More to read

Two new articles are up at the Nordic Wittgenstein Review, by Lassi Johannes Jakola and Stephen Leach.

And there is a whole issue of Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics devoted to Wittgenstein-related work. 

They tell one themselves

Here's a nice passage from Anscombe:

So far as I know, the only places where Wittgenstein considers the expression itself to be what it expresses are aesthetic. A musical phrase, a bed of violets: such things may strongly give one the impression that they tell one something. What is it that they tell one? They tell one themselves, not something else.

(from "Frege, Wittgenstein, and Platonism", p. 163 in the electronic version of From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe).

Compare Schopenhauer's idea of all phenomenal things as embodied music (that perhaps sing or dance themselves), and Larkin's "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said."

Recommended reading

Martin Shuster is kind enough to thank me (I'm not sure what for, but I'm not complaining) in the acknowledgements in his book on New Television. I've only read the introduction so far, but it looks great; a really nice combination of fun subject matter and Cavell-style scholarship.

Something I have read all the way through is Gabriel Citron's paper on Wittgenstein and philosophical virtues: "Honesty, Humility, Courage, and Strength". It's a bit depressing (your mileage may vary) to compare yourself with Wittgenstein's ideal and see how far short you fall, but it's a very good account of Wittgenstein's values.

Ornament and Crime: the book

One of my Christmas presents was Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime, which includes the famous essay of that title but also many more short pieces on related themes. There aren't many huge surprises, but he's funny and seems very similar to Wittgenstein in matters of taste. I couldn't wait to blog about it, but now that I've finished it I don't know what to say. Here goes nothing.

One reason I found the book interesting is that Wittgenstein once wrote that: "It is as though I wanted to change men's and women's fashions by talking" (Culture and Value p, 71, according to some notes I have, but I don't see it there in the edition I own). Loos sort of tries to do this, although he also recognizes the problem with such an enterprise. He also, like Wittgenstein, rejects talk of beauty in the arts in favor of talk about getting things right. Or rather, Loos rejects one in favor of the other, while Wittgenstein, if his students' notes are to believed, merely observed that we tend not to talk much about beauty and instead use words like 'right' and 'wrong'. Here's Loos, from the essay "Men's Fashion" (from 1898):

...what does it mean to be well dressed? It means to be correctly dressed.

To be correctly dressed! With that expression I feel as if I have removed the mystery with which our fashions have been surrounded until now. For fashion we use words such as beautiful, elegant, chic, smart, or dashing. But that is not the main point at all. The point is to be dressed in such a manner as to attract as little attention to oneself as possible. (p. 40)

He is not doing aesthetics here but trying to change men's fashions by talking. He is making propaganda, that is, against the foppishness that he identified as popular in Germany and in favor of what he identifies as the English (he is very pro-English, which probably ought to make one suspicious), modern, refined taste in men's clothing.

On the other hand, he does acknowledge that this is not generally how fashion works:

Today we wear narrow trousers, tomorrow they will be wide, and the day after narrow again. Every tailor knows that. Couldn't we just abolish the wide-trouser period, then? Oh no! We need it to be able to enjoy our narrow trousers again. (p. 60)

He does suggest, though, that the industry can impose styles on people, or at least force the speed of change to increase. And, presumably, the industry might be encouraged to do so by respected essayists. But:

Fashion progresses slowly, more slowly than one usually thinks. Objects that are really modern stay so for a long time. (p. 92)

Another engine of changing fashion is social change:

...we are heading toward a newer, greater age. Women will no longer have to appeal to sensuality to achieve equal status with men, but will do so through their economic and intellectual independence, gained through work. A woman's value will not rise and fall with fluctuations in sensuality. Silks and satins, ribbons and bows, frills and furbelows will lose their effectiveness. They will disappear. And rightly so. There is no place for them in our culture. (p. 111) 

Much has been made of the handles that Wittgenstein designed for the house he built in Vienna. (You can even buy a version of them, although his design has been reworked "to bring it in line with modern technology." The horror!) But has Loos' remark from "The New Style and the Bronze Industry" (1898, presumably, although the date given in the book is 1878--Loos was born in 1870) been noted?

There is only one decent door handle in Vienna accessible to me, and I make a special detour to see it every time I am in the vicinity. (p. 49)

From the surrounding text it seems clear that what distinguishes this handle is its lack of ornamentation. If Wittgenstein was a big fan of Loos' then he might have tried to design something that would have pleased the master. This is not easy:

Changing old objects to adapt them to modern needs is not permissible. We must either copy or create something completely new. (p. 46)

And a craftsman's best work will be the work that corresponds "most closely to his nature, to his temperament, which he produces without effort, which bear[s] the clearest stamp of his personality" (p. 45).

One rule of thumb that seems to apply throughout the book is that the duller the chapter title, the more interesting its content turns out to be. For instance, in "Interior Design: Prelude" (1898) Loos speaks of styles of furniture as languages: "Our cabinetmaker speaks German, the German of Vienna, 1898. Do not call him stupid or naive just because he cannot speak Middle High German, French, Russian, Chinese, and Greek as well" (p. 53). Perhaps this isn't earth-shattering, but it seems rather Wittgensteinian.

As, in a way, does this:

...the ancient Greeks also knew a little about beauty. And they were led by practical considerations alone, without taking beauty into account at all, without wanting to satisfy some aesthetic need. And when an object was so practical it could not be made any more practical, they called it beautiful.[...]

Are there still people who work in the same way as the Greeks? Oh, yes. As a nation, the English; as a profession, the engineers. The English and the engineers are our ancient Greeks. (p. 69)

I wonder whether Wittgenstein read this before he went to England to study engineering in Manchester.

Disciplinary distinctions

If you like that sort of thing (and if you don't) I've posted something about empirical versus non-empirical subjects over at philpercs.

Relativism as bullshit

A bullshitter does not primarily care whether what he says is true or false. His primary goal is to win votes, sell the car, get applause, make the teacher think he has read the paper he was supposed to read, generate buzz, or something of the sort. Bullshit is a sort of consequentialism in action (not that all consequentialism is bullshit, of course). If I don't know what I'm talking about (I haven't read the book, say) then I might sincerely hope that what I say is true, but first and foremost my concern is with appearing in a way that gets others to do what I want them to do. I am pretending.

Whenever anyone does anything they try to do it well, or properly, or at least adequately. Otherwise they are not really doing that thing but something else, such as pretending to do that thing or trying to make it look as though they have done that thing. If I mow the lawn and don't try to do even an adequate job then I am really just trying to pacify someone else (my neighbors, my wife, perhaps even my conscience), not to mow the lawn. I am making a show of mowing the lawn. And I will, in that case, care about putting on at least an adequate show.

