Aesthetics: Past and Present. A Commemorative Issue Celebrating 50 Years of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics || Differences

DifferencesAuthor(s): Peter KivySource: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 2, Aesthetics: Past andPresent. A Commemorative Issue Celebrating 50 Years of The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism and the American Society for Aesthetics (Spring, 1993), pp. 123-132Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431377 .

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PETER KIVY

Differences

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

Abraham Lincoln

It would be a privilege, at any time, to address this distinguished society as its president. It is really a very special privilege to be able to do so on this, the occasion of its 50th anniversary. I am very conscious of that privilege today.

In trying to find the right chord to strike for my own contribution as president to this anniversary meeting, I have found myself mulling over, somewhat obsessively, just what it is that I do as a philosopher of art, how I came to do it, and what future there is in it, anyway. It is natural, I sup- pose, for all of us to want to perform something like this sort of self-examination on the present occasion, and because we are involved in many different projects, my own situation cannot, of course, be just like everyone else's. But I am certainly not engaged in some distant and solitary enterprise. I share it with others and, more importantly, I share a common method with most of you here. It is that commonality that gives me some assurance, anyway, of my own philosophical experiences striking a responsive chord.

It seems to me altogether appropriate, on the present occasion, to begin my self-examination by trying to make out what the state of the discipline was when I entered it as a graduate student in 1960. For I think it is only by knowing where I was when I started, that I will be able to assess where I am now, and where it is that I will go. And because I am not a solitary wanderer, but a member of a tribe-your tribe-I have some hope that where I think I will be going is where it would be advisable for some others to go as well. Thus I have some reason to expect that my own philosophical self-examination will not only tell me something about the state and future of my art, but also the state and the future of the art, at least for a significant number of my colleagues in the discipline.

But in order for you and for me to understand what my view of at least the immediate future of aesthetics is, I must give some personal details of my own experience as a student which may seem at first a somewhat self-indulgent exer- cise. However, it will have a philosophical pay- off and, in any case, will be brief.

Before I made my commitment to philosophy in 1960, I had the intention-perhaps pretension might be the more appropriate word-of pursu- ing a career as a musician. And when, with the usual regrets, I gave up that idea, I nevertheless was not prepared to cut myself off totally from the world of music; so I spent two years doing graduate work in musicology. It was only after that that I decided unequivocally for philosophy, and started my graduate studies at Columbia.

I had been trained, as an undergraduate, by three of the finest philosophers and teachers I have ever personally encountered: Paul Henle, William Frankena, and Charles Stevenson. And I never thought, when I committed myself to the career of philosophy, that I would do anything but try to emulate, as best I could, those really splendid characters. Least of all did I have any intention of combining philosophy with music. No one would have seen what I later came to do as philosophy at all in those days, certainly not I. Everyone knew what philosophy wasn't, then, even though there may have been some differences of opinion about what it was.

I came to Columbia with the intention of doing ethics. How I came to do the philosophy of art instead is a boring but short story, and I won't bore you with it for even the short time it takes to tell. Suffice it to say that I did some work in eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory, and in the process got my Ph.D. However, I had already, at that time, reached the first of three

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51:2 Spring 1993



124 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

turning points in my thinking about the philosophy of art which, I now see in retrospect, deter- mined my future career and formed my view of my discipline. I read Frank Sibley's "Aesthetic Concepts" and, like many others at the time, I became intrigued with the problem it addressed and, significantly, the way in which Sibley addressed it.

Sibley came to the States from Oxford as a kind of messenger of glad tidings. A student of Gilbert Ryle's, he brought to the philosophy of art a fresh kit of analytic tools. Some innovators simply change the subject. But what I now think attracted me to Sibley and to his problem of aesthetic concepts in the 1960s was just that he didn 't change the subject. Rather, he showed us how to deal with essentially the same subject bequeathed to us by the eighteenth-century founders of our modern discipline in a distinctly contemporary way that I was only just beginning to become acquainted with through Ryle's Con- cept of Mind and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. For what Sibley was doing, of course, was trying to make out the distinction between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic-a problem as old as modern aesthetic theory itself, and one of the core problems of the discipline- in the manner of post World War II linguistic analysis.

