Towards a virtue theory of art

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 372-387

  Goldie, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43249144602     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/aym022     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. For discussion, see for example Terence Irwin's Plato's Ethics (New York: Oxford U.P., 1995)-
2. For detailed discussion of the craft analogy in Aristotle, see Sarah Broadie's Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford U.P., 1994)
3. This is why the line from Brecht's Threepenny Opera, 'First food and then morality' ('Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral') is such a bleak line
4. See, for example, Jerrold Levinson 'Defining Art Historically', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 19 (1979), pp. 232-250
5. 'Refining Art Historically', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47 (1989), pp. 21-33
6. and 'Extending Art Historically', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51 (1993), pp. 411-423
7. 'Defining Art Historically', p. 246
8. 'Refining Art Historically', p. 22. Summing up his position at the beginning of his 'Extending Art Historically', Levinson says 'Virtually all concepts, we may safely venture, are subject to historical evolution. In any event, the concept of art is clearly no exception. What was understood by the term "art" in 1790 is not the same thing as is understood by the term today, a mere two centuries later; what items or activities would have counted, the reasons why they would have so counted, and what would have been the paradigms with reference to which counting would have been assessed, were dramatically different' (p. 411)
9. Robert Stecker, in his book Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1997), has an argument that reaches more or less the same conclusion. He first considers the idea that the concept of art since Plato 'has undergone considerable change', but he then goes on to say, 'However, I think it is better, and more in keeping with current tendencies of thought, to think of our concept as different from both Plato's and the eighteenth century's. The extension picked out by our concept is so very different, and recall that it is the extension of a term or concept that a definition is fashioned to pick out' (p. 17). Here the argument seems to be that we need a different concept of art in order adequately to capture the difference in extension, whereas Levinson's seems to be that it follows from the fact of changed extension that there is a different concept (or perhaps that the fact of changed extension counts as evidence for a different concept)
10. Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981), p. 45. I do not want to attribute to Danto any particular conclusion from this thought experiment. (Thanks to Peter Kivy for discussion here.)
11. See Peter Kivy's Philosophies of the Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1993)
12. For discussion, see Nick Zangwill, 'Are There Counterexamples to Aesthetic Theories of Art?', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60 (2002), pp. 111-118
13. See Graham Oppy, 'On Defining Art Historically', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 32 (1992), PP-153-161
14. and Stephen Davies, 'Non-Western Art and Art's Definition', in N. Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Wisconsin: Wisconsin U.P., 2000), pp. 199-216
15. In this context, Stephen Davies has raised a kind of dilemma which faces Levinson's definition of art, which he calls the artword relativity problem. On the one hand, if Levinson's definition of art is meant only to capture our notion of art, then relativism looms. As Davies puts it, 'there is a tendency for those who would deny that non-Western cultures share our concept of art to describe the products of those cultures in a fashion that ignores the artistic goals, intentions, and achievements that such pieces manifest. This kind of reduction creates the conclusion that art is absent from non-Western cultures because it factors out the "artiness" of their artworks' ('Non-Western Art and Art's Definition', in Carroll, Theories of Art Today, pp. 199-216)
16. On the other hand, if it is accepted that there is a concept of art that is shared with other cultures and times, then this is not what we have been provided with; all we have is a definition of something which is admitted to be parochial. In this connection, Dominic Mclver Lopes (in 'Art Without "Art"', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 47 [2007], pp. 1-15) has rightly argued that, with respect to any particular culture, there are two questions: whether that culture has art; and whether that culture has a concept of art. The answers to these questions are doubly dissociable: there is no implication from one to the other. In respect of both, the question is empirical. I agree with Lopes about this (personal correspondence), as I do not insist that either art or the concept of art is universal. But I do find the idea of their universality attractive (perhaps the notion of being pan-cultural is better here), and I do insist that we should not focus the debate in a way that in effect closes off from discussion the possibility of their universality