Internal to everything we do is some sense of adequacy, if not goodness. We live by standards. We cannot do otherwise, but we also cannot live by standards while sincerely affirming that any standard whatsoever is just as good as any other. This would be one possible reason to deny that relativism exists at all. It's an impossible position to hold, so why bother trying to counter it? I agree that it is impossible to hold, in a way that is similar to the impossibility of thinking nonsense, but people still do utter (and 'think') nonsense. And I think they do fall into relativism, even of the very crude sort discussed in textbooks.  

Moral relativism typically shows up in the form of someone saying "it's all relative" when a discussion of ethics gets difficult (socially, intellectually, or in some other way). It's a way to disengage so as to avoid hurt feelings or hard work or boredom or whatever. Aesthetic relativism shows up when students treat artworks as something like bullshit, as content-irrelevant shows whose value is only to produce a certain effect. I once had a discussion with students who claimed not to care at all what the critical response had been to a movie. That is, they claimed it made no difference whatsoever to whether they would watch a movie if critics had universally praised or panned it. Of course they might have been exaggerating, but I think at least some of them really meant it. They had found no correlation at all between movies that get good reviews and movies that they enjoyed. (If you never read reviews this is hardly surprising, I suppose.) Their faculty for enjoying higher pleasures of the movie variety was seemingly non-existent.

There's a similar indifference to content in the way many students talk about responding to poetry. To hear them tell it, a typical essay about poetry is all bullshit. This probably is an exaggeration, and probably not exclusive to essays about poetry--minimum length requirements on any essay encourage bullshit, whatever compensating virtues they might have. But I bet most English professors encounter at least some bullshit when grading essays on poetry, and I expect there is more of it when it comes to poetry than in essays on, say, history or engineering where one can fall back on mindlessly listing facts. And it's not just students. Very large numbers of people, I think, really have no response to artworks beyond thumbs up or thumbs down.

That might be going too far, but I don't think it's going much too far. And so far as it is true, people can't be articulate about art because they have nothing to articulate. (Anything they do 'articulate' will be bullshit.) And then standards will be invisible to them.   

I had a point but I seem to have lost sight of it. One (boring) thing I want to say is that relativism is bullshit, in its crudest form it's simply impossible to believe or to mean. The possibly less boring thing I wanted to say is that bullshit is produced by people who care about effects and appearances, not content, and that relativism about aesthetic matters encourages the production of bullshit. If you don't believe that there is a difference between good art and bad--that the only relevant differences are between what is liked and what is disliked--then you won't try to produce good art (or good criticism), just popular art (or criticism). And something similar goes for ethics. As far as you think of your own ethics as just a product of your culture or genes or upbringing, etc., you will take an external kind of view of them, as if they are just part of a chain of cause and effect, and not something whose contents can be evaluated. This is not a position you can actually live in, but it is possible to insist on talking as if it were.

(I'm not sure that I am not confused about this, but when I started to write this post--several days ago--I felt as though I had an insight to share. I'm posting it now for whatever it might be worth.)

Mm-mm good

I mentioned here that Wittgenstein makes an odd comment about the word 'good' in his lectures on aesthetics:

A child generally applies a word like ‘good’ first to food. One thing that is immensely important in teaching is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. The word is taught as a substitute for a facial expression or a gesture. The gestures, tones of voice, etc., in this case are expressions of approval.  

I also said that:

There is much more to be said about how we get from yummy! to appreciation, about the tremendous (because "One wouldn’t talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art"), and about the significance of all this (its relevance to ethics, for instance). But that will have to wait. 

Presumably Wittgenstein's thinking about the word 'good' being a substitute for a facial expression or gesture that expresses approval is related to Philosophical Investigations 244:

How do words refer to sensations? -- There doesn't seem to be any problem here; don't we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? -- of the word "pain" for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior.

"So you are saying that the word 'pain' really means crying?" -- On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.     

Can we infer that the word 'good' replaces cheering (as in hooray, as in the boo-hooray theory, aka emotivism) or saying 'aah!' or 'mmm!' and does not describe it? I (tentatively) think so. But learning new pain-behavior and new approval-behavior (if that's the right term) is learning something new. It isn't just doing the same thing in a pointlessly different way. So what is it? Well, we know what it is. But perhaps it would be good to get re-acquainted with it.

The move from "mmm!" to "That's good" is, among other things, a move from (something that has the form of) expression to (something that has the form of) a report. It's a move into language, away or on from just being a thing. ('Mmm!' doesn't have much meaning or grammar.) It's a move toward articulation, which allows for greater detail or precision and for (more) rational understanding of what is expressed. It allows for disagreement, too, which is part of this rational understanding. The move into language (and reason) is also a move into society or community with others, out of the (more) private world of the pre-linguistic. But it isn't a leap from one sphere into another. It's a growing from one area into a wider area that still includes the point of origin. I can and do still say "mmm!" or cry instead of always saying "This is good" or "I'm in pain."

The first step is being trained to associate the exaggerated facial expressions and gestures with the pleasant sensations of eating. The next is to be trained to say 'good' or 'it's good' or whatever instead of making such gestures (if kids ever do start by simply mimicking the gestures--at any rate they need to be taught to say 'good,' etc.). Then you start working on your pronunciation (not goo or goot but good), your grammar (not just good but This is good, etc.), and applying words like 'good' to other foods, other sensations, other kinds of thing. And that involves being shown, or simply noticing for oneself, similarities between the original paradigm cases and others.

This can be complicated, as Wittgenstein describes in the case of appreciating a piece of music (from Culture and Value, p. 59):

Doesn’t the theme point to anything beyond itself? Oh yes! But that means: the impression it makes on me is connected with things in its surroundings- e.g. with the existence of the German language and its intonation, but that means with the whole field of our language games. If I say, e.g.: it’s as though a conclusion were being drawn, or, as if here something were being confirmed, or, as this were a reply to what came earlier, - then the way I understand it clearly presupposes familiarity with conclusions, confirmations, replies, etc. A theme, no less than a face, wears an expression.     

It's the ability to say things like "it's as though a conclusion were being drawn" (when this is appropriate, of course) that characterizes what Wittgenstein means by appreciation. It involves having a discerning and articulate taste, although there are limits to this kind of articulation. A novice will not understand an expert, at least some of the time. The only way is for the novice to learn more, to develop the ability to see likenesses and connections. Learning to appreciate a piece of music is not so much a matter of coming to see (or hear) that it is good as it is coming to understand it, finding one's way around it, becoming familiar with it. (And what Wittgenstein says about how one does this, e.g. learning from someone else to hear one part as if it were a conclusion, might be regarded as a helpful filling in of details left out of Nietzsche's account of how one comes to love a piece of music, which is not to say that Wittgenstein would agree with Nietzsche. It is, instead, to say that he could do so.)