Sibley gave me my first philosophical project (to use a current buzz word). I did not become a disciple. On the contrary, I thought Sibley mistaken and aesthetic concepts condition-governed, but in a criteriological, Wittgensteinian way; and wrote a monograph, along with a small collec- tion of articles, to prove my point. But one can't, after all, make a philosophical program simply out of trying to refute others. And having come, in the event, to the conclusion that the Wittgensteinian model was not helpful anyway, on independent grounds, I had no positive program to put forward. I had a hat, but nothing to hang it on. I was at a dead end with aesthetic concepts. The Sibley experience convinced me that what might be called the "grand questions" in the philosophy of art were not my cup of tea, and that perhaps others might, with profit, also discover that about themselves.

This was the state I was in in the late 1970s. But what I did not yet realize at the time was that I had already, even before the period in which I did my work on aesthetic concepts, gone through

two further turning points that were, eventually, to give me an entirely new philosophical agenda and a new outlook on the way philosophy of art might be practiced, at least by some, in the future.

The two decisive years are 1964 and 1968: the years in which were published, respectively, Arthur Danto's "The Artworld" and Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art. Aside from the specific influences of Danto's and Goodman's writings in the philosophy of art on myself and others of my generation, which I shall get to in a moment, the mere fact of their undertaking to work in the area gave it a tremendous and much needed shot in the arm. Living under the shadow of John Passmore's verdict, unjustified though it was, that aesthetics is a dreary subject, I was buoyed up and invigorated by the knowledge that what I thought both philosophically interest- ing and important was also deemed so by philosophers I so much admired, and whose other work was de rigueur for anyone of my generation plying the philosophical trade.

The work of Danto and Goodman has, of course, meant many things to many people work- ing in the philosophy of art. I can speak only of myself; but I do believe that I must speak for others as well, judging by what I observe has happened in the field. Danto's "Artworld," and the brilliant series of papers that followed it, culminating in The Transfiguration of the Com- monplace, comprise, needless to say, an impos- ing example of philosophical analysis and theory-making in the grand style. But for me, as I now see it with the benefit of hindsight, what was so impressive-what, indeed, turned my philosophical outlook around, and turned my professional life into the course it has now taken for the last ten years or more-was Danto's re- liance, in his work, on a profound knowledge of the theory, practice, and history of the art of painting.

Danto, of course, did not intend to have his analysis range only over the visual arts, even though the discussion of them, and of painting in particular, plays such a dominant role in his work. Later on I will discuss that further. But for now I want to emphasize the influence Danto's concentration on the visual arts exerted over my own work and views. What it did, straightaway, was to convince me that the art I knew the best and most intimately, the art of music, could,



Kivy Differences 125

indeed must be the subject of my work in the philosophy of art. I had a new lease on my philosophical life, although without quite knowing which way that life would go.

This conviction was reinforced by reading and teaching Goodman's Languages of Art. For although Goodman meant the concept of language to range over all of the arts, and their philosophy, he spoke of languages, not language in the singular; and he treated the arts indi- vidually, on their own logical terms, thus, for me, calling attention not only to what they may have had in common, but, more importantly, to what made them logically and ontologically different. Musicians and the musically learned had much to dissent from in what they took to be Goodman's rather high-handed treatment of the musical score, and the relation of performance to it, from the point of view of actual practice. However that may be, I think it would be a monstrous injustice to lose sight of the fact that Goodman single-handedly put the musical score on the logical map as a symbol system worthy of the logician's scrutiny. And whatever else may be said for or against Goodman's treatment of the musical score, he reinvigorated the philosophical study of music, as an art, to a degree that we had not seen since the work of Susanne Langer, and, in my opinion, with far more fruit- ful and long lasting results for the enterprise. I was never a Goodmanian; but Goodman set the standard of philosophical rigor and depth for anyone in the future who hoped to apply a philosopher's skills to the art of music. And that was what the work of Danto and Goodman had emboldened me to attempt.

I had no thought, when I began my first venture into the philosophy of music, that I would end up devoting more than ten years of my life mostly to the enterprise. I decided to write on the age-old problem of music and the emotions as a single project, with no further implications for my future work. In the event I ended up with what might be called loosely a "philosophy of music" that Philip Alperson describes as "enhanced formalism," by which he means a formalism that countenances expressive properties as bona fide properties of music.

