On Interpretative Activity: A Peircian Approach to the Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Arts

On Interpretative Activity

Philosophy of History and Culture Series Editor

Michael Krausz, Bryn Mawr College Advisory Board

annette baier – cora diamond – william dray nancy fraser – clifford geertz – peter hacker rom harré – bernard harrison – martha nussbaum leon pompa – joseph raz – amélie oksenberg rorty georg henrik von wright

VOLUME 24

On Interpretative Activity A Peircian Approach to the Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Arts

By

Noel E. Boulting

LEIDEN BOSTON 2006 •

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 0922–6001 ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15409-4 ISBN-10: 90-04-15409-4 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

With his permission, this book is dedicated to Martin Bertman (Editor-in-Chief of Hobbes Studies) in appreciation of the unfailing encouragement he has given me in the pursuit of my philosophical inquiries.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................

ix

Introduction ..................................................................................

1

Chapter One

On Using the Term ‘Science’ ........................

9

Chapter Two

Making Sense of Science and Technology ..............................................

31

Chapter Three The Status of Works of Art ..........................

53

Chapter Four

Art in Society ..................................................

77

Chapter Five

Within the Interpretative Process .................. 101

Chapter Six

The Problem of Reification ............................ 127

Appendix:

Objections to the Iconic Conception of Artworks ...................................................... 157

Bibliography .................................................................................. 167 Index ............................................................................................ 175

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Two people made the writing of this book possible. Michael Krausz of Bryn Mawr College suggested to me that what is now Chapter 5, and which appeared originally as “In Defense of a ‘Three-Tiered Structure’ within the Interpretative Process” in the Journal of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World (Vol. 12, No. 1 Spring/Summer 2005), should be extended into a book. Carl Hausman and I have enjoyed constant argument as to how Peirce’s philosophy can be interpreted since I met him in Buffalo in March 1990, when I was invited by Peter Hare to present a paper “Pragmatism and Scientism” at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Conference. Some of the contents of that paper appear in Chapter 1. Two other societies, besides the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World (SPCW) are quite unique: the North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP ) and the association for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Understanding, Ultimate Reality and Meaning (General Editor Tibor Horvath). All three societies are ‘open’ in that whether a particular contribution is judged fit to be presented at a Conference is decided by the quality of the paper rather than be the qualifications of its author or where that person is employed. If the paper survives refutation at the Conference and a subsequent critical review, it may then appear in that Society’s journal. So, I appreciate John Perry, URAM journal editor, allowing me to refer to my articles published in that journal as well as Joe Frank Jones III (editor) for his constant encouragement, and enabling me to refer to my publications in the SPCW journal. But above all, I have Cheryl Hughes of the NASSP—former editor of Social Philosophy Today— to thank for publishing my article “Science as a Paradigm in the Formation of Socio-Ethical Judgements”, where I tried originally to distinguish three kinds of interpretative activity. However, these ideas—encouraged by discussions with William McBride—may have been foreshadowed in my “On Endymion’s Fate: Responses to the Fear of Death” published in 1996 by Yeager Hudson, editor of Rending and Renewing the Social Order. Indeed, much of the contents of Chapters 2 and 3 have been presented at NASSP Conferences since the turn of the century.

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In addition, I am indebted to Michael Manson of the American Society for Aesthetics (Rocky Mountain Division) for allowing me to present “Max Horkheimer on Art and Society” at the 2005 Conference, a paper which had been presented earlier at a Conference for European Philosophy in September 2003. Much of Chapter 4 contains its contents. I am also deeply indebted to the encouragement of Barry Whitney in providing articles for Process Studies (PS ) as well as for allowing considerable parts of the article “The Reification Problem and Whitehead’s Philosophy” (PS Vol. 33.1 Spring/Summer 2004) to appear in Chapter 6. But readers of that journal may be disappointed to find fewer of Whitehead’s ideas present in this text than might be expected in view of my references to them in this latter chapter. However, in relation to the writing of this book, I have found that Peirce’s insights have proved more convivial for exploring what Lewis Ford, in private correspondence has referred to as ‘social artefacts’1 which he considers fall more “on the side of being” rather than becoming. Nonetheless I hope that such a consideration has not prevented my affection for Whitehead’s philosophy to come out in other ways, a consideration whose importance Dorothy Emmet once emphasized to me at a Social Philosophy Conference at East Anglia University in the Spring of 1977. Much of what is written in this book has been haunted by the writings of an outstanding but somewhat neglected philosopher in our own time, namely Joseph Margolis. That judgment is based not simply on his use of Peirce’s notions, about which there can be disagreement, but because his work, particularly his classic book Art and Philosophy of 1980 and his more recent Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly manifest the basic 3Rs necessary for philosophic activity: Range, Rigour and Reinterpretation. The range of his work covers epistemological concerns in many fields of inquiry so that lessons learnt in one field can be applied in another; a Peircian dream. Unlike the mental gymnastics performed in the rhetoric of fashionable post-modern philosophers of our day, the rigour of Margolis’s writings makes a reader confront the logic of what he is arguing. Thirdly, he attempts to reinterpret important contributions to philosophical activity from ways of thinking that lie outside the narrow

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confines of analytic philosophy—normally labelled under the obfuscation ‘Continental Philosophy’2—so as to bring these into harmony with intellectual issues concerning contemporary life. Of course, such admiration for his work has not prevented this author from disagreeing with him on those occasions when I have had the good fortune of meeting him. Finally, I am also indebted to suggestions from past and present NOBOSS members for their suggestions in the writing of this present volume: Margaret Cashin, Pat Hall my wife, Maggie Lycett and Jon Taylor. But none of the persons identified in these acknowledgements is to be credited either with the way their suggestions may have been distorted, or with any interpretative errors, which may have found their way into the present text.

2 The difficulty with this label is that lumps together different and competing approaches to philosophical activity, which may not be reconcilable with one another: Phenomenology, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School Philosophy and other differing approaches.

INTRODUCTION —philosophy ought to be deliberate and planned out; and that is why, though pitchforking articles into a volume is a favourite and easy method of bookmaking, it is not the one which Mr. Peirce has deemed to be the most appropriate to the exposition of the principles of philosophy; so that, instead of making up this book by a collection of his old papers with additions, as he was urged to do, he has preferred to write it entirely anew, as if he had never before set pen to paper (CP 1.179)1

A large schism mars Western Culture. There is an enormous divide between the activity of philosophy, as understood within institutional practices, and processes of interpretation applied in everyday experiencing. A rather obvious example is the advance of Scientism, the assumption that claims can only be regarded as knowledge to the degree that they adopt the methods of the natural sciences (Habermas, 1978, p. 4).2 Whilst in academic circles, this assumption has been undermined as its advocates sought “to solve its problems in a professional bubble of its own” (Margolis, 2003, p. 108),3 in everyday life the advance of scientism continues apace: consider the rise of faith in procedural rationality (Boulting, 1989);4 the advance of the idea of instrumentality as a model for human action (Boulting, 1988);5 1 CP 1.179 stands for Vol. 1 par. no., not page no., 179 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A.W. Burke, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1931–58, Vols. 1–8. 2 Jurgen Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) London: Heinemann 1978 p. 4. 3 Joseph Margolis’s words—taken from The Unravelling of Scientism Ithaca: Cornell UP 2003—may have been quoted out of their context in which he wished to use them. 4 The idea of procedural rationality is distinguished from other forms of rationality in my “Hobbes and the Problem of Rationality” in Hobbes: War Among Nations ed. by T. Airaksinen and M.A. Bertman, Brookfield: Avebury 1989 pp. 178–89. Cf. Jurgen Habermas “Dogmatism, Reason and Decision: On Theory and Praxis in our Scientific Civilization” Ch. 7 of Theory and Practice (1971) London: Heinemann 1977. 5 The term instrumentality here refers to both Instrumental Behaviour and Calculated Manipulation as these are distinguished in my “Conceptions of Human Action and the Justification of Value Claims” in Inquiries into Values ed. by S.H. Lee, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press 1988 pp. 173–83.

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the scientization of politics (Habermas, 1971, ch. 5)6 and professional activities. Can’t it be argued that it is the duty of a philosopher to confront that widening schism between philosophical activity and understandings operative in everyday life? In To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical (Boulting, 2003)7 I have tried, from an ecological and aesthetical perspective, to address this question and the present book is written in the same spirit. This spirit is captured in the book’s title On Interpretative Activity rather than On Interpretation—Aristotle’s title—since it is written within the tradition of what Charles Sanders Peirce called Pragmaticism. It is written, too, in the way Peirce recommended in the quotation above, even if Peirce was not able to sustain his own advice and the present writer was not urged in any particular direction. But Peirce, as a nineteenth century American philosopher, wanted, on the one hand, to be associated with William James’s pragmatism— that philosophy should bear upon the conduct of life (CP 5.412 & EP, 2, p. 232)8—yet, on the other, he tried to distinguish it from James’s individualistic and voluntaristic concerns, which ignored the mediational aspects of Peirce’s philosophy. The latter implied recognition of general principles operating in relation to reality and for cognitive inquiries. But this book is not to be regarded as an exercise in explaining why Peirce’s philosophy may be more adequate than that of William James nor is it another exegesis on Peirce’s thought in order to explain how it is to be interpreted. Rather, it seeks to employ some of Peirce’s ideas within a contemporary context, risking the charge that in so applying them, Peirce’s own position may thereby be distorted. Indeed, it is to be hoped that you, the reader, will be encouraged to return to Peirce’s writings in order to check these sources so that you can come to different conclusions, thereby generating a contrasting perspective on how his writings might be read. As Charles Hartshorne once put it: Peirce “forces one to make one’s own system”.9 But for me any such system can 6 Cf. Jurgen Habermas “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion” in Toward A Rational Society London: Heinemann 1971, ch. 5. 7 Noel E. Boulting To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical Peterborough, UK: Upfront Pub. 2003. 8 EP, 2, p. 332 stands for Volume 2 page 332 of The Essential Peirce: Selected Writings (1893–1913) Bloomington, Ind: Indiana UP 1998. 9 Charles Hartshorne “Response to Thompson” in Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne ed. by J.B. Cobb & F.I. Gamwell, Chicago UP 1984 pp. 143–48, p. 147.

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only emerge as a result of applying Peircian notions to the problems raised within the chapters of this book. In chapter 1—“On Using The Term ‘Science’’—a way of making sense of this schism between theoretical activity and the practical application of ideas is considered. In two essays of 1896 and 1906, Peirce is concerned with the question ‘What is Science?’ A reply to that question involves distinguishing three different senses of the term science: the Iconic, the Indexical and the Intellective, the latter a term ‘ugly enough to be safe from’ misunderstanding.10 To do that means elucidating what Peirce meant by his use of the signs the Icon, the Index and the Interpretant. Science, as an activity, can be viewed either endogenously or exogenously, from the standpoint of those engaged in it as “a living process” “busied mainly with conjectures which are getting framed or tested” (CP 1.234), or regarded, by non-scientists, as a body of “systematized knowledge” (EP 2 p. 372) awaiting application within a technologically orientated society. This latter, exogenous perspective on science, can be referred to as identifying an Indexical conception: science viewed as a product to be tested in its everyday use. The former, endogenous sense, implies two further conceptions. The weaker conception initiates the idea of sustaining an “impulse to penetrate into the reason of things”, an activity which is “the only thing that makes life worth living” (CP 1.43–4). This Iconic conception refers to “diligent inquiry into truth for truth’s sake” (CP 1.44). It is strengthened by a concern for an adoption of “the most critically chosen methods” set within not simply a single person’s “information and reflection”

10 Peirce spoke of the name for his doctrine as Pragmaticism, a word he said “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414). In earlier writings I used the word Interpretative to distinguish a form of understanding from the Iconic and the Indexical. But since the latter two are to be examined in interpretative terms, that is to say the concern throughout this book is with interpretative activities or with interpretation in general, it is necessary to find a different name for that particular kind of conception. The term Intellective still remains quasi-Peircian, however: he speaks of his intellectual Interpretant in terms of the “mental effects” of what is represented (EP, 2, p. 431) or the effect on the mind of something “after sufficient development of thought” (CP 8.343). On other occasions he speaks less favourably: “pure intellectualism” is defined as a doctrine denying “that blind force is an element in experience distinct from logicality or logical force” (EP, 2, p. 123) whilst in his classic paper The Fixation of Belief he contrasts those who use the scientific method to settle belief with philosophers enjoying “a vastly higher intellectual atmosphere” (CP 5.382n. 12) presumably with Hegel and his followers in mind.

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(EP 2 p. 372), but that of other inquirers. This stronger sense yields an Intellective conception of science. Peirce’s most developed account is unpacked in his Logic of Abduction, through his account of scientific methodology (Boulting, 1994).11 Controversies about the question of what science is, its relative value in society and its place in discussions about its value in education often result because disputants are not employing the same conception of science, whether Iconic, Intellective or Indexical. In Chapter 2—“Making Science of Science and Technology”— technology’s place, as an activity within Western Culture, is articulated similarly through three conceptions of technology. An Indexical sense focuses on technology’s historical development and its indications “for science” (Ihde, 1991, p. xi),12 the scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes mediated through instrumentation, as delineated in the writings of Martin Heidegger. The Intellective renders a cognitive conception: technology as the application of science, defended in modern times by the writings of Karl Popper and his followers. An Iconic conception of technology emphasizes an autonomous activity defined instrumentally, well illustrated in the Eotechnic phase, Lewis Mumford’s name for an early historical development in his account of what he named ‘technics’.13 In everyday life, over the last three hundred years, there has been a shift from the Iconic conception to the Indexical, whilst within an institutional, theoretical understanding of technology’s nature over the last thirty years, there has been an argument about the relationship between the Intellective—as Peirce understood it—and the Indexical. This tripartite approach, so far adopted in relation to understanding the nature of science and technology, is applied in Chapter 3, “The Status of Works of Art”. Here an indebtedness to Joseph Margolis’s work on aesthetics is acknowledged. He is well known for his advocacy of the thesis that “artworks are physically embodied and culturally emergent entities” (Margolis, 1974). In defence of this thesis

11 Noel E. Boulting “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914): Peirce’s Idea of Ultimate Reality and Meaning as seen through Scientific Inquiry” in Ch. 3 of American Philosophers’ Ideas of Ultimate Reality and Meaning Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press 1994, sec. 2.4.1. 12 Don Ihde Instrumental Realism Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press 1991 p. xi. 13 Lewis Mumford Technics and Civilization London: George Routledge and Sons 1934 Ch. III.

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he has employed Peirce’s Type-Token distinction (Margolis, 1980, p. 21)14 to distinguish what can be interpreted, as a general claim about a work of art from what is materially manifested in the world: a Token, namely a concrete, singular instance, exemplifying at a cultural level a Type of art work. In addition, employing Peirce’s distinction between something’s existence and its reality can help to clarify Margolis’s use of these terms (Margolis, 1999, p. 94).15 But he neglects what Peirce would call an artwork’s Tone or Tuone: “an indefinite significant character” (CP 4.537).16 So, in the case of a Pissarro painting, for example, we have a Token—a picture hanging in a gallery—awaiting interpretation as a Type of painting, an impressionistic painting, but also something which evokes a sense of feeling in relation to what is experienced—rather than interpreted— as the work’s Tuone, about which there may be disagreement at an interpretative level. Emphasizing a work’s Tuone is to draw attention to i) its aesthetic quality as opposed to its physical existence or the rule-governed way in which it is interpreted; ii) its iconic character, the manner in which it draws an appreciator into its significant qualitative atmosphere; iii) its suggestive power as opposed to something indicating a factual existence or a law-like nature. In Chapter 4—“Art in Society”—Peirce’s distinctions between Type, Token and Tone are developed to suggest that an artwork can be regarded Intellectively, Reifyingling or Iconically. Examining Max Horkheimer’s 1941 essay Art and Mass Culture advances this articulation. In that essay, Horkheimer considers an artwork Iconically— from the standpoint of the creative processes in producing the artwork—to identify its qualitative or Tonal features which “it possesses in itself ”, as Peirce puts it (CP 5.74), so that an appreciator’s experience of it can be transformed into “a pure dream” (CP 3.362), where the distinction between what is imagined about that artwork and the physical nature of its existence, even its cultural reality as

14 Joseph Margolis “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics (1974) Vol. 14, pp. 187–96; Art and Philosophy Brighton, UK: Harvester Press 1980 p. 21. 15 “What I say in this regard is that what is real but does not exist is—at first approximation—real if true, predicatively, of what exists.” Joseph Margolis What, After All, Is a Work of Art Pennsylvania State UP, 1999 p. 94. 16 The term Tuone captures the idea of a colour tone and a musical tune. Peirce raises the question of whether or not it makes sense to compare the colour scarlet with the blare emitted from a trumpet!

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an Intentional object, disappears in its appreciation. But that Iconic dimension is lost in Horkheimer’s analysis as he pursues an Intellective dimension, following Kant’s example, in order to understand how an artwork, as a Type, can preserve a sense of “utopia that evaporated from religion” (CT p. 275).17 But such a sense, even in the avant-garde artworks of his day—manifested in the creations of Joyce and Picasso—lost that dimension as they became sucked into an affirmative culture forwarded by the entertainment industry, which, in their creation, it may have been hoped they could transcend. But that perspective leads to a Reified Indexical conception of art, a physical entity or performance, regarded as a mere Token, which can be bought or sold as a commodity or regarded as a buyer’s private asset to constitute a work’s commodified ‘after life’. Edvard Munch’s The Scream of 1893 is an obvious example. How artworks as objects can be appreciated and thereby interpreted is a problem that provides the focus of Chapter 5, “Within The Interpretative Process”. Clearly, culturally emergent entities can be assigned to certain physical attributes in relation to a first level of interpretation, given the work regarded as a Token—the latter rendering an explanatory interpretation18—in which such culturally emergent properties are embodied. But such cultural assignations possess certain distinctive Intentional attributes at this second level of interpretation—the Intentional—not assignable to purely physical properties, nor, merely, to their artist’s intentions. But in order to make sense of a work’s Tone or Tuone, to account for its Iconic qualities, a third level of Interpretation is required: experientially in terms of what an individual spectator can bring to an appreciation of an artwork and performatively with respect to an artist’s interpretation of the work in performance, as in dance for example. In the final chapter, Chapter 6—“The Problem of Reification”— the different themes of the book are brought together. Given the

17 CT p. 275 stands for Critical Theory: Selected Essays Max Horkheimer p. 275, “Art and Mass Culture” (1941) New York: Continuum pp. 273–90. 18 Rather than an elucidatory interpretation, as explicated in David Novitz’s “Interpretation and Justification” in The Philosophy of Interpretation ed. by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell 1999 pp. 4–24, p. 5. The explanatory is tied more to the idea of an exogenous understanding where hypotheses are formed to make sense of what we take to be problematic about the existence of physical entities.

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danger of reification within any interpretative activity—an issue raised in Chapter 4—different senses of reification have to be distinguished if sense is to be attached to the claim that any language-use involves reification or that “There is no harm in reification provided it is done nicely!” A return is made to the distinction between the Iconic, Indexical and Intellective conceptions, as outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, to make sense of three kinds of reification. Iconic Reification is risked by the artist in the process of creating an artwork at an expressive level since what is created can be regarded as an objectification of what the artist experienced in sheer presentness. Here the term Iconic Reification can be applied. This label refers to a work’s Tone or Tuone, which can give us not ‘the’ but ‘a’ sense of this form of reification on the artist’s part. Intellective Reification is risked by the appreciator of an artwork who experiences it simply as a Type, as exemplifying a category determined by what one can learn cognitively about a work rather than through enjoying its “aspectual reverberation” as Michael Krausz once put it (Krausz, 1993, p. 123).19 In this way the Tonal aspect of an artwork may be simply ignored as long as interpretative activity is restricted to its own cognitive categories. These two forms of reification have to be distinguished from a third—Indexical Reification—which, as we saw in Chapter 4, can be tied to the idea of false consciousness in regard to the artwork taken as a Token: an unreflective attitude arising from commercial interests manifested in what is taken to exist in relation to how we think and act, so determining our attitudes in everyday life. The case for the necessity of Iconic Reification in the arts, how it is central to any form of Reification and the way false consciousness may be avoided either by the artist or an appreciator of creative works are issues which close this chapter’s contribution to the debate about interpretative activity. Finally, the book ends with an Appendix entitled “Objections to Iconic Conception of Artworks”. In it a dialogue takes place between two disputants, one of whom emphasizes the experiential dimensions of appreciating artworks, the other a more cognitive approach. The former seeks to emphasize the creative aspects involved in the processes originating an artwork. The latter counters with concerns as to how

19 Michael Krausz Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993 p. 123.

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an artwork is to be interpreted as an entity emerging in some sociocultural world. Can, and if so how, the artistic processes generating the artwork—which may outstrip the intentions of its author—be credited in interpretative terms?

CHAPTER ONE

ON USING THE TERM ‘SCIENCE’ Quotations can haunt a reader. One from a non-published paper, which Peirce wrote for his proposed Lessons from the History of Science in 1896, proves no exception: If we endeavour to form our conceptions upon history and life, we remark three classes of men. The first consists of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art. The second consists of the practical men, who carry on the business of the world. They respect nothing but power, and respect power only so far as it (is) exercised. The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn, just as other men have a passion to teach and to disseminate their influence. If they do not give themselves over completely to their passion to learn, it is because they exercise self-control. Those are the natural scientific men; and they are the only men that have any real success in scientific research. (CP 1.43) (My emboldening!)

This passage haunts consciousness because it suggests so many possible lines of inquiry. It seems to imply that if we ask questions such as ‘What is there?’, ‘What is Nature?’, ‘What is Life?’ they cannot be answered without assuming something attitudinal on the questioner’s part. This presupposes perspectives within which any one of these questions can arise. Again, is it the case that one of these perspectives is somehow more valid as a way of regarding Reality, Nature or Life itself? Consider, for example, applying what is said here to different perspectives that might be taken in viewing Kimmeridge Bay, a beauty spot west of Swanage in Dorset. To regard that place as a picture is to be charmed by it for reasons tied to contemplating the play of forms, the light cast by the sun’s rays over them and the way the sea has created a delightful shape on the beach. Such viewing would constitute an iconic perspective since the view focuses on what is

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of value in itself, whereas to view this scene in the light of smoky fires which occasionally occur would be to insist that its value lay in the fact that oil might be gained from within its rock structures; an indexical perspective. The attempt to conceive this landscape from the perspective of the age of its curious rock formations, the way one set superseded another and their twisted nature would be to see the scene more geologically, rendering perhaps a cognitive or intellective perspective on this bay. Peirce, in what follows the above, appears to be somewhat contemptuous of one of these perspectives: the indexical, that arising from those “who carry on the business of the world”. But for the purposes of this chapter it is necessary to focus upon what he has to say about natural scientific human beings. He offers us a descriptive account of their activity, which constitutes science. But notice that it is described in such a way that even a 19th-century philosopher would be able to assent to it as constituting the philosophic enterprise. Peirce’s account is in terms of an inquirer, a person who is prepared to penetrate into the ways of the cosmos out of a passion to learn. Equating the philosopher’s and the scientist’s activities in the pursuit of inquiry—as a descriptive account—is not unique to his 1896 paper. Elsewhere Peirce speaks of Philosophy as “learning what can be learned from experience which presses in upon every one of us daily and hourly” (CP 5.120); Philosophy is regarded as one kind of “Science of Discovery” “in the sense of discovering what really is true but it limits itself to so much of truth as can be inferred from common experience” (CP1.183–4) (cf. CP 1.241); Philosophy is spoken of as a “department of pure science” (CP 1.645). Such claims are clarified to a degree by Peirce saying that Philosophy “is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development” (CP 5.61), a science that should be taken into account before real scientific inquiry begins “with its microscope, or telescope or whatever” (CP 1.246) so as to clarify “a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences” (CP 5.423). The Iconic Conception of Science What is significant here, however, is how Peirce is using that term science. And this inquiring, ‘wanting to learn’ sense, prior to scientific

on using the term ‘science’

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investigation proper getting underway, will be labelled an Iconic conception of science since inquiry is valued for its own sake. In other words, to regard science Iconically is to identify it as a living enterprise in contrast to some other activity, say that of the artist or the business person. Peirce defines science in this sense, not so much in terms of a kind of “knowing” nor with respect to its being a body of “organized knowledge” but as “diligent inquiry into truth for truth’s sake”; not for the sake of taking delight in contemplating truth “but from an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things”. So, for the scientific person, to penetrate into the ways of the cosmos, for example, seems “the only thing that makes life worth living” (CP 1.43–4). And such activity is made possible because “every single truth of science”, according to Peirce, “is due to the affinity of the human soul to the soul of the universe, imperfect as that affinity no doubt is” (CP 5.47). That affinity can be displayed within the exercise of the scientific person’s imagination in conjuring up “what the truth can be” (CP 1.46). So, a passion to learn, allied to an imagination “which dreams of explanations and laws” (CP 1.48), makes scientific activity possible for its own sake alone. Characterizing science in this way—“as a living historic entity” (CP 1.44)—is to regard it as independent of anything else. Notice, too, some salient features of a sense of the Iconic that makes the Iconic conception of science what it is. It is focussed upon i) an individual’s activity in ii) pursuing something for its own sake, where iii) the processes sustaining the activity are stressed rather than the activities’ outcomes. It emphasizes a sense of iv) being drawn into something to the exclusion of other things to such a degree that only a certain sense of self-control would prevent someone giving themselves up to an activity—in this case inquiring—completely. In that case, with respect to this last claim, no distinction can be drawn between the inquirer and his/her inquiring. The latter would constitute the nature of the former. Interestingly, Peirce defines a pure icon as not drawing “any distinction between itself and its object” (CP 5.74) so that it “is independent of any purpose” (EP, 2, p. 306). Let us consider some examples. Someone might be interested in asking the following question: “If one takes a jug of cold water from the tap and a jug of water from the same tap which has been brought to boiling point and then takes the two outside in freezing conditions, the one still very hot, which would freeze first?” Now if it appears that the answer might be ‘the

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water which was brought to boiling point’, then why? Although this is not Peirce’s own example,1 he does render others to his reader not necessarily with respect to “the rarity” of a particular phenomenon but even cases in which the most familiar of facts might seem to call for explanation (CP 7.196).2 But his striking examples belong to the former kind. He considers the experience of sitting opposite a woman he considers to be forty in a street car. He wonders about her past history and indulges in some very pertinent and exact observations about her and her attire and guesses that this “woman was an ex-nun” (CP 7.196). Or again he considers the “dress, expression of countenance, and bearing” of someone observed, thereby supposing, “this man is a Catholic priest” (CP 6.525). Such examples can be taken to illustrate the inquiring nature constituting an Iconic conception of science. The Intellective Conception of Science Other than his use of the label Positive Science for this kind of activity, Peirce never developed the idea of an Iconic conception of science for reasons to be elucidated later. Rather, in his article The Basis of Pragmatism of 1906 he distinguishes three senses of science. The first—scientia—is denoted as “knowledge for certain”. Being a fallibilist,3 this sense is ignored. Secondly, there is the idea of science as “systematized knowledge”. More about that later. Thirdly, he does render what I have called an Iconic conception of science as meaning for inquirers “the concrete body of their own proper activities, in seeking such truth as seems to them highly worthy of life-long devotion”. But then he delineates this wide ranging sense of this conception by adding the claim that such activities are to be

1 In To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical, Leicester: Upfront Pub. (2003), the case of trying to identify a bird eating seed in one’s garden is given (Ch. VI). A farmer near Cirencester, Gloucestershire, as a result of his organic farming, noticed that cows fed on a diet to include iodine and selenium caught TB less than cows without this diet, as did the badgers on such a diet. His findings may stop the culling of UK badgers. Today BBC Radio 4, Wednesday April 5th. “Vitamin Pills or Widespread Culls” 8.50 am. 2 Peirce considers the case of trees in a forest not forming “a regular pattern” (CP 7.189 & 195). 3 “—our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy” (CP 1.171).

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pursued “by the most critically chosen methods, including all the help both general and special” that scientific men “can obtain from another’s information and reflection” (EP, 2, p. 372). This developed sense of the Iconic can be called an Intellective conception of science. The significance of the term Intellective takes what belongs to thought at the Iconic level and develops it according to some method. Its significance lies in the way thought is conveyed “to a mind” as an idea “about a thing” (CP, 2, p. 5), “some kind of mental effects” of something which can be cashed in terms of “the effect that would be produced in the mind” “after sufficient development of thought” (CP 8.343). This Intellective conception of science includes but goes beyond the Iconic—“The life of Science is in the desire to learn” (CP 1.235)—in stressing, for that desire to lead to success, the importance of i) scientists rather than an isolated subject inquiring; ii) the use of appropriate methods which are employed in this activity, developed over the last 100 years; iii) the emphasis on general, lawlike principles—consider the establishment of epistemic standards exemplified in the concern for fruitfulness in predicting new phenomena, the explanatory power of theorizing, coherence, simplicity, consistency etc.—governing scientific activities on an International scale.4 Indeed, Peirce points out that “General principles—if deliberately adopted, must have been subjected to criticism; and any criticism of them that can be called scientific and that results in their acceptance must involve an argument in favor of their truth” (CP 7.187). Such critical activity can only be a public rather than a merely private affair. This Intellective conception Peirce refers to as heuretic science. It emphasizes the idea of science as a form of knowing. This more interpretative sense focuses on science as a “living process” “busied mainly with conjectures which are either getting framed or tested” (CP 1.234). The consciousness of such a process can be distinguished from other forms of awareness since “it covers a time” (CP 1.357 & 381) whereas a feeling or an action may not do so. The term Intellective is used because of Peirce’s emphasis on the fact that according to him “heuretic scientists” “look upon their work as purely 4 Peirce, on his visit to Europe, became the first American scientist to participate in the Committee meeting of an International Scientific Association—the Permanent Commission of the International Geodetic Association—where he reported his findings on his pendulum experiments in September, 1875.

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theoretical” that is to say, they are “particularly given to thinking of their results as affording possible conditions for new experiments, if not in the narrower, then in the broader sense of that term, although they may have the vaguest possible notions of what those experiments may be” (EP, 2, p. 372). If the Iconic conception of Science is to be understood more experientially, constituted as it is by “Attentive Sensation, though one might in ordinary parlance, call it ‘observation’—that is to say Noticing”, the Intellective conception is concerned with cognitive activity, what “men of science” “have concluded from their reasonings about observations” (EP, 2, p. 471). And such reasonings would apply equally in a narrow sense, where an experiment is controlled inside special conditions, or in a broader sense where ordinary observations are significant in testing a hypothesis. But in either case the operations of the mind are important in entertaining different hypotheses so as to investigate a scientific question thereby finding one “that experiment would not refute” (CP 7.197). The Indexical Conception of Science Peirce often contrasts this heuretic sense of science with what he calls the “systematized knowledge” that arises out of the intellectual inquiries pursued under the name of heuretic science. This “systematized knowledge” is regarded as “thoroughly established truth”, “labelled and put upon the shelves of each scientist’s mind”. It has three kinds of future: it can be applied directly as useful knowledge in practical affairs; it can be used by the scientist “almost exactly as a manufacturer or practicing physician might use it”, applied by that scientist in further cognitive inquiries; it itself can become “an object of science” since within scientific progress it may require re-examination to “undergo a process of purification or of transformation” (CP 1.234). This “systematized knowledge” sense of science can be called an Indexical conception of Science. Peirce calls it retrospective science, characterizing this as a body of “organized knowledge” used “for some ulterior purpose”. That purpose can be to alter someone’s life, to earn money, or to enhance the lives of others. So, retrospective science is applied science. The intrinsic value of inquiry is no longer a concern. Rather the relation of the outcomes of inquiry to some-

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thing else is of interest, science’s indexical relation to some ulterior purpose. Chemists, for example, concern themselves “exclusively with dyestuffs”. They may discover evidence “useful to scientific chemistry”; that doesn’t make them scientists in the sense of learning something for its own sake (CP 1.45). To regard such chemists as scientists would reduce science merely to practicalities, degrading its status to one of the “pot-boiling arts” (CP 1.670). As intimated earlier, Peirce does not regard this conception with any degree of importance, despite its great significance in the development of what has come to be called modernism. Only “inquiry into truth for truth’s sake, without any axe to grind” (CP 1.44) is what interests Peirce, whereas an Indexical conception of science focuses on what such activity points to, outside the confines of the pursuit itself. So, for example, in the sense that the weathercock is an index, its significance lies not in anything about itself as an object. Rather its significance lies in the fact that in “pointing in a certain direction it draws our attention to that direction” (CP 2.286) not to itself. In this sense, the Indexical conception is completely opposed to the Iconic: the former’s significance applies not to something subjective but its i) availability for public appreciation; it points to something’s ii) use rather than that thing’s intrinsic value, in this case that of scientific activity; science as iii) an outcome to be applied is what matters, that is to say, scientific activity seen exogenously rather than endogenously, where, in the latter conception, the processes constituting scientific activity in itself are to the fore. The Logic of Scientific Discovery Now why did Peirce fail to distinguish what has been called the Iconic from the Intellective or the Indexical conceptions of science,5 the latter two referred to as heuretic science and retrospective science respectively? This may have been because he regarded the Iconic as leading towards the Intellective so that the latter came

5 These conceptions have been developed from the way the iconic, indexical and interpretative conceptions were elucidated in my “Science as a Paradigm in the Formation of Socio-Ethical Judgments” in Social Philosophy Today Vol. 18: Truth and Objectivity in Social Ethics, ed. by Cheryl Hughes, Charlottesville, Virginia: Philosophy Documentation Centre, 2003, pp. 45–61.