Going back to the first step, I am reminded of the opening of the Philosophical Investigations, whose first step is about these first steps, our first learning of language. Wittgenstein begins at the beginning. Not because he's so methodical--it isn't really that kind of book (it's not a textbook)--but because this is where the trouble starts, I suppose. In moving from expressions to uses of language that look like reports we acquire the temptation to think of them as reports. Hence of our inner life as consisting of weird metaphysical objects. But it is more everyday than that. And weirder. After all, as Augustine says, the mind is like God:

[...] a kind of trinity exists in man, who is the image of God, viz. the mind, and the knowledge wherewith the mind knows itself, and the love wherewith it loves both itself and its own knowledge; and these three are shown to be mutually equal, and of one essence.  

Book X of the Confessions is surely also relevant here:

15. Great is this power of memory, exceeding great, O my God—an inner chamber large and boundless! Who has plumbed the depths thereof? Yet it is a power of mine, and appertains unto my nature; nor do I myself grasp all that I am. Therefore is the mind too narrow to contain itself. And where should that be which it does not contain of itself? Is it outside and not in itself? How is it, then, that it does not grasp itself? A great admiration rises upon me; astonishment seizes me. And men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the extent of the ocean, and the courses of the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves ...

One of the most wonderful things of all is the human mind, including the faculty of memory, which is a great mystery, and which Augustine seems to have been fooled with regard to in the passage Wittgenstein quotes in PI 1. Augustine cannot remember how he learned language--he is fooled into thinking that he must have learned it as he describes by the form of language itself. We are educated, led out, by and into language, but also corrupted by it. Wittgenstein's response is to do battle against this bewitchment by means of language itself.
   
Bernie Rhie quotes Wittgenstein saying that: "If I say of a piece of Schubert’s that it is melancholy, that is like giving it a face." Giving it a face helps us understand it, connect it with facial expressions, gestures, and what they express (although this should not be thought of as something we can really make sense of wholly apart from expressions of it). It is like giving us a concept, a category, like a light, under which to see it. It helps us place it in relation to other things, and thereby (perhaps) understand it. 

And, Wittgenstein says, the word 'good' (and others like it) are first learned in connection with a kind of face and as a substitute for that kind of face. The word has a kind of depth because it replaces (but does not stand for) an expression, not just a three-dimensional object (a wide-eyed, smiling face, say) but one that calls for a certain kind of response (or effect) and implies that it is itself the effect of something else, such as the eating of tasty food. In the beginning was the deed, perhaps, but a gesture is the kind of deed that points back or in to something like a cause (that which it expresses) and forwards or out to something like an effect (the kind of response it calls for).

Some things are better than others

Various things have led me to think about judgments of relative quality recently. Today it's Gary Gutting comparing the Beatles and Mozart. As usual, I mostly agree with him, but not entirely. Here's a key part of his article:

fans of popular music may respond to the elitist claims of classical music with a facile relativism. But they abandon this relativism when arguing, say, the comparative merits of the early Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept.

Further, given the standards fans use to show that their favorites are superior, we can typically show by those same standards that works of high art are overall superior to works of popular art. 

The view roughly is that some things are better than others because they are more interesting, from which Gutting apparently draws the conclusion that the more interesting something is, the better. But what if it's too interesting? That sounds paradoxical, but by 'interesting' here I mean having the kind of features Gutting mentions: complexity, originality, emotional range, and intellectual content. It is surely possible for art to be too complex, too original, too emotionally ranging, and too intellectual. I can prefer this dessert to that because this one is sweeter without its being the case that the best dessert of all would be pure sugar.

How original or complex a work should be seems to be relative to the audience or the context: to what extent is the relevant scene tired and in need of something new?, how much intellectual content can we handle? We don't want Zizek references in a Sesame Street song. Complexity and emotional range also depend on the general context, and on personal taste too, I would think. If everything is complex, simplicity might be a breath of fresh air. But it's also true that different people will be happier with different levels of complexity. I like a certain straightforwardness, a rawness of emotion. But something above the level of the moronic. I can also imagine liking a song, say, that is purely sad, or purely happy, but if too many songs are like this then I will crave emotional range. Other people are likely to be roughly similar, but their preferred ranges of complexity and emotion will vary at least somewhat, as will the background of what they have been reading or seeing or hearing lately. The relative absence of a common culture makes universal judgments of quality difficult. If the scene is Broadway or the Vienna State Opera then we can be fairly objective about what is stale and what is refreshing, what builds on recent trends cleverly and what is merely derivative, but when the scene is your cable package or my iPod then it's much harder to speak to a general audience about what is an exciting new TV series or just the same old rubbish. That is, The Wire was a great TV series, but if you are five years old it will not be much fun for you. Nor will it be if you are fifty but have been fed such a diet of unsophisticated televisual gruel that you cannot handle something so complex. When we all watched the same TV, listened to the same radio, went to the same plays and concerts, it was much easier to talk about what was good or bad, because there was one audience for whom it might be too much or not enough in one way or another. (Of course there never was such a time, but some times have approximated it more than others. We are far from it today.)

Another thing that led me to think about all this (or to want to blog about it, which, alas, is not the same thing) is the debate about the relative quality of philosophy journals and areas of philosophy. In this discussion at NewAPPS, for instance, some people claimed that the general standard of originality and rigor is lower in aesthetics and applied ethics than in other areas of philosophy. These people work in aesthetics and applied ethics, as well as in other areas, so they aren't simply attacking other people by attacking their territory. And their expertise gives a lot of credibility to what they say. And it surely is possible to distinguish good work in philosophy from bad, otherwise how would we grade student papers or conduct peer review?

On the other hand, it would be odd if someone said that, say, History is better than English. That more original work and greater rigor were to be found in one discipline than the other. Such claims might be defensible (perhaps English has been taken over by trendies spouting pomo nonsense), but they would still sound odd, like a claim that jazz is better than medieval music. How can you compare the two? This is (at least one reason) why it is important that the people on the NewAPPS thread stuck to words like 'rigor' and 'originality' rather than using the less helpful word 'better.' There probably isn't much originality in applied ethics. There would be a risk of absurdity otherwise. "Surprise! The ethics of assisted suicide is actually a pseudo-problem after all." We don't, most of us, want that kind of originality. And the kind of rigor that is possible and desirable in such a field is going to be different from that in, say, logic. Judgements about what is better than what else just don't seem helpful, or even very meaningful, in such contexts. (The relative ease with which a given person can knock out a publishable paper in one area but not another is irrelevant, it seems to me. This could just reflect that person's strengths and weaknesses rather than the easiness of the discipline or area in which she finds it easier to work.)

Statements like "Mozart is better than the Beatles" or "work in the philosophy of language is better than work in aesthetics" seem pretty useless to me, except as revealing or expressing the speaker's preferences. Expressing such preferences is perfectly reasonable. It would be weird not to have any, and there is something to be said for acknowledging them. Be true to your school, as the Beach Boys said, and the sentiment is more defensible, I think, when applied to, say, the Frankfurt School or Antirealism, than when applied to a literal school. Within a specific context one can accurately and valuably make distinctions of quality. The new Camera Obscura album is not their best work. That's pretty much just a fact, just as the Philosophical Investigations is better than the Brown Book. But is analytic philosophy better than continental philosophy, or ethics better than metaphysics, or Kant better than Nietzsche? On their own those are silly questions. Not because they cannot be answered, but because a simple Yes or No answer is no use. We need to get into the details. And after a detailed answer a summary thumbs up or down would make a mockery of the thought that preceded it.