"Formalism" is perhaps not quite the right word, although it has come to mean something more than, strictly speaking, it seems to imply. For if enhanced formalism is the view that the

only aesthetically significant properties of music are its form, and the expressive properties that that form might possess, that is not my view. I believe, in fact, that there are other properties of music besides form and its expressive properties that are to be aesthetically appreciated: the sheerly sensuous, for example; and all of the other sonic properties besides the form and ex- pressiveness that make music beautiful, or whatever the appropriate evaluative word might be. I take my "enhanced formalism" to be the view that absolute music-music without text, title, program, or other extra-musical accoutrement- is a pure sonic structure, a pure sonic design that does possess, as part of that design, expressive properties, but not semantic or representational ones.

I reached this conclusion gradually, during ten years devoted to problems of musical expression, musical representation, opera, music drama, and, finally, absolute music or, as I have got- ten into the habit of calling it, music alone. But when I had reached this conclusion, I reached another one, quite suddenly in rather more like a Pauline conversion (on the way to New Jersey) which I have come to think is not merely of significance to the philosophy of music, but to the philosophy of art tout court, and to how I see its immediate future development.

First, then, how have I come to see the pecu- liar art of absolute music? For it is through that lens that I see, and want you to see, the future development of the discipline of aesthetics itself.

It has become part of our established doctrine in aesthetics today, through the seminal article of Paul Kristeller called "The Modern System of the Arts," that the concept of the fine arts, as we now have it, came into being only in the first half of the eighteenth century, having its first absolutely unequivocal statement in Batteux's The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, first published in 1746. Prior to that time, it would have made no sense to anyone to try to produce a theory of what it was to be a fine art, Art with a capital "A"-what music, literature, and the rest might have as their common defin- ing property-because no one thought they all belonged to the same kind. A theory of art was not needed, would not even have been thought of, until the arts, as we know them, were all classified of a piece. But once this momentous event of reclassification had taken place in the




eighteenth century, we, as philosophers of art, were given an agenda that, to this day, has not been concluded: namely, producing the theory that, conclusively, shows what it is that justifies our thinking of the fine arts, the arts with a capital "A," as a system: as members of a unique kind. That is the accepted story.

Until, I should say, the advent of what might be called the "problematic objects" of the visual arts-not merely those of Danto's artworld, but, earlier, those also of the post-impressionist period as well which so disturbed the standard notions of representation-the sharpest thorn in the side of theory, where the definition of art is concerned, was absolute music, music alone. And the first historical evidence we have for this is the fact that eighteenth-century philosophy of art never really did, decisively, place absolute music in the category of the fine arts at all. What did get gathered up into the modern system of the arts, without question, was music with text, principally opera and sacred music. And that is because such music was amenable to theory, where absolute music was recalcitrant to it. For the reigning theory was Platonic and Aristo- telian mimesis, and the musical setting of texts could be seen as a form of mimesis, namely, the representation, in musical tones, of passionate human speech. Indeed, it had been so consid- ered since the end of the sixteenth century.

When music was talked about as a fine art in the eighteenth century, I venture to suggest that it was more often than not music with a text or, as in the case of Du Bos, for example, instru- mental music that was frankly descriptive: storm music, battle music, things of that kind. And I venture to suggest, further, that where absolute music, as we understand it, clearly is the subject, for example in Kant's third Critique, its status as a fine art is either denied outright or, as in the well-known case of Kant, not decisively decided either way. As a matter of fact, on my view, the correct reading of eighteenth-century philosophy in this regard is that there are two musical arts: the fine art of musical text setting and the decorative art, usually estimated to be of little value, of absolute music, compared by Kant, you will recall, with wallpaper and "de- signs a la Grecque." I

It is thus a false, or at least falsely skewed reading of Enlightenment philosophy of art, to see it as having decisively gathered up music,

sans phrase, into the modern system of the fine- which is to say the representational-arts. Only the musical setting of texts and, secondarily, the various minor forms of descriptive instrumen- tal music were decisively assimilated. Absolute music remained, for the eighteenth-century philosophers of music, a decorative art of minimal value or else a bone of contention. And insofar as they held to a bifurcated theory, with vocal music as one of the forks and absolute music as the other, I fully believe now that they were profoundly correct, and what came after profoundly mistaken-though, needless to say, I cannot share the incredibly low estimation of absolute music current in those times, exempli- fied by no less a figure than d'Alembert, who wrote in the Preliminary Discourse to the Ency- clopedie that: "Music that portrays nothing is merely noise, and it would be scarcely more pleasurable than a succession of sonorous words lacking proper order and connection"; or by Kant who could say nothing better of absolute music than that it was good for digestion.2 It will be one of my conclusions, here, that we should recapture the Enlightenment insight that absolute music is, in essence, one of the decorative arts, although I shall not, of course, recommend that we fall into the Enlightenment error of thinking that this must make absolute music a despicable thing. I shall return to this thought in a moment.