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to embrace the former. Consider for a moment what Peirce had to say about “Pure Self-Consciousness”. He says it “might be roughly described as a mere feeling that has a dark instinct of being a germ of thought” (CP 5.71). Settling whether or not Peirce is correct here is not to our purpose. Rather it is to say that Peirce saw feeling as leading to and so intimately connected with thought in a quite different way from the manner in which thought might relate to action. As was implied in the elucidation of the Iconic conception of science—“being seized with a great desire to learn the truth”— incites the Intellective: after being so seized, scientists go “to work with all their might by a well considered method to gratify that desire” (CP 1.235) through working on hypotheses generated initially in that first stage of Inquiry.6 And with respect to that first stage, it is the observing of facts, which do not “in themselves contain any practical knowledge” (CP 6.523) that is important. Here Peirce is consistent with what he wrote later: “Direct experience is neither certain nor uncertain, because it affirms nothing —it just is” (CP 1.145). The First Stage, then, of Peirce’s Logic of Scientific Discovery relates to the generation of such hypotheses, which may be surrounded by and “almost drowned in a flood of false notions” (CP 5.50). This “first starting of a hypothesis and the entertaining of it, whether as a simple interrogation or with any degree of confidence, is an inferential step”, called abduction (CP 2.525). Because he wanted to call the whole of the Logic of Scientific Discovery, that is say its three stages—the Logic of Abduction—he later called this First Stage retroduction (CP 1.68). It reflects the possible in experience, felt qualities of the world, expressed iconically. As an example Peirce cites the experience of seeing a Catholic priest, resulting in the formation of a hypothesis. This constitutes abduction or retroduction “—because that would explain his dress, expression of countenance and bearing” (CP 6.525). Such an “abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight” (CP 5.181).

6 What follows is taken from my “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914): Peirce’s Idea of Ultimate Reality and Meaning Related to Humanity’s Ultimate Future as See Through Scientific Inquiry” in American Philosophers’ Ideas of Ultimate Reality and Meaning, ed. by A.J. Reck (et al.) Toronto UP, 1994, sec. 2.4.1.

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The Second Stage entails examining the hypothesis by collecting together “all sorts of conditional experiential consequences” as if it were true, having made it “as perfectly distinct as possible”, a step which “has been happily provided with the name of deduction” (CP 6.470–1). Since, in this process, an entity is being represented as something to an interpretant by means of concepts, deduction, as a form of inference is co-ordinated with mentality, some rule-like feature within interpretation. It refers to the real within experience since such deductions can be made by anyone committed to argument about the significance of such a hypothesis. In the Catholic priest example, deduction requires the drawing out of the consequences of the abductive suggestion. Surely Catholic priests “—are more or less familiar with Latin pronounced in the Italian manner.” If a remark in Latin were to be made pronounced with an Italian accent it would rule out anyone not accustomed to such pronunciation. Moreover, if the remark were made he would be so surprised “he cannot but betray his understanding of it” (CP 6.526). The Third Stage of Inquiry involves taking up the prediction that the hypothesis makes so as to test it (CP 2.755). This “characteristic way of reasoning is induction” (CP 6.472). Whether implicit in perceptual judgments or explicit in law-like statements, as general presuppositions for all experience, elucidated by deduction, either form of hypothesis can be tested through induction. In the case of the Catholic priest, testing a deduction, by making a remark, is induction “because it is a test of the hypothesis by means of a prediction” having “no originality in it, but only tests a suggestion already made” (CP 6.526). We are now back with experience since our inquirer notices that “he does understand it.” But what is to be done now? Should the inquiry rest content with this result, which has rendered a weak confirmation of the hypothesis? Alternatively a new hypothesis might be generated. If this man were a Catholic priest, he would have to believe in the Pope’s infallibility etc., so that inquiry could begin once more, this time with a new abductive inference. But note that now the nature of the experiencing has altered. The inquirer has not simply noticed something, becoming aware of a possibility unintentionally. Rather s/he is now purposively involved in investigation. As Peirce put it in 1910: “Instead of waiting for experience to come at untoward time”, the inquirer “provokes it when it can do no harm and changes the government of his internal world accordingly” (CP 1.321). So instead of a linear idea attaching to the notion of

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the Logic of Scientific Discovery, we have rather a cycle of inquiry starting with direct experience, evolving into abduction, leading to deduction and then resulting in induction to bring the inquirer back once more to experience. Incidentally, because induction involves the clear, factual identification of objects in time and space, existence—not simply possibility or reality—is invoked, employing as it does the indexical-function of language. Moreover, induction is important because the generality— carried with the concepts employed by human intellects—embodied in law-like statements, presupposes future confirmation in the light of the facts. This claim is important for Peirce’s realism since universals or generals are to be regarded as much more than mere convenience tickets for referring to presently existing individuals.7 As Peirce puts it in relation to trying to identify two people with names: “—without indices it is impossible to designate what one is talking about. Any mere description would leave it uncertain whether they were not mere characters in a ballad; but whether they be so or not, indices can designate them” (CP 2.295). Scientism If all our cognitive inquiries are regarded as if they were scientific in character and if Peirce in his comparison of scientists with artists and practical people gave the former pride of place, isn’t he open to the charge of endorsing Scientism? To answer this question, a definition is required: Scientism is the doctrine that science is not to be understood as one form of knowledge but rather that all knowledge must be identified with science.8 This is an epistemological thesis, but it can carry certain psychological implications. It may imply that thinking is to be regarded as strategic in the way it makes mental rehearsal of manipulative techniques, devised to attain certain end results, possible. As Peirce puts it in his What Pragmatism Is of 1905 (WPI from now on), such thinking characterizes those who “think of everything just as everything is thought of in the labora-

7 J.F. Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism, Seattle: Washington UP, 1963, p. 10. 8 J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) tr. by J.J. Shapiro, London: Heinemann, 1978, p. 4.

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tory, that is, as a question of experimentation” (CP 5.411). Furthermore, when it comes to action, what we do can be explicated through a methodological analysis of scientific practices, that is, through calculated manipulation.9 Now how far does Peirce identify his own philosophic position with Scientism? The answer to this question is not easy to give since in his hands Scientism is a slippery doctrine not only because of the way he handles it but because it can take one of three forms: dogmatic; epistemological; predictive.10 To adopt Scientism unthinkingly would be to recommend science not as a way but THE way of life since its devotees would be “—saturated, through and through, with the spirit of the physical sciences” (CP 1.3) just as Peirce admits he was. Indeed, at first sight, it might look as if Peirce is treating the experimentalist’s point of view as though he is advocating it.11 In addition, he sees the experimentalist as simply side-stepping the high sounding aspirations of those concerned with, metaphysical issues or what Peirce calls “ontological meaning” (CP 5.411).12 Finally he confesses not only that he would like to be regarded as a thinker of the experimentalist type, but when he reads other philosophers, he puts trust in “—strains of thought that recalled the ways of thinking of the laboratory” (CP 5.412). Peirce’s Use of Different Methods of Writing To deal with the issue as to how far Peirce adopted such a Dogmatic form of Scientism, a careful examination has to be made of the way that doctrine is presented. To do this we need to proceed by means of a slight diversion by turning to some remarks of William James. 9 Cf. my “Conceptions of Human Action and the Justification of Value Claims” in Inquiries into Values, ed. by S.H. Lee, E. Mellen Press, 1988, pp. 178–93, pp. 186–9. 10 What follows is taken from my “Pragmaticism and Scientism” presented at the SAAP Conference The American Philosophical Tradition as Interpreted and Used in Other Countries at New York State University, Buffalo, March 1st–4th. 1990. 11 So he says it would be a good thing if those “—whose education has largely been a thing learned out of books” were initiated into experimentation. After all the experimentalist is clear-headed: when it comes to a question of meaning, he will understand the answer to such a question as involving “—a given prescription for an experiment to be carried out” so that “—an experience of a given description will result.” (CP 5.411). 12 This claim is consistent with his rejection of metaphysical speculation in separation from logical reasoning: no logic no metaphysics (CP 1.487).

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Without delving into the latter’s philosophy, attention can be drawn to a distinction he draws in his The Meaning of Truth between the ‘saltatory’ and the ‘ambulatory’, distinctions he credits to a certain Professor Strong. James cites the term ‘difference’ as saltatory since we jump from one term to another in appreciating what the difference is between one item and its comparison in interpretative activity. This form of knowing, is thereby abstract and saltatory. ‘Distance’ within space or time is constituted, he says, by “intervening parts of experience through which we ambulate in succession”. Of course the ambulatory can be reduced to the saltatory; ‘Distance’ can be made abstract “by emptying out whatever is particular in concrete occasions”. But notice that his alternatives here relate to an epistemological claim: “the most general way of characterizing the two views is by saying that my view describes knowing as it exists concretely, while the other view only describes its results abstractly taken”.13 Peirce does not speak of these two ways of knowing. Rather it is the reader who can ascribe to his manner of writing either the descriptive term ‘saltatory’ or ‘ambulatory’. If, for example, we examine his Eighth Lowell of 1903—How To Theorize—it can be said to be written in a saltatory style: Peirce simply sets down, as a product of his thinking, three kinds of inferences. These are clearly delineated and the three different kinds of reasoning corresponding to them are sharply distinguished. But his WPI is not written in this saltatory fashion but rather in an ambulatory manner. He carries the reader through the latter in an exploratory fashion, as though the reader him/her self is engaged in processes of thinking,14 which may emerge in some kind of conclusion as s/he considers alternatives to that point of view. So Peirce appears to be appraising his own former standpoint in distinguishing his version of pragmatism from its rivals (CP 5.411–15), but in his reworking of material from his two famous birth certificates of pragmatism—The Fixation of Belief and How to Make our Ideas Clear—he develops an internal dialogue between himself and a Mr. Make Believe (CP 5.416–21), before a Socratic type of dialogue breaks out between someone called the

13 W. James, The Meaning of Truth (1909), introd. by R. Ross, Michigan UP: Ann Arbor pbk 1970, pp. 138–9; cf. R.A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Though, North Carolina UP 1974, ch. III. 14 I owe this suggestion to Carl Hausman.

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‘Questioner’ and the ‘Pragmaticist’. Furthermore, we can’t be sure whether its concluding section (CP 5.430–37) is part of this dialogue or not, or simply tagged on, at least in the way it appears in Collected Papers.15 What is clear is his obvious preference for the instinctual or common-sensism with respect to life itself, a view defended elsewhere (CP 2.3, 2.177, 4.450, 5.60). Despite, in its opening paragraph, his pointing out that if the non-experimentalist were “—to take skilful soundings of the experimentalist’s mind”, he too would adopt his experimental attitude, he clearly exempts topics related to “personal feelings” or by a person’s “bringing up”. Yet he makes two strange moves in the following paragraph. Firstly, in the expression that he as a writer “—here and in what follows simply exemplifies the experimentalist type”, he seems to imply that he may not be that kind of thinker outside the limits of this present paper (CP 5.411–2). Secondly, the laboratory life he says did not prevent him from “—becoming interested in methods of thinking”. Through considering these issues, he says, this writer was led to present his theory. It relates, he says, NOT to truth, NOR to the acquisition of truth NOR even to a particular epistemological doctrine. His theory was related to meaning—the meaning of an assertion. It was “—that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life”.16 By a peculiar locution— “—since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct”—the thinker Peirce, he says, reached a definition of his doctrine of pragmatism: a complete definition of a concept referred to the accurate definition of “—all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or the denial” of the concept would imply, and nothing more (CP 5.412).

15 This very book, it might be said, is written in a saltatory fashion with the exception of its Appendix. 16 The fact that his theory concerns meaning does not prevent its being interpreted scientistically. After all, Peirce does say, in ascertaining the meaning of an action, that we have “to determine what habits it produces” and if this claim is interpreted naturalistically, as it has been, in terms of physical operations, objective facts or causal processes, such an interpretation would lead to pragmatizing once more Peirce’s Pragmaticism scientistically (cf. Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (1972), tr. by G. Adey and D. Frisby, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980, p. 107).

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Here Peirce specifically identifies the conduct of a person’s life with experimentation, yet he sustains, in an ambulatory manner, the idea of speaking of the originator of this doctrine as “the writer” or “he” who “invented the name Pragmatism” (CP 5.412) for this doctrine. Speaking in this distanced manner from what he invented, then, it was this “writer” or “he” too, who specifically: i) defined a concept in terms of “—all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply” and who ii) spoke of the “most striking feature” of this “new theory” as its “recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose; (CP 5.412), though it may appear subsequently that he meant scientific cognition and scientific purpose! Scientism as an Epistemological Doctrine Even if he does distance himself from such a dogmatic form of scientism—“I know very well that science is not the whole of life” (CP 5.537) as he puts it elsewhere—the impression that Peirce is an advocate of epistemological scientism is not so easily dismissed. Note, by the way, he does not say, as he did elsewhere “Philosophy is Positive Science”.17 Instead, in WPI he explores the idea that scientific activity can be compared with the philosophic, as we saw earlier, rather than saying that philosophy itself must become a science, and the one thing he wants from this comparison is the illumination about the way science is capable of generating “—a suitable technical nomenclature, whose every turn has a single definite meaning universally accepted among students of the subject”. Subsequently, he attempts to legitimise his own activity as a philosopher by showing his reader how he will satisfy such a requirement. This move enables him to take a swipe at those whom he thinks have injured philosophy by the wresting of its terms “from their original meanings” (CP 5.413). So he can speak of kissing his bantling “pragmatism” goodbye, announcing the name “pragmaticism” for his former

17 Yet even in this case, Peirce delimits this thesis by adding “in the sense of discovering what really is true” (CP 1.184).

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doctrine, a term “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (CP 5.414). We now have an additional reason for seeing why he writes in an ambulatory fashion in establishing this conclusion. He needs to show something about the nature of philosophical activity in comparison with the scientific. For Peirce, scientific inquiry can provide an analogy for philosophical activity but, as he himself pointed out in his 1909 article Notes on Metaphysics, analogies “—are never perfect, for an analogy that should be made perfect would be more than an analogy” (CP 6.325). In his philosophic activity he shows his reader how a possibility can be entertained at first—that a philosopher should adopt the experimentalist’s attitude—and then how it is to be delimited in the case of instinctual behaviour, personal feelings or metaphysical beliefs. But by emphasizing the way science employs a suitable technical nomenclature, Peirce can legitimise his own move to rename his former doctrine as “pragmaticism”. In this way he can treat the term as though it did indeed cover “—his original conception of the doctrine” but, through his ambulatory style of writing, avoid the charge of ‘scientistic’ for his philosophising. Scientism as Predictive for Rationality Itself Yet despite keeping both a dogmatic and an epistemological form of Scientism at bay, does he not endorse Scientism as predictive for rationality itself? When he says philosophy is a positive science, could not his remark “—it limits itself to so much truth as can be inferred from common experience” (CP 1.183) be seen as meaning that our common experience should be treated scientifically. Indeed, in what now follows in WPI (CP 5.416–7) he does exactly that by going over old ground in his article The Fixation of Belief. This is done hardly satisfactorily,18 unless he is using his ambulatory style, especially in relation to Mr. Make Believe, ironically with respect to either or both what he or James once believed in 1877. But he then goes on to treat not only our beliefs and doubts about experience scientifically, but, indeed, our actions themselves in considering the degree to which a person “can exert a measure of self-control 18 Karl-Otto Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, tr. by J.M. Krois, Massachusetts UP, 1981, p. 107.

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over his future actions” (CP 5.418). He then relates this idea to what distinguishes “—a rational being” (CP 5.419) before breaking into his “exposition of pragmatism” (CP 5.422). In saying all this then, is Peirce offering his reader a scientistic account of rationality—the view “that the social progress of science will bring about simultaneously a rationalization of human conduct, whose ‘habits’ may be conceived as being analogous to natural laws”.19 Elsewhere, in the 1901 Logic of History paper, for example, he speaks of “the whole motive of our inquiry” as being the attempt to rationalize in relation to using a hypothesis to explain surprising facts (CP 7.220). Yet on several occasions he distances himself from such attempts at rationalization. So, in the 1902 piece Critical Analysis of Logical Theories Peirce writes (CP 2.3): —we have an instinctual theory of reasoning, which gets corrected in the course of our experience. So, it would be most unreasonable to demand that the study of logic should supply an artificial method of doing the thinking that his regular business requires every man daily to do—.

This sentiment is completely in accord with what we find in Why Study Logic where he speaks of instinctive or common sense reasoning being trustworthier than rationalistic reasoning and it being more rational to rely on this than any rationalistic morality. If he is advocating a scientistic account of rationality, what are we to make of these attempts at distancing, and his general advocacy of “—the dictates of Instinct in preference to those of reason herself ” with respect to matters of business, family “—or other departments of ordinary life” especially in relation to “certain dicta of my conscience” (CP 2.177)? The Dualism of the Theoretical and the Practical Three conclusions can be drawn from all this. Firstly, Peirce is endorsing pragmatism’s original faith in common-sensism, trusting in the instinctual, providing this keeps us in harmony with existing natural and social tendencies. That is why he can define common sense in

19 Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (1972–3), tr. by G. Adey & D. Frisby, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, p. 90.

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1905 as “—those ideas and beliefs that man’s situation absolutely forces upon him” (CP 1.129). Secondly, as Peirce puts it in his 1902 Why Study Logic paper, a person “—is not so happy as to be provided with a full stock of instincts to meet all occasions, and so is forced upon the adventurous business of reasoning—”. This is likely to occur when doubt about a belief or an action arises, so that s/he is no longer in harmony with natural or social tendencies.20 In this case it is best “—to base our conduct as much as possible on Instinct, but when we do reason to reason with severely scientific logic” (CP 2.178). Thirdly, Peirce offers a descriptive or explanatory account of how the human attempt to be rational arises.21 In 1896 he argued that the human capacity to reason develops because of the instincts becoming smothered in a highly individualistic and originatory nature (CP 1.178), a conclusion implied four years earlier (6.132). Yet the reader remains tantalized by Peirce’s ambulatory manner of writing, for it might even now be said that he slips from the descriptive to the normative. After all, he does say in the 1902 article Why Study Logic, referred to earlier—and he emphasizes “advisedly” incidentally—that “fortunately” man is forced upon the adventurous business of reasoning. But in this substitution of “rational purport” for sential qualities (CP 5.428), Peirce makes another normative claim which might take a reader in the opposite way, since who would want to lose happiness in this pursuit even for “its splendid substitute, success” (CP 2.178) which reasoning may bring?22 Elsewhere, we find Peirce sustaining this dualism between the theoretical and the practical from a phenomenological point of view. On the one hand we have what James’s pragmatism so much emphasized in the popular imagination: the instinctual or common-sensism which Peirce defined as covering what was “inherited” or “due to 20 Cf. “I do reason not for the sake of my delight in reasoning, but solely to avoid disappointment and surprise” (CP 2.173). 21 Reasoning as a task, involving processes of thinking, is distinguished from rationality pertaining to reasoning as an achievement—the outcome of reasoning—so that we can ask whether a given piece of reasoning is rational or not (CP 2.159). So rationality is “the product and expression of human reason” (CP 2.156) and reasonings are not accepted “which do not seem to be rational” (CP 2.191). 22 “But fortunately (I say it advisedly), man is not so happy as to be provided with a full stock of instincts to meet all occasions, and so is forced upon the adventurous business of reasoning, where the many met shipwreck and the few find, not old-fashioned happiness, but its splendid substitute, success.” (CP 2.178).

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infantile training and tradition” (CP 2.170) On the other hand, we have what Peirce’s pragmaticism explicated as developing out of this: reasoning employed by scientific knowledge (CP 2.253–4). Yet in what he writes he does not see the latter as substituting for the former, since the scientific cannot surpass the instinctual in relation to its degree of certainty (CP 1.204; cf. 5.522; 5.496). Yet the matter is altogether different if Peirce is read as asserting something predictive from an epistemological standpoint. For his own time he was anxious not to be “understood as promising for logic what she could not perform” (CP 2.178). Then it was possible for him to say it “—is the instincts, the sentiments, that make the substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its locus of contact with what is external to it” (CP 1.628). But if, since then, as a result of our awareness of Freud’s insights, which the passage from Why Study Logic at CP 2.178 of itself presages, more and more of what was instinctual in human beings becomes rationalized, then it is not that Peirce’s philosophy is to be understood as scientizing an account of what it is to be rational. Rather, Peirce is to be interpreted as anticipating that this is how rationality would come to be understood in the developments to follow in the age of analysis.23 In other words, while he rejects the prescription ‘Science as the guide to life’ in the pursuit of social engineering, he does appreciate, at a descriptive level, the significance of the idea of human beings, within the development of modernism, outgrowing their natural, instinctive behaviour as this becomes subject to rational scientific control. Implications of Peirce’s Lessons on Scientific Activity What this examination of Peirce’s view of science shows is that because he does not employ the idea of Iconic, Indexical and Intellective conceptions directly, we have to be careful in appreciating the significance of his use of the term ‘science’ within his writings. Interpreting the use of that term endogenously—within the terms of his own philosophy—it has been established how he avoids

23 Cf. at CP 5.513 he speaks about our race being transported to another planet by modern “science, with its microscopes and telescopes, with its chemistry and electricity, and with its entirely new appliances of life.”

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the charge of scientism. Regarding his philosophy exogenously—viewing his conclusions about scientific activity taken as a whole—the Iconic, Indexical and Intellective conceptions may not be that clearly distinguished, although, as we have seen, after the turn of the century he does distinguish the latter two as the retrospective and heuretic respectively. But he constantly rails against the former, against the idea that the sciences should be “looked upon as practical”, “degrading science” just as philosophy of religion is degraded “in claiming that it is practical” in focussing upon the hereafter (CP 1.670). So not only does making science useful degrade pure science and speculation, but causes humans to become one-dimensional, leading them to at least one of two terminations: “either on the one hand, what is called, I hope not justly, Americanism, the worship of business, the life in which the fertilizing stream of genial sentiment dries up or shrinks to a rill of comic tit-bits, or else on the other hand, to monasticism, sleep-walking in this world with no eye nor heart except for the other” (CP 1.673)—through making the philosophy of religion practical—so as to sacrifice the real concerns of this world to an interest in future salvation.24 The Indexical conception then is opposed to the Iconic and the Intellective—to which the Iconic leads—in Peirce’s view. It would take us too far afield to consider whether he is justified in this claim. But clearly it is the case that when public discussions of the place of science in society do occur, it is important to ascertain the conception of science being articulated, whether the Iconic, Indexical or Intellective. However, two examples might be considered, which could sustain his claim. First of all, if in schools science education is conceived in indexical terms, that is to say, initiating students into bodies of knowledge which can have ready application in the everyday world, then it might not be surprising if students are not interested in science presented as established truths to be learnt. The situation might be otherwise if they were initiated into scientific activity according to the Iconic conception. This was, of course, Dewey’s contribution to the education debate of his own time: to become motivated to learn science, it was necessary for students to be initiated into processes of learning, learning through their mistakes, and then to experience the joy of discovery. 24 Cf. Robert J. Roth, “Is Peirce’s Pragmatism Anti-Jamesian?” Internat. Philos. Quart. 1965 (Nov.) Vol. V, pp. 541–63, pp. 545–7.

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Our second example returns us to where we began. Consider Peirce’s claim that those for whom aesthetic feeling rather than the pursuit of inquiry is “the chief thing”. For them “nature is a picture” (CP 1.43). For this to count aesthetically, should such experiencing focus on what is known about what is experienced from a scientific point of view for such an aesthetic appreciation to be rendered possible? After all, aren’t we required to attend to the design and/or orderings of what is experienced?25 Again, before such a suggestion is either endorsed or rejected, don’t we have to consider what is meant by that phrase ‘from a scientific point of view’? Clearly taking an Indexical conception might truncate any aesthetic experiencing. Where would the charm or indeed wonder implicated in aesthetic experiencing arise if it could be claimed that the dimensions in such experiencing could be explicated through using geological knowledge which could settle for us the facts of the case, as someone advocating scientism might well argue? If, however, an Iconic conception of science is being recommended, then it might make sense of referring to scientific activity as related to aesthetic appreciation, since both do invoke a sense of wonder within an individual’s experiencing, leading him or her to explore other perspectives within it for their own sake, as the experiencer becomes drawn more and more into them. Such a position can be sustained without necessarily following Peirce in converting the Iconic into the Intellective conception of science. The latter move would make the interest in science dominate over the aesthetic, in the sense that retroductions formed within aesthetic experiencing could constitute the first stage of his Indagation (CP 6.568), his cycle of Scientific Inquiry or Logic of Abduction. Finally, we are now able to consider Peirce’s response to the kind of questions formulated at the start of this chapter. For him, human beings are to be regarded as inquiring beings, interpreted not psychologically but logically. Their nature is to be understood in term of four basic inclusive dispositions, rather than cashed in the fashionable view that humans are characterized by their capacities for language-use: to be able to experience; to reflect on that experience;

25 Cf. Allen Carlson, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. by S. Kemal & I. Gaskell, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 228–43; my To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical ch. XIII.

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to deduce logically consequences from such reflections; to be able to test them. This characterization determines what we can think and say about ultimate reality and meaning. Indeed, for Peirce, there is no independently accessible ultimate reality and meaning outside such cognitive inquiries. That latter conclusion can provide a solution to one of Michael Krausz’s paradoxes. These two are: i) “whether the natural sciences themselves are best understood as cultural practices”; ii) “whether the “physical sciences” and the “human sciences” designate an essential difference in kind”.26 For Peirce, natural science is an activity engaged in by a community of inquirers, as should be clear from what has been argued in this chapter. This means that the natural sciences themselves have to be understood as cultural practices. How otherwise could they be interpreted? Regarding the second paradox—the relation to or the difference between the physical and the human sciences—that issue may emerge in the development of the following chapters in this book, particularly Chapter Five, “Within The Interpretative Process”.

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Michael Krausz, Rightness and Reasons, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993, p. 4.

CHAPTER TWO

MAKING SENSE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Consider another haunting quotation. This one was written thirty years after Peirce remarked upon three attitudes human beings could take towards what is experienced. This passage occurs in Martin Heidegger’s book Being and Time: “Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’. As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale.’1

It isn’t necessarily because it suggests different lines of inquiry that this quotation haunts consciousness, but because it can generate different interpretations.2 This passage could be read as if Heidegger were distinguishing a number of different perspectives we can adopt towards the natural world: i) ‘Nature’ discovered as something objective, an array of products—rock, forest timber, minerals, water; ii) the power of Nature exercised by water, wind or sun or as protection from these in the case of a mountain or a wood; iii) Nature as that which enthralls us. Fourthly, “Nature” regarded ontologically “in the widest sense” presumably cannot be identified with any one of these three alone but might include all such dimensions.3 It is,

1 M. Heidegger Being and Time tr. by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell 1978 p. 100. 2 What follows, for example, is a slightly different interpretation from that offered in Chapter III of my To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical. 3 Being and Time p. 31. It would be a separate line of inquiry to establish that Heidegger’s sense of “Nature” might best be accessed through that “which assails us and enthralls us as landscape”. Indeed, it might be argued that the latter third way of regarding Nature—that which ‘stirs and strives’—emerges only from the

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however, his introduction of these attitudes taken towards existents, which is of interest: i) the ‘present-at-hand’, objects regarded scientifically; ii) ‘the ready-to-hand’, the practical use of objects; iii) entities appreciated in aesthetic contemplation. According to Heidegger, even if adopting the present-at-hand attitude is necessary for the pursuit of science, to see the world only from this perspective is to adopt scientism. But even if the ready-tohand refers to a kind of tacit awareness employed every day when we use such things as knives, forks and spoons and even if such awareness has experiential priority over any kind of formal cognitions we may have as to their chemical composition, size etc., it is not to be regarded as a superior form of awareness. Indeed, neither a theoretical, objectivist view—the present-at-hand—nor the equipmental view of the world—the ready-to-hand—can explicate everything within its own dimension in experience. Moreover, whilst the theoretical standpoint is derivable from the equipmental on the hand, only “by reason of something” being present-at-hand can anything be equipmental or ready-to-hand.4 Once a hammer, for example, is in need of repair, it becomes an object to be fixed before it can be once more used equipmentally, as an artefact. The Indexical Conception of Technology: Science as Theoretical Technology Later, in his 1955 Lecture The Question of Technology, Heidegger identified technology with what he called “Enframing”. In this later account, modern physics, determined by this Enframing, reveals material nature as “objectness”. Indeed, such Enframing “drives out every other possibility of revealing” the natural world, to the point where human nature itself is to be grasped through such Enframing.5 He claims this development would be unintelligible to the Ancient Greeks since ‘the rule of technology’ would not have had a place in their dimension of ‘Being-with’ the natural world in some way akin to being with humans, from which the other two dimensions emerge (cf. M. Gelven A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time” New York: Harper Torchbook 1970 p. 58). Certainly, elsewhere, Heidegger speaks of three dimensions only (Being and Time p. 121), an issue discussed by Joseph Fell in Heidegger and Sartre New York: Columbia UP 1979 pp. 118–22. 4 Being and Time p. 101. 5 M. Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays New York: Harper, Colophon Bks., 1977, p. 27.