Tempo house

When I think of the word 'temple' now I think of it as said by the man at Ounalom Temple, who pronounced it roughly: tempo. In this post I want to think out what it is that I like so much about temples, particularly Buddhist and Taoist ones. It's the Taoist aesthetic that I like, but my beliefs are closer to Buddhism, and that makes a difference. I feel less strange in a Buddhist temple. I was about to add "but it's the strangeness that appeals," but that isn't true. What appeals is strange, but it isn't the strangeness. It's the vitality.

Compare:

Protestant

Taoist

Actually these pictures don't quite make the point, but I'll try to put it in words below. The kind of church I grew up with tends towards minimalism, like Apple products and much else that is revered in our culture. Perhaps rightly so. But minimalism has to do with silence, and silence does not speak the ineffable. It might be tasteful, very tasteful indeed even, but it says nothing. A contemporary church (and I'm no expert, but I suspect there is little difference in this regard between Protestant, Catholic, and even Orthodox churches being built now) might be "the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, an expression of great understanding (of cultures, etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open—that is lacking." Wittgenstein (in the same passage I've just quoted) links wild life striving to erupt (a very Schopenhauerian image, to my mind) with health. And I think what I like, or one thing that I like at least, about Taoist (and some Buddhist) temples is this sense of health and of life. 

They are full of gods and life. Spiral incense sticks hang slowly burning from the ceiling, drooping into cones that drop brown ash below. Shorter, straight incense sticks poke out from urns of sand as offerings to the gods. There is a large bell and a large drum that are occasionally sounded, after an offering has been made. Every part of the ceiling is painted brightly or carved elaborately. There are ranks of lanterns and prayer flags hanging down, banks of memorials to the dead line the walls (possibly with the ashes of the deceased behind each one--I don't know). There are large statues of armed gods standing near the back of the temple, and paintings of similar figures on the doors as you enter. Entrance is through a gateway blocked by a step to keep out ghosts, which have no knees and so cannot bend their legs to get over it. The main gods are presented (or represented) at the very back, with lesser ones along the walls, sometimes in glass cases. Before them are offerings, usually of fruit but also expensive treats (Ferrero Rocher and Toblerone, for instance, but I also saw Guinness). And of course people praying and giving incense, robed and performing ceremonies, selling incense and paper goods to burn (it is all about fire as well as smells and color, and there must be sacrifice), or just waiting in attendance while eating lunch or having a smoke. Life is here, even if this life revolves around death. I don't know, but my sense is that most of the prayers are either for the dead or the dying, or at least sick. One of the most popular temples in Hong Kong is dedicated to Wong Tai Sin, who is believed to have been able to cure all illnesses and to help with other troubles too. Outside one temple two elderly people offered pieces of paper supposed to bring luck by their red color and propitious symbols (they wanted money in return). Temples are places for the grieving and the unfortunate to grieve and indulge in superstition. But the grief, the sacrifice, and the respect for forces not of this world are all real. (How do I know? Partly because people go there alone and at any time of the day to make their offerings and say their prayers. This isn't a performance, as some church attendance is.) All day every day people come and pray, and the temples are right there among the businesses, each of which (as well as each home) typically contains its own spirit house. Merely for luck, perhaps, but this isn't the luck it takes to win the lottery. It's luck that's linked to heaven or the Buddha, and to one's ancestors. I don't mean to deny or even downplay the superstition in all this, but it isn't all superstition, and even the superstition itself (give me money and I'll give you luck) is not pure superstition. It's a corruption, a corrupt form, of something much better. Or so it seems to me. 

Larkin's "Church Going" is relevant to these temples:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in
If only that so many dead lie round.

But the question of obsolescence that runs through Larkin's meditation just isn't there in Hong Kong and Cambodia (or it didn't seem to be there to me). The temple next to the Mercedes dealership feels like a necessity, not a relic.

I don't know that I really have a point here, or if I do I'm not sure exactly what it is. Something about the pre-modern age has tremendous appeal, for me and for others. And religion, or perhaps religion of a certain kind, strikes me as essentially, perhaps definitively, pre-modern. It also seems closed off though. I can just about imagine becoming a Buddhist (of a very minimal kind), but not a Taoist. Probably all I mean is: death of God/disenchantment of the world/the good old days/the exotic Orient/etc. etc. But I mean it as the expression of a real experience. The best temples in Hong Kong felt like oxygen to me, in a way that works of art sometimes, and wild animals always, do. 

Here's an otherwise irrelevant video to explain the post's title:

Ethics, aesthetics, and sport

Ooh, this is good: Coetzee and Auster on sport. Some good bits:

Coetzee: One starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends up neither envying nor admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a human being—a being like oneself—can do.

Which, I find, is very much like my response to masterworks of art on which I have spent a lot of time (reflection, analysis), to the point where I have a good idea of what went into their making: I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he (occasionally she) exemplifies!

And at that point, I can no longer distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic.…

Coetzee: Winning or losing—who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.

Auster: By trying to win the game you are playing, you forget that you are running and jumping, forget that you are actually getting a healthy dose of exercise. You have lost yourself in what you are doing, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this seems to bring intense happiness. There are other transcendent human activities, of course—sex being one of them, making art another, experiencing art yet another, but the fact is that the mind sometimes wanders during sex—which is not always transcendent!—making art (think: writing novels) is filled with doubts, pauses, and erasures, and we are not always able to give our full attention to the Shakespeare sonnet we are reading or the Bach oratorio we are listening to. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.

I'm not sure how much commentary I can offer that would have the slightest value, but there's a lot to think about here. Connections come to mind with Geoff Dyer on the Olympics, the possible relation between not being fully in the game and language going on holiday (if philosophical problems arise when we take our heads out of the game, so to speak), and Stephen Mulhall on freedom through subjection to law.

And then there's Wittgenstein on rule-following in matters that call for appreciation (is this what unexceptional but high-level professional athletes do?) in contrast with the tremendous (is this what a Federer or a Beckham occasionally produces?). Lots to think about. 

UPDATE: on Facebook I just came across this, which seems relevant: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” - Schopenhauer

Wittgenstein on aesthetics

What I think of as Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics are actually just notes taken by students, but they are pretty good notes, and the material is rich. There are some useful quotes here and a nice account of the lectures here.