My own reading of the history of art-theorizing since the Enlightenment has the eighteenth-century mimetic theories succeeded, chronologi- cally, by Romantic expression theory, formalism, twentieth-century expression theory, the Wittgensteinian anti-theory movement, the institutional theory, and, finally, what I shall call neo- representationalism, a return, it seems to me, to the spirit of eighteenth-century mimesis.

It seems abundantly clear that expression theories in the Romantic era were motivated largely by the problem of absolute music; and as music became the epitome of Romantic art, expression theory in the nineteenth century was preemi- nently the Romantic art theory. For the rest, I shall not bother to make any specific comments. The history of attempts since the Enlightenment to make a theoretical net wide enough to catch absolute music, and narrow enough to keep out the red herrings, is well known to all of you here; and the reason for each failure well under-




stood. There is no need to rehearse them yet again, except perhaps to remark on the irony of formalism, a theory of art-indeed the one theory of art-with a leg up on absolute music-in fact, arguably given its modern version first by music theorists-being erected into a theory of the fine arts at all. The aim of Bell and Fry was not, of course, to tackle the problem of absolute music, but that of the new trends in representational painting. But viewed from the point of view of the absolute music problem, what we see is a complete reversal of strategy in which we go from the attempt to force absolute music into the mold of the other fine arts by making of it representation or expression, to the attempt to force the arts of representation and expression into the mold of absolute music-an equally violent assault. In the first case it is insisted that absolute music, appearances to the contrary not- withstanding, has some secret content, where clearly it does not; in the second that, like absolute music, the fine arts have none to speak of, that is to say no content of any aesthetic significance, where clearly they do. Surely at this point in the history of theorizing, it was already time to say: Let us stop trying to reconcile the differences and start trying to recognize them. Why have we waited so long?

Some further comment, however, is in order concerning what I have called neo-representationalism. For it is the most philosophically powerful attempt, in our times, to knit the fine arts together once and for all. Its (to me) appar- ent failure to solve the absolute music problem, as well as its stunning success with the problem- objects of the contemporary visual arts, has seemed to me yet another reason to give such theorizing a rest, where absolute music is concerned, and attend to its marked individuality instead. The theory I allude to, of course, is Danto's. And it is with purposeful intent that I do not refer to it as an institutional theory of art.

It is Danto's view, as is well known in this company, that what distinguishes art objects from the real things with which, in the present state of the artworld, they might well be con- fused, is that "the former are about something (or the question of what they are about may legitimately arise)."3 Of course, other things besides art works are about; so aboutness cannot be the single property that alone bestows art- hood. We know only by it what distinguishes art

works from mere real things. We must also dis- tinguish them from mere representations, which also exhibit aboutness, and also are distinguished from mere real things. "The thesis is that works of art, in contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exclusively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented." In other words, a work of art, as opposed to a mere representation, not only possesses a content but "expresses something about that content."4

The virtuosity with which Danto was able to deal with the most outlandish objects of the contemporary art scene, by application of what I have been calling his neo-representationalism, is too familiar to you all to require further comment from me. But music finds little mention in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, or elsewhere in Danto's work, and I foresee only immediate failure for the theory in that direction.

The initial problem is that even the minimal criterion for the distinction between mere representations and mere real things is not clearly applicable to absolute music at all. Indeed, it is likely to be contested right from the start whether, with regard to works of absolute music, "the question of what they are about may legitimately arise."