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culture. He arrives, then, at the Indexical conception of technology. Science is “theoretical technology” since it is driven by technology6 so that neither in principle nor in practice can science be distinguished from technology. Once more we can see how, for Heidegger, the theoretical nature of scientific activity is to be seen as deriving from the equipmental, but now, within the development of modernism determined by scientism, the natural world—along with human beings themselves—can be regarded as an array of objects. Now why has attention been drawn to Heidegger’s contribution? Two of his claims seem to endorse what our examination of an aspect of Peirce’s philosophy, in Chapter One, established: I) the significance of three basic attitudes which can be taken in regard to what exists—the theoretical, the equipmental and the aesthetic; II) Heidegger provides a rationale for why scientific inquiries have to be regarded as cultural practices emerging from other cultural activities. But that rationale goes beyond Peirce’s contribution—with some qualifications as we will see—in arguing that a human being can be regarded more as an ‘artifactual creature’, a tool-user, rather than being pre-eminently a cognitive inquirer, as your author might like to see himself in his own activities! But the chief difference between Peirce and Heidegger, in their respective philosophies, lies not in the way the former adopted a positive attitude towards scientific development, whereas the latter was more negative in perceiving the dangers of what he called Enframing. Rather, Heidegger adopted an Indexical conception of technology: science is theoretical technology, so that both are to be understood as indistinguishable from each other both in theory and in practice. Peirce, on the other hand, adopted an Intellective conception: technology is applied science, so that it can be distinguished from technology both in theory and in practice. It might be argued, of course, that Peirce did indeed anticipate the Indexical possibility: “Modern science, with its microscopes and telescopes, with its chemistry and electricity, and its entirely new appliances of life, has put us into quite another world; almost as much so as if it had transported our race to another planet” (CP

6 C. Mitcham “What is Philosophy of Technology” Int. Philos. Quart. March 1985, Vol. 25, No. 1 Issue 97, p. 81.

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5.513).7 But in 1905, he may not have fully appreciated how, through such new technologies, we are presented not with natural objects which can be observed or manipulated, but with scientific entities dressed up by such technologies “so as to exhibit themselves in specific socio-cultural worlds”, as Patrick Heelan has it.8 In other words, what is taken to exist scientifically manifests itself or indicates its actuality “through transformations of perception mediated by standard instruments used as readable technologies”9 to provide a more contemporary meaning for Heidegger’s sense of Enframing. Whereas in Peirce’s own time, the natural world—inciting the possibility of an iconic conception of science, which continued to haunt the heuretic or intellective conception—could be regarded as constituted through non-instrumentally mediated awareness, in the contemporary scientific world, nature is constituted through instrumentally mediated perception. Don’t such claims now provide the warrant for a Genuine Indexical conception of technology, that is to say, for implying that science is in fact driven by developments in technology? That sense of science being driven by technology in practice, however, may not imply necessarily it is in theory. To say this, is to leave room for a weaker sense of an Indexical conception of technology, namely that although the scientific advancement may be driven by developments in technology, that may not be so from a theoretical point of view. This position can be referred to as a Degenerate10 rather than a Genuine Indexical conception. In other words, this driven or determining relation between technology and science is of “a degenerate sort which does not exist as such”—to use Peirce’s words from a slightly different context—but “is only so”

7 CP 5.513 stands for Vol. 5 par., not page, no. 513 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 P.A. Heelan “Natural Science and Being in the World” Man and World (1983), 16 pp. 207–19, p. 219. 9 P.A. Heelan “Perceived Worlds as Interpreted Worlds” in New Essays in Metaphysics ed. by R. Neville, New York State UP 1987 pp. 61–7, p. 69; “Advances in theoretical physics, for instance, depend no less upon electronic computers than upon the brains of physicists.” Arnold Gehlen Man in the Age of Technology tr. by P. Lipscomb, New York: Columbia UP 1980 p. 10. 10 The term ‘Degenerate’ is not to be regarded as normative in this context: “This term is borrowed from geometers, who speak of a pair of complanar rays as a “degenerate case”. That is, the idea of their being a conic is unnecessarily imported” (The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2 (1893–1914) ed. by N. Hauser & C. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana UP 1998 p. 268n.).

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at the level of conceptions or ideas (CP 1.365). That technology determines or drives scientific activity, then, applies only practically but not theoretically, since at this level the relation is not an actual one but merely a relation of reason. Now how would such a Degenerate Indexical conception be exemplified? Karl-Otto Apel’s writings could be regarded as defending a Degenerate Indexical conception of technology. He would agree with Peirce that it is not possible to “assimilate the methodological structure of science to that of technique or even technology in the usual sense”.11 But Apel does emphasize, along with Jurgen Habermas, what is called a technical cognitive interest. This is an interest which ensures survival for human beings. To act effectively humans rely on their capacity to manipulate the natural world successfully. So in continually expanding powers of technical control, science can be employed to generate the possibility of securing and expanding what can be called feed-back monitored action through the use of relevant information. In this way, the technical cognitive interest ensures that “technical control over objectified processes”12 becomes possible. Moreover, without recognizing, in human historical development, the emergence of this “behavioural system of instrumental action”13 as Habermas puts it, that development could not be understood. In practice, then, technology—the latter interpreted as the “scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes”14—and science are indistinguishable, even if in principle they can be so distinguished. Indeed, in the spirit of this Indexical conception, the advancement of technology determines the nature of scientific inquiry within an industrially orientated society such as we inhabit, because the methodology and achievements of science are now fully integrated within that society as a productive force,15 thereby giving a sense to Heidegger’s notion of Enframing.

11 K.O. Apel “Types of Social Science in the Light of Human Cognitive Interests” in Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences S.C. Brown (ed.), 1977, Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, p. 7. 12 J. Habermas Knowledge & Human Interests tr. J.J. Shapiro, London: Heinemann, 2nd. ed. 1978 p. 78. 13 Knowledge & Human Interests p. 35. 14 J. Habermas Towards a Rational Society London: Heinemann, 1980, p. 57. 15 “The notion that technique constitutes “applied science” is obsolete and old fashioned; today the three establishments—industry, technique and natural science— presuppose one another.” Arnold Gehlen Man in the Age of Technology, p. 10.

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If, then, it can be claimed that Peirce did anticipate the Indexical conception, why did he not develop it? After all, didn’t he also write: “The study of the steam engine gave birth to modern thermodynamics. Such is the historical fact. The steam engine made mechanical precision possible and needful. Mechanical precision rendered modern observational precision possible, and developed it. Now every scientific development is due to some new means of improved observation” (EP/2/38–9)?16 And didn’t he, in 1898, anticipate Rachel Laudan’s claim: “science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science”.17 So, why didn’t Peirce adopt the slogan ‘Science is theoretical Technology’? In 1902 he wrote: “Speaking in a broad, rough way, it may be said that the sciences have grown out of the useful arts, or out of arts supposed to be useful. Astronomy out of astrology; physiology, taking one medicine as a half way, out of magic; chemistry out of alchemy; thermotics from the steamengine, etc.” (EP/2/127). Yet he failed to adopt the slogan ‘Science is theoretical technology’. Peirce’s Cognitive Conception of Science and Technology Peirce did not adopt the slogan ‘Science as theoretical technology’ in the light of three claims: firstly, because of his definition of technology; secondly, his highly cognitive view of science, as we saw in Chapter One; thirdly, because of the habits of mind evidenced in the pursuit of science. In relation to the first claim, Peirce equates Technology with “the fine and useful arts” (CP 1.264) which he identifies with “practical sciences” (CP 5.125): “I recognize two branches of science: Theoretical, whose purpose is simply and solely knowledge of God’s truth; and Practical for the uses of life” (CP 1.239). He speaks of listing these “Applied Sciences or Arts” “containing upwards of three hundred different sciences” (EP/2/37).18

16 EP/2/38–9 means The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Vol. 2 (1893–1913) pp. 38–9. 17 R. Lauden (ed.) The Nature of Technological Knowledge: Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub. Co. 1984 p. 9. 18 He continues “ranging from such general psychical sciences as ethics, religion, law, to gold beating, cooking, charcoal burning and so forth” (EP/2/37). In relation to the practical sciences he says “I mean, then, all such well-recognized sciences now in actu, as pedagogies, gold-beating, etiquette, pigeon-fancying, vulgar

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With respect to the second claim, science can’t just be theoretical technology since such practical arts and sciences have their own “manifest destiny to grow into pure sciences” (EP/2/39) rather than just applied sciences. Even useful sciences, such as engineering and surgery, have their ultimate value or “divine spark” not in “petty practicality” (CP 1.671) but in a pursuit he regards as one of a higher order. To make that vocation clearer requires something to be said about the differing habits of mind ascribed to the scientist on the one hand and the practical person on the other, our third claim. The practical person “has a definite job which he sets himself to accomplish. To that end he has to adopt some consistent plan, based upon a theory, and to that theory he must be wedded before the work begins”. In acting upon this theory, as if it were true, it has to be believed to represent the facts of the case. But a scientific person, in being “desirous of learning the truth”, must ardently desire “to have his present provisional beliefs (and all his beliefs are merely provision)”, not adopted as valid in the way the practical person accepts them, but “swept away, and will work hard to accomplish that object”. So the practical man can’t understand “what science is about unless he becomes as a little child and is born again” (CP 6.3), to undertake a life pursuing the truth, rather than seeking to do something useful with it. But Peirce’s contrast here, between two ways of living, is initiated by the conceptions he has of science itself. The Intellective Conception of Technology: Technology as Applied Science With respect to this heuretic or Intellective conception of science, Peirce makes two important distinctions, which have emerged again in contemporary debates about the relationship between science and technology. Both are in relation to what he seeks to understand about observation. The first lies in his emphasis upon the idea that, as a scientist, he exercises “a disposition to think of everything just

arithmetic, horology, surveying, navigation, telepathy, printing, bookbinding, papermaking, deciphering, ink-making, librarian’s work, engraining etc. In short, this is by far the more various of the two branches of science. I must confess to being utterly bewildered by its motley crew, but fortunately the natural classification of this branch will not concern us in logic—at least, will not do so as far as I can perceive” (CP 1.243).

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as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that is, as a question of experimentation” (CP 5.411). Unlike the iconic conception of science, where the pursuit of science is identified with “the desire to learn” (CP 1.235), so that a “scientific” intelligence is “an intelligence capable of learning from experience” (CP 2.227), in relation to the heuretic or Intellective conception, it is the nature of observing that is foremost: “perceiving by the aid of analysis” in the light of “testing suggestions of theories” as opposed to “passive perception unassisted by thought” (CP 1.34). Put in a more dramatic way, in the one case, an observation might be made quite passively yet lead to inquiry: “I wonder if—”. In the other, the observation becomes much more scientific when placed within laboratory conditions. Here experiments result with respect to manipulable objects. Whereas in the first case, for an Iconic conception, it might be said Nature poses issues, Man disposes of them, in the latter, for the Intellective conception, Nature is required to ‘answer’ questions put by the scientist in the context of the laboratory experiment. Peirce’s second distinction can be regarded as even more important. He anticipated a claim developed by those whom Don Ihde claims to be advocates of Instrumental Realism:19 “the great landmarks in the history of science are to be placed at the points where new instruments, or other means of observation, are introduced. Astronomy before the telescope and astronomy after the telescope. Prephotographic astronomy and photographic astronomy. Chemistry before the exact analytic balance, and after” (CP 1.102). But once more we return to an Indexical conception of technology, with its focus upon the development of technology in its implications “for science”20 as opposed to the implications of such development itself which, later, will lead us to an Iconic conception of technology. Peirce himself, of course, would not have been interested in developing such distinctions largely because of his obsession with the logic of pure science. Nor was he concerned with the logical nature of the branch of sciences he called the practical (CP 1.243). Yet his slogan—“Technology as Applied Science”—haunted discussions in the philosophy of science during the middle part of the twentieth century. Even Michael Polanyi, who in Chapter 4 of Personal Knowledge

19 20

Don Ihde Instrumental Realism Bloomington: Indiana UP 1991 Ch. V. Don Ihde Instrumental Realism p. xi.

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emphasizes what Don Ihde has called “the primacy of practice”21 in concentrating on what scientists do and the skills they employ in experimental activity, he sustains Peirce’s slogan: “in science originality lies in the power of seeing more deeply than others into the nature of things, while in technology it consists in the ingenuity of the artificer in turning known facts to a surprising advantage”. Polanyi argued this case in order to save the distinction from being “violently challenged in principle” as it was in countries “subject to Marxism”. Yet he acknowledges this distinction was more significant in the late nineteenth century, when “a true appreciation of science became possible”, than in the twentieth.22 Yet in his own work he had to distance himself from Popper’s claim that science and technology can be distinguished in principle: pure science equates with the search for knowledge, applied science seeks theories which “are merely powerful instruments for certain purposes”.23 And that distancing comes about because of Polanyi’s emphasis upon tacit awareness, a kind of subsidiary form of bodily awareness humans carry with them into all their activities, elicited in a kind of know-how which issues in any attempt at understanding our world, whether it be in a scientific or technological sense. Consider, for example, a woman wearing a hat and being able to avoid things which might break a feather precariously attached in it; a person driving a car into a narrow opening without having to measure the distance across the opening; a blind person using a stick to ascertain obstacles to a forward movement.24 If that issue—concerning the nature of embodied awareness we carry with us in relation to all our activities—were not enough, Polanyi draws attention to forms of inquiry lying between science and technology: Systematic Technology—consider electronics and aerodynamic theory—which can be regarded “as pure science” on the one hand, and Technically Justified Science—consider “the scientific study” of coal, metals and other materials—on the other.25

21 Don Ihde Technics and Praxis Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co.: A Pallas Pbk./9 p. xix. 22 Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge (1958) New York: Harper Torchbook 1962 pp. 178, 180 & 182. 23 Karl Popper Conjectures and Refutations (1963) New York: Harper 1965 p. 226. 24 M. Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception tr. by C. Smith, London: Routledge & K. Paul 1966, p. 143. 25 Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge p. 179.

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Yet Polanyi still thought that they could be distinguished in practice. So whilst, theoretically, it may be true that “inventions rely as a rule on known facts of experience, but it may happen that a new invention involves a discovery”, in practice Patent Law “draws a sharp distinction between a discovery which makes an addition to our knowledge of nature and an invention, which establishes a new operational principle serving some acknowledged advantage.” And because of this stance—weakening the distinction between the two in principle, yet advocating it in practice since “only the invention will be granted protection by a patent, and not the discovery as such”26— he could be seen as forwarding a Degenerate Intellective conception of technology: experience does not supply evidence to sustain the ‘in principle’ distinction between science and technology, one which may have had its home in some earlier historical conception of science. To dogmatically assert that the ‘in principle’ distinction can be so sustained is to float “in an ideal world” not asking or caring whether this in principle distinction “be real or not” to use Peirce’s words from another context (EP, 1, p. 282). Yet real or not, that Peircian distinction between the cognitive achievements of science and their application led philosophers, such as Mario Bunge, to identify different kinds of theory in technology: substantive and operative technological theories. Whilst the former apply scientific knowledge to objects and process in natural events, which relate to cognising human beings, the latter refer to knowledge which can be applied to human actions in response to them. Whereas palaeontology, for example, belongs to pure science, the knowledge this discipline provides can generate substantive technological theories which oil prospectors can apply. These theories, in their turn, can provide operative technological theories to assist in oil drilling. Behaviourism provides a body of theory constitutive of the branch of Psychology known as Behaviourial Psychology. Its theories can be used to provide substantive technological theories about how, for example, different kinds of worker behaviour can be reinforced or discouraged at the work place. These theories can then provide operative technological theories—‘know how’—a particular manager can use to suggest kinds of rewards which may reinforce or discourage co-operative working practices. Even if such

26

Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge p. 177.

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operative technological theories are cognitively “less deep” than those of pure science, they can still yield results about “effects that occur and are controllable on the human scale”.27 On the Relationship between Science and Technology Given that as well as distinguishing the Indexical and the Intellective Conceptions of technology, and that each can take one of two forms, a Genuine and a Degenerate case, the results of our exploration can be summarized in the diagram below: Science can be distinguished from Technology in Principle A Degenerate Indexical Conception of Technology (Apel; Habermas)

A Genuine Intellective Conception of Technology (Popper; Bunge)

It is not the case that Science

It is the case that Science

can be distinguished from Technology in Practice

can be distinguished from Technology in Practice

A Genuine Indexical Conception Technology (Heidegger)

A Degenerate Intellective of Conception of Technology (Polanyi)

It is not the case that Science can be distinguished from Technology in Principle

If the Genuine Intellective conception of technology is regarded as out of date or as indeed “stipulative”,28 it may still offer suggestions, as above, to stimulate further research.29 But because it fails to concern itself with scientific activity—the nature of laboratory practice, as Peirce, later, and Polanyi conceived it—especially in relation to the nature of the embodiment of instrumentation in such 27 Mario Bunge “Towards a Philosophy of Technology” in Philosophical Problems of Science and Technology A.C. Michalos (ed.) Boston: Allyn & Beacon Inc. 1974 p. 32. 28 Whilst excluding “vast areas of technological phenomena” (Don Ihde Instrumental Realism p. 8). 29 Research into the ways these different kinds of theory relate to each other and the way theorizing at one level, historically, has initiated activity at another level.

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activity, which Peirce partly appreciated, this cognitive approach has been at least partially eclipsed by an Indexical conception. In other words, what our exploration has indicated is that the “canonical” view of science, as Margolis calls it—“which reduces technology, to an application—of the independent achievements of science”—an Intellective conception of technology, has given way, historically, to the Indexical conception and thereby “a technologized view of science (which construes science as itself a disciplined idealization of man’s interventions in and within nature)”. And if that be so, then it may be that the ‘natural’ or physical sciences cannot be used as a paradigm or as indeed stipulative for the conduct of the ‘cultural’ or human sciences.30 But before such implications are explored, a further conception of technology awaits elucidation: the Iconic conception. The Iconic Conception of Technology: Technology as Applied Arts and Crafts Three further considerations can assist us in drawing out the idea of an Iconic conception of technology. The first is in regard to the definition of technology itself; the second concerns the distinction between technology and technics; the third draws out important implications carried by the historical development of technology. First of all, both the Intellective conception—technology as applied science—and the Indexical conception—technology as the scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes—carry the implication that the idea of technology is tied to something instrumental, the achieving of an end by appropriate means. Even if we seek to distinguish, as is necessary, several kinds in different cultural settings, we would agree with Heidegger that the instrumental definition of technology is what is common “—and is indeed so uncannily correct that it holds even for modern technology”.31 The next two considerations are developed by a neglected figure in contemporary debates about technology’s status, namely Lewis Mumford. Like Don Ihde subsequently,32 in his book Technics and 30 J. Margolis Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, p. 243. 31 M. Heidegger The Question of Technology & Other Essays New York: Harper, Colophon 1977 p. 5. 32 Cf. Don Ihde Technics and Praxis.

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Civilization (TC from now on),33 Mumford speaks of technics rather than technology since the term ‘technology’ ties to applying individual arts systematically, whereas the word ‘technics’ pertains to techniques as found in the useful arts broadly understood. In his book, even if he inclines towards an Intellective conception of technology, Mumford claimed that science and technics are simply two independent—yet related—spheres of human endeavour: “Technics is a translation into appropriate, practical forms of the theoretic truths, implicit or formulated, anticipated or discovered, of science.— Mainly empirical inventions, like the steam- engine, may suggest Carnot’s researches in thermodynamics: abstract physical investigation, like Faraday’s with the magnetic field, may lead directly to the invention of the dynamo.” (TC p. 52) In this context, he refers to what he calls “Leonardo’s dictum”, saying it holds true: “Science is the captain and practice the soldiers. But sometimes the soldiers win the battle without leadership and sometimes the captain, by intelligent strategy, obtains victory without actually engaging in the battle.” (TC p. 52). The final consideration emerges in Mumford’s acknowledged indebtedness to Whitehead for the insight in Science and the Modern World that the church’s belief in the order of nature provided the necessary foundations for the pursuit of modern physics. (TC pp. 12 & 34). The implication here is that in obtaining an Iconic conception of technology, one focusing on its own independent nature, what its iconic status is and the way we describe it will depend on the historical period within which it is examined. To develop this approach we can take a leaf out of Technics and Civilization and examine the phases in which the historical development of technology has occurred. Lewis Mumford’s book outlines three distinct kinds of technological development from the perspective of the 1930s. The table given below illustrates these in the light of Heidegger’s claim that technology is to be seen instrumentally. The four phases I have illustrated in this table, Mumford’s three and the Altotechnic phase I have added, seem to imply—through their overlapping and intermingling—a steady development, but this may not have necessarily been willed by human beings. Perhaps we can ascribe an inner logic

33 Lewis Mumford Technics and Civilization London: George Routledge and Sons 1934.

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to this, at least in part, unintentional progress, by regarding it with Arnold Gehlen as a “—step-by-step disconnection of the behavioral system of purposive-rational action from the human organism and its transferral to machines”.34 Different definitions of technology can be related to this table. Technology as the study of the practical arts and crafts would satisfy Heidegger’s old handcrafts account of technology. Mumford points out that between 1000 and 1750 in Western Europe, the new technics fostered and adopted a series of fundamental inventions and discoveries characterizing what he calls the Eotechnic Phase. He considers as primary such inventions as “—mechanical clocks, the telescope, cheap paper, print, the printing press, the magnetic compass, the scientific method, inventions which were the means to fresh innovations, knowledge that was the center of expanding knowledge”. The important thing, however, about these tools, inventions, even machine tools like the lathe and the loom, which were “far older than the Eotechnic period” (TC p. 131), is that in the case of all of them, ultimately the worker, maker or fabricator remained the centre and origin of his own instrumental action. What is important about the Eotechnic Phase is that human energy was concentrated and utilized within the handcraft basis structuring human activities more closely connected to agriculture than is the case today. It was during this period that previous technical improvements and ideas were used systematically in furthering human expression before the advance of a more mechanized form of production. Yet even though the tool still dominated production, so that human energy and skill were “—united within the craftsman himself ”, as 34 Arnold Gehlen’s work in his article “Anthropologische Ansict der Technik” is referred to in Habermas’s “Technology and Science as Ideology” in Chapter 6 of his Towards a Rational Society: “From the beginning this principle of organ substitution operated along with that of organ strengthening: The stone grabbed to hit with is much more effective than the bare fist. Thus next to replacement techniques that allow us to perform beyond the potentials of our organs, we find strengthening techniques that extend the performance of our bodily equipment—the hammer, the microscope, the telephone—reinforce natural abilities. Finally, there are facilitation techniques, operating to relieve the burden upon organs, to disengage them, and finally to save effort—as when the use of a wheeled vehicle replaces the dragging of weights by hand. If one flies in an airplane, all three principles operate—the plane supplies us with the wings we do not possess, outperforms all animals flights and relieves us of making any contribution whatever to our own motion over vast distances.” Arthur Gehlen Man in the Age of Technology pp. 3–4.

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Shifts in the Iconic Conception of Technology: Four Phases of Technological Development Functions

Kind of Technology

Definition of Technology

Body Parts Substituted

Models of Examples of Man Invention

Motor Apparatus

Eotechnic Phase from 1000

The Study of Practical Arts and Crafts

Legs; hands

Fabricator Sailing Ship improvements Water-wheels The Windmill

Energy Production

Paleotechnic Phase from 1750

Industrial Science; the science of the industrial arts

The body as an energy source

Labourer

Boring Machine (1774), Steam Engine, Power Loom Spinning Mule

Sensory Apparatus

Neotechnic Phase from 1850

The totality of means used to provide objects of a culture

Eyes, Ears, Skin

Consumer

Light Bulbs, Radio, TV, (Mathematical sciences make it possible to imitate processes in Nature)

Governing Function

Altotechnic Phase from 1946

The relation of man to nature and the whole of culture

The Brain

Spectator

The first large scale Centre computer (ENIAC 1946), Automation, Micro-technology; Nature becomes subject to social requirements.

the Eotechnic phase developed these two elements, the tool and the man, became separated in production. This led towards a greater impersonality in the productive process as “—the machine tool and the machine developed along with the new engines of power.” (TC p. 112) The definition of technology offered in Webster’s International Dictionary (1909) as “—industrial science, the science or systematic knowledge of the industrial arts, especially of the more important manufacturers” captures the sense of the Paleotechnic phase in which

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powerful industrial machinery now came to the fore replacing human movements or at least programmed to imitate them. These powerful machines in their turn no longer determined the worker’s but a labourer’s activities in what, for the moment, remained beyond the machinery’s capacity: the worker no longer manipulated his own tools and equipment since he had become a labourer whose bodily movements were adjusted or reduced by assembly line production to become automatic motions,35 even if these motions could still be regarded as skilled in some way. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) catches the spirit of the Neotechnic phase when technology is defined as “— the totality of means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture.”.36 This totality of means, however, relates man to his environment in distinctly different ways. Not only do we have an increase in inventions and machines which result in transforming our relations to the world, (even the Eotechnic phase had these—the sailing ship, paddle boat, hot-air balloon (1232 in China), the diving suit (1405) and bell, microscope and telescope), in the bicycle, car and aeroplane but also during this phase, too, we can see a vast increase in the different kinds of labour saving machines that surround us, for example, lights, kettles, washing machines, electric fires and so on. Since the First World War—in addition to these labour saving devices—we can see emerging in the Radio and TV, apparatus which comes to absorb us more in employing those elements in our experience which can be quickly communicated in a functional manner.37 These reach their peak in our own present post Second World War period—the Altotechnic phase—where machines such as the computer, and other physical systems involved in micro-technology, foster calculative modes of reasoning relating us to the world in a new way. These machines now themselves masquerade AS A WORLD. We regard what these machines provide as entities in the world distinct from ourselves, a virtual reality. But they exist like natural objects or other people in that they can be

35

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (1958) Anchor Bks. (1959) Ch. III sec.

II. 36 I am indebted to Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology Camb., Mass.: MIT Press 1977 for drawing my attention to these dictionary definitions in relation to defining technology. 37 Cf. Don Ihde’s classification in Chapter 1 of his Technics and Praxis.

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regarded either as physical entities or as objects capable of being understood at a symbolic level in terms of what they can relate to us. Nonetheless it is clear that what such physical systems offer us is to be experienced in an objectified, distanced, observed, behavioural fashion, where counter-factual modes of reasoning are well to the fore. In this Altotechnic phase the idea of technology now seems as elusive as trying to place one’s finger on a mercury bead to fix its position. Perhaps that is why Marx’s explication might serve to complete this discussion of the Iconic conception. In the twentieth century it appears to be increasingly difficult to conceive of nature existing independently of man’s industrial and cultural activities since human beings can in fact transform nature itself; nature becomes ‘socialized’ leaving its residual powers to haunt conservation areas and natural parks. Marx wrote “Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the immediate process of production of his life, and thereby also his social life-relationships and the cultural representations that arise out of them.”.38 If this be so then the Iconic conception of technology has collapsed into the Indexical. Objections to the Analysis At least three objections can be made against the arguments for distinguishing three senses of technology: the Indexical (science as theoretical technology); the Intellective (technology as applied science); the Iconic (technics as applied arts and crafts). First of all, the distinction between science and technology has been rendered irrelevant by what can be called the Continuity Thesis. Secondly, this chapter’s argument contains no recognition of the fact that humans are to be seen as technological selves. Thirdly, because of a concern to make sense of Peirce’s ideas in relation to characterizing the nature of science and technology, the canonical view of the relationship between science and technology has been unduly emphasized. Margolis formulates what can be called the Continuity Thesis in the following way: we have to “concede a pertinent continuity between

38 Karl Marx Das Capital quoted in W. Leiss’s The Domination of Nature G. Braziller, 1972, p. 145.

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the most ancient human technology (largely tacit, hardly recognized, essentially pretheoretical) and the most up-to-date inventions and experiments of science”. The only support offered for this claim is that in both the ancient and modern technologies we have what Margolis calls “effective human agency or human technology”.39 Before examining that claim, however—the second objection—something needs to be said about this Continuity Thesis itself. As it stands it may commit what Vico called ‘the conceit of scholars’, which he defined as the fault of scholars “who will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (NS3 127)40 and earlier, as “a common error of the human mind, that of judging the scarcely known natures of others according to oneself ” (NS1 13).41 In other words, in the absence of any supporting argument, Margolis ascribes what he calls the effective intervention of human technology “to both the most ancient human technology” and the modern42 without acknowledging the danger of projecting upon the former, states of awareness and activity related to those of the latter. What is curious about this assumption is that in other aspects of his work, Margolis is alive to the idea that selves are “constituted by processes internal to the formed worlds in which they contingently mature”.43 This claim can be called Lukacs’s lesson—though Margolis does not credit him with the argument: “Our habits of thought, of action, of production tacitly internalise our “second nature” and provide for the transformation of that nature and the form of life in which it is formed, impressed on the biological template of the species”.44 Interestingly, Peirce too faced this issue when he wrote as follows: But fortunately (I say it advisedly) man is not so happy as to be provided with a full stock of instincts to meet all occasions, and so is forced upon the adventurous business of reasoning, where the many meet

39

J. Margolis Science Without Unity p. 252. NS3 127 stands for par. no. 127 The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1730 & 1744) tr. by T.G. Bergin & M. Fisch, New York: Cornell UP 1994. 41 NS1 13 stands for “The Principles of the New Science and the Nature of Nations leading to the Discovery of a New System of the Natural Law of the Gentes” (1725) in Vico: Selected Writings ed. & tr. by L. Pompa (1982) New York: Cambridge UP pp. 228–45. 42 J. Margolis Science Without Unity pp. 252–3. 43 J. Margolis “The Technological Self ” in Technological Transformation: Contextual and Conceptual Implications ed. by E.F. Byrne & J.C. Pitt, Dordrecht: Kluwer Ac. Pub. 1987 pp. 1– 15, p. 4. 44 J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts Pennsylvania State UP p. 88. 40

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shipwreck and the few find, not old fashioned happiness, but its splendid substitute success. When one’s purpose lies in the line of novelty, invention, generalised theory—in a word, improvement of the situation—by the side of which happiness appears a shabby old dud— instinct and the rule of thumb cease to be applicable (CP 2.178).

Here Peirce indicates how, through social development, human beings have been able to set aside a former “natural self ”45 to take on a “second nature” as Lukacs called it.46 This ‘second nature’, generated through the historical development of human beings, comes to be regarded as natural, unproblematic within a transformed culture to which it is then in accord. So, whilst ‘first nature’ can be interpreted biologically, human being’s ‘second nature’—issuing from it— has to be regarded historically, even socially, as increasingly sophisticated technologies transform the relationship of humans to their environment. Such a standpoint seems to imply that Margolis is wrong to assume that humans are continuous in the way earlier forms of humankind have been in accord with their natural environment for the very reason that Holmes Rolston III gives: whereas natural organisms “have freedom within ecosystems” with the advancement of technological means “human beings have freedom from ecosystems”.47 The point of Lukacs’s lesson is to insist that humans develop within processes which cause them to be ‘denaturalised’ continuously within an environment they create, a creation which has unintended consequences in terms of transforming them as Vico saw: limited to narrow ends, actions instigated by all too human intentions come to serve wider unintended goals.48 Since humans are, in Margolis’s words ‘“second-natured”—“enlanguaged” and “encultured”’, Lukacs’s lesson carries implications for the “thesis of the technological or technologized self ” leading to “a number of important findings” which can’t be reached “in a remarkably

45 G.W.F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) tr. by A.V. Miller, Oxford UP 1977 sec. 489. 46 “The second nature, the nature of man-made structures” estranges the human being “from nature (the first nature)” G. Lukacs The Theory of the Novel London: Merlin Press 1978 pp. 63–4. 47 Holmes Rolston III from “The Wilderness Reaffirmed” in Reflecting on Nature ed. by L. Gruen & D. Jamieson Oxford UP 1994 pp. 265–78 p. 266. 48 NS3 1106; elsewhere Vico remarks: “a history of the institutions by which, without human discernment or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has allowed this great city of the human race” (NS3 342).

