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Paskow, Alan. the Paradoxes of Art: APhenomenological Investigation.

by John B. Brough

PASKOW, Alan. The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004. xi + 260 pp. Cloth, $65.00--Much recent discussion in philosophicalaesthetics has focused on the issue of defining art, particularly visual art. Such efforts generallypresume that art is important without explaining why it is important. It is the latter questionthat Alan Paskow addresses. He is interested in discovering how and why art, and especiallypainting, matter in out lives. This is an important topic. If art did hot matter to people in somedeeply personal sense, it would not be the subject of such intense interest, whether on the partof the art-appreciating public or of academic philosophers. Paskow attempts to link the work of art to the viewer's existence, to show its continuity with life, and to provide a framework thatmakes sense of the many effects art can have on those who experience it. To classify somethingas an artwork is to identify it as the kind of thing that can and should have value in our lives;and such value is not a question of pure, disinterested contemplation cut off from quotidianexistence.

Paskow's approach is phenomenological, drawing on Husserl and especially Heidegger, althoughnot ignoring developments in analytic aesthetics. He finds particularly useful Husserl's emphasison first-person consciousness, arguing that we might make better progress in understandingwhy art is important if we start with "our personal experience of artworks, the sensuous andaffective dimension that takes place in our first-person engagement with them" (p. 204). Thethird-person perspective, which Paskow takes to be characteristic of analytic aesthetics andwhich approaches the artwork from the "outside," will have a role to play as well, although it willremain subordinate to the individual's personal experience.

Paskow is willing to take bold stands. In chapter 1 he argues that the characters in fiction andthe people and things depicted in painting are much more real than most philosophers grant.They are not sealed off in a world of their own, nor are they simply images in the mind. Fromthe first-person perspective, they are "out there," real in the sense of having an affect on ourlives, of being the subjects of emotion and concern, and even of assuming a place in the midstof ordinary reality. To be sure, this claire has its difficulties, which Paskow attempts to meet byappealing to a distinction between what he terms "[consciousness.sub.l]," which isconsciousness absorbed in the quasi-real world of the work, and "[consciousness.sub.2]," whichreminds [consciousness.sub.1] from a third-person perspective that what it is experiencing is,after all, an image or fiction. This reminder, however, does not erase the personal, existentialimpact of the work, "which continues to reverberate in my world" (p. 64). (One might askwhether it would hot be more plausible to speak here of a single consciousness carrying out twodifferent but complementary activities, rather than of two separate conscious agents, as theauthor does on p. 63).

In chapters 2 and 3, Paskow sets the stage for his full account of why painting matters bydrawing out implications of Heidegger's notions of being-in-the-world and being-with-others,and the relation of both to Seinskonnen, out potentiality to become more authentic in our beingwith others in the world. Experience is not comprised of isolated Cartesian minds striving toconnect with objects. Connection or "co-being" is there from the start. Persons and even thingshave an immediate emotional and existential resonance and the capability of changing us. This,the author argues in chapter 4, is equally true of what is depicted in paintings. Paintings matterto us and effect our lives when we enter into and dwell "with their depicted worlds" (p. 204),allowing them "to speak to us" (p. 159). Just as our properly human being is to be in the world

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with others, so our genuine experience of the artwork is to enter into its world. Being-in-the-world, however, is hot merely a model for the way in which we should relate to the worldsdepicted in paintings. Rather, there is an existential bond between my relation to the world of the work and my relation to the real world and to the others who inhabit it with me. I bring myexperience of the world to my experience of the work, and the world of the work in turn deepensmy appreciation of the ordinary universe. In that sense, depicted beings are not simply "about"the world but are in and of it, for they can change my world and how I relate to others and totheir worlds. The work is "a quasi-living being who can be a special 'other' to challenge the wayin which we have determinedly spent our lives shaping our destiny" (p. 226).

The final chapter, on interpretation, balances the claim that one should give full weight to one'spersonal experience of an artwork with the work's complex contextual and cultural character,which calls for interpretation. In an illuminating array of interpretive vignettes--Marxist,feminist, and others--directed toward Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, Paskow makes astrong case that interpretation, however useful, must remain subordinate to the first-personinhabiting of the work. There are encouraging signs that aestheticians are beginning to ventureinto the territory this book so ably explores. Paskow's timely and important study places him inthe vanguard of that movement.--John B. Brough, Georgetown University.Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Article Title: Paskow, Alan. the Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation.Contributors: John B. Brough - author. Journal Title: The Review of Metaphysics. Volume: 59. Issue: 4.Publication Year: 2006. Page Number: 895+. COPYRIGHT 2006 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.; COPYRIGHT2006 Gale Group