Upon leaving a Soho gallery of completely blank canvasses, if a viewer should ask "What were they about?," the question would surely be thought legitimate and intelligible, given the long tradition of representational painting of which such canvasses would quite understandably be seen as a part. And if, in the event, the answer should be "They are not about anything," this would not in the least detract from the legitimacy and intelligibility of the question which elicited the negative response. That, I think, is Danto's point. But a concert-goer who leaves a piano- and-violin recital with the question on his lips "What were these sonatas about?" is as likely to be thought a man completely off the rails as one in the grip of a profound question in musical aesthetics. To ask what Ravel's sonata for piano and violin is about, unless there are some pretty unusual extenuating circumstances, sounds, in the normal context of post-concert conversa- tion, rather like asking what a volcano or a bicycle is about. There is no uncontested tradition of absolute music that clearly is representational, against which to project Ravel's sonata in




replying, "Ravel's sonata for violin and piano isn't about anything," as if that made it different, in that respect, from the sonatas for violin and piano of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. There just is no agreed upon tradition of absolute music with a subject matter, that can make it immediately legitimate to ask of any given work "What is it about?;', even if it isn't about anything, as a matter offact. If there is an intuition that even a blank canvass, so seemingly empty of content, can have legitimately raised about it the question of its possible subject matter, that intuition completely fails us with regard to absolute music. Absolute music fails the very first, minimal test for aboutness in Danto's scheme.

Many considerations, both historical and philosophical, have led me inexorably to the conclusion that the traditional problem of absolute music-that is to say, the problem of accom- modating it in a grand theory of the fine arts-is a pseudo-problem. Not the least of these considerations has been that a theory as powerful as Danto's, so stunningly successful in the world of the visual arts, seems to lack even initial plau- sibility when applied to music alone. Taken all together, such considerations suggest that theorizing about absolute music in the grand manner, with a view to providing it a place in Kris- teller's "Modern System of the Arts," is a futile enterprise on which we should place a mora- torium until such a time as it may again seem productive. I do not think such a time will ever come. Absolute music is what it is; and what it is is very different, in crucial respects, from the visual and literary arts. This insight the eighteenth century had exactly right, though ex- pressed darkly, negatively, and with hesitation.

But though we do put aside the traditional attempt to make a theory of the fine arts that encompasses absolute music, and simply deal, philosophically, with the individual problems of absolute music on their own terms, there is still a danger even in harboring the assumption, without acting upon it, that absolute music is of a piece with those of the fine arts in which content plays a significant aesthetic role. For the assumption itself, whether consciously or uncon- sciously held, tends to make us see questions in the individual arts as instances of the same basic problem when, really, their similarities are super- ficial only, and their substance completely dis- parate. Let me instance a case in point.

Both in the fictional arts, and in the art of absolute music, there is a question that might be called, with some propriety, the question of audience emotion. In fiction it is the well-known question, to which some in this audience have made substantial contributions, of how we can feel real emotions, such as pity, anger, and terror, for characters that are fictional and not real. In absolute music it is the question, also addressed by some of you here, of how seemingly meaningless, contentless structures of sound can so deeply move their auditors, as they man- ifestly do.

Assuming, as we are wont to do, that, in dealing with fictional works and works of absolute music, we are dealing with two examples of the same basic thing-that is, the fine arts-we tend to think of these two questions, feeling for fiction and feeling for music, as two instances of the same question: the question of audience emotion. And because we have a handle on the question in the fictional arts, we tend to think that we can transfer the answer we give to the question of audience emotion in the fictional arts directly to what we perceive to be the same question in the art of absolute music.

That we feel sorry for Anna Karenina must, most of us believe, have something directly to do with the situation we perceive her to be in; that we feel anger towards lago must, similarly, have something directly to do with our awareness of his despicable behavior; and that we feel a surge of terror over the prospect of the green slime ingesting the little girl and her kitten must, like- wise, have something directly to do with our being observers of the slime's inexorable progress towards its hideous repast. But if that is our paradigm of audience emotion, if that is at least part of our standard explanation of how works of art move their audiences, then when we turn to absolute music we are immediately faced with the task of finding, in that most unlikely of places, some Annas, lagos, and Slimes to do the business. We are, per force, committed to a heffalump hunt, with failure assured. We are asked to hear, in the music, secret voices of ghostly protagonists wailing their grief, or trum- peting their triumph. And these empty shadows, these characters without character, are supposed to do for us what the fully fleshed out, vividly painted products of Tolstoy's and Shakespeare's imaginative genius, or, at the very least, the




considerable skill and resources of the Holly- wood entertainment factory, accomplish in the fictional arts. The supposed fictional voices of symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets are empty. We the listeners, the propounders of such theses tell us, must fill them out with our imaginative fantasies in order to be moved. I must do for myself, in absolute music, what only the genius of Tolstoy and Shakespeare, one would have thought, are capable of doing in the fictional arts. A recent writer captures my thought exactly when he writes, in a related context: "It should seem quite extraordinary that so many philosophers should seek to make our responses to Anna's suicide, or Desdemona's fate more intelligible by relating these masterpieces of literature to our own banal fantasies. "5 It must be obvious, straightaway, that such an explanation for how absolute music moves its auditors in the striking way that it does is completely broken- backed.