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painless way”.49 Firstly, it is a nonsense to regard Saxons or Normans as technological selves—as a result of Margolis equating “effective human agency” with “human technology”50—for reasons Lukacs’s lesson makes clear: they can’t be ascribed habits of thought, never mind forms of life—now second-nature to contemporary human beings—given the kinds of shifts in the Iconic conception of technology towards that of the Indexical as indicated earlier. Secondly, if Margolis wishes to clarify the idea of the tool-centred nature of human existence, following the earlier insights of Marx, Heidegger and Dewey, then it might be more appropriate to speak of artifactual selves, given that the name and idea of technology itself is of comparatively recent origin. In relation, then, to Margolis’s claim about ‘technological selves’, what does he mean by his use of the term technology? In the case of artifactual selves, the word ‘tools’ invokes the idea of implements such as the garden spade, the kitchen knife or the hammer. As we have seen, these were central in the development of an old handcraft account of technology manifested before the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution. Talk of ‘tools’ evokes, then, an Iconic conception where, in a world of practical arts and crafts, a craftsman decided to employ autonomously chosen techniques to deal with a particular task where s/he remained at the centre and origin of his or her own activity. Here the term technology refers to ‘tool’ employment, the use made of practical arts and crafts. For any ‘technological self ’ today, however, instruments are employed which have issued from highly developed theoretical awarenesses, now embodied in their use, and to which the user of them has to adapt. Unlike traditional tools, which can be returned to the garden shed, such expensive and highly sophisticated equipment can’t be left idle: the necessity for their use generates problems to be solved! Clarifying this point leads to the third objection. Hasn’t “the canonical picture” been presupposed throughout the arguments in this Chapter? In opposition, Margolis—by emphasizing “Technology or technic experience”51 and by endorsing Heidegger’s insights—he 49

J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts p. 4. J. Margolis Science Without Unity p. 252. 51 J. Margolis Science Without Unity pp. 257 & 256; “Technology or technic experience (agency, intervention, experiment, invention, even observation therefore) signifies the intersection of all humanly pertinent modes of discerning, contacting, affecting and being affected by whatever is real.” 50

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favours the Indexical over the Intellective. The point of the present Chapter, however, has not been to take a partisan view on either of these conceptions but rather to show how an obsession with either does a disservice to both the Iconic conception and the way the two other conceptions have emerged historically from this earlier one. Conclusion Use of Peirce’s insights in Chapter One enabled distinctions to be drawn between three conceptions of science. Similarly technologytalk has been distinguished in three ways; the Indexical, the scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes mediated through instrumentation; the Intellective, technology as applied science, the canonical picture as Margolis calls it; the Iconic, an instrumental definition of technology as applied Arts and Crafts. Whereas in an intellectual grasp of technology’s nature, greater emphasis has been given, over the last thirty years, to the Indexical over the Intellective, in practice during the last three hundred years, there has been a shift too, from the Iconic to the Indexical conception. Following in the steps of Lewis Mumford, it has been argued that this shift occurred through four developmental phases: the Eotechnic, the Paleotechnic, the Neotechnic and the Altotechnic phases. It would require separate inquiries to deal with two issues arising from this analysis. Firstly, how are we to account for the domination of the Indexical over other conceptions of technology in our culture, a problem partially considered elsewhere;52 secondly, whether the development in such techniques of facilitation “accompanies and largely determines the history of mankind” to satisfy Margolis’s demand to be told what “the teleology of History or Reason or Human Existence is”53 or might be!

52

See chapter 6. A. Gehlen Man in the Age of Technology p. 70 & J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts p. 87. 53

CHAPTER THREE

THE STATUS OF WORKS OF ART Interpretative activity has been considered in relation to science and technology. The work of Joseph Margolis has been and will continue to be invoked not so much to be critiqued but rather for three more positive reasons. Firstly, there may be family resemblances in regard to issues raised by the prospect of interpretative activity as sustained in science and art.1 Secondly, in carrying forward such inquiries he admires a thinker who earlier was prepared to engage in the same activities, “that remarkable American genius, Charles Sanders Peirce.”2 Thirdly, in turning to the arts and in understanding the actions of human beings, Margolis is firmly opposed to physical reductionism. In terms of Lucaks’s lesson, explanations appropriate to ‘second-nature’ cannot be reduced to those of ‘first-nature’.3 Margolis’s way of making this distinction is clarified in the following quotation:4 Artworks are normally individuated as being of a kind that would permit intentional, purposive, semiotic, representational, expressive and similar intrinsic properties; and these appear to require an idiom of a culturally developed sort that simply does not lend itself perspicuously to their being reduced to mere physical properties.

The issue, then, in this chapter is to examine arguments, which may clarify Margolis’s claim. In developing this clarification, it will be 1 “I have always felt that the puzzles of the philosophy of art and the philosophy of science were most intimately linked—both in terms of the actual discipline of theorizing about particular artworks and particular experimental results and in terms of the same intelligence that must be admitted to guide the admirable practices each is concerned to review.” J. Margolis Science Without Unity p. x. 2 J. Margolis The Flux of History and the Flux of Science Berkeley: California UP 1993 p. 39. 3 “This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first; it is a complex of senses—meanings—which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority.” “The first nature, nature as a set of laws for pure cognition, nature as the bringer of comfort to pure feeling, is nothing other than the historico-philosophical objectivation of man’s alienation from his own constructs.” G. Lukacs The Theory of the Novel p. 64. 4 J. Margolis “Constraints on the Metaphysics of Culture” in The Review of Metaphysics June 1986, Vol. 39 No. 4 Issue No. 156 pp. 653–73, p. 659.

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shown how he makes use of certain ideas developed within Peirce’s own philosophy to make his case. It is not being claimed that Margolis is a disciple of the philosophy of Charles Peirce, as your author might be, but rather that he uses Peirce’s distinctions for his own purposes, yet does not appreciate their full latent content in doing so. Before carrying out this project, however, something further needs to be said about Peirce’s philosophy. A Return to Peirce’s Philosophy One criticism of the project, carried forward in this book’s opening chapters, is that no satisfactory rationale has been offered so far for the distinctions between what has been called the Iconic, Indexical or Intellective conceptions, as these have been applied to interpretative activity. Rather, like Don Ihde’s distinctions concerning technological artefacts—those which transform our relations to the environment, those which surround us and those which come to absorb us—such conceptions seem to have been simply plucked out of the air arbitrarily. So how can they be grounded? To make sense of that grounding, we must refer to Peirce’s account of semiotic activity, his sign theory. Peirce defines a sign as a three placed or three termed triadic relation because “—a sign has, as such, three references: 1st., it is a sign to some object thought which interprets it; 2nd, it is a sign for some object to which in that thought it is equivalent; 3rd, it is a sign in some respect or quality, which brings it into connection with its object” (CP 5.283). Peirce refers to these as symbols, indices and likenesses respectively in 1867, the latter called icons later (CP 5.73). Indices—consider the weathervane or barometer—and icons—consider unnamed portraits—“assert nothing” (CP 2.291) “because no arguments can be constructed of these alone” (CP 1.559) whereas in the case of words, linguistic utterances, books and other conventional signs, there can be arguments about how they are to be interpreted. In Chapter One, these three kinds of representation were related to three fundamental forms of reasoning: the Iconic to Retroduction; the Indexical to Induction; Interpretants (symbols) to Deduction. Peirce then claims that on the basis of “differences of form among signs of all sorts” there are but three “elementary forms of predication or signification” (CP 1.561), three basic conceptions which

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could be applied to experience, what he called categories: “Quality (reference to a ground)”; “Relation (reference to a correlate)”; “Representation (reference to an interpretant)” (CP 1.555). Originally, then, these fundamental categories were regarded as deriving from thinking’s representative function. With the development of his phenomenology in 1903 they were named Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness respectively. Here he turned to aesthetics by referring to “the blue dome of heaven” for “the artist’s eye”—“the poetic mood”—characterizing Firstness as sheer presentness, immediacy. It is apprehended as “any simple and positive quality of feeling”, “something which our description fits”, which is what is “quite regardless of anything else” (CP 5.44). It therefore has a monadic quality. Elsewhere he connects Firstness to the idea of a “mere may-be” constituting “the vividness of feeling” (CP 1.302), a potentiality rendering a qualitative possibility for expression, aiming it towards a sign situation, namely an Icon. But it must be distinguished from Secondness so as to separate a present “world of fancy” from established fact: “The idea of second is predominant in the ideas of causation and of statical force”: for “cause and effect are two: and statical forces always occur between pairs. Constraint is a Secondness” (CP 1.321 & 325). Peirce’s law court example—which may have been pertinent for himself—clarifies Secondness. The injunctions and judgments in law, embodying reason, constitute Thirdness since “order and legislation are third”, but once “I feel the sheriff’s hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality. Actuality is something brute” (CP 1.24). But if “action is second”—dyadic—the rule-governed nature of conduct, and even of habit itself, because of its futureregarding perspective, is a “third” (CP 1.337). In other words, to return to the law court example, although the sheriff’s hand releases the shock of its actuality—Secondness—in the condemned person, looked at from the sheriff’s standpoint, his conduct is one which is subject to habit, embodying Thirdness—subject to rules which can be written down—so that “Law as an active force is second, but order and legislation are third” (CP 1.337). In order to illustrate these categories further, we can return to Don Ihde’s taxonomy of technological artefacts and relate these to Peirce’s categories. In human development new inventions transformed peoples’ lives at the level of Firstness: the feeling-quality of our experience has been altered in the way we experience our world through

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such conveniences as the bicycle, the motorcar or through air transportation—consider glider flying. In addition, at the level of what Peirce called Secondness, daily actions have been made more convenient by the mass supply of electric fires, kettles, washing machines and so on providing background relations for our daily lives to create an atmosphere taken for granted in the new world within which we have come to live and work. But since the 1940s, we have the development of TV, computer games and other AI technological devices. These come to absorb us5 as entities distinct from ourselves. They provide the means through which certain kinds of communication and interaction can be convenienced at the level of Thirdness. Employing Peircian Distinctions Having now given support to the identification of three different kinds of interpretative activity in Peirce’s philosophy and having said something about his categories—“my one contribution to philosophy” (CP 8.123)—we can return to the issue of identifying a work of art. To do this we need to elucidate Margolis’s central claim that “artworks are physically embodied and culturally emergent entities”6 and how he uses Peirce’s notions to establish his case: Peirce’s typetoken distinction; Peirce’s categories; the separation of existence from reality. In other words, it will be argued that “like Columbus who never visited America”—to apply Whitehead’s words in another context—Margolis may have missed “the full sweep” of his own use of Peircian discoveries.7 To show how this ‘full sweep’ can best be manifested, Margolis’s ideas concerning embodiment require exploration before examining three areas where they may be deficient: firstly, with respect to his comparison between artworks and persons; secondly, the way in which art works can be distinguished from found objects; thirdly, in regard to a distinction between artworks and craft. 5 Don Ihde Technics and Praxis Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., Pallas pbk. 1979 pp. 3–50. 6 J. Margolis What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Lectures in the Philosophy of Art Pennsylvania State University Press 1999 p. 68; cf. “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics (1974) Vol. 14 pp. 187–96 reprinted and revised in Culture and Art ed. by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press 1976, pp. 32–45. 7 A.N. Whitehead Process and Reality (1929) corrected & ed. by D.R. Griffin & D.W. Sherburne, New York: The Free Press 1978 p. 159.

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In order to distinguish cultural artefacts from physical bodies, Margolis makes use of Peirce’s type-token distinction, which he credits to him in many places besides his Art and Philosophy.8 For Peirce, whereas the term ‘type’ refers to Thirdness, to ideas or what can be interpreted in terms of a general claim, the term ‘token’ relates to what is materially manifested in the world; a concrete, singular instance, namely Secondness. For example, when Pissarro and Monet broke with the tradition of landscape painting to create a new kind of picture making—a kind or type of painting called Impressionism— their individual paintings could be regarded as tokens of this type. Whereas in the case of a type of painting—impressionism or expressionism say—we may be concerned with the rules or general lawlike features of a work, which make the term impressionism applicable, the term token refers to a particular physical entity exemplifying that type. But without tokens then there can’t be a type.9 Peirce’s Prolegomena to An Apology for Pragmaticism of 1906 is Margolis’s source of reference. Here Peirce comments: “In order that a Type may be used, it has to be embodied in a Token which shall be a sign of the Type, and thereby of the object, the Type signifies. I propose to call such a Token of a Type, an instance of the Type” (CP 4.537). What is curious about Margolis’s reference to this passage, however, is that he does not refer to what Peirce calls a Tone:

8 J. Margolis Art and Philosophy (AP) Brighton: Harvester Press 1980, p. 21; see also “Nature, Culture and Persons” in Culture and Cultural Entities Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub. Co. 1984 pp. 1–19 p. 14 n. 12. 9 In AP, p. 20 Margolis lists “the ontological peculiarities of the type/token distinction”: “i) types and tokens are individuated as particulars; ii) types and tokens are not separable and cannot exist separately from one another; iii) types are instantiated by tokens and “token” is an ellipse for “token-ofa-type”; iv) types and tokens may be generated and destroyed in the sense that actual tokens of a novel type may be generated and destroyed, and whatever contingencies may be necessary for the generation of actual tokens may be destroyed or disabled. v) types are actual abstract particulars only in the sense that a set of actual entities may be individuated as tokens of a particular type; vi) it is incoherent to speak of comparing the properties of actual token- and type- particulars as opposed to comparing the properties of actual particular tokens-of-a-type; vii) reference to types as particulars serves exclusively to facilitate reference to actual and possible tokens-of-a-type.”

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“An indefinite significant character such as a tone of voice can neither be called a Type nor a Token. I propose to call such a Sign a Tone” (CP 4.537). Consider an impressionistic painting by Pissarro, The Quays at Rouen of 1883. In the foreground, the yellow-orangey colours, deftly dabbed on the surface of the canvas, render the surface of a bright sunlit road, contrasting with the bluish colourings of the shadows, generating a sense of vibrancy in the picture seemingly at odds with the darkly painted, round-shouldered appearance of the faceless people depicted there. So, not only do we have a token—Pissarro’s painting —of a type, namely Impressionism, but this particular token renders a tone. Peirce remarks elsewhere that “some colours are called gay, others sad” and in this context he speaks of tones—the firsts of tokens—as “signs of visceral qualities of feeling” (CP 1.313). In this case, such feelings may be generated in the viewer as a result of seeing this particular picture. On another occasion in 1903, he refers to “the tragedy of King Lear” as having “its Firstness, its flavour sui generis” (CP 1.531). So we can speak of King Lear as being a token of a type ‘a tragedy’, having its particular unique and special quality, its Tone or Tuone.10 Even if Margolis employs only two of Peirce’s triadicy of terms, he does refer to a further distinction Peirce makes. In distinguishing the artwork, for example, Pissarro’s painting The Quays at Rouen, from its physical manifestation—a picture hanging on a wall at the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London—we can speak of something awaiting interpretation which, Margolis points out, “implicates “thirdness”, in Peirce’s terms”, distinguishable from “the brute resistance of the world—its ‘secondness’—”,11 as something concretely manifested. But we look in vain for any idea of the evocation of Firstness, a sense of feeling in relation to what we experience in the world, mirroring Peirce’s idea of something’s Tuone.12 10 I owe the phrase “the firsts of tokens” to Carl Hausman. A Tuone rather than a tone is “a blend” Peirce says “of Tone and Tune. It means a quality of feeling which is significant, whether it be simple like a Tone or complex like a Tune”. Unlike a Type it can’t have a specific identity “only similarity” to another Tone or Tuone: for example, “the sound of any vowel will be slightly different every two times it is pronounced and in so far it is so, as two Tuones” (“Logic Notebook”, entry of 1906, April 2 Ms. 339d.: 553–4 quoted in Dialogic Semiosis: An Essay on Signs and Meanings J.D. Johansen, Bloomington: Indiana UP 1993 pp. 70–1). Earlier, Peirce compares “the blare of a trumpet” to “the colour scarlet” wondering about the sense it can make to compare the one to the other. (CP 1.312). 11 J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History Berkeley: California UP 1995, p. 91. 12 Indeed, even in our ordinary experience, when consciousness is not focused

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Finally, Margolis also applies Peirce’s distinction between “what exists, as opposed to what is real (but is not real in the way of existing) in the predicable natures of particular things for instance”.13 Yet Margolis fails to identify two quite different cases: the possible for the individual subject and an alternative for a number of persons. For the individual person who dreamt it “a dream has a real existence as a mental phenomenon” but considering it in itself, “it retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them” (CP 5.405). Even if I dream of an aircraft crashing, this pertains at most only to the possibility of what might happen, not to an event or a future event necessarily! On the other hand, in terms of interpreting Pissarro’s work of art, it has a reality for its interpreters which not only must be distinguished from its existence as a physical entity but also from any dream I might have either about this picture or the quays at Rouen. That last claim remains true, even if, in closely attending to it, I seem to be taken into a dream as I become drawn into this painting. Such distinctions may clarify two of Margolis’s further claims. With respect to the first, Margolis writes “what is real but does not exist is—at a first approximation—real if true, predicatively, of what exists”.14 This is a valid claim, of course, for interpreters within any given social milieu, but for an individual interpreter, what is real but does not exist remains real even if not true predicatively speaking! Secondly, Margolis, in terms of his own analysis, must be wrong in claiming that “cultural entities exist in the same sense physical objects do and their properties are as real as physical properties are”.15 Cultural entities do not exist in the way physical objects do, even though such entities are embodied in physical objects.16 Otherwise, we would be returning to some form of physical reductionism. Hence, the properties of such cultural entities cannot have the same status as physical

on anything in particular—whether a picture, a bird flight or the presence of another human being—we are aware, says Peirce in correspondence with William James, of “a certain tinge or tone of feeling connected with living or being awake, though we cannot attend to it, for want of a background.” (CP 8.294). 13 Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 91. 14 J. Margolis What, After All, Is a Work of Art p. 69. 15 J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts Pennsylvania State UP 2001 p. 145. 16 That is why it will prove necessary later to apply a more sophisticated taxonomy than Margolis uses, so as to distinguish the being of an artwork—to account for its reality for interpreters—and its actuality within the experience of an individual appreciator.

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properties. Physical properties exist: cultural properties are real. But in order to grasp these distinctions we need to make sense of the idea of embodiment. Between Physicalism and Idealism Let us see, then, how Margolis’s use of tokens of types in the way cultural entities are embodied physically is developed. What does that term ‘embodiment’ mean? His claim is quite specific: “particular works of art cannot exist except as embodied in physical objects. This is simply another way of saying that works of art are culturally emergent entities; they exhibit properties that physical objects cannot, but do not depend on the presence of any substance other than what may be ascribed to purely physical objects”. Yet the term ‘culturally emergent entities’ refers not only to works of art but to the concept of persons too.17 To do justice to these claims we need to appreciate the context in which they arise, clarify the idea of embodiment before examining the implications of his analysis regarding persons and works of art. In his earlier writings, that context was determined by the opposition between materialism and idealism. On behalf of the latter, the idea of artworks goes beyond a sense of physicality: the discourse we use about artworks can’t be construed merely as remarks about physical objects. Yet, unlike Dewey, for whom the art product, as he called it, is something physical all right whilst the artwork arises out a sense of co-operation between the human being and the physical product “so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties”,18 Margolis’s standpoint is much more cultural in character. But both Dewey and Margolis would reject physicalism. Both would insist that the actual properties of art objects, for example, cannot be reduced “to being all and only physical properties”, that artworks possess attributes which “physical objects, qua physical objects do not and cannot possess”. But how are we to make sense of these properties? They can’t

17 AP p. 23 and “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” p. 33. 18 AP pp. 28–9; John Dewey Art as Experience (1934) New York: Capricorn Bks. (1958) p. 216.

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be regarded as something merely added to the physical entity. Rather, they must be attributed to the artwork if we are “to be able to speak of a work at all”.19 Rejecting physicalism in this way, however, does not commit Margolis to any form of idealism since he rejects the idea that in saying something about a work of art we are referring to the state of someone’s mind, either the artist’s or the appreciator’s. Rather the materialists were right to emphasize the significance of something public since what are regarded as cultural objects—cultural institutions, works of art or persons—are embodied in something material. So, in relation to such cultural entities at least, we can’t do without Secondness in invoking a sense of Thirdness. Peirce defines the latter, at least minimally, as “the mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a determinate character” (CP 1.26). The extensional v the intensional In this reference to something public, materialism is right then to focus on the issue of “reference or identification” within anyone’s discourse. It is the block of stone, the written words in a poem, the music score that “secure the identity of a particular work”. But “in what sense can the poem be said to be given?” Margolis’s answer is that it is the poem rather than the text—provided it can be agreed what constitutes the latter—which renders the referent for what we can say about it. It is in regard to the poem that we can speak about what is or is not “true or plausible” as a poem. But if persons and works of art are embodied in something physical whilst their properties arise as culturally emergent entities, then it follows that whereas physical properties are referred to extensionally, the former are to be identified intensionally.20

19

“Nature, Culture and Persons” p. 2; AP pp. 22 & 31. Cf. AP pp. 32, 34 & 32. J. Margolis “Critics and Literature” in The Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. II no. 4, Autumn 1971, pp. 369–84, p. 372. Margolis comments: “Works of art are identified extensionally in the sense that their identity (whatever their nature) is controlled by the identity of what they are embodied in; but to identify them as what they are is accomplished only intensionally (by reference to the cultural tradition in which they may actually be discriminated)” (AP p. 41). 20

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The intensional relates to semiotic activity, it pertains to what may be publicly expressed—the linguistic—and is thereby cultural,21 not physical. Again, Thirdness is evoked since we are referring to thought, to the rule-governed, the conceptual or what can be regarded as rule following in its interpretation.22 Consider institutions, given practices and customs as well as accepted traditions. We can thereby refer to persons and what is produced by human activities. Moreover, works of art can be regarded intensionally for two reasons. They are to be identified as intensional entities “relative to cultural contexts in which they might be said to be embodied in a physical medium”. Secondly, the ways in which they are characterized and appraised “are relativized to plausible interpretations of the work (where relevant)”. Consider such “paired categories” as ‘the tragic or the comic’, ‘the beautiful or the ugly’, ‘the right or the wrong’, ‘the true or the false’ along with “a host of others including, prominently, distinctions of period styles and of kinds of artistic excellence”. These can’t be reduced to extensional properties,23 where the extensional can be identified with the physical—Secondness—with what exists materially.24 The intensional and the intentional The intensional is to be identified, then, with the non-extensional. Whilst the intensional ties to issues concerning meanings within some 21 Since the intensional signifies “the nonextensional”, Margolis might appear to adopt a dualism which Vico could find convivial: a dualism between the historical and the natural (cf. Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 13). But Margolis’s dualism is a little more tempered since he seeks “what may be called nonreductive materialism”, a form of “attribute materialism”: “the irreducibility of actual human powers and products” either to anything merely physical—physicalism—or indeed to anything mental—idealism (cf. Culture and Cultural Entities pp. 1–2). So, although he sees himself as a materialist, he would not identify his position with physicalism (cf. Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 138). 22 Whilst the rule-governed identifies what can be understood in relation to rulelike regularities—the traditional, the customary, institutional practices, even human activities—the rule-following refers to the way intentional thoughts and conduct of persons, conceived of as language-users, “can accord with rules which they understand and are able to violate” (AP p. 46). 23 See “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” pp. 40–2. 24 See Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 48. On page 13 Margolis defines the intensional: “It designates any form or structure of meaning, significance, sense, symbolic or semiotic or rhetorical or similar function or role assigned to a suitable vehicle (a sentence or semaphore signal or artwork or action or custom or text— or thoughts, if thoughts may be singled out).”

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cultural context—so that the intensional relates to thoughts or propositions expressible in language—the extensional refers to truth claims in regard to what the extensional indicates. On the other hand, the intentional refers to individual states of mind or prepositional attitudes directed towards some thought or even purpose, which may or may not refer to what exists or, indeed, be realizable. But if the intensional is meant to relate to the cultural and is thereby dependent on language-use, surely what makes a creature human, on this account, is his or her disposition to construe “something under one description rather than another” thereby displaying an understanding of “the nature of a rule” and what it means “to follow it intentionally”. But there are sentences which relate to the intensional but not the intentional. Consider: “If Peirce had not married Juliette Anne in 1883, he would not have been fired from John Hopkins University”. If we take the first clause of this conditional as a declarative sentence—‘Peirce did not marry Juliette Anne in 1883’—it is false. But this contrary-to-fact conditional is a sentence which relates to the non-extensional and is thereby intensional since Peirce did marry Juliette in 1883. Yet this contrary-to-fact conditional does not refer to or express anything intentional about Peirce.25 Again, there are sentences which relate to the intentional but which are not intensional. Consider: “Peirce is thinking of William James.” The claim is that Peirce is thinking of a particular person and the name or the description employed to clarify this claim is restricted only to the conditions which indeed do apply to the person to whom thought is directed. Say we substitute ‘the writer of The Principles of Psychology’ for what is extensionally equivalent, namely ‘William James’. In this case, the truth-value of the original claim is not altered. We have then an extensional sentence, which is also an intentional one.26 The 25 Margolis ties the intensional to the linguistic on p. 46 of AP; cf. J.W. Cornman “Intentionality and Intensionality” in Philosophical Quarterly vol. 12 1962, pp. 44–52. Cornman comments on p. 47: If a conditional “were extensional, and thus truthfunctional, its truth-value would be a function of the truth-values of its antecedent and its consequent clauses. Thus, knowing the truth-value of these two clauses when taken as declarative sentences would be sufficient for calculating the truth-value of the conditional. However, for contrary-to-fact conditionals this is not sufficient. The two clauses are both false and, it seems, the conditional is true.” 26 Incidentally, in this case, it is thought which relates Peirce to James. Peirce comments: “Thirdness is found whenever one thing brings a Secondness between two things” (The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Vol. 2 p. 269. Peirce and James are or were extensional objects as physical existents and therefore the claim possesses or would have possessed a truth-value.

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Secondness in both cases is genuine making the claim an extensional one. If these two persons were fictional characters, as in “‘the narrator in Henry James’s The Real Thing’ is thinking of Miss Churm”, then we have references to two entities, which are not genuine— degenerate Seconds for Peirce—so that we would have an intensional sentence. Indeed, one way of making this distinction between the intensional and the intentional clearer would be to take up Margolis’s suggestion: the intentional pertains to “what is culturally emergent” whilst the intensional refers to “what is causally efficacious within the cultural domain”.27 The significance of the intensional and the intentional A recent scandal may serve to illuminate some of the distinctions drawn so far. On January 31st. 2000, Harold Shipman, a GP working a singleton practice in Hyde, near Manchester, was found guilty at Preston Crown Court of murdering 15 of his patients. Indeed, perhaps even as many as 260 persons were killed. He was caught only because in the case of just one of these patients—his last killing, Mrs. Grundy—Shipman tried to forge her will clumsily, raising suspicions in her daughter, a lawyer. Soothill and Wilson consider some of the possible motives Shipman might have had for these killings.28 They don’t give much credence to physical reductionism, that is to say that Shipman, at least initially was ‘out of his mind’. Yet they admit he was addicted to pethidine for which he had to face a court sentence for obtaining the drug by deception, for unlawfully possessing it and for forging prescriptions to obtain it! Presumably the rejection of the physicalistic account is because that gives rise to the idea that the Shipman case was a ‘freak’ event. Soothill and Wilson reject this possibility for a host of reasons: i) the idea that the Shipman episode was a ‘freak event’—“like lightning, it is thought not likely to strike the same place twice” does not sus27 “A physical utterance may exert a causal force; but an utterance that has a certain propositional import may affect a being capable of grasping that import in a way altogether unlike the way in which a physical force operates” ( J. Margolis “Nature, Culture and Persons” p. 9). 28 The details of this case can be found in “Theorizing the Puzzle that is Harold Shipman” K. Soothill & D. Wilson The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology Dec. 2005, Vol. 16, No. 4 pp. 685–98. At n. 4 page 698 the issue as to whether Shipman committed suicide or was murdered is raised.

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tain historical analysis; ii) that no-one wishes to believe otherwise, because of its frightening implications, is an assumption that blocks the road to further inquiry; iii) that Professor Donaldson’s claim— as the Department of Health’s Chief Medical Officer—that “Everything points to the fact that a doctor with the sinister and dark motivation of Harold Shipman is a once in a lifetime occurrence” is a political claim obfuscating the scientific since no evidence has been given for it.29 They are equally dismissive of any intentional analysis on Shipman’s part.30 Say he admitted that he had had a troubled childhood involving the loss of the one person he really loved, his Grandfather, and that in his work as a GP he was ‘inspired’ to get older persons to pass on to join him. This ‘explanation’ could not serve surely as a justification. Many human beings may have severely troubled childhoods without becoming serial killers. But this possibility can’t be explored since “Shipman refused to have anything to do with the inquiry”. Now he is dead “that avenue is closed”.31 Neither do the writers consider a secular devilment theory: an outlandish act is pursued just to see if it can succeed without its perpetuator being discovered, to be followed by others. Iago’s behaviour in Shakespeare’s Othello might provide a paradigm here: the play begins with Iago tricking Roderigo into raising street unrest; Iago incites Brabantio with the idea that the Moor has stolen his daughter; then he suggests their relationship is one where “an old black” is “tupping your white ewe”; he speaks to Othello against Brabantio. Whereas he does not succeed in the city—“This is Venice” as Brabantio says—on the island of Cyprus, his series of daring tricks ensure not only the downfall of Othello, the murder of Desdemona, the death of his wife, but his own demise too. Note a similarity with the Shipman case: just as characters such as Cassio—Othello’s lieutenant—Desdemona and Othello, speak well of Iago even as his mischievous deeds become more daring, so Shipman “rapidly gained a reputation as being a particularly good ‘old-fashioned doctor’”.32 29

“Theorizing the Puzzle that is Harold Shipman” p. 686, pp. 689–92 & p. 692. Here the ground is far from clear since David Wilson said, in the BBC Radio Four Programme Start the Week with Andrew Marr on Monday December 12th. 2005 (9.00–10.45), that Shipman had tried to make claims on behalf of his childhood: he had never recovered from the death of his Grandfather. 31 “Theorizing the Puzzle that is Harold Shipman” pp. 686 & 692. 32 “there was a ‘Shipman’s Patient Fund’, which raised money to buy medical 30

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The argument against the secular devilment theory has already been stated: there is no access to Shipman’s intentions. But what of Iago’s? Iago confesses to his hatred of the Moor; to seeking Cassio’s place in the Moor’s affections; to being jealous of Desdemona’s love for the Moor. But such a jealousy of the Moor’s position in regard to her is undone by his suggestion that his desire for her exists “to diet my revenge”, to get even with the Moor for taking that position. In addition, of course, Iago warns us in Act 1 that “I am not what I am”. That claim may not only pertain to how others see him in the play, but could be a warning to us in the audience too. Given all this, then, we can reach a similar conclusion as was reached by the writers in the Shipman case: no reliance can be placed upon the agent’s stated intentions. They may mislead us just as in each case they misled eventual victims! So where can we turn to explore either Shipman’s or Iago’s motives? The answer lies in examining the intensional, rather than the intentional, that which is “causally efficacious” within the cultural context of these two person’s lives to use Margolis’s phrase. Revenge, whether out of some form of socio-economic frustration in Shipman’s case or non-recognition in terms of social hierarchy in the case of Iago, may not go far enough. What Soothill and Wilson claim in the case of the former is that a structural argument forces us to recognize that Shipman’s victims lived outside “the moral order of competitive capitalist society” so as to be seen as socio-economic burdens on that society.33 In Iago’s case, instead of concentrating on his intentions it might be more appropriate to focus on his use of language in respect to a minority within his culture, namely black people. We can note his racist reference to the Moor, speaking to Brabantio, condemning him for allowing his daughter to be “covered by a Barbary horse” and saying to Roderigo that “Moors are changeable in their wills.” But Brabantio, who refers to the Moor’s “sooty bosom”, also exhibits that racism in referring to his daughter’s falling in love “with what she fear’d to look on”, in a relationship which errs “against all rules of nature” (Act 1 sc. III). Accordingly, just as the Shipman case “should have contributed to

equipment for his practice—when allegations about murders—started to circulate, a group of incredulous patients formed a support group for their erstwhile GP.” “Theorizing the Puzzle that is Harold Shipman” p. 688. 33 “Theorizing the Puzzle that is Harold Shipman” p. 696.