The part that most interests me at the moment is this (edited) passage (my emboldening):

5. One thing we always do when discussing a word is to ask how we were taught it. Doing this on the one hand destroys a variety of misconceptions, on the other hand gives you a primitive language in which the word is used. Although this language is not what you talk when you are twenty, you get a rough approximation to what kind of language game is going to be played. Cf. How did we learn ‘I dreamt so and so’? The interesting point is that we didn’t learn it by being shown a dream. If you ask yourself how a child learns ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’, etc., you find it learns them roughly as interjections. (‘Beautiful’ is an odd word to talk about because it’s hardly ever used.) A child generally applies a word like ‘good’ first to food. One thing that is immensely important in teaching is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. The word is taught as a substitute for a facial expression or a gesture. The gestures, tones of voice, etc., in this case are expressions of approval. What makes the word an interjection of approval? {2.1} It is the game it appears in, not the form of words. (If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation, including Moore, I would say that it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words.) 

6. If you came to a foreign tribe, whose language you didn’t know at all and you wished to know what words corresponded to ‘good’, ‘fine’, etc., what would you look for? You would look for smiles, gestures, food, toys. ([Reply to objection:] If you went to Mars and men were spheres with sticks coming out, you wouldn’t know what to look for. Or if you went to a tribe where noises made with the mouth were just breathing or making music, and language was made with the ears. Cf. “When you see trees swaying about they are talking to one another.” (“Everything has a soul.”) You compare the branches with arms. Certainly we must interpret the gestures of the tribe on the analogy of ours.) How far this takes us from normal aesthetics [and ethics—T]. We don’t start from certain words, but from certain occasions or activities.

8. It is remarkable that in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’, etc., play hardly any role at all. Are aesthetic adjectives used in a musical criticism? You say: “Look at this transition”, {3.2} or [Rhees] “The passage here is incoherent”. Or you say, in a poetical criticism, [Taylor]: “His use of images is precise”. The words you use are more akin to ‘right’ and ‘correct’ (as these words are used in ordinary speech) than to ‘beautiful’ and ‘lovely’. {3.3}

And here's another bit:

23. We talked of correctness. A good cutter won’t use any words except words like ‘Too long’, ‘All right’. When we talk of a Symphony of Beethoven we don’t talk of correctness. Entirely different things enter. One wouldn’t talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art. In certain styles in Architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it. But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correct—it plays an entirely different role with us. {8.1}  The entire game is different. It is as different as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say ‘He behaves well’ and on the other hand ‘He made a great impression on me’. 

Two things that strike me are the difference between articulate appreciation and just saying "Ah!", for one thing, and the difference between art that gets things right and art that is tremendous, for another. I think Wittgenstein has a similar distinction in mind when he says that "the house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, and expression of great understanding... But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open - that is lacking." Culture and Value (1980 edition, p. 38e, from 1940). He also says somewhere that really good architecture is like a gesture, like someone saying something. Speaking (in this sense) is then quite different from following rules, which is perhaps not what one would expect to find Wittgenstein saying. And it is not what he says, it's my gloss, but he comes interestingly close to it.

Why does it matter that a child first uses the word 'good' in connection with food or toys or something of the sort? We no longer speak the language of our childhood, and yet there is a sense, an obvious sense, in which we do. We do still use the word 'good' and it is the same word, even if we now use it in more sophisticated ways. It makes little sense to say, "This food is good, but I don't want to eat it," or "This music is good but I don't like it." Those sentences can make sense, of course, but the latter sounds as though it perhaps means, "I know I'm supposed to like this stuff, but I just don't." The word 'good' is in quotation marks. Which suggests that a question like "Why be good?" really makes no sense. The real question is what do we actually regard as good, not why we should pursue what we so regard. Although even that might not be much of a question, since we know pretty well what we regard as good. The challenge, or one challenge, is, so to speak, maximizing the good. This sounds too consequentialist to be quite right, but I mean making sure that we act consistently with our priorities. For instance, I like money but if my pursuit of money costs me things that I love even more (my family, the local wildlife, etc.) then I have behaved foolishly. This is obvious, but I think it's quite difficult in practice to avoid this kind of folly. Another challenge, if I can call it that, would be to do the tremendous. Socrates in the Crito might be an example of this. 

I'll be returning to this. I think there could be a lot to think about in connection with ethics that I haven't really thought about before.      

The horror, the horror

Why do people enjoy being scared? It surely is not the case that scary movies are not really scary, nor that the pleasure comes from the relief when the fear stops. It seems at least possible that people enjoy scary films for the same kind of reasons that they enjoy sad movies, songs, and stories. And why is that? The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" suggests a kind of answer: "I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me. Yeah." If you're feeling sad you're likely to want to have your feelings articulated, and recognized. Not necessarily shared, that is, but acknowledged as something that people do experience. It's a kind of validation, as well as sympathy. Fear might also need to be articulated and validated. For instance, if it is usually only very vaguely felt, or if attempts to articulate it are quickly censored because they sound crazy or evil. If this is right then popular movies might be very revealing of a society's psychological state. And that sounds plausible anyway.

Last night I watched two horror films: Nosferatu and [REC] 3 Genesis. Both are kind of silly, but in different ways. Nosferatu is, not surprisingly, very dated, and the acting seems terrible. On the other hand, even now the images (some of them, anyway) are powerfully striking and, appropriately, haunting. [REC] 3 (the "rec" is for the letters used to indicate that a camcorder is recording: think The Blair Witch Project) is much more forgettable, and the weakest of the [REC] series, though still, to my mind, worth seeing. When the bride picks up a chainsaw to fight off the zombies you know you are in Japan being catered to by crowd-pleasers.

Nosferatu reminded me of the links between the plague and legends of vampires. It also seems portentous to watch an angry German mob run through a town after a scapegoat. Creepy. But what could the contemporary fascination with zombies mean? Perhaps nothing, of course, but my pet theory is that we are afraid that our own society is being taken over by people who are dead on the inside, and that this internal death is contagious. That we are already succumbing to it. This might be thought of as part of the death of God (freedom and immortality die along with him, and so we become mere things), or as the death of the Overman. The disenchantment of the world means, among other things, the disenchantment of human beings. Free will might be thought of as something like a compliment that we cannot help but pay to each other, but it isn't so hard to deny the compliment to those we don't really interact with (Descartes's hats and coats below in the street, "the they"), and these seem to be increasing in number and influence (see here, for instance). And much the same goes for consciousness. (Doesn't it? I haven't thought this anything like all the way through.)

We can, and perhaps cannot but, have an attitude toward a soul when it comes to people we really live with. But all those others out there, and people we live only virtually with, can't really be treated the same way. What kind of attitude can I have toward someone on the other end of an internet connection? I realize that means most of the people who will read this, i.e. the ones I will never meet, and I don't mean to be rude. But we cannot literally see eye to eye like this, or make any use of facial expression or bodily posture. I can only have an attitude toward you in a limited sense of the word. And what about people who are not themselves even in person, only representatives of some corporate position, say, or speakers of jargon? I am not of the opinion that they have souls, to misquote Wittgenstein. And then Schopenhauer's argument against solipsism comes up: you can't prove that you are fundamentally different from everyone else, but you would have to be crazy to think that you are. This goes two ways. It's a kind of argument against zombies, but also an argument against one's own non-zombie-ness. That is, if they are all zombies, and I must be the same as them, then I must be a zombie too. Just being surrounded by them, even if you are still human, is bad enough. And however incredible that idea might be, it's still scary.

