Paradoxes of autonomy; or, why won't the problem of artistic justification go away?

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-22

  Haskins, Casey ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952297326     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/432346     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Works and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994)
2. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)
3. James Etlin, In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
4. Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995)
5. Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Penguin Books, 1995)
6. Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
7. A longer list, representing the spectrum of mainstream humanist-to-post-humanist cultural perspectives, would surely include Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
8. Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1996)
9. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
10. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993)
11. and the symposium "Art and Ethics" in Salmagundi (1996): 27-145
12. T. J. Diffey, "Aesthetic Instrumentalism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 22 (1982): 337-349
13. Greenberg's remark was made in an exchange on modernist criticism with art historian T. J. Clark, in Modernism and Modernity. The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), p. 190
14. R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 4
15. This interplay is of course old news for the philosophical subdiscipline of the theory of knowledge. But philosophers can still have a peculiar myopia when it comes to acknowledging how this interplay shapes their own practice. On this subject see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: The Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Debate (Harvard University Press, 1996)
16. For different versions of this instrumentalist counter-move, see Monroe C. Beardsley, "Intrinsic Value," reprinted in his The Aesthetic Point of View (Cornell University Press, 1982)
17. also, Robert Stecker, "Aesthetic Instrumentalism and Aesthetic Autonomy," The British Journal of Aesthetics 24 (1984): 160-165
18. In a similar vein, Budd also defines "artistic value" in such a way that "values that are not specific to art or the aesthetic" - such as "intelligence, wit, imagination, knowledge and understanding of human life" - are "not thereby essentially unrelated to artistic value" (Values of Art, p. 10). Budd does not elaborate on this point, but I take it that he means to leave the content of "the experience of the work," or more explicitly, "the experience in which the work is understood," fairly open with regard to its content - subject, however, to the important ideal-spectator constraint that not just any experience counts as an experience of the work in this sense, and not just anyone is qualified to say with authority what that experience is
19. Budd, Values of Art, p. 5
20. Noël Carroll, "Moderate Moralism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 223-238
21. and "Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding," in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Levinson
22. and "Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 419-424
23. Given their proximity, I shall treat these discussions as parts of a single sustained argument. Related discussions can be found in Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
24. and in his article, "Morality and Aesthetics," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 3
25. Carroll, "Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism," p. 419
26. Carroll, "Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding," in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Levinson, p. 127
27. Carroll is noticeably spare in acknowledging precursors to his position, but it should be noted that on this point he is in the company of writers like Shelley and Dewey but also even writers like Kant and Schiller, who defend variants on what might be called the "indirection hypothesis" about the meliorative aspects of art. I like to think Carroll would find congenial many of Dewey's remarks on the art/morality relationship in the conclusion to Art as Experience, where he quotes to good effect Shelley's famous line (from "A Defense of Poetry") that "The Imagination is the great instrument of moral good, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the causes." John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934), p. 34 7
28. James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, "Moderate Autonomism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 150-166
29. "Admittedly," Carroll writes, "a number of factors will contribute to the moral defectiveness and the aesthetic defectiveness of the artwork in question. ... Among the complex of factors that account for the moral defectiveness of the artwork in question, on the one hand, and the complex of factors that explain the aesthetic defectiveness of the artwork, on the other hand, the evil perspective of the artwork will play a central, though perhaps not sufficient, explanatory role in both. ... That there are other contributing factors does not mitigate the explanatory role that the evil of the work plays in accounting respectively for the moral and aesthetic defectiveness of the work in question. The evilness of the work is a reason for both its moral and aesthetic defectiveness," "Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism," p. 423
30. On the continuum of means and ends see John Dewey, Theory of Valuation, vol. 2, no. 4 of International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (University of Chicago Press, 1939)
31. also, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
32. Dewey wrote Theory of Valuation some years after Art as Experience, but the general idea is already implicit in the latter work
33. For more on this, see my "John Dewey: Overview of Thought," Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Kelly, vol. 2
34. Derrida - whose methodological sensibility is inimical in familiar ways to that of much mainstream work in aesthetics - has not written on the instrumentalism/ autonomism debate. But a related discussion, rich in Hegelian and Nietzschean undertones, can be found in his interpretation of Kant's idea of the "parergon" in The Truth in Painting