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a debate about the place of the elderly in later modernity” so Shakespeare’s play may be seen to contribute to the argument about the place of black people in Elizabethan England. The intensional, the intentional and the Intentional More lessons can be drawn from these examples than merely the claim that the intensional—tacit meanings embedded within a public language use employed in some cultural context—may be more significant than the intentional in exploring human actions.34 Before exploring that issue, how can the intensional and the intentional be understood within the context of what Margolis calls the Intentional? The Intentional is clarified by Margolis in “the Kantian manner”: artworks depict an “interior purposiveness” through the use of musical notation, strokes of paint, linguistic phrases or whatever, even if in the case of carpet-making, landscape gardening, architecture or musical composition, what is created does not refer to something specific. And when it is claimed that the “Intentional” incorporates both the “intentional” and the “intensional”, arising as features of culturally formed phenomena”,35 Margolis makes two quite distinct claims: the first about Intentional attributes, the second about their determinability. In relation to the first claim, consider a short story. In relation to it we can identify physically the marks on the page, which come to count as the written words on the paper constituting the short story. But the short story as a work of art is identified “under a certain description (or interpretation)” that is as “intensionally qualified” as an ironic tale, a tragedy, a moral story or an instructional narrative. Though we can fix the short story physically as a

34 Christopher Alder chocked to death whilst handcuffed lying on a police station floor in 1998 in front of four police officers. The Independent Police Complaint’s Commission’s chairperson, Nick Hardwick, claimed that the four Humberside Police Officers exhibited “unwitting racism” in their language and behaviour by whistling and chatting as he died. (The Independent 28th March 2006 p. 9). 35 See AP p. 42 and Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 14. Within “Relativism and Interpretative Objectivity” in The Philosophy of Interpretation ed. by J. Margolis and T. Rockmore, Malden Mass.: Blackwell 2000 pp. 200–26, Margolis takes the “Intentional” to refer and include the “linguistic, “lingual”, semantic, gestural, semiotic, significative, symbolic, meaningful, representational, expressive, rhetorical, institutional, rulelike, intentional, purposive, historical, traditional, stylistic, genre-bound, and other similar properties” (pp. 216–7).

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number of pages in a book, we can’t fix the work of art in the same way and thus interpret it. Rather the work of art itself “is identified for relevant description and appraisal when ‘it’ is interpreted”. And in the case of any our four interpretations different Intentional attributes can be ascribed without having to consider the writer’s actual intentions. In relation to Margolis’s second claim, “what distinguishes artworks, texts, and other cultural entities from natural entities depends essentially on the complex incarnation of so-called Intentional properties”.36 Whereas the properties of an existent or event can be determinate or specific, Intentional ones are not but, rather, “are determinable only in being open to being interpretatively determined ” given “consensual rigor”37 within a community of inquirers. Yet this cognitive approach lacks an account of what makes artworks distinct from persons, the relationship between created art works and ‘found art’ and how we may wish to distinguish artworks from other cultural entities or, indeed, works of good craft. Artworks and Persons Clearly, we can speak of certain human beings as though they were works of art. Analogously, we can come to regard artworks as if they were persons. For Margolis the salient features of the latter lie in their capacity for “self-reference and self-individuation”, the possibility that such entities can be regarded as rational agents, effectively responsible for what they do, their ability to share in language-use embedded within meaningful cultural practices and with respect to their historical origination.38 Though they may be “embodied in different ways”—human beings possess minds—we regard both artworks and persons similarly for in each case “what is embodied are Intentional structures that are affected in similar ways under interpretation”.39 But this assimilation overlooks at least two significant differences between them. For an artwork, such as Othello, it is possible to work back from the artwork to its Intentional properties in

36

AP p. 43 and Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 47. “Relativism and Interpretative Objectivity” p. 221. 38 “Constraints on the Metaphysics of Culture” in Texts Without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative J. Margolis, New York: Blackwell 1989, pp. 187–234, p. 213. 39 What, After All is a Work of Art? pp. 135–6. 37

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order to reconstruct the intentions of its creator in producing it. Despite Iago’s artful use of language, we can analyse too what he said and through his ‘common sense’ use of everyday speech identify his racism in the play’s context. But in the case of persons, access to their intentions through such Intentional attributes is not nearly so easy in view of the capacity for humans to lie! Margolis’s comparison of artworks to persons also misses something else. In relation to artworks, we adopt a contemplative attitude. Simone Weil characterizes this stance as invoking “the fullness of aesthetic contemplation” since it “excludes introspection”.40 And she directly compares the existence of human beings to artworks under this dimension.41 But she dissents from Margolis’s stance: in seeking to experience such a reality a “method is necessary for the understanding of images, symbols etc.. One should not try to interpret them, but to contemplate them until their significance flashes upon one”.42 But in ordinary life, as Sartre argued, we are more, often than not, engaged in instrumental behaviour,43 sharing purposes to realize agreed ends, So, the salient features of what constitutes a person, as opposed to a cultural artefact, are revealed under necessarily different conditions. But what actually makes particular cultural artefacts artworks? The answer here does not lie simply in that the latter can be interpreted in a certain way but rather that artworks can be ascribed different kinds of significances when experienced from an aesthetic point of view. Considering the issue of ‘found art’ can best develop this point.

40

The Notebooks of Simone Weil tr. by A. Wills, Vols. 1 & 2, London: Routledge and K. Paul 1976, Vol. 2 p. 541; Vol. 1 pp. 214 & 240. 41 “It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. They help us through the mere fact that they exist.” S. Weil Gravity and Grace New York: Routledge 1995 p. 58. 42 It is as if an aspect suddenly dawns upon the viewer, rather than revealed by the conscious, intentional attempts by a person to ferret out the work’s meaning; cf. The Notebooks Vol. 2 p. 334. 43 Instrumental behaviour is distinguished from contemplation necessary to enact responsive behaviour and both from calculated manipulation and passionate endeavour in my “Conceptions of Human Action and the Justification of Value Claims” in Inquiries into Values ed. by S.H. Lee, Lewiston, Queenston: E. Mellen Press 1988 pp. 173–93.

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chapter three The Problem of ‘Found Art’

Margolis’s concern to distinguish between merely found objects such as bottleracks and driftwood in contrast to their use as materials in creating artworks leads him to suggest that there is an ontological distinction between these, that is, between physical objects and their role as “tokens of art-work types”. At the level of human intentions, we can speak of the latter objects as being used to produce artistic effects or objects enabling aesthetic contemplation to occur. But that can only happen if the appreciator is sufficiently “sensitized” to the idea that such a work can be so identified, whilst this latter sort of activity can only take place within “a suitable cultural tradition”. Without that, the object would remain something merely physical, identified extensionally—not intensionally—as “being context-free”.44 Whilst this analysis is well and good so far as it goes it needs extending to benefit from “the full sweep” of Margolis’s Peircian discovery. We can still regard a piece of driftwood—even if first thought of as a piece of primitive art or sculpture45—as a natural object and aesthetically without claiming it to be a work of art. It may rise to the level of an aesthetically sensuous object at most, but not an artwork until interpreted within a given culture as its context. What Margolis fails to tell us, however, is why an object can be viewed aesthetically. By employing Bullough’s analysis of the aesthetic in terms of his psychical distance theory, an argument can be presented separating an object’s aesthetic qualities from its status as an art object: “aesthetic relevance exists prior to and independent of the art world”. Indeed, the whole motivation for seeking to claim that a piece of driftwood might be regarded as an art object is because it displays “certain aesthetically relevant properties”.46

44 AP p. 21 & “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” pp. 36 & 37. 45 “Suppose—that a finely wrought object, one whose texture and proportions are highly pleasing in perception, has been believed to be a product of some primitive people. Then there is discovered evidence that proves it to be an accidental natural product. As an external thing, it is now precisely what it was before. Yet at once it ceases to be a work of art and becomes a natural “curiousity”. It now belongs in a museum of natural history, nor in a museum of art.” J. Dewey, Art as Experience p. 48. 46 G. Iseminger “Appreciation, the Artworld and the Aesthetic” in Culture and Art ed. by Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press pp. 118–30, p. 121; cf. my “Edward Bullough’s Aesthetics and Aestheticism: Features

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In Peircian terms, for an object to be regarded aesthetically, it has to be regarded as a Qualisign: “a quality which is a Sign” (CP 2.244). To be regarded as such it has to be embodied somehow, as a patch of red, for example, “is instantiated” in itself within a Kandinsky abstract painting or as sound instantiates a musical note.47 Secondly, that as a sign it is significant because the object is to be regarded iconically, not necessarily indexically or intellectively. The significance of the driftwood aesthetically, for example, does not lie in the fact that my friend may have walked along this beach and this is the sort of thing s/he may have dropped on the way, nor that the driftwood can be understood as indicating how far the tide has risen on the seashore. Regarding driftwood iconically rather than indexically or purely intellectively is to see “its significant virtue” as “due simply to its Quality” (CP 2.92), its character, “which it possesses in itself ” (CP 5.73). Finally, for an object to be regarded aesthetically it has to be regarded rhematically—as a rheme—as “a sign of qualitative Possibility”, inciting or evoking “such and such a kind of possible Object” (CP, 2.250). In that sense, a rheme is a sign without a subject and thereby cannot refer to what is true or false (CP 8.337). It can “only be presented to the interpretant for contemplation”, akin to an artwork or a reflection on a dream, as opposed to a Dicent sign48 which, like a weather-vane, is insistent in relation to a physical existent, or an argument which is submitted as a valid form of reasoning (CP 8.338). Employing these further Peircian distinctions, then, we can say that an artwork, as well as a found object, can suggest something qualitative (its Qualisign status) as opposed to something existing or rule-governed. Secondly, in relation to any potential object, an artwork simply has a character, what it is in itself “purely by virtue of its quality; and its object can only be a Firstness” (CP 2.276) (its Iconic quality). Thirdly, with respect to its Interpretant, either can be regarded as suggestive of something possible—its Rhematic status (cf. CP 2.243)—as opposed to indicating a fact or something lawlike. It is for these reasons that the artifactuality condition has to be of Reality to be Experienced” Ultimate Reality and Meaning Vol. 13, No. 3, Sept. pp. 55–85; cf. my To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical Chs. VII, XII & XIII. 47 J.J. Liszka A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce Bloomington: Indiana UP 1996, pp. 48–9. 48 Whereas a Rheme ties to the qualitative, a Dicent sign indicates an actual existent (CP 2.250) independent of itself. It is therefore a genuine Index (CP 2.257).

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emphasized to distinguish art objects from found ones. But we can best realize how these aesthetic features can be appreciated by drawing out, as Margolis does not, the contrast between artworks and craft products. The Art/Craft Distinction Given that cultural entities “are embodied and are tokens of a type”,49 what are the distinguishing features that mark off works of art from craft? Claiming that artworks are produced “or appear as what is done (deeds, actions) by way of human agency”,50 Margolis’s account hardly provides a way for distinguishing the former from “institutionalised craft”.51 Consider, then, the following: “There was once a flute player who, one day, began to play nothing but a single, sustained, uninterrupted note. After he had continued to do so for about twenty years, his wife suggested that other flute players were capable of producing not only a range of harmonious tones, but even entire melodies, and that this might make for more variety. But the monotonous flute player replied that it was no fault of his if he had already found the note which everybody else was still searching for.”

This is a rendering of an account of a Persian tale by Yves Klein.52 Notice that it incorporates the very three elements identified so far in ascribing an aesthetic status of an artwork: something qualitative (cf. Qualisign), a sound embodied in this one note; something which is by virtue of its character (Iconic) in itself for the player’s wife; something which renders a possibility (a Rheme) for other flute players. How it affects us experientially defines the character of an artwork. Klein was led to monochrome painting through his concern— exemplified by this Persian tale—to express what he regarded as the sense of his own soul through a colour rather than a musical note and that colour was what he patented as IKB or International Klein

49

“Nature, Culture and Person” p. 13. Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 9. 51 “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities”, p. 42. 52 Quoted in Yves Klein: 1928–1962, Hannah Weitemeier Taschen GmbH: Koln 2001 p. 11. 50

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Blue (patent no. 63471 (19th/May/1960)). It is true that when this Blue Monochrome is experienced—set twenty centimetres from a wall mounted on a block53—its contemplator is drawn into the depths of this depiction, transporting both the experiencer and the experienced into something incorporeally qualitative, something gentle, calm, even serene. A work of craft just does not render this transformatory dimension. It simply presents to its appreciator the familiar, the known already. It gives back to us what we could have anticipated.54 Contrariwise, the kind of experience Klein’s block induces is iconic in character, since it has nothing “to do with the sense of contact with the world, nor with the actual existence of its object. It is a mere dream”.55 In this way a work of art draws us after it whether we intend to be so drawn or not. Consider Weitemeier’s comment on Klein’s invention: The emotion invested in the creation of such imagery was matched by the freedom of the viewer to see and feel whatever he was prompted to in its presence. Nowhere could the eye find a fixed point or centre of interest; the distinction between the beholder, or subject of vision, and its object began to blur. This, Klein believed, would lead to a state of heightened sensibility.56

Consider two objections. Firstly, Klein’s block is only a putative candidate for the label an artwork. Peirce indicates the difficulty: “—pictures, though their main mode of representation is iconical, yet depend very much upon conventions. That is why new methods of painting are always unpopular”. Maybe what Klein created could be regarded as a new type of artwork. People rejecting it hadn’t “become familiar with the conventions of the method”57 he used. And Peirce’s insight here about a new type of artwork can guide us as to how works can come to be regarded as artworks rather than good craft: artworks are judged within a cultural context to have

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Yves Klein: 1928–1962, p. 15. Cf. T.R. Maitland “Art and Craft: The Distinction” Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. 14, No. 3 Summer 1974 pp. 231–8. 55 Writings of Charles S. Peirce Vols. 1–6 (1857–90), Max H. Fisch & the Peirce Editorial Project (eds.) Bloomington: Indiana UP 1982–2000, Vol. 5 p. 380. These Peircian notions, in relation to the aesthetics of landscape viewing, are developed in To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical, Ch. VII. 56 Yves Klein: 1928–1962, p. 19. 57 Writings of Charles S. Peirce Vol. 5 p. 380. 54

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transformed the standard conventions of a method generated by previous types.58 In Klein’s case, indeed, access to his new method might be facilitated by getting viewers to compare their own experience with that of hearing a continuous tone in music since “the specific hue of the pigment engendered a visual sensation of complete immersion in the colour, without compelling the viewer to define its character”.59 Firstness is well to the fore if emphasis is put on the iconic, whereas a second objection might be that really Klein was trying to capture a sky’s deep blue colour, that is to say, that his picture has something symbolic about it: thought and reasoning are involved, so Thirdness proves relevant. In addition, if the picture does refer to the sky, thereby resembling something in nature, it can be regarded as an index—like a signpost—pointing to something other than itself; the category Secondness would be invoked. But artworks do not have to represent anything. It might be most laudable if someone was able to so appreciate Klein’s picture—seeing it representationally— but that is not necessary in experiencing its iconic, Rhematic quality. Conclusion Margolis has been credited for making use of Peirce’s token-type distinction in trying to distinguish a physical existent from a work of art, and in showing how the latter can be embodied in the former, so making sense of the claim that anything referred to, as an artwork, must be able to sustain interpretative activities.60 Though such

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Or, better, megatypes. With so many productions of the work Othello for example on the stage and as recorded on film, we can speak of Shakespeare’s play as a kind of type, a megatype. In relation to painting and sculpture the megatype is the original. Analogously, in music “the megatype composition noted in the score” is instanced in any token performance governed by that score (AP p. 59) just as the film productions of Othello starring Orson Wells or Lawrence Olivier’s version of the play are instances or adaptations of that megatype drama. So artworks “must continue to “secure uptake” with an appropriate community of practitioners and be recognized or recognizable, as the works they are.” (P. Lamarque “Objects of Interpretation” in The Philosophy of Interpretation ed. by J. Margolis & T. Rockmore, Malden Mass.: Blackwell 2000, pp. 95–124, p. 111). 59 Yves Klein 1928–1962, p. 15. 60 R.J. Scalfani “The Logical Primitiveness of the Concept of a Work of Art” in Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. 11 no. 2 Spring 1971 pp. 113–22, pp. 116–7. See also

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an analysis is necessary in distinguishing the one from the other, it has been argued that it is not sufficient since it does not make sense of what Peirce called the specific Tone or Tuone. This comes to constitute an artwork’s essential qualitative features marking it off from other cultural artefacts, particularly products of craft. In reply, Margolis might claim61 that to make sense of a work’s Tuone is to refer to the way we appreciate artworks culturally, just as anything identified in relation to the category Firstness can only be realized within an interpretative context. But such rejoinders may not be entirely satisfactory since the feeling qualities embodied in artworks must be present in the work for cultural appreciation to be possible, just as Thirdness—employed within an interpretative context— makes sense of Firstness. The Chinese may not be using white and red in a funeral context because these colours indicate something different for them at a feeling-qualities level, but because such colours are used to celebrate the sacredness, the religious import of a funeral rather than the uncleanliness of a decaying body or despair at the loss of a loved one. The fact that a cultural context influences colour preferences in no way indicates that such a context determines the nature of the colour tones themselves.62 It is this sense of an artwork’s feeling-quality imprint the work leaves with us aesthetically, its “gaze” to “reverberate” within our own subjectivity,63 as we give ourselves up to appreciating it, which Margolis’s account lacks. But just how these appreciations of artworks can be related to aesthetic experiencing more widely understood would be the subject of a different, more extensive kind of inquiry.

Theodor Adorno Aesthetic Theory (1970) tr. by R. Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone Press, 1999 p. 128. 61 As he did claim in a discussion following his contribution to the series of lectures entitled What Future for Art? “Placing Art—Placing Ourselves” at the Southampton University’s Centre of Contemporary Art Research, Winchester, Hampshire on 30th May 2002. 62 Charles Hartshorne The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934) Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press 1968, pp. 170–1. 63 T. Adorno Aesthetic Theory pp. 112–3.

CHAPTER FOUR

ART IN SOCIETY It is time to bring the results of our inquiry together. Agreement has been expressed with Margolis on two features regarding artworks: i) works of art are entities created by human beings so distinguishing them from natural objects; ii) such works may be made subject to interpretation. An Indexical conception of an artwork accounts for the first feature, the second an Intellective conception. What was missing in Margolis’s approach is a proper account of the aesthetic dimension in relation to an artwork’s appreciation, a dimension distinguishing artworks from institutionalised craft. Indeed in the previous chapter, this Iconic dimension was brought to the fore, focussing on the way an artwork, as an artefact, has a unique Tuone released within an individual’s experience in being captured by something beyond the self. In addition, although, in his approach, Margolis seeks to interpret the sheer physicality of an artwork, particularly in relation to painting, architecture and sculpture, his analysis fails to examine how the being of a completed work—now present independently of its creator’s intentions—is manifested in a commodified world. In that world, beautiful historical artefacts are stolen from churches, old books wantonly removed from libraries, and created monuments taken for private collections or melted down in the case of metal artefacts. So, although the emphasis now is upon making sense of an Indexical conception of an artwork—as an entity capable of being appreciated, embodied in some physical existent within some societal context—it has to be related to the way the artwork, as a product, is regarded in a society subject to the dominance of exchange value. Before embarking on such a project, however, we need to remind ourselves about the distinctions between the Iconic, Indexical and Intellective conceptions before clarifying the Iconic sense to which the Indexical may be opposed. Turning back to the quotation which initiated our inquiry in Chapter One, it was claimed that an Iconic conception of what is created refers to creative processes in its creation. According to Peirce, people who create art are “those for whom the chief thing is the

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qualities of feelings” as opposed say to practical persons “who carry on the business of the world”. Whereas, for the latter, the experience of nature represents “an opportunity” (CP 1.43), the artist is concerned with what “can be imagined” (CP 1.304) about it. That is because the artist’s concern is not so much with existents as such but with their qualitative features, an existent’s character which “it possesses in itself and would possess just the same though its object did not exist” (CP 5.74). And in focusing upon something’s character or qualitative features, Peirce speaks of someone as though taken up in “a pure dream” (CP 3.362), whether it be that of the artist or an appreciator in relation to what is imaginatively created. In either case the distinction between what is imagined about something and its reality as a created entity disappears, but which possesses, as a creation, a value in itself. Whereas the Iconic refers to the processes involved in some activity, for Peirce the Indexical refers to something’s existence. So, in speaking of science, we saw how he claimed that “organized knowledge” could be used “for some ulterior purpose”, to alter someone’s life, earn money or enhance the lives of others (CP 1.45). Similarly, a work of art can be regarded extrinsically to bring someone pleasure, be bought or sold as a commodity to become someone’s private asset or symbolize a corporate image. Lastly, the Intellective conception focuses not so much on the activity originating an artwork but, rather, on a much more reflective activity seeking to make sense of what has been created. In this way it can be regarded in terms of the tradition within which the work has its place in the way the artwork is physically embodied. Whether through paint, sounds, words, images, material construction, a new creation is revealed within some tradition. In other words, for the appreciator, there can be a play of ideas contemporary with the piece’s creation and one for the appreciator living today. But a further examination of this Intellective conception will take place in the next Chapter. What is required now is a fuller account of these three different conceptions so that the Indexical can be clarified in relation to them. One way of doing this would be to focus on a classic article written by Max Horkheimer in 1941 entitled Art and Mass Culture. Horkheimer’s article, which appears in Critical Theory (CT from now)1 not only represents the clearest statement of his view of 1 Max Horkheimer “Art and Mass Culture” (1941) in Critical Theory: Selected Essays New York: Continuum (1982) pp. 273–90.

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art in society, but he also explores within it what has been called the Iconic, Indexical and Intellective conceptions of an artwork. In addition in the first part of this article, a logic involving these different conceptions can be elicited, before ideas presented in Mortimer Adler’s book Art and Prudence are considered in the article’s second half.2 The Iconic Conception of Art Consider Geertz’s use of the phrase that the artwork materializes ‘a way of experiencing’ so identifying an Iconic conception of art, a phrase inspired perhaps by Matisse’s claim that he was unable to distinguish between the feeling he had for life and his way of expressing that feeling.3 Such a standpoint suggests that works of art can be identified as expressions not of something cognitive which is dysfunctional generating a problem to be solved, but rather as a felt dysfunction. Such dysfunctions come in different forms. Some simply occur, spring into view, and can’t be completely identified. Dreams are of this order, or sudden awarenesses, which appear from nowhere. Dreams, typically, have, in their content, the ‘residues of the day’. These residues come to haunt us, as though in dealing with their content, originally, we may not have done justice to what we feel ought to have been done. Another kind of dysfunction—a contrast or contradiction between what is expected and what appears or is experienced—can relate to images. But images are ascertainable, analyzable in what we feel appears before us: a facial expression; the whiteness of knuckles grasping some object; consider Benjamin’s own example: “How a convivial evening has passed can be seen by someone remaining behind from the disposition of plates and cups, glasses and food, at a glance”.4 A claim of Vico’s, in his New Science, puts 2 This articulation will be related to remarks Horkheimer made earlier in his career and subsequently with his return to post-fascist Germany (see my “Between Religion and Secularism: Max Horkheimer’s Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning (2004) Vol. 27, No. 3 (Sept.) pp. 188–218). Indeed at the time of writing Art and Mass Culture Horkheimer had moved to Santa Monica, California where he and Adorno worked on the famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally entitled Philosophical Fragments in 1944. 3 C. Geertz “Art as a Cultural System” in Aesthetics ed. by S. Feagin and P. Maynard Oxford UP (1997) pp. 109–18, pp. 112 & 110. 4 W. Benjamin One Way Street & Other Writings tr. E. Jephcott & K. Shorter, London NLB 1979 p. 83.

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the point exactly: “Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind”.5 We can see the influence of Benjamin’s article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction6 upon Horkheimer’s Art and Mass Culture. Horkheimer indicates the way in which an artwork was once tied to “other avenues of social life” before, under modernism, it finds its place in the “interior”, celebrated within the experience of the “isolated” human being. Indeed, he may still be seen as referring to the Iconic conception of the artwork when he writes: “Individuality, the true factor in artistic creation and judgment, consists not in idiosyncrasies and crotchets, but in the power to withstand the plastic surgery of the prevailing economic system which carves all men to one pattern”. Unfortunately, the context of this sentence can be read in one of two ways. It could be read in the context of the way an artwork comes to be created, that is to say Iconically: “In his esthetic behaviour, man so to speak divested himself of his functions as a member of society and reacted as the isolated individual he had become”. Or it could be read in relation to the way a work might be interpreted Intellectively: “Human beings are free to recognize themselves in works of art in so far as they have not succumbed to the general levelling” (CT p. 273). But because he invokes talk about Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, at this point it appears that Horkheimer pursues an Intellective understanding of an artwork rather than the Iconic. But for the moment, let us stay with the Iconic. According to the way Peirce’s view has been explicated, an artist seeks to seize what emerges from some felt dysfunction to render its fleeting existence a reality that will last. For, as Benjamin in 19317 and Vico saw, the truth of the human condition lay in an examination of its passing, contingent states of affairs. Indeed, Vico claimed that “imaginary figments”, as he refers to the results of the poet’s

5 G. Vico The New Science of Giambattista Vico tr. by T.G. Bergin & Max Fisch, Ithaca: Cornell UP (1984) par. no. 218. 6 W. Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations (1979) ed. with an introd. by Hannah Arendt, tr. by H. Zorn, London: Plimco pp. 211–44. 7 W. Benjamin “A Small History of Photography” in One Way Street and Other Writings pp. 240–57.

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activity, are, in a way, “more real than physical reality itself ”.8 Perhaps Benjamin treats photography so honorifically because the images created out of fleeting moments of experience can be redeemed, placed back into the felt life of human experience. What may appear to be fleeting in fragile moments of experiencing can be made static, frozen or specially constructed to last.9 As a result of appreciating such creations, its appreciators can learn how to approach experience to access such creative potentials for themselves.10 But that possibility is not really explored by Horkheimer as it was by Adorno and Benjamin. This Iconic conception, however, raises problems in aesthetics associated with the intentional fallacy in the sense of ascertaining how far an artwork merely reflects an artist’s intentions. Ought we to postulate an ‘artist’ who creates the artefact, outstripping the intentions of its human creator? How, exactly, are we to account for that sense of a felt imprint a work leaves upon us which cannot be accounted for by what its creator has to say about it? Incidentally, remarks made by Horkheimer might intimate something of an answer to these questions: “men are in accord concerning the possibilities they envision”. But reference to Kant once more invokes the Intellective conception: “Kant thinks that every man’s aesthetic judgment is suffused with the humanity he has in himself ” (CT p. 274). An Excursus into Horkheimer’s philosophy We can only speculate why Horkheimer, unlike Benjamin, whose work he championed, downplayed an Iconic conception of art. Maybe he would have found it impossible to focus upon the fleeting appearances

8 G. Vico On The Study of Methods tr. by E. Granturn (1990) Ithaca: Cornell UP p. 43. 9 N.E. Boulting “Edward Bullough’s Aesthetics and Aestheticism: Features of Reality to be Experienced” Ultimate Reality and Meaning Vol. 17, No. 3 Sept. 1989 pp. 55–85, p. 220. 10 Of course, Horkheimer with Adorno, hints in Dialectic of Enlightenment at this idea when he points out that the way to undo the concern to master nature— brought about by the pursuit of an unreflecting sense of enlightenment (For the distinction between an unreflecting and an authentic sense of enlightenment see my “Between Religion and Secularism” (2004) sec. 2.5.3)—is to be “taken back into nature” in some way, presumably aesthetically (Dialectic of Enlightenment M. Horkheimer & T. Adorno, tr. by E. Jephcott (2002), Stanford California: Stanford UP p. 31).

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of everyday phenomena in order to ascertain some emancipatory effect, which could be detected within an aesthetic perspective upon them. Rather, Horkheimer’s focus was upon those “dialectical realities”, clarified by his interest in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which was locked to a more Hegelian Marxism eliciting the truth about the human condition.11 He did so because, as he says in his 1941 article, “(t) he purely esthetic feeling is the reaction of the private atomic subject, it is the judgment of an individual who abstracts from prevailing social standards” (CT p. 273). Horkheimer’s attack on the conception of ‘the private atomic subject’ takes a number of forms. If, following Kant, every human being can be regarded as suffused with humanity, such an entity was not to be regarded abstractly, transcendentally—as for Kant—but rather, historically, as a social creature. Consequently, as he says in Dawn and Decline (DD from now on), “(b)oth in their origin and their goal, all feelings are social” (DD p. 190)12 so that he rejects the idea that human beings can express themselves in aesthetic judgment “without consulting social values and ends” (CT p. 273). And for him, as he comments in Eclipse of Reason (ER from now on),13 this had always been so, even in Kant’s own time: “The great individualists who were critical of city life, such as Rousseau and Tolstoi, had their intellectual roots in urban traditions; Thoreau’s escape to the woods was conceived by a student in the Greek polis rather than by a peasant. In these men the individualistic dread of civilization was nourished by its fruits” (ER p. 131). His rationale for rejecting Kant’s methodological individualism, however, reveals a further reason for slighting the idea of “the private atomic subject” in his “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology”: “thought processes are comprehensible only in terms of the reality in which they have meaning. Consciousness requires clarity concerning the historical context in which it evolves and the praxis within which it emerges, takes effect, and is changed.” This practical, active sense of what it is to be human is emphasized, then, as much as the social: “The value of

11 M. Jay “Mass Culture and Aesthetic Redemption: The Debate between Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer in On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives ed. by S. Benhabib (et al.) (1993) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press pp. 364–86, pp. 374–5. 12 DD p. 190 stands for Dawn and Decline tr. by M. Shaw (1978) New York: Continuum Bks., Seabury Press page 190. 13 ER stands for Eclipse of Reason (1947) New York: Continuum Bks.

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concrete thinking and of self-criticism is contingent on their relationship to praxis”,14 a practice to be understood in Hegelian Marxist terms. Humans transform the natural world through creative activity to establish works or products, which come to haunt the lives of those who inherit them, through exercising the human capacity to appreciate the value of what previous generations have created in the form of inherent value. And just as Marx had generated political action with practical effects in writing Capital, so Horkheimer, and his fellow workers, sought to emphasize the practical intent implied by their intellectual inquiries, by penetrating ‘deeper’ into newer forms of domination so as to “undermine ideology, enhance awareness of the material conditions of life circumstances, and to aid the creation of radical political movements”.15 Without these dimensions thought is discouraged “from its practical tendency of pointing to the future” (CT pp. 263–4). A further reason can be revealed for his rejection of attaching any weight to the idea of a ‘purely aesthetic feeling’ related to ‘the private atomic subject’: for him and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE from now on), “(i)n a certain sense, all perception is projection” since projection in human beings has become automatic as in defensive and offensive behaviour realized as “reflexes” (DE p. 154). Since, in examining Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory in aesthetic appreciation, this issue has been discussed elsewhere,16 it will not be considered here, save to say that for Horkheimer such perceptive reflexes do not lie just in relation to the natural world. Because of the way humans have to operate in their lives, where, increasingly, institutions themselves embody injustices—consider how ‘whistle-blowers’ today are treated—peoples’ minds become closed “to dreams of a basically different world and to concepts that, instead of being mere classification of facts, are orientated towards real fulfillment of those dreams” (ER p. 150). Prophetically, then, Horkheimer speaks of new “forms of social life” “announcing themselves in which the

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Max Horkheimer “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” in Between Philosophy and Social Sciences: Selected Early Writings tr. by G.F. Hunter (et al.) (1993) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press pp. 151–75, p. 159. 15 D. Held Introduction To Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (1980) London: Hutchinson p. 361. 16 N.E. Boulting To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical Leicester: Upfront Pub. (2003) pp. 286–7 & 300–2; cf. J. Appleton The Experience of Landscape (1975) rev. ed. NewYork: John Wiley 1996.

