criticism at a certain moment in its history, never asking why that scheme had arisen and developed as it had, attempting just to offer analyses of the concepts critics use and uncover criteria for the warranted assertion of the statements they make, scarcely guided in his analyses even by the doctrines of founda- tionalism and constructivism. There was, as I have mentioned, a second strategy for developing an a