There is, then, no such thing, in absolute music and the fictional arts, as the problem of audience emotion. The problem of audience emotion in absolute music is drastically dissimilar to what appears to be the analogous problem in the fictional arts. The intentional object of emotion is very different, as is the emotion itself, and, of necessity, its cause. And, I dare say, if there is a problem of audience emotion in Western painting, for example, it may well be a third problem in its own right.

I offer thz so-called problem of audience emotion merely as a single example. I am convinced that other problems as well, as they crop up in our consideration of absolute music, will demand very different treatment from similar problems in the arts of content and representation. The pernicious assumption that the modern system of the arts is a monolith, with common problems and necessarily common solutions, has served to impede progress by making us look in vain for sameness, while blindly overlooking differences. It is time now to put aside this assumption, at least for the present, and tend to the differences: to the problems of the arts as they uniquely arise in their various manifestations.

But music, you may say, and the problem of audience emotion that it gives rise to, is a special case that does not, of itself, prove the point I am trying to make. So let me adduce one more example, this time from a far earlier attempt to

gather together at least some of what we now know as the major arts.

If it seems problematic, even perhaps just plain wrong-headed, to think of absolute music as one of the representational arts, it surely must seem fairly straightforward to think of literary fiction that way; and, indeed, we can trace the tradition of thinking it so right back to Plato, which is to say, right back to what all philosophers of art in our tradition take to be the first philosophical investigation of their subject matter.

Plato, I need hardly remind you, classified some poetry, along with painting, as a "mimetic" or (as some modern translators are beginning to render it) "representational" art. We have so classified it for so long that it has come to seem obviously, almost trivially true. But if we think of the most common form of interac- tion that we have with literary fiction, and have been having increasingly, since the beginning of the modern era, this view should seem wildly implausible, at least if we take the paradigm of representation or imitation to be pictures and reflections, as Plato did, and I think, judging from the contemporary literature, we still do today, however differently we may analyze it. For I submit that what we commonly take to be the usual way of experiencing the literary work of art, which is to say a novel of one kind or another, is, as the saying goes, "curling up with a good book." And if you compare the experience of reading a novel with that of looking at a representational painting, it is very hard to say what they have in common, in the way of "representation" or "mimesis;" or that, if looking at pictures is a paradigm instance of it, reading novels can be any instance of it at all, in any non- empty sense of "representation" or "imitation. "

Perhaps someone will want to say that, like painting, a novel projects a fictional world, the difference being that a painting allows us to see its world, while the novel allows us to "see" (scare quotes) its world in the imagination, or in the mind's eye. Even if you believe, as I do not, that that way of describing the two experiences would make it quite unproblematical to think of both as "representation" or "mimesis," I think it is perfectly clear that we cannot look at novel reading, at least as mature adults do the thing, as a process in which the reading of the words puts into our minds or imaginations a kind of running mental moving picture of what we read. To do so




would be to succumb to the most naive kind of Lockean theory of meaning according to which one understands a text when the words therein evoke ideas, construed as images, to which the words refer. I hardly need, at this late day, launch an attack on that as a philosophical analysis of meaning. And it is no more a correct account of what happens when one reads a novel than it is of what happens when one reads a philosophy text or a treatise on the breeding for profit of golden retrievers. For it is as hard to credit that each time I read, understand, and appreciate a novel or short story all of the things related therein must pop into my head as mental pictures, as that each time I read and understand the words "golden retriever" I must have a picture of that lovable creature in my sensorium.

Both "representation" and "mimesis" (or "imitation") suggest, of course, bringing to the senses, the sense of sight in particular, some kind of simulacrum of the thing imitated or represented, or of its visual image. It is re-pre- sented, its likeness or surrogate, in some sense or other, brought before our presence. Repre- sentational painting and sculpture can be plausibly thought to do so. Novels and narrative poems, it would seem, cannot.