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individual, as he is, will be transhaped unless he is destroyed” (CT p. 189). If what exists is the rational, then not only is there no “need for aesthetic reflection” (DE p. 209), but, indeed, no room for dissent either, or at least for taking that dissent seriously. Does this then end the possibility of an authentic existence for the individual? Horkheimer locates this concern as part of the legacy of Christianity.17 And with the undoing of the coherence of what it is be an individual, so any relationship to what it is to be a Christian is undone too. The lives humans are forced to endure under capitalism—captured in such slogans as ‘Pursue your own self-interest’, ‘Greed is good’, ‘The value of anything is its price’, ‘Profit is the measure of right’—are lives subject to constant criticism by Christian principles. This “liquidation of the subject” (ER p. 93) arises through “the gradual dissolution of the family, the transformation of personal life into leisure and of leisure into routines supervised to the last detail, into the pleasures of the ball park and the movie, the best seller” and mass-media generally (CT p. 277) as he puts it in Art and Mass Culture. The only glimmer of light in this grim picture lies with “the educated”, those who can be “still indissolubly bound up with man as he existed in the past. They still have in mind the individual’s harmony and culture, at a time when the task is no longer to humanize the isolated individual, which is impossible, but to realize humanity as a whole” (CT p. 289). The Intellective Conception of Art Given that Horkheimer appears to be more interested in an Intellective rather than the Iconic conception of an artwork, let us turn now to the way a culturally emergent entity such as an artwork can be interpreted without referring necessarily to the processes, which may have created it. According to this conception the created object has, as it were, its own autonomy independently conceived from its producer once its creation is completed. And that means bringing into view the sense of imprint the work makes upon us, ‘the gaze of an art

17 “Although Hamlet, a good disciple of Montaigne, lost his Christian faith, he retained his Christian soul, and in a way this marks the actual origin of the modern individual. Christianism created the principle of individuality through its doctrine of the immortal soul, the image of God” (ER p. 137).

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work’, how it “reverberates” within our own subjectivity.18 For Horkheimer, in Art and Mass Culture, the artwork offered the possibility for the human being to conceive “a different world from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art. Today it survives only in those works which uncompromisingly express the gulf between the monadic individual and his barbarous surrounding— prose like Joyce’s and paintings like Picasso’s Guernica” (CT p. 278). Here he seems to be offering a communication theory of art of some kind: artworks “denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay”. Hence his famous conclusion: “Art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the utopia that evaporated from religion”.19 That evaporation took place with the decline of the family since “the experiences that have invigorated religion also lose their power”. So having cast aside any ties “to the principle of heavenly love”, any command that human beings “should return to it for reasons of state is not tenable in religious terms” (CT pp. 279, 275 & 278). But how are we to understand this conception of utopia which has evaporated from religion? In his “Egoism and Freedom Movements” of 1936, Horkheimer indicates that he sees a sense of utopia in Freud’s writings. According to Horkheimer, Freud refers to specific impulses exhibited in “the life of certain primitive tribes and the doctrine of Bolsheviks” lending 18 T. Adorno Aesthetic Theory tr. by R. Hullot-Kentnor (1999) London: Athlone Press pp. 112–3. 19 Buck-Morss credits this idea to Adorno: “art rather than theology” is to be viewed “as the refuge for that utopian impulse which could find no home in present”. She cites Adorno’s letter to Benjamin of 6/11/1934 (S. Buck-Morss The Origins of Negative Dialectics Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press 1977, pp. 170, 140 & 142): Adorno recommends to Benjamin that his “work should proceed without qualms to realize every part of the theological content and all the literalness of its most extreme claims, everything that was originally harbored within it (without qualms, that is, concerning any objections stemming from that Brechtian atheism which we should perhaps one day attempt to salvage as a kind of inverse theology, but which we should certainly not duplicate!)”. In his letter of 17/11/1934 he praises Benjamin’s “image of theology, into which I would gladly see our thoughts dissolve, is none other than the very one which sustains your thoughts here—it could indeed be called an “inverse theology”. This position, directed against natural and supernatural interpretations alike, first formulated here as it is with total precision, strikes me as utterly identical with my own—.” And on Benjamin’s conception of “attentiveness in prayer” Adorno remarks “I cannot think of anything more important from your hand than this—not of anything which could better and more precisely communicate your innermost intentions” (T. Adorno & W. Benjamin The Complete Correspondence 1928–40 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP (1999) pp. 53, 67 & 71).

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substance to the utopianism of the just and valid structuring of life itself, even if this is cast as “expressions of impotent longing”.20 In “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” in 1930 Horkheimer sees those desires directed toward an individual’s sense of sensual happiness, which Freud, with the culture of his time sought to repress.21 Freud’s insights, undistorted by their author, implied what true art expressed: “man’s legitimate interest in his future happiness”, a glimpse of some ideal life offered imagistically.22 Because that glimpse could not be rendered communicatively through language,23 the family resemblances between art-works and magic were explored: “Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special, self-contained sphere, removed from the context of profane existence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the ceremony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from reality by its own circumference” (DE pp. 13–14). We can now see why artworks have the capacity to challenge the everyday. They can initiate what can be called ‘non-identity thinking’24 to oppose Hegel’s claim that the real is the rational. That thinking can undo the easy formula that our concepts settle for us “the forms of experience we have of the world”, that what we take to exist is mediated to us satisfactorily through ordinary language we use to communicate with each other every day.25 Artworks can denounce that relationship—the art movement Surrealism being a prime example—where such “renunciation places the pure image in opposition to corporeal existence, the elements of which the pure image sublates within itself ”. This phenomenon is what Benjamin referred to as a work’s aura, its spiritual dimension that led philosophers such as Schelling to rank art higher “than conceptual knowl-

20 M. Horkheimer “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” Between Philosophy and Social Sciences pp. 318–88, p. 372. 21 M. Horkheimer “Egoism and Freedom Movements” in Between Philosophy and Social Sciences pp. 49–110, p. 105. 22 M. Jay The Dialectical Imagination (1973) Berkeley: California UP (1996) p. 179; D. Held Introduction to Critical Theory p. 84. 23 Much earlier, Horkheimer had remarked in his piece “The Undiscovered Land”: “But we are still surrounded by a sea of darkness which cannot be illuminated by any language” (DD p. 31). 24 D. Held Introduction to Critical Theory pp. 82 & 215. 25 P. Winch The Idea of a Social Science (1958) London: Routledge & K. Paul (1971) p. 15.

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edge”.26 And for this reason, new artistic creations have been frowned upon within modernism just as magical practices still are now within Western Culture. Horkheimer remarks in this context: where that Civilization “restricted knowledge, it generally did so to make room for faith not art” (DE p. 14). It could be argued, however, that despite this utopian possibility an artwork postulates, this feature originates from, even if it promises to transform, existing “socially transmitted forms”: “By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute” (DE p. 103). Consider Marx’s claim: religion was the opiate for the people keeping their senses turned away from the injustices, left intact, that they endured every day. Similarly for Horkheimer and Adorno, art served to legitimize given societal conditions through its idolization. So they preferred the modern successor to “high culture in its traditional form”, no longer functioning “as a positive model into which the aesthetic consumer could escape as a refuge from unhappiness in the real world”.27 Their hope was undone as they became aware that even avant-garde art could be sucked into an affirmative culture forwarded by the entertainment industry (DE p. 101).28 So we are now taken towards an Indexical conception of a work of art. 26 “it is art alone which can succeed in objectifying with unusual validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion.” In sustaining this claim, Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism ((1800) tr. by P. Heath, Charlottesville: Virginian UP 1993 p. 232) employs Vico’s insight: “Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge.” Indeed, Schelling in his Philosophy of Art ((1802–3) ed. & tr. by D.W. Scott, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP 1989 p. 98) goes as far as saying that “to understand the transition of the aesthetic idea” into the concrete work of art, is the same as the general task of philosophy as such, namely, to understand the manifestation of ideas through particular things.” 27 M. Jay “Mass Culture and Aesthetic Redemption” p. 370. 28 Following his Art and Mass Culture article of 1941, the idea of providing a Freudian naturalistic anchor for the rational claim to happiness elicited in some way by artworks, was abandoned, even if Marcuse continued to pursue it (H. Brunkhorts “Dialectical Positivism of Happiness” On Max Horkheimer S. Benhabib et al. (eds.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1993) pp. 67–98, p. 87), thereby disconnecting any relation between such utopian fantasies and possible political action. Instead, during the 1940s, speculations are generated in terms of a non-instrumental, non-technical relationship to nature, implying a return to the examination of what made fantasy possible in man’s prehistory, that is to say, the very interest manifested in Vico’s The New Science where the human concern for self-preservation can be detached “from the oppression of nature”, something which may still lie dormant within “the collective unconscious of the species” (H. Dubiel Theory and Politics (1978) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1985) p. 96) leading possibly towards a transformed humanity to realize utopia.

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chapter four The Indexical Conception of Art

The Indexical conception focuses upon a work as an identifiable product indicating something to a societal subject. It can be seen with respect to its own culture which made it possible or—more importantly in relation to our present concerns—from within a different culture in which it is now appreciated. In this latter context, the artwork can be treated simply ahistorically, as an emblem used to sell some commodity or be regarded itself as a possessable asset. To illustrate the former case, consider the all too familiar way Constable’s The Cornfield of 1827 has been used on biscuit tin tops, household plates, wallpaper and so on. This painting’s ‘after life’ can be ensured by replication of its now reified character, understood Indexically,29 available for purchase in the market place. Whilst its passage, as an image, can be eased “into the dream world of the private consumer”, it humanizes the product to which it is attached to undo the latter’s ‘commodity character’:30 “Ever more callously the object world of man assumes the expression of the commodity. At the same time advertising seeks to veil the commodity character of things”.31 This threat to the Intellective conception as a result of the Indexical’s advance is cast as follows: the refusal of “the constraints imposed by society”, that an artwork can postulate, is undermined by an artwork’s ahistorical ‘after life’ that the work draws to itself in the market place. The Intellective conception only exists for an individual for whom cultural changes have not “brought about the disappearance of the inner life” (CT pp. 274 & 277). So the individual’s private realm “to which art is related, has been steadily menaced”: “Life outside the office and shop was appointed to refresh a man’s strength for office and shop; it was thus a mere appendage, a kind of tail to the comet of labor, measured, like labour, by time, and termed ‘free time’ ”. Art becomes “no longer communicative” because what is expressed within the artwork no longer resonates for its potential appreciator, since s/he has become merely an idle ama-

29 N.E. Boulting “The Reification Problem and Whitehead’s Philosophy” Process Studies Vol. 33 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 110–34, see Chapter 6. 30 S. Buck-Morss The Origins of Negative Dialectics p. 184. 31 W. Benjamin “Central Park” New German Critique Winter, 1985, Vol. 34, pp. 32–58, p. 42.

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teur historian or a consumer for whom the work either pleases or not. So artworks have to be rendered ‘hype’: certain art exhibitions have to be ‘sold’ to a public. Hence the cultural submission of people to the attitudes and prescribed awarenesses of the day, where “People desire to submit to them or rebel against them, as if they were gods” (CT pp. 275, 278 & 287), in a world where Hegel’s real is the rational. So the Intellective can become liquidated by the Indexical reified. An example of this transformation applying not only to cultural artifacts but to natural entities too is given by Horkheimer when he cites the case of a child who looks at the night sky and asks, “Daddy, what is the moon supposed to advertise?” (ER p. 101). Five Objections to the Identification of the Indexical Conception This sense of an Indexical conception of art faces five objections. The analysis reifies art in the sense of considering works which are clearly physically artifactual—painting, sculpture, architecture—and to theorize about art in general on the basis of such ‘paradigms’. Secondly, the argument tries to distinguish “high art”, in relation to which other creations are to be regarded as lesser or even inferior entities. Thirdly, the distinction between the Iconic and the Indexical can no longer be sustained because of the present nature of creative activity. Fourthly, the distinction between the Indexical and the Intellective conceptions of art is unintelligible, logically, not simply as a result of cultural developments in the way Horkheimer seems to assume. Finally, in endorsing Benjamin’s approach, he accepted the thesis that technological developments can serve to alienate human beings so as to undermine some former more ‘natural’ sense of being human, to commit two ‘fallacies’: i) essentialism; ii) separating technological from cultural development, an invalid idea since it confuses “the relationship between the physical and the cultural”.32 Painting, sculpture and architecture have been used to clarify the significance of the Indexical conception, thereby emphasizing the ‘thinghood’ of created entities. As Margolis has argued,33 such examples

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J. Margolis “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” in What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Pennsylvania State UP 1999 pp. 101–27, p. 110. 33 J. Margolis Art and Philosophy Brighton, UK: Harvester Press 1980 chapter 6.

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illustrate the plastic arts not the literary and the performing arts.34 Yet the novel is still an identifiable object, which can be bought or sold in a bookstore. In relation to the performing arts, both the text of a play, the performance of a jazz solo on a disc or a film as a video can be bought or sold as a product. The case of the ownership or salability of a dance may be more problematic since the variability of possibilities with respect to a dance’s notation—outside the classic repertoire represented by such ballets as Swan Lake—may be more numerous. If this first objection, given the exceptional nature of a dance, proves ineffective, perhaps it could be reformulated in terms of the second objection. Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin focus on “works of “high art” in the European canon” and, because of “complex, historical and economic reasons, modern European works of high art are extraordinarily and unusually fixed and stable”. This objection could be developed in one of two ways. One way of proceeding might be to point out that the ‘thinghood’ of created entities—“a contingent byproduct of the economics” of the life of the arts “in modern Europe” is only an outcome of artists having “to sell their wares on the market” illustrating Marx’s ‘fetishism of commodities’ or Lukacs’s notion of ‘reification’. Left like that, we have the reified Indexical conception of art reconfirmed not rejected by Cox35 but its status could be undermined in one of two further ways. Firstly, Cox argues that in the case of music at least, the fixation upon the outcomes of human activity, that is, appreciating works “as embodied in fixed objects”, is “an anomaly” since, in a pre-modern world, much more emphasis was placed upon the performative aspects of creative endeavour. Consider, Cox claims, the way Homer’s Iliad was performed, reiterated or transformed within each generation. This move seeks to dissolve the Indexical into an Iconic conception, our third objection. Secondly, it could be said that the distinction

Incidentally, he remarks in his book What, After All, Is A Work of Art how in her book Feeling and Form Susanne Langer may have had doubts about including “a section on film” since she felt “uneasy about doing so because she had doubts about film’s standing as an art form” (p. 101). 34 Margolis’s taxonomy distinguishing these three will be examined further in this volume’s Chapter 5. 35 C. Cox “Versions, Dubs and Remixes: Realism and Rightness in Aesthetic Interpretations” in Interpretation and its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz New York: Radopi 2003, pp. 285–92, p. 287.

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between the works of “high art” and the products of pop culture is no longer valid today. All human creative activities are art exemplars in the postmodern world. This move would seek to recast the Intellective conception to include the Indexical, anticipating what constitutes our fourth objection. But let us stay with Cox’s case against the Indexical conception. Cox’s case is that in a postmodern world the Indexical conception dissolves into the Iconic, as the focus on creative activity moves from the product to the processes of its creation. The Turner Prize Winner 2005 was Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed (Mobil Architecture No. 2): a shed was dismantled, transformed into a boat, but packed with its remains before being paddled down the river Rhine to Basel where the boat was dismantled and reassembled into a shed once more in a museum. For Starling, this activity represented the way thought processes could be manifested in some physical entity to reveal unfamiliar relationships and perhaps secret histories. It was not the work’s qualitative aspects which were significant so much as the kind of processes and ‘life histories’ of the materials coming to constitute it.36 Cox makes this point—at least as far as music is concerned—as follows: “(o)nly musical performances exist” since in Hartshorne’s words, taken from another context, “being is to be defined” in terms of “becoming” since the latter “is the more concrete conception.”.37 Cox cites Jazz: not just one “Body and Soul” “exists but thousands”. He extends the scope of this case to cover the phenomenon of remixing where in relation to electronic music, for example, “Remixes often radically overhaul the original material such that only select bits are maintained in the new version”. In the “age of recording and digital sampling so much of contemporary music” involves such remixing and recycling of material suggesting that the artist becomes “an interpreter and the interpreter an artist” in ongoing creative activity. Such a standpoint indicates “that a “philosophy of music” worthy of the name would come to see classical music”, as a case of “high art”, to be “the exception rather than the rule”.38

36 Considerations regarding how far such a creation might be regarded as an artwork is an issue developed in Chapter 5. 37 C. Hartshorne The Zero Fallacy & Other Essays in NeoClassical Philosophy Chicago: Open Court 1997 p. 97. 38 C. Cox “Version, Dubs and Remixes” pp. 288, 289, 290 & 291.

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Michael Krausz has pointed out how—in terms of this Chapter— the Indexical conception cannot be undermined so easily: “By remaking one work one makes another”.39 As Hartshorne puts it, in relation to Whitehead’s formula, the being of any entity “constitutes a “potential for every (subsequent) becoming”.40 Any further versions of the Jazz tune “Body and Soul” would constitute a new work, out of the being of which further works may become! Downplaying the importance of the Indexical, whether recognized as an outcome of creative activity or as an entity capable of being priced in the market-place, undercuts Cox’s own analysis of the creative process he seeks to delineate, for without the recognition of the being of previous works, interpreters of such works could not produce new ones. Yet there is a further fudge. How are these replays, new versions, remixes to be regarded? Are they art exemplars or simply a means to entertain groups of persons or individuals who seek to have returned to them versions which will reinforce in them the desire to hear something very similar to what they have heard on previous occasions? In this context Cox speaks of “a new kind of music, a new Musica Practica that anyone with rudimentary playback technology can engage in.” Such activity can certainly be described as cultural, but how can it be described as creating arts works capable of being appreciated more than once in the present or in the future? Do the practitioners of this Musica Practica have to possess any knowledge of music? Does one have to have enjoyed any awareness of what is involved in mastering some musical technique? It may not be coincidental, for example, that most of the Jazz idols, Cox refers to, were classically trained. Would a ‘practitioner’ be capable of composing music him/herself? Does what is remixed make any demands upon its appreciator and, if so, of what kind? Lacking answers to these questions must make it hard to claim that “philosophers of music have been asking the wrong questions about music and coming to the wrong conclusions about it”41 for without dealing with them, it is hard to see what philosophers of music are meant to discuss! A different kind of objection, however, may raise some of these same issues in a different form, since it may represent the flip side42 39 M. Krausz “Replies and Reflections” in Interpretation and Its Objects pp. 315–62, p. 338. 40 C. Hartshorne The Zero Fallacy & Other Essays p. 97. 41 C. Cox “Versions, Dubs and Remixes” p. 290. 42 “the less important side of a pop record” The New Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus in One Volume W.T. McLeod (ed.) Glasgow: Collins 1990, p. 383.

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of Cox’s argument. His claim, interpreted as dissolving the Indexical into the Iconic, could misrepresent his real intention. That intention might be to dissolve the Indexical, through his idea of Musica Practica, into the Intellective. He quotes a producer of remixes in claiming that the notion of an artist or creator is now out of date since either is to be regarded as a filter “for a sort of cultural flow”; s/he is now a curator rather than a creator, a connector of “possible places for artistic attention”,43 so dissolving the notion of an artwork, in any Indexical sense, through Musica Practica into an act of interpretation! So, Cox could assent to Margolis’s claim, for example, that there is “no principled distinction between discerning and imputing a determinate nature to an artwork by interpretative means” since the denotatum of what we take that art work to be “is proposed, revised and entrenched in the interpretative process itself ”. The attempt then to distinguish the Indexical from the Intellective conception of an artwork is simply unintelligible since the ontology of art works has to be distinguished from physical objects. In other words, the reason Margolis is so adamant about this issue—namely that it is not possible to describe an artwork independently of rendering an interpretation of it—is because he argues that to try to do so is to loose the distinction between physical objects which can be so described and cultural objects whose reality can’t be so identified independently of interpretative activity.44 Some remarks of Margolis, however, might sustain the Indexical conception of an artwork to a degree. On the one hand he claims that “there is no way to construe “cultural entities” (artworks or selves) as entities on a par with physical entities, if that means that their description must conform, a priori, with whatever logical or conceptual constraints are thought to limit what could possibly be true or said of physical objects”. What then are we to make of his previous claim that even works of art “which, for commercial and legal reasons, are usually detached as denotata apt for attribution, are open to being construed as entities”?45 If seen as commodities are they cultural objects or just plain physical entities, bought and sold like any other entity? 43

C. Cox “Versions, Dubs and Remixes” p. 290. J. Margolis “What, After All, Is a Work of Art?” in What, After All, Is a Work of Art? pp. 67–100, pp. 99, 95 & 99. Such issues will be taken up in the next chapter. 45 J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism Pennsylvania State UP pp. 103–4. 44

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Consider some comments by Margolis on a concern of Danto’s who says: “There was a certain sense of unfairness felt at the time when Warhol piled the Stable Gallery full of his Brillo boxes; for the commonplace Brillo container was actually designed by an artist, an Abstract Expressionist driven by need into commercial art; and the question was why Warhol’s boxes should have been worth $200 when that man’s products were not worth a dime.”

Danto offers an historical rationale for his observation: “certain artworks simply could not be inserted as artworks into certain periods of art history, though it is possible that objects identical to artworks could have been made at that period”.46 Margolis agrees: after all, “one has to learn a great deal of art history, in order to perceive a particular artwork for what it is”.47 But what is the object, if not merely a physical entity and not regarded as an artwork yet thereby made subject to interpretation; simply a cultural artifact, an out-ofplace societal creation (Danto) or an artwork not perceived “for what it is” (Margolis)? The Indexical conception of an artwork, explicated in Horkheimer’s article Art and Mass Culture, can account, thereby, for an eventuality that neither Danto nor Margolis, for their different reasons, can clearly articulate. Two Objections to the Methodology generating an Indexical Conception of Art The final criticism does not raise objections to the Indexical conception of art so much as to the methodology—taken from Horkheimer’s approach—which succeeded in articulating it. In identifying the significance of the reified Indexical conception as the ahistorical ‘after-life’ a cultural object draws to itself in the market-place, it is necessary for him to postulate the decline of a human being’s inner life, or essence of what it is to be human being, so that s/he comes simply to repeat in his or her own life the slogans delivered from the media of the day, rather than being able to engage in independent interpretative activities for him or herself.48 Secondly, because

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A.C. Danto The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Harvard UP 1981, p. 44. J. Margolis Selves and Other Texts p. 62. 48 “The human subjects whom psychology pledges itself to examine are not merely, as it were, influenced by society but are in their innermost cored formed by it. The 47

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Horkheimer may be relying on some of Benjamin’s insights for his analysis, he may run the danger of blaming such atrophying of the individual’s consciousness upon technological developments, thereby generating a false bifurcation between cultural transformation on the one hand and technological advance on the other—as separate realms of human endeavour—whereas they can only be understood as part and parcel of an overall ongoing societal development. Of course, such themes are sufficiently complex themselves as to deserve much fuller treatment in their own right.49 But perhaps some remarks can be made to indicate the direction in which a fuller defense against these two claims could be made. If the second objection is taken first, this is a consistent claim made by Margolis: technological advance and cultural transformation belong to one seamless whole. This claim may be true for our contemporary position, but is it valid to take that perspective and project it upon past civilizations? Curiously, with perfect clarity, Margolis formulates the opposite conjecture: “Benjamin obviously believed that changes in technologies of the past could be benignly reabsorbed into the salient practices of human societies whose members remained in touch with the living history that sustained them: because—very simply—those changes did not alienate them from that history”.50 Three arguments can be cited to make Benjamin’s case: i) the anti-continuity thesis; ii) the status of Margolis’s Dogmatism; iii) the anti-neutrality thesis. Margolis’s continuity thesis was examined in Chapter Two: no discontinuities can be identified separating ancient technologies from that of our own. His only support for this claim is linguistic: he characterizes humans as technological selves, thereby obfuscating the kind of self which might have existed say in Saxon times as opposed to humans living today. No recognition is given to Holmes Rolston III’s insight that whereas for the former it was more likely that they could exercise their freedoms within ecosystems, today—through more

substratum of a human being in himself who might resist the environment—and this has been resuscitated in existentialism—would remain an empty abstraction.” T.W. Adorno “On the Logic of the Social Sciences” (1961–2) in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology T.W. Adorno (et al.) eds., London: Heinemann 1976 pp. 105–22, p. 119. 49 As Margolis has done, rightly or wrongly, in “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism”. 50 J. Margolis “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” p. 111.

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advanced technologies—humans enjoy “freedom from ecosystems”. Ignoring this is to ignore the fact that the contrasts “between nature and culture were not always as bold as they now are”.51 Secondly, consider Margolis’s claim that “our own technologies can rightly claim a genuine continuity with the ancient forms.” We are given no grounds for the use of the term ‘rightly’!52 But consider the status of this claim for his continuity thesis. It can’t be analytic and it lacks empirical support. Is it simply metaphysical in character, since it would carry little weight if it expressed merely his private opinion? But if it is metaphysics, it is bad metaphysics since it practices a philosophy of omission in not examining carefully the work of Mumford and Gehlen in this field. Thirdly, Margolis’s practice of a philosophy of omission fails to consider what can be described as the (in)validity of the neutrality thesis. Firstly, unlike the use of tools which can be returned to the kitchen drawer or the tool shed, our modern technological devices imply not only “reflexive results for ourselves”, as the former do, but reflexive results upon our very individual lives themselves; the form of life of my grandparents is vastly different from that of my own. Secondly, new modes of production—consider the significance of the introduction of computer technology towards the end of the twentieth century—“are seen to have effects which far exceed the specific intentions or purposes to which they are put”.53 Now let us consider the main methodological objection: rejection of what Margolis considers to be essentialism: “there are no timeless or invariant subjective or spiritual values that the drift of “material” history can be accused of violating (Benjamin)”. Rather, “(t)he “essence” of human nature is its unfinished history, its intractable inventiveness and diversity, the consequence of endlessly transforming (by way of endlessly different perspectives) whatever it may have succeeded in inventing ante”. Now it may well be that Margolis is right about the sheer openness of the future with respect to the potentialities of human development, that those who regard histori51 Holmes Rolston III from “The Wilderness Idea Reaffirmed” in Reflections on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy ed. by L. Gruen & D. Jamieson New York: Oxford UP pp. 265–78, pp. 266–7. 52 Indeed, in the very next sentence he concedes that modern technology is “radically different in certain ways from pre-industrial technologies” ( J. Margolis “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” p. 115). 53 D. Ihde Technics and Praxis Boston: D. Reidel 1979 pp. 4 & 131

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cal development as violating some sense of what it is to be a human being may indeed be expressing “nostalgia for the ‘aura’ ” of some previous world and that those like Benjamin who employ “aura” talk fail to recognize “the contrived auratic power” of more recent forms of art-production, namely the film.54 But consider for a moment the following possible societal changes in the UK over the last forty years: teachers are no longer to be regarded as professionals with cognitive awarenesses about the place of their professional activity in relation to wider epistemological concerns in philosophy, sociology or psychology since it is sufficient for them to be equipped with ‘tips and tricks’ for trainers, enabling them to manage the dictates of an imposed National Curriculum; outside the financially privileged, students can no longer choose between universities where learning can be pursued for its own sake and a polytechnic where a vocational education can be gained since all institutions are meant to provide the means for them to earn a wage to repay their student debts; school children are not initiated into a musical education but rather will be trained where necessary to enter what is called the ‘music business’ where the paradigm for ‘prestigious music’ is provided by The Brit Awards 2006,55 that is to say pop-music. What are we to make of the kind of claims about societal changes just outlined? Are these merely subjective opinions of someone looking back with nostalgia at a more ‘golden age’ of his youth? Are his implied claims about the quality of music he enjoyed at recent Cheltenham Jazz festivals, as compared to the ‘music’ of The Brit Awards 2006, merely a matter of his personal likes and dislikes? Clearly, at one level, these remarks are to be so regarded. But is that all that can be said about them? Are all musical performances now, of whatever kind, all-of-a-piece so that it is quite impossible to distinguish between one and another from a musically qualitative point of view? Or are we at last in the final heaven of saying that what makes one thing better than another is simply what is found to be desirable by the majority of the population? What these claims 54 J. Margolis “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” pp. 104, 108, 116 & 118. 55 Presented by Chris Evans at the Earls Court, London (16/02/2006). No celebration here of the musical creations of saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, the new Jazz Band Music of Jason Yarde, the piano compositions of Liam Nobel or the kind of music created by the amazing Jazz fusion of music from British and Hungarian traditions by the Improvokation Band led by bassist Arnie Somogyi.

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share is a concern regarding the shift from pursuing an activity for its own sake to its pursuit for some other end. In that shift the possibility for a human being to enjoy the free exercise of imaginative possibilities is truncated in favour of the repetition of some fixed model. Does it make no sense to say that something about humans is being lost without claiming this is mere nostalgia for something in the past or presupposing essentialism?56 Let us try to be more rigorous about the latter issue. In attacking the idea of an ‘essence of human nature’ Margolis finds his case “compellingly described in Cézanne’s career”. Yet he no more informs us what he means by such an essence in this context than he identifies different ways in which Benjamin uses the term ‘aura’ in attacking it. He speaks of Cézanne’s “break with traditional painting”.57 But what constitutes that break is the ‘Cézanneness’, which haunts all his paintings. That essence can be characterized in at least three directions: i) Cézanne’s reaction to representation, since the old masters had simply “replaced reality with imagination”;58 his conception of the geometry of nature, “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” he said in 1904; iii) his attempt to use colour to define form, “I want to render perspective solely by means of colour”.59 No one would dispute the claim that our perception of his later canvasses can be “a function of the sequential training of our eye through the actual sequence of Cézanne’s entire output” as might occur in an exhibition.60 But the Cézanneness, as an essence in his work, is still exhibited somehow in the paintings themselves in their being, whilst in the specific painting Mount Sainte Victoire of 1904, we are able to see exactly how these three defining features are actualized 56 Even Margolis says “we submit to the contrived auratic power” of film, that it “compels our attention” and that we find ourselves “privileged voyeurs” in experiencing “the cinematic world” (“Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” pp. 118–9) The films he praises clearly are artworks in their own right but he does not consider how far films of their quality are available ‘on circuit’ nor the difference between experiencing them in the cinema rather than on TV at home! 57 “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” pp. 107–8; for different senses of “aura” see my To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical p. 305. 58 Quoted by M. Merleau-Ponty in his “Cézanne’s Doubt” Sense and Non-Sense tr. by H.L. & P.A. Dreyfus Northwestern UP 1964 pp. 9–25, p. 12. 59 These quotations are in Cézanne intr. by B. Taylor London: Books for Pleasure 1961 pp. 37 & 13. 60 “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” p. 107; a Cézanne exhibition took place at Tate Britain 8th. February to 28th. April 1996 sponsored by Ernst and Young.

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in what is embodied in the work. This tripartite division of essence, being and actuality, in opposition to the traditional essence-existence duality, can make sense of Margolis’s claims. The endless transformation of Cézanne’s work can be seen through the being of his paintings hung in the exhibition whilst the actuality of a particular stage of his transforming experiments can be appreciated in contemplating one of them from a particular period as a particular actuality of his working at a specific time. The identity of Cézanneness remains merely a mere potential for the young man; it is a partial identity at a particular stage of his development, where the actuality of a specific painting refers to an inclusiveness and possible constitution by previous paintings in the way they are transformed in the new work.61 But that qualification pertains to the concrete specificity of a painting. Margolis’s sense of “intractable inventiveness” and endless transformation applies to the actuality of the paintings themselves and has nothing to do with something labeled the “essence” of anything, since it is within specific paintings where Cézanneness is actualized, identifying them as produced by Cézanne. Conclusion Following suggestions put by Vico and Benjamin, an Iconic conception of art—interpreted in Peircian terms—was articulated focusing on the processes creating it by someone moved by a felt dysfunction s/he enjoys in relation to some cultural or natural phenomenon. This was done in order to clarify a reified Indexical conception to which the Iconic might be opposed. It was argued that Horkheimer casts little attention upon the latter conception because, unlike Benjamin, he was not so interested in deconstructing everyday appearances to deliver some kind of emancipatory effect to be discovered within them in aesthetic experiencing. Rather, he was interested in grasping what he took to be the underlying realities governing social existence, employing Marx’s historical materialism and insights provided by Schopenhauer’s philosophy to do so. Indeed, he was suspicious of the pure aesthetic experience of the lonely individual preferring, instead, to focus upon the practical effects of philosophical 61 “Potentiality as the essence of futurity” C. Hartshorne Creativity in American Philosophy Albany: SUNY 1984 pp. 160 & 216; cf. The Zero Fallacy p. 81.