35. There he argues that one cannot understand what lies inside the "frame" of the supposedly autonomous object of a Kantian judgment of taste (say, an artwork construed as a noninstrumental object possessing "purposiveness without purpose") without making reference to what lies outside that frame (e.g., its actual purposes or functions in the world, along with its material social conditions) as well. In this way artistic autonomy would seem to amount in the end for Derrida to an illusory projection of a certain kind of philosophical discourse. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McCleod (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
36. Some of Derrida's discussion of the frame is anticipated by a much earlier, and decidedly undeconstructionist, paper by Lucius Garvin, "The Paradox of Aesthetic Meaning," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1947): 99-106
37. Galen Strawson, "Freedom of the Will," Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig. (London: Routledge, 1998), vol. 3
38. I further discuss these analogies, along with other issues touched on throughout the rest of this paper, in "On the Sources of Aesthetic Scepticism," The Philosophical Forum 27 (1996): 89-126
39. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap. 1. Compare the Kuhnian idea that disciplines evolve conceptual structures that demand a certain methodological conservatism from within the discipline-which is roughly what Kuhn meant by "normal inquiry"-even while those structures are subject to increasing critical pressure to modify or "revolutionize" that picture and the forms of practice it underwrites
40. See "On the Sources of Aesthetic Scepticism"
41. also, my article "Autonomy: Survey of Thought," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Kelly, vol. 1
42. Most philosophers today who discuss subjects like rationality and the theory/evidence relationship will likely agree that James's "anti- evidentialist" view needs some qualification, given our more open-ended sense today of what rationality demands we infer from anything. But James was right that there are fields of belief - his main example was religion, but for us it surely includes aesthetics - about which it is hard not to form opinions but for which there are a plurality of styles of reasoning that are consistent with our larger shared intuitions about rationality, justification, and similar matters. This sort of discussion, once largely the province of philosophy of science and epistemology, is now commonplace in a variety of humanistic disciplines and challenges the conservatism about evidence and its contexts that still by and large pervades mainstream work in aesthetics. A good introduction to this development is James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
43. The literature on this topic is massive, especially since the entry of Wittgensteinian themes into cultural anthropology and epistemology at mid-twentieth century. For those wishing further reading here, a good place to start is the essays in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), which can be profitably perused alongside the Questions of Evidence volume mentioned in the preceding note
44. If a general principle is wanted here, it might be stated like this: any philosophy of art presupposes (in some sense of "presuppose") a more concretely empirical understanding of the form of life under philosophical analysis. After Wittgenstein, such a maxim should be a truism for any aesthetician, as should its analogues be truistic in other areas of philosophy. This formulation of the maxim is indebted to a similar point Alasdair MacIntyre made some years ago about moral philosophy in After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), chap. 3
45. See the Critique of Pure Reason's discussion of the "antinomy of pure reason," in particular A409/B436-A424/ B452
46. See the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment's discussion of the "antinomy of taste," sections 56-57
47. On this issue see, besides the texts by Derrida and Adorno mentioned in note 24 above, Thierry de Duve's discussions of various antinomical structures in post-Kantian aesthetics and criticism in Kant After Duchamp (MIT Press, 1996)
48. also, Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the "paradox of the sublime" in chapter six of The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)
49. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modem Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
50. On the usage of "autonomy" (Autonomie) in the Critique of Judgment, see my "Kant and the Autonomy of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 43-54
51. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1951), Ak. 117
52. Franz Kafka, "Before the Law," reprinted in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum M. Glatzer (New York: Shocken Books, 1971). One can, of course, read this story, like all Kafka's stories, many ways. On my "Kantian" reading, the Law and its guardian, the Gatekeeper, which in the narrative are external to the protagonist, are allegorical of something within ourselves, in that they represent aspects of law-giving Reason. For Kant, we are at once our own yearner-for-a-glimpse-of-the-Law and, autonomously as it were, our own Gatekeeper. There is, to be sure, something paradoxical about this scenario - it represents what one might think of as the deepest paradox of autonomy in Kant's philosophy
53. The first two criticisms are broadly in the spirit of Dewey's hypothesis of a continuum of means-end activity (see note 24 above). The second criticism condenses Dewey's more specific argument in Art as Experience that the work of art, properly conceptualized, is not the art product but rather the experience of some intelligent agent or agents engaged in a certain sort of productive activity. For further discussion, see my "John Dewey: Overview of Thought," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Kelly
54. The relevance of the third criticism was impressed upon me by Joseph Margolis, who commented on a draft of this paper at the 1998 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. Margolis's own work underscores how various arguments in the philosophy of art typically rest upon deeper, and contentious, views of cultural ontology. See his "Ontology of Art: Historical Ontology," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Kelly, vol. 3
55. also his What, After All, is a Work of Art? (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)
56. This remark echoes Donald Davidson's comment that there is a "sea change" underway in philosophy that is having the effect of undermining the picture of subjectivity-as-disengaged-from-nature - a picture common to Kant and empiricism and still in evidence in much contemporary philosophy - in favor of a more naturalizing vision that is the subject of various cutting-edge philosophical debates today. (Donald Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," in Krausz, ed., Relativism.)