But if that is so, how could so great a philosopher as Plato have said something so wildly implausible as that the poets, like the painters, practice the art of imitation? The answer would seem to be-and this, I think, we tend to over- look or forget, because of the way we typically experience poetic fiction-that the Greeks of Plato's time were not readers. It is clear both from the Ion and the Republic that Homer was not typically experienced as a good book to curl up with, but as a dramatic recitation. Indeed, when Plato comes to discuss Homer, in Republic X, he refers to Homer's audience not as readers but as spectators at a performance (598-599). And in Book III we get a rather startling idea, from Plato's diatribe against such performances, of how mimetic they truly were. The reciter of poetry, Plato there complains, "will attempt, seriously and in the presence of many hearers to imitate everything without exception, even ... claps of thunder and the noise of wind and of hail, and of wheels and pulleys, and the sounds of trumpets and flutes and pipes and all manner of instruments; nay, even the barking of dogs, the bleating of sheep, and the notes of birds; and

his style will either consist wholly of the imitation of sounds and forms, or will comprise but a small modicum of narration. "6

No problem then, for Plato, in construing fictional poetry, Homer in particular, as mimetic art. For its aesthetic pay-off, for its audience, was in the audition of a performance, not in the fairly recent experience of silent reading. And the poetic performance, as this passage from Republic III amply demonstrates, was mimetic with a vengeance.

The reference in the afore-quoted passage to Narration is quite crucial. For Plato, as you will again recall, distinguished shortly before this passage poetry that is wholly imitative, which is to say, tragedy and comedy, from poetry which "employs the simple recital of the poet in his own person," and both from a "third [kind which] employs both recital and imitation, as is seen in the construction of epic poems."7 In other words, pure narration on Plato's view is "wholly without imitation." Plato, apparently, gave no thought at all in his analysis to the experience of reading a poem. He thought solely of poetry as a performance art. And where that performance was wholly narrative, it was not an art of imitation at all according to Plato, and therefore no relation at all of paintings and mirrors; for even when recited, narration merely tells how things are, whereas paintings, mirrors, and recited imitative poetry show how they are.

What would Plato have thought of a literary fiction, such as the novel, that is not a performance art? Well, that is pure conjecture. But one thing is certain: to the extent that it is purely narrative, it would not be a mimetic art. And my own view is that without the idea of performance as the ultimate goal of the literary work, the Platonic account of fiction as mimesis simply does not wash. For a speech read to one's self is no more a simulacrum or a re-presentation of a spoken one than a spoken narration is of an event; neither shows-they tell. Nor, a fortiori, is a description read to one's self a simulacrum or re-presentation of the scene it might describe any more than a spoken description is; for they also tell-they do not show.

I do not of course deny that there is a broad and important sense of "representational" in which language and thought are plausibly said to "represent" the world. And in that sense, needless to say, I do not wish to deny that read novels




and poems may be "representational." But as real human experience, the experience of reading a novel is so different from that of see- ing a representational painting, or attending a dramatic representation, that it is in a deep way false and misleading to put both kinds of thing in the same category, call it "representation," and now think we have really settled an important problem of aesthetic experience and classifica- tion. For it is the essence of that experience which we, as aestheticians, are after; and merely concluding that that experience is of "representation," in the very broadest sense of the word, will not turn the trick for vs.

But if fictional literature, as we typically experience it, that is to say, read to one's self, is not a representational art, then what in the world is it? What I am suggesting is that this question has been languishing away, waiting in the wings, completely overshadowed by questions of visual representation which can have little if indeed any relevance to it. No progress has been made, it appears to me, with a philosophical understanding of the literary work of fiction as a read experience because it has, as it were, been mis- catalogued by a careless application of the oldest theory of art we possess. It is non-trivial that Plato's account of literary fiction, even the kind we now typically read to ourselves, was an account of a performance art. It is of the very essence.

A lot has been done by literary critics and theorists towards understanding narrative strat- egies and techniques. And the problem of literary interpretation has been in the philosophical limelight for a long time. But little has been done by philosophers, outside of the problem of feeling sorry for Anna Karenina, with what I have been calling the philosophical problem of literature as a reading art. I believe this is because we still have it in the backs of our minds that it is somehow established-if anything is in the philosophy of art-in place since our earliest philosophical texts, that literary fiction, all literary fiction, is of a piece with representational painting and sculpture: that is to say, one of the representational arts. And, that being the case, if we talk about representation enough, which is to say, visual representation, and the kind of representation that takes place in the dramatic arts, somehow literary fiction, all of literary fiction, will have its due.