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activity arising among a community of inquirers. Little faith too could be rendered in the aesthetic insights of the individual atomic subject since his/her responses to the environment are likely to be cognitively conditioned historically as well as emerging from someone incapable of resisting the oppressive social conditions, which might lead to the liquidation of the potential experiencer. And even in cases that would illustrate exceptions to this claim—in the case of the works of Picasso or James Joyce—any sense of retaining art’s utopian impulse could only be expressed negatively rather than in an affirmative form. Only in this way, alongside the advancement of a reflective enlightenment, could authentic works of art “avoid the mere imitation of what already is” (DE p. 13). Horkheimer’s attention is focused instead upon the Intellective conception, which sees the artwork as an outcome beckoning a conception of the world very different from that of our own, preserving a sense of something utopian that has fled from organized religion, a utopia which reveals the benighted nature of the Hegelian claim that ‘what-is’ or the real is the rational. Yet against this claim, he sensed it could be argued that artworks still arise out of prevailing social conditions, so in idolizing the former, the latter became legitimated. Hence he and Adorno turned to the art of their own time. But such works, made subject in their turn to a reified Indexical conception, became commodities and so part and parcel of the culture industry they were meant to transcend. Yet despite our being left in the air as to where his argument was to go next, at least Horkheimer identified a reified Indexical conception of art! A number of objections to this analysis have been considered, the most important of which attempted either to reduce the Indexical to an Iconic conception of art or to show how the Indexical cannot be comprehended without being reduced to an Intellective conception. After dealing with these objections, two methodological postulates in Horkheimer’s philosophical approach were examined, namely the charge that he commits two fallacies: i) presupposing that there is a human essence which can be undermined; ii) attempting to distinguish the technological dimensions of human activity from cultural developments. Even if these objections were overcome, however, there remains a problem which haunts this chapter: is it possible to identify an Indexical conception of art without that conception being regarded as a reification? That issue will have to be faced in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE

WITHIN THE INTERPRETATIVE PROCESS Birds of a feather flock together. So Michael Krausz approves the claim made by those philosophising under the shadow of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—for example Stuart Hampshire and Hilary Putnam—that the idea of interpretation is some kind of open-ended concept which finds it home only within “a highly informal activity”.1 Developing the approach taken in this book so far, an attempt will be made to defend a more Peircian approach by referring to “a three-tiered structure”2 within the interpretative process, sustaining a position akin to that of Thom and Lamarque.3 But in developing their criticisms of Krausz’s treatment of interpretation, it will be shown how that three-tiered structure is to be understood, focussing primarily upon cultural artefacts. Of course, Krausz’s treatment of interpretation is, by his own admission, “generally sympathetic with that of Joseph Margolis”4 so it will prove useful to unpack some of his philosophical notions of which Krausz approves, especially since Margolis is clear about his indebtedness to Peirce who for him— noted already—is “the most interesting American philosopher”.5

1 The phrase “a highly formal activity” is that of Hilary Putnam quoted by Krausz from Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face Cambridge UP 1992, p. 139 in Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices Michael Krausz Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1993 p. 66. 2 M. Krausz “Interpretation and its “Metaphysical” Entanglements” in The Philosophy of Interpretation ed. by J. Margolis & T. Rockmore (1999) Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub. Pp. 125–47, p. 137; M. Krausz Limits of Rightness New York: Rowman and Littlefield (2000) p. 151. 3 P. Thom “On Changing the Subject” in The Philosophy of Interpretation pp. 63–74; P. Lamarque “Objects of Interpretation” in The Philosophy of Interpretation pp. 96–124. 4 M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons p. 62. 5 “Peirce was an evolutionist, not a historicist. I am a historicist as well as an evolutionist of sorts, but I give up all of Peirce’s purple notions of evolutionary love and objective mind or thought in nature apart from humans and the like. That is why I find Dewey so attractive (but dull), Wittgenstein so natural (but halfbaked), Foucault so daring (but careless).” J. Margolis “Replies in Search of Self-Discovery” in Interpretation, Relativism and the Metaphysics of Culture ed. by Michael Krausz & Richard Shusterman, New York: Humanity Press 1999, pp. 337–408, pp. 394–5.

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In Chapter Three we could see how Margolis uses Peirce’s typetoken distinction in relation to appreciating works of art. Whereas the term ‘token’ serves to identify what exists physically as something singularly specific, namely Secondness, the term ‘type’ relates to Thirdness, to ideas or to what can be interpreted as a general claim. So Van Gogh’s paintings might be regarded as creating a new kind of ‘type’ of painting referred to as Expressionism so that his individual creations could be seen as tokens of this type. The term ‘token’ then can be taken to refer to a particular entity—an individual painting—exemplifying a type –expressionism say—where we are more concerned with the general features or rules applying to the use of the term ‘type’, making the term expressionism applicable. Yet, when we contemplate Van Gogh’s picture The Potato Eaters we must sense the way in which a poorly lit interior emphasizes the hardship and poverty of the peasants’ lives as depicted in the painting. A feeling of warm intimacy emanates from this picture not simply through the arrangement of the figures but by use the artist makes of various contrasts between bright highlights cast against various dark, neutral colours rather than straightforward brown and black. It has already been noted how Peirce observes that “some colours are called gay, others sad” and in relation to such observations he refers to tones as “signs of visceral qualities of feelings” (CP 1.313). Viewing such a picture as Van Gogh’s may generate feelings in the contemplator. Peirce speaks of “the tragedy of King Lear” as having “its Firstness, its flavour sui generis” (CP 1.531). We can see once more the way in which Margolis employs Peirce’s distinction between Second and Thirdness by referring again to Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. We can refer to its physical manifestation, “the brute resistance of the world—its ‘secondness’ ” when we identify it as a picture hung in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Seen as an artwork, however, it awaits interpretation, which “implicates ‘thirdness’, in Peirce’s terms”.6 But the category Firstness is never mentioned by Margolis, a sense of what we feel in the presence of an artwork within our own experience, capturing Peirce’s

6 J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History Berkeley: California UP p. 91.

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notion of a work’s Tuone. This feature, it has been argued, is central to the idea of an Iconic conception of a work of art. Finally, we also saw how Margolis also refers to Peirce’s distinction between “what exists, as opposed to what is real (but is not real in the way of existing) in the predicable natures of particular things for instance”.7 But two senses of reality require delineation: what is real for a number of persons as opposed to an individual person (CP 5.405). If I dream of being present at a table, eating a meal with a number of very poor people, this may refer to what has happened in the past or indeed to a possible future event, but it remains merely a possibility. But Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters possesses a reality for its viewers, which has to be distinguished from any dream anyone might enjoy or endure about it, and from its existence as a physical thing hanging in an art museum. Such a claim remains valid even if, on giving myself up to that work of art, I appear to be taken into what appears to be a dream-like experience! Employing Peirce’s Categories As an example of the plastic arts, as opposed to the literary or performatory arts, constituting Margolis’s tripartite classification—in his book Art and Philosophy (AP from now on)—The Potato Eaters, as has been said, can be identified as a painting hanging in an Amsterdam museum of which there have been and are many duplications or replicas (AP p. 126).8 Similarly, at this level of Secondness, we can identify, say, Henry James’s The Real Thing as an existent, i.e., as a short story made up of four sections in the form of a number of pages in a book which can be found in a library under some classificatory number. As Margolis himself points out, the case of the play King Lear is more ambiguous, as an example of the performing arts, since there are two versions9 of the play yet they do share approximately a similar “design from the range of alternative and even contrary designs” imputed to each. Analogously, in the case of 7

J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 91. AP p. 126 stands for p. 126 of Art and Philosophy J. Margolis Brighton UK: Harvester UP 1980. 9 It seems like that the 1623 folio edition was printed on the basis of a copy of the first quarto edition based, presumably, as a prompt book for an authentic playhouse production (AP pp. 55–6). 8

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music, the existent is the score instanced by any token performance governed by that score (AP pp. 55–6 & 59). But unlike the play or the musical score, in the case of dance we may have a particular performance which could be regarded not simply as a token but rather as a prime instance of a common megatype, that is a unique kind of type, since there are or have been so many productions of it on stage or recorded on film. At a further level, we have not a text, but a work awaiting interpretation, implicating Thirdness. And a particular art work—whether a painting, short story or drama— cannot exist as such save as embodied in a physical entity; on a canvass, in a book, as a text, a musical score or a set of notations (AP p. 126). As we saw in Chapter Three, this work is an Intentional object whose being is created by the intentional activities of its creator in an intensional context that includes precursors taken to be works of art, and other created entities. As opposed to a piece of canvas, a book, a text or a score, the Intentional can be identified with the cultural “(b)roadly speaking” even if “incarnated” in the physical.10 Such claims can be used to lead us to what has been called an Intellective conception of the artwork. The Intentional Object The Potato Eaters is an Intentional object since we can recognize five figures sitting around a table under an over-hanging lamp. In the case of two of them we can see the way the veins and knuckles have been painted with care as they use their implements to take food from a common dish, whilst a dark liquid is being poured into four caps by one of the three women depicted in the picture. The air of domesticity is reinforced by the appearance of another coffeepot or kettle standing on either a stove, table or cupboard in the picture’s right hand corner. The short story The Real Thing is an Intentional object because it depicts a set of intensional relationships between an artist-narrator and a husband and wife desiring to sit for him. A confusion arises between these three of the story’s six characters since it is not clear, initially, whether the Monarchs are seeking to be painted in a picture for which they will pay, or whether they wish to be paid as models. To the narrator-artist, they appear to be a 10

J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly pp. 14–5.

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couple more suited to a photographic depiction since they seem somehow complete in themselves, already made, “always the same thing”. Unlike his work with Miss Churm and Oronte—professional models—his art seems to suffer. The sixth character Hawley—his friend and critic of his work—advises against persevering with these “amateurs”. Reluctantly, the artist-narrator uses them merely as servants before, finally, he buys them off and then dismisses them. Similar intensional properties can be attributed to the Intentional object King Lear. At the opening of the play, we have a very selfwilled King dividing his kingdom between three daughters provided they display their affection towards him. Two daughters, Goneril and Regan, pass this test and with Edmund, the Duke of Gloucester’s bastard son, along with the Duke of Albany, they come to oppose the King in their unrestrained self-seeking. On the other side stand Cordelia, his third daughter, Edgar—legitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester—the Duke of Kent and the fool, whilst the King himself goes mad during the development of the play and his most loving daughter Cordelia is killed. At this Intentional level, in identifying the artwork, consider some of these Intentional properties, which characterize each work for each example, what Krausz refers to as rendering a cultural entity’s meaning controlled as that is “by the social constraints in which it appears”.11 Consider in the case of The Potato Eaters such properties as ‘five figures’, ‘sitting around a table’, ‘taking food from a common plate’, ‘liquid being poured’, ‘domesticity’; for The Real Thing ‘being sitters for’, ‘being critical of ’, ‘befriended by’, ‘six characters’, ‘artist-narrator’, ‘photographic depiction’; for King Lear ‘King’, ‘self-willed’, ‘test’, ‘dividing his Kingdom’, ‘three daughters’, ‘affection for’. For each, six of the many possible Intentional properties these works possess have been listed. They constitute what these artworks are as works. Reject any one of them as being open to doubt—for example, ‘five figures’ in the case of The Potato Eaters, ‘being sitters for’ in The Real Thing or ‘test’ in the case of King Lear—and you would not have the artwork as it is presently constituted, even if in the latter case “we need not fuss very much about the apparent absurdity of his public test of his daughter’s affections in the division of the kingdom.”12

11 12

M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons p. 63. L.C. Knight “King Lear and the Great Tragedies” in The Pelican Guide to English

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Now why call these properties Intentional rather than those that represent the intentions of the artist? Margolis draws attention to the dispute between Chekhov and Stanislavsky in the production of the former’s plays. Stanislavsky rejected the idea that they were comedies in the way Chekhov may have intended. Rather, what was embodied in Chekhov’s plays, preventing them from being regarded as anything other than tragedies, were certain Intentional properties carried by the intensional characterizations “under which the plays were identified” (AP p. 43) as such. These characterizations can’t be reduced to Chekhov’s intentions even if the latter account creatively for what he wrote. And the reason for this is that such intensional characterizations embedded in expressive forms he employs—or those that Van Gogh, Henry James and Shakespeare chose to work with— these intensional characterizations trigger meanings outstripping the intentions of their creator employing them. They have a life of their own independently of the forms of expression in which they are manifested. And it is these intensional characterisations along with the artist’s intentions in using them, which come to constitute an artwork’s Intentional properties. As Margolis puts it: what distinguishes artworks and “other cultural entities from natural entities depends essentially on the complex incarnation of so-called Intentional properties” of the artwork. Krausz sustains this standpoint when he says: “Individual intentionality is empty without social intentionality”.13 Now my disagreement with Margolis and Krausz lies in their treatment of these Intentional properties: we no more interpret them than we interpret a piece of paper as being a $5 note, Beckham scoring a goal or that, at the start of a Society’s public meeting, the minutes from the last meeting are accepted. Such properties are not a matter of dispute—even if it might be claimed that a particular $5 note is a forgery, Beckham’s goal is disputed or something in the meeting’s previous minutes is incorrect—since they are objective properties of what is being considered. They are objective in regard to specific cultural practices, an understanding of which we use to grasp the significance of Van Gogh’s painting, James’s short story or Shakespeare’s tragedy, even if these properties are objective in a

Literature (Vol. 2): The Age of Shakespeare ed. by B. Ford, Harmondsworth (Middx.: Penguin 1968, pp. 228–56, p. 234. 13 J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 47; R. Krausz Rightness and Reasons p. 63.

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different sense than those that typify physical objects.14 Such properties are an inherent15 part of the work, whilst at the same time they can be regarded as discerned in it at a cultural level, since what is depicted in the art work is grasped by the cultural practices and institutions within which, in our culture, we live everyday. Why, then, should Margolis claim “that the nature of the work is not first fixed and then interpreted”,16 because in relation to The Potato Eaters, James’s short story The Real Thing or Shakespeare’s King Lear that is just what can be accomplished? In other words, the six descriptive terms cited for each of the three artworks cited can only be regarded as descriptive of those works, and in relation to such terms Krausz’s claim that “in different contexts”17 what is so descriptive could count as interpretive is simply a nonsense. If what has been claimed about such descriptive terms is true then an Indexical conception of a work of art has been identified without invoking a sense of reification initiated by the idea of commodification. An artwork under an Indexical conception has been delineated without reference to its being regarded necessarily as a commodity within a wider social context. The argument for this claim is that the six descriptive terms, in the case of the three artworks considered, constitute what these entities are at a cultural level. And if they lacked one of those defining terms—there may of course be others—we would not have that particular cultural entity. Without being that specific cultural entity, they could not be rendered the ‘hype’ associated with being a work by Van Gogh, Henry James or Shakespeare, thereby to be regarded in reified terms. The act of reification then depends upon an object being identified as a cultural entity of a particular kind rather than being a physical thing in some way. How, then, are we to make sense of the issue of interpretation, the third level of our analysis in order to clarify once more an

14

P. Lamarque “Objects of Interpretation” p. 117. In To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical (Leicester, UK: Minerva Press 2003) I separate the inherent from the intrinsic; the former defined as pertaining “to the cultural or the historical in relation to something’s creation” (p. 326) to distinguish it from the intrinsic (see Ch. XII & p. 327). 16 J. Margolis “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” in Culture and Arts Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (ed.), Atlantic Highlands N.J.: Humanities Press pp. 32–45, p. 40. 17 M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons p. 126. 15

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Intellective conception of an art work? At the initial stage we employed Peirce’s category Secondness to grasp an artwork’s physical existence whilst establishing its agreed status as a cultural object embodied in it at a second level—through his category Thirdness—to explicate its cultural reality as an Intentional object awaiting interpretation. But we now need to see how disputes at a further level, that is to say in relation to the Intellective conception arise. Making Sense of Interpretation David Novitz employs the term elucidatory interpretation in relation to physical objects, since such interpretations take the form of hypotheses formed to deal with what we take to be problematic about their existence. Instead the term explanatory interpretation will be used in what follows since the explanatory renders an exogenous sense of understanding—from the outside—rather than the elucidatory. Cultural and institutional practices can be regarded externally, too, but only exclusively if we were rampant Behaviourists of some kind. But the important feature of such an interpretation is that it reflects a “lack of comprehension”18 in a community of inquirers.19 By way of contrast, in interpreting cultural entities, properties are discerned in them within an institutional or cultural framework. We can speak of an Intentional interpretation, which focuses upon properties a cultural object possesses inherently, as opposed to its intrinsically physical properties. Provided we bear in mind the differences between physical and cultural objectivity, in either case, we are dealing with something objective. Hence, quoting Margolis’s words in a different context, we can say that the emphasis in relation to either an explanatory or Intentional interpretation “is upon an object independent of any particular effort of description, an object that has or has not the properties attributed to it” (AP p. 111). So Krausz quotes approvingly Margolis’s claim that “interpretation imputes a determinate sense to what (interpretively) is constituted as 18 D. Novitz “Interpretation and Justification” in The Philosophy of Interpretation ed. by J. Margolis & T. Rockmore (1999) Malden, Mass.: Blackwell pp. 4–24, p. 5. 19 “Since the Gulf war US satellites and aeroplanes had watched everything that moved in Iraq. But for knowledge about actual Iraqis, their hopes and fears, Washington” had no access. D. Gardiner’s review of My Year in Iraq P. Bremer & M. McConnell in the Financial Times’s Magazine 4/5 Feb. 2006, p. 28.

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an Intentional denotatum—determinate as a denotatum and, as such, determinable in nature”.20 But against Margolis, we can say that whilst there can be “clear-cut agreement about what is present in a painting” at the Intentional level, to deliver an Indexical conception of a work of art, there can be disputes about what is “imputed to it” (AP p. 122) at a further level of interpretation characterizing the Intellective conception. Disputes at the Intentional level are the least interesting since they can be quickly settled: consider what can be regarded as a forgery; if a goal is to count as a goal; whether a meeting’s minutes are correct. And they can be settled quickly too in just the same way as we can settle possible disputes as to whose faces are illuminated by the overhanging lamp in The Potato Eaters, whether the artist-narrator in The Real Thing does try to befriend the Monarchs as he is befriended by Hawley or whether Claudia really loves her father in King Lear. Again, there can be no disagreement as to what constitutes the work of art in terms of the Indexical conception. But in a different sense of interpretation, there can be disagreement about what is imputed to an artwork at an individual, personal level constituting an Intellective conception of the artwork. The wisdom of Peirce’s distinction between reality, as an individual conceives of it privately, and something’s possessing a reality—shared culturally— can now be appreciated.21 To make sense of this move we have to turn from appreciating the work of art as a token of a type— Secondness manifesting Thirdness—towards its tonal quality, i.e. 20 M. Krausz “Interpretation and its “Metaphysical” Entanglements” p. 140; Limits of Rightness p. 28; J. Margolis What After All is a Work of Art? Pennsylvania UP 1999 p. 100, n. 45. 21 Peirce puts the case for God’s reality—not his existence—in his Neglected Argument, that is to say that the idea of God “should be obvious to all minds high and low alike” (CP 6.457). This suggestion could be interpreted as Habermas does: God is “a name for a communicative structure” for human beings to sustain their humanity, extending beyond their “empirical nature” to encounter something objective they “themselves as individuals” are not ( J. Habermas Legitimation Crisis London: Heinemann 1980 p. 120). The reality of the Divine, cast in these terms, can only be interpreted with respect to the development of humans, yet, which—as a contingent necessity—can sustain the humanity of human beings. But God’s necessary existence can’t be established by this argument since there is nothing ontological about it. I consider how such a philosophical approach might be relevant in understanding Vico’s position in “The Mythico-Poetic and Recollective Fantasies as Routes to an Ideal Eternal History Grounding a New Science: Giambattista Vico’s Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 93–126.

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invoking the category Firstness, in fact the Firstness of Thirdness. To do this will mean developing a suggestion of Krausz, which is not considered by Margolis, namely Krausz’s notion of “aspectual reverberation” (Krausz 1993, 123).22 It is this to which we must now turn but not before recording the fact that the Intellective conception invokes the Iconic in some way with respect to what has been identified under an Indexical conception. Elaborative Interpretation: Performative and Experiential Interpretations For Margolis the performing arts are quite different from the plastic ones in that in their performance the performers interpret a work. The performing artist’s interpretation then “brings the work of art” into its full being. Indeed, in the performance of a dance, it may be very hard to say, as we have seen, that it is not a prime instance of a particular megatype—as is the case in the making of a film— rather than simply just another token. This is especially the case if the dance’s notation is “more of an ad hoc device for preserving a rough sense” of the dance’s structure rather than “a score whose own internal subtleties are required to be analysed” (AP pp. 119–20), as applies in the case of a play or musical score. In such an extreme case, we can speak of the performer’s “elaborative interpretation”, coming to constitute the artwork in itself, where what is appreciated is something whose content is filled in by, created through the performers within the performance.23 In this case we might speak of a performative interpretation and use the term experiential interpretation for what the appreciator, as an individual experiencer of the work, imputes to it in experiencing it as an art work,24 so account22

“Aspectual reverberations may issue in an acceptable degree of instability of the object-of-interpretation. And, there is no fixed degree of tolerance in this regard.” (M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons p. 123) 23 D. Novitz “Interpretation and Justification” p. 5. 24 These two kinds of elaborative interpretation—the performative and the experiential—are suggested by Margolis himself: “I am drawing attention, in short, to a certain double use of “interpretation” in the performing arts, that use in which the performing artists are said to interpret a score or text or, more elliptically, a particular work of art, and that in which a critic might state discursively an interpretation of such a score or text or work without performing in the artist’s manner. I say we have here a double use of “interpretation” because the critic is rather like a quasi-performer and the performing artist is rather like a quasi-critic” ( J. Margolis “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” p. 117).

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ing for the work’s particular tone, hue or “aspectual reverberation”. In relation to this sense of experiential interpretation, it is what the individual appreciator brings to the work, which substantiates its private reality for him or her, derived as that is from its more public, cultural reality as an Intentional object. Putting this point in another way, Krausz’s claim can be endorsed: “Imputational interpretation involves imputing properties which, in being imputed, actually become intrinsically part of the work”.25 But such endorsement can only be sustained provided it is understood that we are speaking of the third experiential level where the Intellective conception of an artwork will apply, not the Intentional properties alone, constituting the cultural artefact itself, at the second level, thereby identifying the Indexical conception. Reconsider James’s short story. Its form of appreciation seems to lie between relating to a work typifying the plastic arts, such as The Potato Eaters, and the performatory, say King Lear. The reader may contribute more to the reading of The Real Thing than s/he would in appreciating The Potato Eaters. It is this, which contributes to his or her experiential interpretation of it. S/he may have an image of Mrs. Monarch, describing her perhaps in some detail, imitating her voice or suggesting her gestures. Yet since the short story is more specific than simply a set of instructions “and because of the intimate connection between written and spoken language”, it seems more complete and fixed in its nature than a musical score or a set of notations for a dance (AP p. 126). Such an experiential interpretation arises out of the Intentional. But it is to be accounted for in terms of the feeling significances, iconic characteristics or qualitative elements emerging from a work’s Intentional properties understood within the terms of an Iconic conception of an artwork.26 What has just been claimed, however, does not entail that there may not be different, perhaps competing, experiential interpretations of a painting, sculpture or piece of architecture, as Krausz delineates

25

M. Krausz Limits of Rightness p. 67. To fail to credit the difference between (social) Intentional properties and an artwork’s more (subjective) experiential significances after agreeing with the way the former are constituted would, of course, be plain inconsistent. I am indebted to Krausz’s nomenclature for sharpening this distinction between Intentional properties and experiential significances in his “Replies: Interpretation and Codes of Culture” in Philos. in the Contemp. World Vol. 12, No. 1 Spring-Summer 2005 pp. 103–14, p. 109. 26

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in his treatment of The Potato Eaters.27 An experiencer may find that the way two figures in that picture are sharing the same plate of food, and the manner in which the woman is regarding her male companion, recall Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in order to elicit a religious interpretation. Another viewer might be moved by the deep sympathy the picture depicts for the condition of the poor, sensing the muddy tones as if they had been painted with soil from the fields in which they work, to interpret the painting politically. Krausz cites the Marxist-Feminist interpretation of Griselda Pollock in this regard. Yet another appreciator might interpret the painting autobiographically, drawing attention to the feelings of contentment which can be enjoyed in the painting of a domestic scene rendered through the use of warm colours to celebrate a brief state of stability Van Gogh enjoyed with his parents in 1885. Krausz explores Lubin’s interpretation, which is along these lines. By way of contrast, a contemplator of the painting might draw attention to the pictorial tensions expressed by the contrast not so much in relation to light and dark in the painting, but between warm and cool colours both in the foreground and background, revelatory of the artist’s inner conflicts to yield a psychological interpretation28 such as is considered by Graetz. No doubt other interpretations—such as Bremmer’s formalist account29—could be considered but none can undermine the Intentional properties characterizing the artwork perceived, constituting what it is: who is looking at whom; the muddy colours through which the peasants are depicted; the scene’s domesticity; the nature of the picture’s design. To say that such properties “are not immune from experiential imputability”30 does not show whether they are or are not so immune. What requires distinguishing is the being of such properties and the way that they are actualised in a person’s individual experience of the work.31 Someone could agree that 27

M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons pp. 70–7. See W. Hardy Van Gogh London: Quarto Books (1989) pp. 22–5 for these suggestions. 29 M. Krausz Rightness and Reasons pp. 72–3 and pp. 70–2. 30 M. Krausz “Replies: Interpretation and Codes of Culture” p. 109. 31 The word ‘exists’ applies to a physical existent, interpretation’s first level. The term ‘reality’ applies to a cultural artefact. But the word ‘being’ applies to the reality of that cultural artefact as an entity within some cultural tradition whereas an artwork’s ‘actuality’ pertains to the way the artefact is appreciated within the experience of an individual. Such distinctions owe much to C. Hartshorne’s different taxonomy between existence and actuality: “Actuality is how, or in what concrete 28

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what is present in a picture is the depiction of X looking at Y without knowing anything about the phenomenology of the “gaze”. But for someone who did, the picture’s significance would be actualised within their experience in an entirely different way from that of the former. Consider interpreting The Real Thing. It could be understood as: i) an aesthetic experiment by James in exploring the relationship between the arts of painting and story telling; ii) as an ironic narrative about a destructive and unreliable story-teller’s narrative, whose narrator is a painter, a ‘hack’—he confesses to wishing he had “been able to paint that,” referring to Mrs. Monarch’s gesture towards Miss Churm and to having the idea of being “a great painter of portraits”32—a ‘hack’ seeking to humiliate persons of good breeding—the Monarchs— as a scapegoat for his own inadequacies; iii) an instructive tale undertaken to demonstrate to its reader the distinction between craft and art; iv) a moral illustration of a battle between the social and an artistic conscience occurring in the same person, namely the narratorpainter.33 For The Real Thing we can refer to the marks on the page, rendered physically, constituting the text. This short story can be fixed physically in relation to its pages, whilst agreed upon too at an Intentional level as the artwork, but rendered experientially differently to individuals in the actuality of experiencing it. And, in the case of any of our four interpretations, we can emphasize different experiential qualities of this work without considering the actual intentions of James himself. King Lear provides more challenges. Attention might be drawn to the heath scenes emphasizing Lear’s tormented consciousness, representing a mind at the end of its tether. This more pathological view would emphasize the capacity for human destructiveness, indicated by Cordelia’s reference to her father as a “poor perdu” (Act IV, Sc.VII).34 Again, emphasis might be placed on the power of love

thing or things, an essence is actualised; mere existence is only that the essence is somehow or in something concretely actualised.” C. Hartshorne The Zero Fallacy & Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy Chicago: Open Court 1997, p. 81. 32 Henry James “The Real Thing” in Selected Tales ed. with an introd. by John Lyon, New York: Penguin 2001, pp. 204–24, pp. 203 & 205. 33 Interpretations i), ii) and iv) are considered by Richard A. Hocks in his Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought Chapel Hill: North Carolina 1974, pp. 120–34. 34 A reference to the old French army’s sentinelle perdue, someone placed in a very dangerous position.

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emanating from Cordelia whose consistent non-presence haunts the play to make an interpretation of it in Christian morality terms; her goodness triumphs over evil. Contrawise, a political interpretation might focus more on the character of Edmund and those opposing the King, illustrating the conflicts within humanism emerging at the time of the Renaissance, the former character dedicated to an idea of nature as mechanistic force and brute instinct, whilst his moral motives are confined to political aggrandizement for himself. A conflict of nature interpretation might attempt to reconcile these diverse views by insisting that the play’s sub-plot—concerning Gloucester’s relationship to his two sons—varies and exemplifies the main issues of the central themes of the plot, an interpretation generated by Gloucester’s own claim: “there’s son against father: the King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child” (Act I, Sc. II). The first part of this claim characterizes Edmund’s rebellion, not Edgar’s as his father thinks; the second, the pathological interpretation and the third points to Lear’s tormenting of his daughter and his redemption through her forgiveness. Of course, these interpretations can be emphasized too within the play’s production. To clarify this distinction between two kinds of interpretation, we can say that it is “logically possible to identify one and the same work” under an Intentional interpretation at our second level to deliver an Indexical conception, yet “under alternative and incompatible” experiential interpretations at a further level. Yet, at this further level, each experiential interpretation is “compatible with the minimally describable features of the work in question” (AP p. 40) at the Intentional level. The problem in Krausz’s treatment of the different interpretations of Van Gogh’s work35 occurs because he confuses the Intentional with experiential interpretation; issues relevant at the second Intentional level, concerning “both determinability as well as consensuality” are confused with what might be imputed to some object-of-interpretation at the third interpretative level. Different experiential interpretations rendered at this third level— whether in the case of the painting, short story or tragic play—can be said to be “sufficiently similar” for “interpretations to compete”.36

35 36

P. Lamarque “Objects of Interpretation” pp. 108–9. M. Krausz Limits of Rightness p. 95; Rightness and Reasons p. 74.

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A return to each of our three examples illustrates this point. For Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, none of the experiential interpretations offered—as a religious image, a political vision, an autobiographical reference, a psychological revelation or the formalist account—would reject in any fashion elements the way in which the work was analysed descriptively earlier, that is to say in terms of its Intentional properties or attributes. The same is true of The Real Thing considered as an aesthetic experiment, an ironic tale, an instructional narrative or as a moral story, as it is of King Lear regarded more pathologically—as can be seen in Peter Brooke’s film version with Paul Schofield as King Lear—or in Christian morality terms, or politically or in terms of a conflict of and within the nature of human beings and their conceptions of ultimate reality. Whereas Intentional properties can be found in artworks interpreted at the cultural level, attributes making experiential interpretations possible are imputed to them within the interpretations of individual appreciators or critics. Whilst it is the Intentional properties which make it possible for there to be agreement “on some propositions about the work” sufficient to identify it Indexically, feeling significances or qualitative possibilities at the experiential level can account for its Tuone, for “how different readers and critics can understand the same work differently”,37 something that neither he nor Margolis make any attempt to explain but which, as we have seen, Krausz hints at but does not develop. On the other hand, it is clear from the above that Margolis is right to say that “the fact that an artwork might answer to incongruent interpretations does not mandate multiplying —the work into correspondingly separate and distinct works” at the Intentional level, whilst Krausz is correct in seeking to pluralize “the work into correspondingly separate and distinct works”38 at the experiential level. To “suggest that the fixity of Intentional properties” at the former level “is malleable or unstable, depending upon the intervention of innovators and the receptivity and legitimation of the community of pertinent practices”39 can only be defended as an objection if a different account is to be rendered of the Intentional properties, presented in this

37 R. Shusterman (1987–8) “Interpretation, Intention and Truth” Jrnl. of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 46, pp. 399–411, p. 409. 38 M. Krausz “Interpretation and its “Metaphysical” Entanglements” p. 132. 39 M. Krausz “Replies: Interpretation and Codes of Culture” p. 109.