Wittgenstein's Chinese man argument

According to Béla Szabados: "Wittgenstein said to his friend Drury: "It is impossible to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life," adding, " How then can I hope to be understood?"" Szabados remarks that, "This is an interesting remark for it surprisingly relates understanding music's significance for Wittgenstein as a person, to understanding his philosophy." This sounds right, but it might be worth looking into why Wittgenstein considered it impossible to say what music had meant to him.

On p. 7 of the 1938 lectures on aesthetics (as recorded in notes taken by some of his students) Wittgenstein is reported to have said: "It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment." Later, on p. 29, he is reported to have said that:

'The sense of a proposition' is very similar to the business of 'an appreciation of art.'

Neither, he seems to believe, can be explained:

"Then why do we admire this and not that?"  "I don't know." [p. 30]

Szabados's take on Wittgenstein's remark about music, which I think is pretty natural and standard, may well be right. Wittgenstein might have meant that anyone who did not understand him well enough to know what music had meant to him would never understand his philosophical work. But I think a different interpretation might be possible. He might have meant something like this: given that it is impossible to explain x, how will anyone understand my book on y, which is very similar to x?

The very idea of explanation in aesthetics seems almost to be a mistake in Wittgenstein's view, although he may well have meant that it is a mistake to look for the kind of explanation that we tend to look for. There is little to be said by way of explanation in any case (that is, even if there is something to be said). I will return to this, albeit briefly.

Now, what of the Chinese man? Here's the relevant passage:

Thinking is not even speaking with accompaniment, noises accompanied with whatever may be, is not [of?] the sort 'It rains' at all, but is within [the] English language. A Chinaman who makes [the] noise 'It rains' with [the] same accompaniments--Does he think 'It rains'?   [p. 30, note 1]

He only thinks "It rains" if he means what he says, and we have to suppose that the Chinaman in question cannot mean "It rains" because those words mean nothing to him, being in a language that he does not know. If he makes the right sound and has simultaneous mental pictures of rain this does not give the sound the meaning we are talking about. One can think without such an accompaniment, and one can have the accompaniment without thinking, without meaning. What gives words meaning when we say, write, or think them is, it seems, "the whole environment." And this cannot be described. Nor can how or why this context makes words meaningful be explained. This is where the connection with aesthetics lies. Why certain pieces of music make such an impression on us cannot be explained, Wittgenstein seems to have thought. (And he might have put why murder is wrong in the same category, I don't know.)

We tend to want to reduce, to go in, to locate thoughts in the brain (or computer) and feelings in the stomach (or wherever). Wittgenstein wants, as it were, to expand, to go out. If you want to understand the laughter of the audience at a comedy show, attend to what they are laughing at, not to the laughter itself (which will be much like all other laughter) or to things unknown going on inside them. If you want to understand a feeling look at its full expression (the flower, so to speak), not at its origin (a point-like seed, hard or impossible to distinguish from other such seeds). It's almost like Blow-Up in reverse (in order to see the details a photographer magnifies a picture more and more, but all he gets is a big blur). What he needs is greater definition, not magnification. Wittgenstein's view seems to be that we reach for the microscope when we don't understand something, but that this will give us no better focus. Nor do we need to expand, in fact, because the expansion has already been done for us. The expression of the thought or feeling is the magnification that we need. The phenomenon we want to understand includes the inner and the outer, but the inner is, so to speak, tiny, hidden, almost fictional, whereas the outer is open to view and comprehensible. It is this big end of the phenomenon that we should attend to. But we need to do so in the right way. To understand what is funny about a joke we should not look for hidden causes of its funniness but at the joke itself and for the reasons why that would be funny in this context (attending to the context means looking out, taking a broader view, not looking inwards or back to the root of something). To understand what is so great about this painting or music we should not look at what happens in the brain when we see a painting or hear music, but focus on the painting or music itself, and perhaps on the context, which will include art or music history as well as politics, culture more broadly, and the rest. This is how we acquire appreciation. Once you have it you might still be puzzled or mystified by it. I take it Wittgenstein was. But he doesn't seem to think there is anything to say that will explain it. The mystery, a kind of wonder, might be part of it.

I don't mean that one cannot say anything at all in Wittgenstein's view about why certain works move us as they do. But I think he thought that any such explanation will itself be an expression of appreciation. It will be analysis or criticism, not something more obviously scientific or causal. So you couldn't have an anaesthetic explanation of aesthetics any more than you could have an amoral explanation of ethics. Or rather, you could (perhaps), but even then it would not be what we really want. Someone wondering at the greatness of Michelangelo or the terribleness of murder is not looking for facts about the brain or evolution.

      

Taste without flavor

Mohan Matthen says a couple of interesting things about judgments of taste here. First there's this:

there is nothing universalizable or normative in lustful contemplation. There is nothing in it that supports the idea that others should take the same kind of pleasure, or any kind of pleasure, in the contemplation of this [person’s] naked form.

I'm not sure that I agree with this, but then how would the matter be decided? (And that is what I find most interesting about the claim.) How do we know, or how could we know, what is or is not in lustful contemplation? Getting into a lustful (but merely contemplative) state can't be the way to do philosophy, and whatever I might find in my lustful contemplation might not be in lustful contemplation as such or in general. In other words, the empirical approach might conflict in practice with the philosophical aim of the experiment, and its results might not generalize even assuming one can analyze well while genuinely in the required state. If we try some lust-free armchair analysis then Matthen seems right--there is nothing about the concept of lust that implies any universalizability or normativity. To lust is not to judge lust-worthy. Lust is animal, and animals don't judge.

Still, this seems not quite right, perhaps because it makes too sharp a distinction between us and animals, or between lust and aesthetic appreciation. Are they really so distinct? Is it possible to desire without regarding as desirable? And how different are a) desire and lust, and b) regarding as and judging to be? I recently ate some tasty wasabi trail mix, the kind of thing it is hard to stop eating. I didn't think of it as tasty-to-me or merely desired (but not necessarily desirable). Nor did I think of it as something that every rational or normal eater would like. I just liked it. And, it seems to me, the judgment (or experience) that something is tasty is quite similar to the judgment/feeling that someone is hot (to keep the wasabi theme going). It isn't normative, but it isn't non-normative either. That is, there is nothing about the contingency of my feeling this way in the experience, just as there is nothing about other people's having to feel the same way in it.