Of course I am not suggesting that anyone is so silly as to believe that a good account of visual perspective is going to cast light on Jane Aus- ten's description of Emma Woodhouse. But I do think that, on the whole, progress with the philosophical account of literary fiction as a reading experience has been stymied by the identifica- tion of it with the mimetic or representational arts. It is worth at least considering the possibility that it is as different from those as it and they are from absolute music. Recognizing differences here, as in the case of absolute music and elsewhere, is, I believe, at least the strategy, in our present situation, in the short term anyway, for progress in the discipline.

I hasten to add that this is no Wittgensteinian argument, or any other kind, directed against the very possibility of theory-making in aesthetics. I claim nothing of the sort. But I do urge, and indeed predict that progress in the philosophy of art in the immediate future is to be made not by theorizing in the grand manner, but by careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems, seen as somewhat unique, individual problems and not necessarily as instances of common problems of some monolithic thing called "ART." Ironically, this is the very suggestion that Pass- more made when he read over philosophical aesthetics what many thought to be its epitaph. The alternative to theory-making in the grand style, he suggested, was "an intensive special study of the separate arts."8 It was, as events have shown, bad advice for his times but, I am suggesting, perhaps good advice for ours.

We may be wise, then, to take as a temporary heuristic principle, if not a timeless truth, the precept attributed to Konrad Fiedler: "There is no art, he wrote, there are only arts."9 But if such a heuristic is to be followed, it will no longer be possible to practice the philosophy of art without thorough professional grounding in at least one major aspect of one of the major or minor arts, any more than it would be possible, at the present time, to practice philosophy of science without solid, nuts-and-bolts knowledge of the individual sciences, and their individual histories. We can no longer hover above our subject matter like Gods from machines, be- stowing theory upon a practice in sublime and sometimes even boastful ignorance of what takes place in the dirt and mess of the workshop.




In exchange for our safe, inviolable vantage point above it all, we will get, and already have begun to, the renewed interest and attention of those in the arts and in practical criticism, who heretofore have seen what the philosophers say about their subject as remote, abstract, arid, and completely irrelevant to art as it is known in the marketplace and the studio. It mattered greatly to the nineteenth-century artistic community what Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel said in their great aesthetical writings. It will matter again to the artworld what the philosopher of art has to say. But we will not be able to make it matter in the same way that these old masters did. Different times call for different philoso- phies. And our philosophy will be done in the heat of the kitchen, not the coolness of the strato- sphere. That is my prediction and my plea.

But where we really do go from here, I fully realize, is not in my power, or in the power of my generation to determine. A lot will have been said here, before we are through, about the founders, the early formers, and present celebri- ties of this Society. This is right and proper. But perhaps, in conclusion, it might be appropriate for me to say something about a whole new generation of scholars who are now, in the natural order of things, making their mark on our discipline. The American Society for Aesthetics is blessed with a wealth of extraordinary young

talent. It is this that assures its future strength; and it is these young scholars, not my generation, or the founders of this Society, or the gen- erations between, who will determine the future course of the philosophy of art in our times. I wish these young scholars well, and I wish the American Society for Aesthetics another fifty years and more of intellectual vigor. 10

1. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ?16. 2. Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-

Nineteenth Centuries, eds. Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 59; and Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ?54.

3. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Com- monplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 82.

4. Ibid., p. 87 (Stephanus, 394) 5. R.M.J. Damman, "Emotion and Fiction," British Jour-

nal of Aesthetics 32 (1992), p. 19. 6. Plato, Republic, trans. J.L. Davies and J. Vaughan

(London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 90 (Stephanus 397); my italics.

7. Ibid., p. 87 (Stephanus, 394). 8. J.A. Passmore, "The Dreariness of Aesthetics," Aes-

thetics and Language, ed. William Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), p. 55.

9. Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller, "The Necessity and the Irreformability of Aesthetics," Reconstructing Aesthet- ics: Writings of the Budapest School, eds. A. Heller and F. Feher (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 14.

10. I am beholden to Noel Carroll for reading an earlier draft of this address and affording me his advice and support.



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Aesthetics: Past and Present. A Commemorative Issue Celebrating 50 Years of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics || Differences