17. Stuart Hampshire has argued that 'there are no problems of aesthetics comparable with the problems of ethics'; see his 'Logic and Appreciation', in W. Eaton (ed.), Aesthetics and Language (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1954), pp. 161-69, esp. p. 162
18. But for a thorough response, see Eddy Zemach 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Ethics-Aesthetics Parallelism', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 29 (1971), pp. 391-398
19. David Velleman, 'The Guise of the Good', Nous, vol. 26 (1996), pp. 3-26
20. I do not want to get into the detail here of just what intentions and motives are, and what the difference is between the two. For discussion, see my On Personality (London: Routledge, 2004)
21. Niromachean Ethics 1105a26-b5, trans. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1925)
22. Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1980), sections 42 and 46
23. The idea has been explored recently, in different ways, by Marcia Eaton in Aesthetics and the Good Life (Cranbury, NJ: Associated U.P., 1989)
24. by David Woodruff, 'A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 35 (2001), pp. 23-36
25. and briefly by Jonathan Lear in Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1988)
26. One I do not discuss is the relation between moral luck and artistic luck, particularly with reference to Gauguin; see Bernard Williams, 'Moral Luck', in his Philosophical Papers: 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1981), pp. 20-39
27. and Marcia Eaton, 'Integrating the Aesthetic and the Moral', Philosophical Studies, vol. 67 (1992), pp. 219-240
28. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 2, para. 19. In various editions
29. For discussion, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1999)
30. Bernard Williams, 'Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts', in R. Heinaman (ed.), Aristotle and Moral Realism (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 13-23
31. reprinted in Williams's The Sense of the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2006), pp. 190-197
32. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 416
33. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1978), Second Enquiry, Appendix 2, 'Of Selflove'
34. Compare Stephen Davies, 'Aesthetic Judgements, Artworks and Functional Beauty', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 56 (2006), pp. 224-241
35. In relation to these last two points, the question of the doctrine of double effect is relevant, but I will not consider it here
36. J. Tooby and L. Cosmides, 'Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts', Substance 94/95, vol. 30, nos. 1 & 2 (2001), pp. 6-27, at p. 10
37. For discussion, see Myles Burnyeat, 'Aristotle on Learning to be Good', in A. O, Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 69-92
38. John McDowell, 'Two Sorts of Naturalism', in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (eds), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
39. reprinted in McDowell's Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1998), pp. 167-197
40. Page references are to this version. The reading of Aristotle that McDowell is objecting to is found in Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP., 1985)
41. Amelie Rorty talks of dispositions of interpretation, tropic dispositions, and self-activating dispositions; see her 'Virtues and Their Vicissitudes', Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13 (1988), pp. 136-148, at pp. 137-138
42. To this list I have added self-monitoring dispositions; see my The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 158
43. Echoing the words of Kant on the coolness of the scoundrel in his Groundwork, p. 394
44. Several of these are mentioned in David Woodruff, 'A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 35 (2001), pp. 23-36
45. Nicomachean Ethics 1099a 16-20
46. And it is just because someone is less than fully virtuous that they are prone to weakness of will
47. This is discussed in Marcia Eaton, Aesthetics and the Good Life (Cranbury, NJ: Associated U.P., 1989), ch. 7
48. For discussion of this vexed topic, see for example John Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1975)
49. his 'Contemplation and Happiness: A Reconsideration', Synthese, vol. 72 (1987), pp. 187-216
50. For discussion, see Robert Heinaman, 'Eudaimonia and Self-sufficiency in the Nicomachean Ethics', Phronesis, vol. 33 (1988), pp. 31-53
51. In the Preface to his The Nigger of The 'Narcissus', edited with an Introduction by C. Watts (London: Penguin, 1963). First published in 1897
52. Thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their support in relation to the two-year Reseach Project, 'Towards an Aesthetic Psychology: The Philosophy of Aesthetic Perception and Cognition', reference 17362. Thanks also for the many penetrating questions raised when I presented earlier versions of this paper at the British Society of Aesthetics annual meeting, Oxford 2006, at the London Aesthetics Forum, January 2007, at The Nottingham Graduate Seminar, February 2007, and, for an earlier paper on the concept of art, at a conference, 'Metaphysics of Art', on the work of Jerrold Levinson in Nottingham, March 2006. Thanks also to Stephen Davies, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Dom Lopes and Carolyn Wilde for very helpful discussions, and especially to Peter Lamarque