That's obscure. What I mean is that, like Homer Simpson, when I eat or lustfully contemplate a doughnut my thought is something like, "Mmmm...doughnut." It isn't, "Well, that doughnut looks good to me, but I realize that others might quite reasonably not feel the same way." Nor is it, "What a doughnut! All must want it on pain of irrationality." But if anything I think it's closer to the latter than it is to the former. And lust is like hunger.

Some experiences do have a sense of contingency about them, especially when we're not quite sure what we think or how we feel. I like marmite, but I can see how other people might not. And this is related to (but not the same thing as) the fact that I don't like it very much. When I really like something a lot I do tend to think that you would have to be mad not to like it. So that is normative, although of course I can understand that tastes differ, especially when it comes to sexuality (less so with food, I think). Most obviously, if you don't share my view of someone's attractiveness I will be less likely to think you insane if your sex or sexual orientation is not the same as mine. But there is still something theoretical or intellectual about such recognition (or acceptance) of other's rationality. My mouth tells me the trail mix tastes good. My brain tells me your mileage may vary.

Then Matthen says this:

Enjoying food is not enough for the application of aesthetic epithets; indeed it is irrelevant. To make a “judgement of taste”about food, you have to judge that it has qualities, which might be related to the flavour experience, that ought to give anybody pleasure independently of enjoying the flavour.  

I can make no sense of this. So here's the same thing with more context:

it is certainly possible that persons are beautiful, but only if the pleasure of contemplating them transcends sexual preference and desire.

Similarly for food and wine. Enjoying food is not enough for the application of aesthetic epithets; indeed it is irrelevant. To make a “judgement of taste”about food, you have to judge that it has qualities, which might be related to the flavour experience, that ought to give anybody pleasure independently of enjoying the flavour. It’s certainly possible that terms like beautiful (or their domain-specific counterparts) can be attributed to food, but it requires considerations quite different to the sort that food critics usually employ. 

Now food can look nice or have an appealing texture without tasting good. But I take Matthen to be saying that, or wanting to say something like, food can taste beautiful without this having anything to do with the enjoyability of its flavor. That's got to be wrong. If this is what he or Kant (Matthen says he has "adopted Kant's notion of beauty") thinks then it looks like a reductio of that position. Maybe I've got it wrong. Let's see.

Here is Matthen on Kant on judgments of beauty:

Kant said that you attribute beauty to something when you judge that it is, i.e., ought to be, an object of disinterested pleasure for everybody. His example is that of a palace. You can judge that it would give you pleasure if you lived in it. Or you may think it represents the kind of extravagance that greatly pains your socialist soul, and you judge that others should share your disapproval. But these pleasures and pains are not “disinterested.” Disinterested pleasure is independent of the palace existing. It attaches to the “mere representation.”

I (think I) understand the first part of this, the idea that you can take pleasure in something's appearance without anticipating any personal benefit from it. The socialism part makes less sense to me, because surely the socialist in this case is trying to be disinterested. She judges that others ought not to approve of the palace. Perhaps the idea is that the socialist sees that the palace is beautiful but disapproves of the causal chain by which it was produced, or the effects its production is likely to have. The palace considered just in itself, as it were, might be fine from her point of view. It's the socio-economic context that makes such a palace objectionable, not anything about the palace's matter or shape. So how does this apply to people and food?

I can judge, or simply see, that someone is beautiful without wanting to have sex with them. I agree with that. So if food can be beautiful then perhaps I should be able to appreciate this without wanting to eat the food. Indeed, I might be too full to eat. But I think Matthen wants to exclude that kind of consideration. Other things being equal, considered only as food (and not as, say, poison to someone with your allergies), could you judge this food to have a beautiful flavor without at all wanting to eat it? That makes no sense to me.

But, having worked on this post on and off for several days, I think I'll leave it there. The comments thread at New APPS has some good stuff in it, but also more mystery. In comment 30 Matthen says this:

I am sure you don't think (all/any of) the following count as experiences of beauty: sexual arousal by somebody very attractive, the taste of chocolate, the soothing sound of a waterfall or surf on a beach, a warm bath. How do you think that these differ from the sight of a magnificent mountain range, the taste of coq au vin, the sound of a nightingale? I take each of the last three to be examples of beauty as opposed to mere pleasure. 

Most of the time I just see no difference at all between the first examples and the last ones. Sexual arousal could be different, but when you specify that this is arousal "by somebody very attractive" then I don't see how that could not include an experience of beauty, even if it also includes other things too, such as love or lust. How is chocolate different from coq au vin, unless the flavor of one is assumed to be simpler than that of the other? Why do waterfalls give mere pleasure with their sound but nightingales sound beautiful? Complexity seems to be the difference again, since waterfalls make a kind of noise whereas nightingales sing a kind of tune. But I don't accept that beauty requires complexity or order.

Then again, perhaps I'm forgetting what beauty is. How could I think that getting into a warm bath is experiencing beauty rather than mere pleasure? One problem here is that we don't have a good account of what pleasure is, which makes it hard to distinguish between it and beauty. Another problem, as Wittgenstein is reported to have said in the lectures on aesthetics, is that we actually use the word 'beauty' very little in discussing aesthetic matters. At least, I imagine that professional critics try to avoid using it. It doesn't seem to have a very clear or precise meaning.

I'm getting suspicious of the whole idea. Matthen talks about "the sight of a magnificent mountain range" as an example of beauty. I do and don't know what he means. On the one hand, this is a standard kind of idea of beauty, the kind of scene people used to put on boxes of chocolates. But does anyone look at such pictures and think "Magnificent!" or "How beautiful!"? Don't they just look cheesy? I live in a valley surrounded by mountains, and I certainly think of them as beautiful. But they aren't what I would call magnificent. Emperors are magnificent (doesn't it mean great-doing, or something along those lines?), while the Blue Ridge mountains are firry (to coin a word) and green. The Alps might be magnificent, or the Rockies. But to see something as magnificent seems to me to involve being a little bit afraid of it, while seeing it as beautiful involves a kind of love. (And then the sublime somehow combines these two, as I understand it.)

In the end I'm not sure that 'beautiful' means much more than nice to look at. And 'nice' means neither nice-for-me nor nice-for-all-right-minded-people. It means nice. The nice is good and worth protecting, of course, but should others like it? I don't really know what it would mean to say such a thing. Other things being equal, it seems good to like things. And, as lucky Jim says, nice things are nicer than nasty things. As I said a few paragraphs ago, I think I'll leave it there.

Faces

The main point of this post is just to draw attention to nonsite.org. It's an online humanities journal with lots of essays by good people on Wittgenstein and art. The only one I've read so far is this by Bernie Rhie on faces. It's very good, but a couple of points make me wonder. For instance, Rhie writes that:

There is nothing to stop us from regarding artworks as void of intrinsic expressive life, just as there is nothing to stop us from seeing the human face as without intrinsic psychological expressiveness.

This seems sort of true but also sort of false. Don't (some) artworks themselves force us to regard them as intrinsically expressive, just as the human face (sometimes) forces us to see it as intrinsically psychologically expressive? Or rather, since I don't really want to make any claims about what does the forcing here, is the kind of blindness Rhie refers to always a live option? It doesn't seem so to me. I remember (i.e. might have dreamed) that there was once a room full of Rothko paintings in London (presumably in the Tate, but I don't remember) that you entered by going through a black curtain. As soon as I went in I felt instantly depressed. That isn't a very subtle response to art, I know, but it wasn't a response that I had any control over. Was there nothing to stop me from regarding these paintings as void of intrinsic expressive life? I suppose I could have insisted that it was a coincidence, or that I was projecting, or something. But I can't imagine honestly agreeing there and then that these paintings did not have intrinsic expressive life.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding Rhie's claim. But he goes on to say that:

Cavell’s important discovery about skepticism was that far from simply being an intellectual error in need of correction, the skeptic’s position expressed an important philosophical truth: that there is no absolute ground for the meaningfulness of our lives together (like a framework of concepts or rules), only the fragile attunements we ourselves maintain by means of our continuing investment in, and care for, our shared sense-making practices. There is thus nothing to stop any of us from withdrawing our acknowledgment of those attunements, fragile as they are, which is of course the skeptic’s tragic choice. And just so, there is nothing to stop any of us from withdrawing our mutually attuned acknowledgments (fragile as they are) of the expressive meaningfulness of our very bodies, or of the artworks we make, enjoy, and study. The aesthetic expressiveness of art will indeed be but a fiction—and artworks will be dead: mere sounds, images, and dead letters—in so far as we choose (as we always can) to see them in that way. Indeed, as I think my essay has made clear, quite a few modern thinkers have already made that very choice.

This passage seems to me to move from something true to something much more dubious. I'm happy to accept that the meaningfulness of our lives together depends on the fragile attunements that we maintain by involvement in certain practices. It doesn't follow, though, surely, that we are free to choose to withdraw our acknowledgement of those attunements. Can we choose to see artworks as dead? We can choose to try to do so, I would think. And the attempt might succeed. But I don't think that we can choose in the sense that trying is bound to succeed. I can't choose not to be moved by a song or film, even if I know that I ought not to be moved. Surely this is part of Wittgenstein's suggested experiments involving trying to see children as automata or flies as no more capable of pain than rocks are. (Which relates not only to his idea of doing philosophy from within the sphere of the ethical but also to this post of Kelly Jolley's on which I would comment if I could think of more to say than Yes.)    

Being moved doesn't make you right. I have twice seen and twice cried at My Stepmother is an Alien, but (not having seen the film recently) I expect this is because I am a sucker for a certain kind of sentimentality, not because I am a discerning connoisseur of cinematic drama. On the other hand, not being moved doesn't make you right either. You might be blind (or deaf or whatever). There are some things that ought to move you. That, of course, is a value judgement. But so its denial. The facts don't dictate that we not be moved. Which is, at least roughly, why I agree with Rhie's conclusion:

But what I would like to suggest, by way of conclusion, is that that choice [not to see expressiveness] need not be one we ourselves feel compelled to make, as if it were somehow philosophically truer and less theoretically naïve to see the emotional expressiveness of artworks (as of ourselves) as something that’s not really there, but rather some sort of interpretive projection, an animating fiction, or what have you.  

Rubber ring

A lot of the great philosophers of the past were single men. It would be superficial to suggest that this explains all their 'so-called problems', but it might be a relevant fact to bear in mind.  Chesterton says that the main problem for philosophers is to find a way to be at once at home in and yet astonished by the world. This is not exactly how most philosophers have expressed their concerns, and it is certainly not the only concern of philosophers, but I think it's not bad as an expression of one kind of problem. Chesterton's solution is orthodox Christianity. But another might be children--nothing is more domestic or astonishing than (one's own) children.  And perhaps anyone you love can fill this role. So family and friends are important--this is banal, of course, but also likely to be overlooked or denied by someone who thinks this cannot be even part of the answer to the question of the meaning of life.

And another answer might be art.  Salman Rushdie said he tried to fill the God-shaped hole in his life with literature. I can think of at least three ways that this might work. One is to revere the work of literature (or other kind of art) as a kind of icon or fetish. This seems to be roughly what Roquentin does in Sartre's Nausea, seeing art as having a value quite distinct from the rest of life or the world. The artist is then a kind of shaman or god.

Another way to fill the hole with literature would be if it presented you with a variety of characters, each with their own point of view and personality. These could possibly fill a friend-shaped hole in one's life. (I'm thinking of Jim Morrison singing "Music is your only friend," but I'm sure there could be literary as well as musical versions of this.) They might also, or instead, help one see more in one's friends and acquaintances, making them more familiar and/or surprising. If someone came to seem just like a character you had read about, for instance, this might make them both more familiar (so that you felt more at home with them) and more interesting than they had previously seemed. More generally, people might come to seem more interesting and worth getting to know if you take an interest in the people in books. In this case the artist is just a guide, helping you see the world (and people in particular) in a better way.

The third way is by experiencing an aspect shift.  I think somewhere (a memoir by Rush Rhees perhaps) there is a story of Wittgenstein seeing newsreel of a bombing raid and saying that with different music being played the raid could seem tragic instead of, say, evil.  There seem to be multiple ways this kind of aspect-shift could occur.  Christians in pain might regard themselves as closer to Christ, which could make pain easier to bear (if nothing else).  Readers of Philip Larkin might take a kind of pleasure in eating an awful pie in Sheffield, which could make the pie easier to bear.  Perhaps this is a matter of making connections rather than seeing something under a different aspect, but in each case the connection sheds a different light on the experience.  It very often seems possible to see things in a different light, which in itself is good news.  When Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks that "The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics" (p. 83e) he was paraphrasing Schopenhauer, who thought that still life paintings showed that everything is beautiful when looked at the right way.  (I think the work of the Boyle family might be used as another example to make the same point.)  Attentively might be the right word for what this right way is.  Or lovingly. This is similar to the second case, but it isn't particularly about people and it's more about perspective or framing, and the possibility that art reveals of different perspectives, as well as the actual perspectives that it provides.  In this case the artist is a kind of therapist.  


(What is missing is the way that art expresses what we already feel better than we can manage. That seems like a very important function to me, but it doesn't fill a hole exactly. If anything, it makes a hole, letting out what was stuck inside, unable to be expressed.)


The title of this post comes from the song by the Smiths that talks about songs saving your life (like a life preserver, the rubber ring of the song's title).  But what I'm really thinking of is two songs by Belle & Sebastian: Judy and the Dream of Horses (a celebration of the pleasure of dreams and songs, even for someone whose life has "gone wrong") and Lazy Line Painter Jane (a seemingly sad song about a girl whose life is a mess that turns into a celebration of her life, mostly by having a celebratory instrumental section at the end (around 4:23, although the triumphant horns around 4:52 clinch it for me)--odd that this should work, but I think it does).