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Chapter. Without such an alternative account of their being in artworks, an explanation is required as to how they can be malleable or unstable in identifying a work of art for what it is. Of course, their fixity may be loosened at the experiential level where imputation can take place in the appreciation of the actuality of the work by a particular experiencer. Three Objections: (i) The Aesthetic Nature of Art Because Krausz’s arguments against a Three-Tiered Structure are directed against Thom’s analysis, which doesn’t adopt a Peircian methodology,40 resources for an attack on the position defended herein have to be sought elsewhere. Three can be articulated. The relevance of Peirce’s remarks about Tuone might be denied: there is no necessary requirement that artworks should relate to aesthetic experiences. Secondly, in distinguishing a work’s Secondness—its physical existence—from its Thirdness in relation to its cultural nature awaiting interpretation, the work’s identity can’t be secured save through its existence materially. Thirdly, it makes no sense to separate the two senses of reality—the cultural from the privately individual—because these two realms are far too closely entwined. So, the experiential sense of interpretation can’t be separated from the Intentional in the way supposed. Margolis refers to artworks in terms of the artifactuality condition since they “appear as what is done (deeds, actions) by way of human agency”41 and in relation to the interpretability condition, artworks can be identified “under alternative and incompatible interpretations.” But no reference is made to the possibility of their giving rise to aesthetic experience in some way. How then can they be distinguished from what he refers to as “institutionalised craft”? He does refer to artworks as possessing “symbolic, representational, and expressive properties” but subsumes them under what he calls properties “that are peculiarly cultural in nature” (AP p. 30), that which makes

40

Because of his lack of such a methodology, Thom fails to distinguish distinct problems within his own account. Those surrounding Idealization and Resegmentation concern the experiential level; Reconception, the Second Intentional Level; Recovery pertains more to the first—the physical. Yet all these seem to be run together (P. Thom “On Changing the Subject”). 41 J. Margolis Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly p. 9.

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“reference to the artistic and appreciative traditions of a given culture”.42 We need to consider arguments, which might sustain that position. Found objects, like driftwood, can elicit aesthetic experiences. But Margolis avoids this move by claiming that such objects can only be identified extensionally, physically, making them “context-free”, whereas reference to artworks is intensional. Driftwood might be regarded as ‘found art’ but then an appreciator would not see it as such save as s/he is “suitable sensitised” in regarding it as “a certain culturally emergent object”43 awaiting interpretation. Yet we can refer to scientific papers, philosophical treatises or even journalistic essays as satisfying the artifactuality and the interpretational conditions whilst at the same time saying they can be appreciated aesthetically.44 So what distinguishes artworks from these or should we rather regard them as works of art too? If we adopt the latter strategy two alternatives emerge. One leads to vacuity: anything created by humans could be regarded as a work of art. The other, its opposite, would be to say that the nature of experience claimed to be aesthetic is in need of analysis so that it would be possible to say of certain scientific, philosophic or journalistic pieces that they do indeed constitute works of art. But that move is not open to Margolis without considering the nature of the experiences to which such works give rise, that is to say, the Tuone of such works. Rather, he might make an entirely different move: he might reply “Only relative to some cultural tradition”45 does it make sense to speak of experiences, preferences or indeed values of an aesthetic order; they are determined culturally. Perhaps aesthetic concerns were of importance earlier in the history of art, but faced today with such examples, taken from the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, “such as Happenings, Environmental Art, Body Art, Ecological Art, Musical Art and Conceptual Art”46 aesthetic considerations may be less important and 42 J. Margolis “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” pp. 40, 41 & 36. 43 J. Margolis “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” pp. 36–7. 44 B. Dziemidok “Controversies about the Aesthetic Nature of Art” in Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter 1988 pp. 1–17, p. 13. 45 J. Margolis “Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” p. 36. 46 At the end of the twentieth century, we have seen other avant-garde developments. Consider Violent Art in the activities of Hermann Nitsch; Shocking Art

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can thereby be ignored by Shusterman and himself. In reply, three possibilities emerge.47 The first would be to deny that these examples do constitute works of art. They might be regarded as examples of anti-art and “to think of anti-art as merely some more recent forms of art is to nullify its significance”.48 The second would be to assert that the kind of aesthetic dimensions these works reveal are broader than the usual senses in which the term aesthetics is used. Just as art has a history, opposing the idea that it has any real essence, so the term aesthetic has no essence either because it too is subject to historical transformation. It is no longer to be identified with the beautiful alone,49 for example. The difficulty here is whether such a transformation leads to a sense of vacuity in relation to this term’s use. A third more promising move would be to acknowledge that there are indeed certain paradigm cases where it is agreed we do have works of art: consider The Potato Eaters, The Real Thing; King Lear. In addition, there may be some unexceptional cases about which there is a general consensus: consider a specific scientific paper; a fine philosophical treatise; a memorable journalistic essay; outstanding craft examples; architectural constructions produced originally for functional purposes; specific examples of design, such as a make of car; performances in sport. Finally, plausible candidates would include those exemplified in a culture’s avant-garde; the grounds for regarding them as artworks would be satisfactory enough to some critics but not persuasive enough for all art appreciators within some given culture. Consider, in this context, Krausz’s treatment of the works of Christo50 for example, which raises the question, among others, ‘What constitutes art?’ Such cases might represent rather “borderline instances of art”.51

exemplified in the Sensations at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York (Oct. 22nd. 1999—Jan. 9th. 2000) which included Marcus Harvey’s mosaic of Myra Hindley, the child murderer; Banal Art in the case of Thomas Kinkade’s ‘religious paintings’ or ‘Out banalling Banal Art in the sculptures of the Super-Realist Duana Hanson. 47 B. Dziemidok “Controversy about the Aesthetic Nature of Art” pp. 5 & 12–15. 48 T.J. Diffey “On Defining Art” Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. 19, No. 1 Winter 1979 pp. 17–23, p. 21. 49 C. Hartshorne “The Kinds and Levels of Aesthetic Values” in The Zero Fallacy, Ch. 3. 50 M. Krausz Limits of Rightness pp. 101–3. 51 R. Kamber “A Modest Proposal for Defining a Work of Art” Brit. Jrnl. of Aesthetics Vol. 33, No. 4 October 1993 pp. 313–20, p. 314.

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It would be a subject for further enquiry to examine these three possibilities in any further detail. Suffice it to say that doing justice to the possible aesthetic features of a work of art still remains a central issue in aesthetics, one that thinkers such as Schusterman and Margolis can hardly continue to ignore. Let us now turn to the further issues of identifying the Intentional Object and whether different kinds of interpretation delineated in this paper can really be separated in practice. (ii) Identifying the Artwork Returning once more to Margolis’s stance, firstly, so as to identify a work of art, we have to recognize that “works of art are public objects where distinctive properties are regularly described, debated, appraised and appreciated” and the paradigm in speaking of public objects—whether persons, artworks or any other cultural entities— “are precisely material objects” (AP p. 30). This claim implies “that the nature of the work is not first fixed and then interpreted” since the artwork “is itself identified for relevant description and appraisal when ‘it’ is interpreted”52 and this is because artworks “are intensionally qualified.” In other words “we cannot even characterize an artwork as such without reference to some interpretation by means of which its very structure as an artwork may be exhibited”; “the properties or features that interpretations impute or ascribe to artworks cannot be construed as the native, describable properties or features of such works” (AP pp. 43 & 38). It has already been argued how the reference to the artwork at the Intentional level can be secured without falling back upon its physical existence as a text. The studies of The Potato Eaters, The Real Thing and King Lear showed how their Intentional properties can count as “perceptual data” “constituting”—to use Margolis’s more recent terms53—the kind of cultural objects they are, such that to

52 J. Margolis “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” p. 40. 53 I suspect that Margolis has physical objects in mind when he speaks of perceptual data: the latter are “constituted (in a certain way) as the objective data, that they are (descriptively)” ( J. Margolis “Relativism and Interpretative Objectivity” p. 212). But analogously the Intentional properties constituting artworks are perceived too, just as objectively, even if not in the sense in which canvasses, a book

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doubt them as properties so as to regard them as imputed in some way would undermine the very ontological status of such artworks in themselves. This manner of argument was used to establish the sense of an Indexical conception of an artwork without invoking the idea of reification. Why, then, should Margolis have taken and continued to adopt his stance characterized, in Shusterman’s words, that “every description of a work of art, involves an interpretation of it”?54 Four reasons can be given for this stance. Firstly, a particular description of an artwork cannot describe everything. Rather, a selection of what is important to describe is governed by an interpretation. But this argument won’t do since, in the case of a physical object, it is not the case either that everything is described in order to identify its material condition. Rather, those features of it are identified in relation to a puzzle we focus upon with respect to its existence. For both cultural and physical objects, it is possible to describe an entity objectively without delineating all its properties, despite a different sense of description in each case. Margolis offers a second reason: “it is logically possible to identify one and the same work under alternative and incompatible interpretations (each interpretation compatible with the minimally describable features of the work in question)”.55 This claim falls too, for reasons previously explicated. The ‘minimally describable features of the work in question’ refers to the Intentional object as presently constituted. The ‘alternative and incompatible interpretations’ refer, as we saw in the case of The Potato Eaters, The Real Thing and King Lear, to experiential interpretations arising from the qualitative features, as these are identified by individual appreciators. Margolis could be seen as offering a further reason when he refers to an artwork’s “nature”: a work’s “Intentional structure” can vary “over the span of its interpretative history” to effect what can be regarded as interpretable about it. But his examples undo the very point he might want to make about the nature of such Intentional objects because he lumps together very different cases. He considwith so many pages or a text or musical score are so regarded as they are in ordinary life: a green piece of paper is seen to be a $5 note; Beckham scores a goal rather than kicks a ball into a net, even if he does that; words read from a paper are seen to constitute minutes from a previous meeting. 54 R. Shusterman “Interpretation, Intention and Truth” p. 403. 55 J. Margolis “Works of Art are Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities” p. 40.

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ers “Rembrandt’s damaged Night Watch or the nearly replaced surface of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper;” and “an abbreviated Hamlet” along with “a Bach Brandenburg transcribed for modern instruments” all in the same breath.56 But this gloss indicates that both physical and cultural objects are subject to change through the passage of time. In that case there is no difference ontologically in the status of either some physical and some cultural entities in this regard. Of course, in relation to the abbreviated Hamlet or the playing of Bach’s music there is a problem regarding their ontological status, but that issue relates to their existence as cultural objects, an issue concerning how they can be contrasted with other cultural entities rather than with any contrast which may be drawn with physical objects. The fourth reason for arguing that any description of a cultural entity is dependent upon interpretation is rendered by Shusterman when he claims that what we regard as descriptively true about an artwork will depend on the kind of interpretation we choose to adopt. Like Margolis, he cites the case of Hamlet. A Freudian interpretation for him, or “the prior history of a work’s interpretation” for Margolis,57 leads to the possibility that “the simple facts about the works” are recast by an interpretation “which dislodges or recasts the facts by showing the work in such a way that the original descriptions no longer ring true”.58 Yet we lack an account of how this happens. None of the Intentional properties considered in our three cases earlier are dislodged by any putative interpretation. Shusterman refers to the effects of a Freudian interpretation of Hamlet—referred to by Margolis as “stilted”, “anachronistic”, having a “maverick quality”59— which if accepted might recast the way we may view Hamlet’s love for his father, so as to make us regard his own assertions as rationalizations. But the play’s Intentional properties remain unaffected by such claims: Hamlet says and leads us to believe he loves his father; he behaves in a certain way towards his mother; we can describe accurately what he says and does to Ophelia and so on. To deny the existence of these ‘simple facts’ as valid for the play is to deny the very Intentional properties, which constitute what that play is. 56 57 58 59

J. Margolis What After All is a Work of Art? p. 90. J. Margolis What After All is a Work of Art? p. 91. R. Shusterman “Interpretation, Intention and Truth” p. 403. J. Margolis What After All is a Work of Art? p. 91.

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chapter five (iii) Intentional, Performative and Experiential Interpretations

The artwork, as a culturally emergent entity—an Intentional object— embodied physically, has been distinguished from attempts to interpret it elaboratively—whether experientially of performatively—in the plastic, literary and performative arts. Two inter-related lines of attack can be brought to bear on this position. Firstly, the experiential sense of interpretation can’t be separated from the Intentional in the way presupposed. Secondly, an objection related to it, the two senses of reality—the cultural and the privately individual—can’t be sharply delineated as has been claimed. We can soon dispense with the second objection, not because it might lead to problems such as to how to deal with solipsism or someone’s use of a private language-game but because Margolis has come to acknowledge a distinction. At one point he admits to the possibility of discerning “something as an artwork”: the object’s “material elements” embody he says “an Intentionally qualified denotatum” and constituting material elements in this way is an interpretative activity, which sustains collectively “the very reality of the cultural world.” On the other hand, there is the activity of “interpreting that denotatum,” sustained by “individual inquirers who venture an interpretative claim about the meaning of Intentional entities thus considered.” Yet in both his earlier and later writings he still claims that there is “no principled distinction between discerning and imputing a determinate nature to an artwork”.60 This confusion is deepened when he claims even more recently that “Intentional properties are determinately imputed to this or that particular denotatum”61 rather than being discerned within the latter. Such confusion is overcome by insisting that the Intentional properties a work possesses in being a token of a type, rendered through the intensional features which characterize it as a culturally emergent entity, are interpreted Intentionally. So, “construing the pigments placed on the canvas,” say of The Potato Eaters, enables us to discern ‘taking food from a common plate’, ‘five figures’, ‘liquid being poured’, figures ‘sitting round a table’, a ‘domestic scene’. A child could describe “these features in the painting” (AP p. 122), since

60 61

J. Margolis What After All is a Work of Art? p. 99 (cf. AP p. 22). J. Margolis “Relativism and Interpretative Objectivity” p. 223.

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they are discerned to be there constituting an Indexical conception of an artwork; not discerning them would amount to not seeing the artwork as opposed to marks on canvas. So too for the others kinds of art: the literary and the performative. What can give rise to interpretative dispute is not these properties but what is released between the artwork and its appreciator, our sense of being transformed away from the hurly-burly of the everyday to an intense felt, qualitative, dream-like experience. This is indeed an individual response as we may impute all kinds of possible features to the work. What we feel is incited by a dream-like reality, valued in itself. It arises from an iconic experience within which we are held. Peirce used the term rhematic to identify possibilities artworks elicit, originating experiential interpretations about which there might be individual disagreements. Nonetheless, these features sustain the artwork’s Tuone, which each person can carry with them on leaving the gallery, closing a book or departing from the theatre after experiencing the work’s actuality individually. The case for the position of Shusterman and Margolis is best defended with respect to performative works of art. Notice how often examples of these works are cited to sustain the case that culturally emergent entities possess Intentional properties “determinable only in being open to being interpretatively determined—where what counts as an objective determination depends primarily on the consensual rigour of a particular society’s ampliative practice”.62 Now a reader of the text of King Lear can grasp its Intentional properties, so that s/he could describe what happens in the play. But hasn’t Margolis a point when he draws attention to the performatory aspects of interpretation: “Our dramatic interest lies primarily in the way the play may be mounted and the parts interpreted precisely in what cannot be entirely foreseen from the text itself ”. Hence our experience and consequently our experiential interpretation can be transformed by both the Intentional properties of the artwork itself and the performatory elements of say this token of the megatype King Lear. His point must be granted but to say the Intentional aspects of a such a work and its performative elements—“by which the performing artists are said to interpret” an artwork (AP pp. 118–9 & 117)— can’t be distinguished at the level of practice, in experiencing it, does not entail that they may not be so distinguished in principle. 62

J. Margolis “Relativism and Interpretative Objectivity” p. 221.

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An account of what Michael Krausz calls ‘a three tiered structure’ within the interpretative process has been defended. Peircian nomenclature, applied in previous chapters and deployed by Joseph Margolis, was used to distinguish artworks and persons—cultural artefacts— from physical entities, as tokens of types. Culturally emergent properties can be attributed to certain physical features in relation to their materiality at the first level of interpretation—the explanatory— in which such culturally emergent properties are embodied. But these culturally embodied entities, at a second level of interpretation, possess certain distinctive Intentional attributes—the Intentional—not assignable to purely physical properties nor, in the case of artworks such as Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, Henry James’s The Real Thing or Shakespeare’s King Lear, to their creator’s intentions. Such Intentional attributes can be used to identify an Indexical conception of a work of art without, it would seem, invoking the idea of reification understood as commodifying its being as an artwork. In order to make sense of Krausz’s notion of “aspectual reverberation” for an individual appreciator, however, a third level of interpretation is required—the elaborative—so as to make sense of Peirce’s notion not only of the type and token status of a work of art, but its Tuone. It is the artwork’s “aspectual reverberation” or its Tuone, which, in the case of a painting, can draw us into the work initially or, in the case of a play or film, haunt our consciousness after experiencing it. Moreover, only by crediting the significance of a work’s Tuone is it possible to characterize what can be called an Intellective conception of an artwork. Here there is a play between the Intentional attributes, characterizing an Indexical conception of the artwork, and its ‘aspectual reverberations’ characteristic of the Iconic conception of a work of art.63 Now with regard to this third

63 It might be said that two different approaches in the way the Iconic, Intellective and Indexical are related to each other are on offer. On the one hand the Indexical conception, constituted by the work’s Intentional properties, makes different Iconic interpretations possible whilst, on the other, those same properties make an Intellective conception possible too! In terms of the former the elaborative sense of interpretation is characterized as a play between the Iconic and the Indexical whilst, for the latter, the Intellective is derived from the Indexical. But such a criticism misses an important distinction. The first approach is experiential in character; it seeks to elucidate what happens within the experience of an art- work to make an Intellective

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elaborative sense of interpretation—the Intellective—one of two stances can be taken: experientially in terms of what the spectator can bring to an appreciation of an artwork as it is actualised for him or her within an individual’s experience, or performatively in relation to an artist’s own interpretation of the being of the artwork as a cultural entity in performance, as in dance for example. Possible attacks on this position—as articulated in this chapter—were then considered. But no attempt was made to show exactly how the being of an artwork, at an Intentional level, can be related to the idea of its commodification. That remains a problem for the sixth and final chapter!

sense of interpretation possible. The second approach is epistemological in that it seeks to delineate clearly what different kinds of interpretative activities there are.

CHAPTER SIX

THE PROBLEM OF REIFICATION The thinker may easily comfort himself by imagining that in the dissolution of reification, of the merchandise character, he possessed the philosopher’s stone.1

We need a new alphabet book. A would be for action-plan, abolish, anti-social; B for backdown, blitz, boom and bust; C for clash, crack-down and crisis talks; D for defy, doomsday and downgrade; E for escalate, emergency-relief, entry-point and so on. During the latter part of the twentieth century we have witnessed a considerable shift within public language—manifested through an obsession to convert verbs into nouns—in conveying information and interpretative discourse about social and cultural affairs. A glance over our freshly constituted alphabet confirms that these newly appointed terms herald an increasing concern for the indicative in human affairs, so that any iconic or interpretative elements are as Ransdell says, “reduced to special cases of the indexical”, the former two becoming “eliminated as theoretically distinct functions”.2 The importance of this development cannot be under-estimated given Whitehead’s claim that “language dictates our unconscious presuppositions of thought”3 where lurks the danger of trusting “language as an adequate expression of propositions” (PR pp. xiii & viii).4 Given such possibilities we run the risk of converting what we know we think—namely, that there is only one way ahead, a way 1 Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics tr. by E.B. Ashton, New York: Seabury Press 1979 p. 190. Susan Buck-Morss claims that Adorno was criticizing his own former position in writing “Thought easily flatters and consoles itself with the belief that in the solution of reification and commodity structure it possesses the philosopher’s stone.” (S. Buck-Morss The Origin of Negative Dialectics Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press 1977, p. 213, n. 17). 2 J. Randsdell “Semiotic Objectivity” Frontiers in Semiotics ed. by J. Deeley (et al.) Bloomington: Indiana UP 1986, pp. 236–54. 3 A.N. Whitehead Modes of Thought (1938) New York: Capricorn books, 1958 p. 90. 4 PR pp. xiii & viii stands for A.N. Whitehead Process and Reality Corrected ed., ed. by D.R. Griffin & D.W. Sherburne, New York: Free Press pages xiii & viii.

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mediated to us through instrumentalism and consumerism—into what we think we know.5 And this is where the risk of reification begins. Yet, in the extensive literature on this subject, the term is muddled with objectification; or regarded as a corollary of ideology in the form of concrete political action; or used to refer to certain cognitive processes yielding an unwarranted authenticity for abstractions.6 Not that this extensive literature includes apparently the usual philosophical texts. Like the doctrine relativism, the concept of reification “does not seem to have attracted” “much interest”,7 certainly with respect to most of the philosophers referred to so far in this book. That may not be because Whitehead’s warning has been ignored. Rather, like the contents of this book itself, a sense of our embeddedness in a cultural world has been emphasized to yield not only a reading of human selves and their artefacts as “culturally constituted”, but “subject to similar interpretative interests”. This involves the awareness that the idea of physical nature itself, along with those former distinctions, are to be “drawn from within the scope of culturally qualified phenomena”8 themselves. Hence, for Margolis, at least “there cannot be a cognisable physical world unless the world of human culture is as real as the other; anything less would require a disjunction between reality and knowledge”.9 5 I owe a great deal in this paper to my conversations with Morris Grossman since we met in 1980, although he is not to be credited with the way any of his suggestions or remarks may have been misunderstood by myself (cf. “How Sartre Must Be Read: An Examination of a Philosophic Method” Bucknell Review Vol. 16, No. 1 March 1968, pp. 18–25, p. 18). 6 The confusion in the literature is generated by a failure to distinguish three quite distinct kinds of reification. Consider, for example, Alex Pott’s “Dolls and Things: The Reification and Disintegration of Sculpture in Rodin and Rilke”. He adopts a Marxist approach: Reification is regarded as “the process of giving a phantasmoric projection of value the substance of material phenomenon” (Sight and Insight J. Onians (ed.) London: Phaidon Press 1994, pp. 355–78, p. 356). This seems to render Iconic Reification as a paradigm. In his “Reification as Dependence on Extrinsic Information” Julius Sensat describes Reification as a social impairment, tying it to a “constriction” on “the capacity for deliberative control” in circumstances when what is not deliberated upon becomes something genuine in “the decision environment” (Synthese 109, 1997, pp. 361–99, p. 387). This approach makes the Indexical paradigmatic. Michael Rosen’s references to Lukacs’s and Adorno’s approach emphasizes Intellective Reification as the paradigm; reification as “the reduction of what is vital or meaning-bearing to something merely thought” (On Voluntary Servitude Cambridge: Polity Press 1996 p. 232). 7 J. Margolis The Truth About Relativism Oxford: Blackwell 1992, p. 1. 8 J. Margolis “Relativism and Cultural Relativity” in What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Pennsylvania State UP 1999, pp. 41–66, pp. 56 & 52 9 J. Margolis “Mechanical Reproduction and Cinematic Humanism” in What, After All, Is a Work of Art? pp. 101–27, p. 121.

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So we can’t say what there is. Rather we can only say what there is. And if that claim is excessively bold, then it will be claimed that we may at least be able to show what exists through our language use.10 But then comes the question formulated by Apel, Gellner, Watkins and others: “Whose language use are we to examine?” So the lexicon of the philosophers we have so far referred to make no use of such terms as ‘commodification’, ‘consumerism’, ‘false consciousness’, ‘ideology’, ‘objectification’, ‘rationalization’, ‘reification’, ‘thingification’ or ‘typification’.11 The only term, which might approach the interests nestled within the use of these latter nine terms, would be ‘objectivism’. This term refers to a dogma identified and rejected in the writings of the late Wittgenstein and by the popular reception of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To account for scientific development, there is no need to invoke a “theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’” whilst it is incoherent to think that there is somehow a “match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature”. The rejection of the dogma ‘objectivism’ implies relinquishing “the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and sciences”.12 Given all this, it may be hardly surprising that what is seen as constituting such conceptual schemes and interpretative activities are themselves to be seen as somehow immune from critical scrutiny, given that it is through such schemes and practices that knowledge of the natural and cultural worlds are rendered to us. Nonetheless we need to clear away any obstacles, which might block the road to inquiry, and so the issue of the risks posed by reification need to be addressed. That endeavour will be forwarded by employing remarks Peirce made in regard to his three categories and his theory of signs, as these have been employed in this book so far, to identify three forms of reification: the Iconic; the Indexical; the Intellective senses of reification. Even if there may be problems such a treatment of Reification raises,13 a number of objections to this present analysis

10

M. Krausz Limits of Rightness New York: Rowman and Littlefield 2000, p. 48. As we saw in Chapter Four. The exception is C. Cox in “Versions, Dubs and Remixes: Realism and Rightness in Aesthetics” Interpretation and its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz New York: Radopi 2003, pp. 285–92. The terms ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ideology’, however, are discussed in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy T. Hondrich (ed.) Oxford UP 1995, pp. 268 & 392f. 12 T. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd. ed. Chicago UP 1971, pp. 206–7. 13 Since my treatment is inspired by Peirce’s theory of signs, one problem with 11

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will be faced. As a result of dealing with them, an attempt can be made to relate these three forms of Reification not only to issues which have been raised within the context of the writing of this present book but also to each other. Three Forms of Reification Let’s begin by returning to Peirce’s nomenclature. Icons are simply “non-relative characters” whose significant virtue is due simply to their quality. They possess the character they do in themselves and would possess that character “just the same though its object did not exist” (CP 1.564, 2.92 & 5.73).14 The Monarchs in Henry James’s short story The Real Thing display their qualities even though they do not live as genuine human beings and despite the fact that these very qualities prove problematic within the story.15 Peirce cites the shape of a centaur which might be embodied in a statue “whether there be a centaur or not”. Since the realm of the possible characterizes an Icon “purely by virtue of its quality; and its object can only be a Firstness”, the iconic refers to a sign which “may represent its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being” (CP 6.73 & 2. 276) to something else. When Whitehead, for example, speaks of “the function of language, working through literature and through the habitual phrases of early life” to incite what he calls a “diffused feeling of the common possession of a treasure infinitely precious”, he is inciting the iconic function of language. It

that origination must be put to rest. Peirce’s theory can be seen from one of three standpoints. Firstly, it can be seen in the way it maps out three kinds of sign—the Qualisign, the Sinsign and the Legisign. Secondly, his theory can be viewed from the way a sign relates to an object—a possible object, the Icon; an existing entity, the Index; something law-like, the Interpretative or the Symbolic. Thirdly, it can be seen from the standpoint of representing something at the level of interpretation: a Rheme as a sign of possibility; a Dicent Sign identifying a factual proposition; an Argument relating to reason. The nomenclature Iconic, Indexical and Intellective has been adopted for two reasons. Firstly, the analysis is in relation to something, namely the way language is generated. Secondly, the use of these three terms may be more understandable at the level of common speech, whereas his other terms are in need of examination. 14 CP 1.564 stands for Vol. 1 par. not page no. 564 of Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce Vols. 1–8 ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A.W. Burks, Harvard UP 1931–58. 15 H. James The Notebooks of Henry James ed. by F.O. Matthiessen & K.M. Murdock, New York: Oxford UP 1947, p. 102.

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evokes a picture of “the love of the sheer geographical aspects of one’s country, of its hills, its mountains, and its plains, its trees, its flowers, its birds, and its whole nature-life”. Such an Iconic Reification can provide “that binding force which makes a nation”.16 Indexes serve as pointers for Peirce. Their mood is indicative or declarative in character. An Index has a genuine relation to an object, which, as a sign, it designates, and it would “lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed” (CP 2.291, 92, & 304). Unlike icons, indexes “have no significant resemblance to their objects”, “they refer to individuals” or what is singular and they direct attention “to their objects by blind compulsion” as do weathervanes, barometers or sign-directions. Jumping to the dogmatic conclusion “That man is a sailor!”, as a result of seeing “a man with a rolling gait” (CP 2.306 & 2.285), we have cited a case of Indexical Reification. With respect to understanding, Peirce speaks of a sign’s interpretant within his theory of signs. A thought, which interprets something, can be regarded as that thing’s interpretant. Consider again Peirce’s example of the interpretant ‘it rains’. “Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced. The index is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience”. The “mental act” stamping “that day as rainy” gives rise to an interpretant.17 So, Peirce can say that “anything belongs to the interpretant that describes the quality or character of the fact, anything to the object that, without doing that, distinguishes this fact from others like it” (CP 2.438 & 5.473). But the significance of the interpretant lies in its capacity to generate further interpretative activity. In the case of the interpretant ‘it rains’ it can lead to other thoughts: “If I go outside I will need an umbrella” and so on. But the development of thoughts to the cost of relating thinking to what Peirce refers to as brute fact “has its dangers”

16

A.N. Whitehead Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect 1927, New York: Capricorn Bks., 1959, p. 68. 17 Technically, it is more correct to refer to the symbol in this context. Peirce claims that a symbol “is a sign which owes its significant virtue to a character which can only be realized by the aid of its Interpretant” (CP 2.92 (cf. 2.304)). But the notion of a symbol is problematic within Peircian scholarship in the way he seeks to distinguish it from the use of that term in more usual discourse (cf. D.A. Pharies Charles Peirce and the Linguistic Sign Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. 1985 pp. 41–2).

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according to Whitehead. One way of characterizing Intellective Reification might be to say that it is committed “in the triviality of quick-witted people” obsessed by abstractions that lead away “from the realities of the immediate world”.18 Iconic Reification Whitehead points to the danger of committing Iconic Reification when he distinguishes between symbolism and direct experience:19 Direct experience is infallible. What you have experienced, you have experienced. But symbolism is very fallible, in the sense that it may induce actions, feelings, emotions, and beliefs about things which are mere notions without that exemplification in the world which the symbolism leads us to presuppose.

So the poet, for example, “in his ecstasy—or perhaps, agony -of composition” in writing “a lyric on trees” “will walk into the forest in order that the trees may suggest the appropriate words”.20 Such expressive activity may be rare in that most expression is responsive expression in that it “expresses intuitions elicited by the expression of others”. But for great writers or poets “completely novel intuitions” may be expressed: “Such intuitions can be responded to, analysed in terms of their relationships to other ideas, fused with other forms of experience, but as individual primary intuitions within their own province of experience they are not surpassed”.21 To understand the nature of this kind of reification at such an expressive level, we can return to Peirce’s terminology. Speeches or tributes at a memorial service,22 for example, can be called iconic,

18 A.N. Whitehead Modes of Thought p. 55. The term Intellective rather than Interpretative Reification has been used because in this chapter, as has been the case throughout this book, there has been a concern to articulate interpretative activity generally, whether in iconic, indexical or cognitive forms. So the term ‘Interpretative’ has had to be dropped in favour of ‘Intellective’ (see Introduction n. 10). 19 A distinction not really appreciated by philosophers like Margolis, eager to follow in the steps of the late Wittgenstein or Kuhn in emphasizing the significance of the conceptual over the experiential. 20 A.N. Whitehead Symbolism pp. 6 & 12. 21 A.N. Whitehead Religion in the Making 1927 New York: Capricorn Bks. 1959 IV/2/pars. 4 & 7. 22 The memorial service was for my friend and NOBOSS member Ian Hills,

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that is to say, they may offer their listener a picture, an image of the kind of person someone was. They can be regarded as sign of a “qualitative Possibility that is” as “representing such and such kind of possible Object” qualitatively. They can excite “in the mind some or, as it were, a composite photograph of images, like the Firstness meant” (CP 2.250 & 317). Such speeches are expressions to the degree that their hearers are not concerned necessarily with their truth or falsity since they are “presented to the interpretant for contemplation” and are “interpretable in qualities of feelings or appearances” (CP 8.338–9). The difficulty for the speakers is that in making their speeches, they are required to objectify their friend’s former life and “Objectification involves elimination” (PR p. 340). But does such objectification imply some kind of reification? Let us consider an analysis that identifies reification with objectification per se. It is provided by Burke Thomason’s affirmative answer.23 And although Thomason admits that Schutz never used the label ‘reification’, he uses Schutz’s approach to legitimise his own position.24 Interestingly, in a footnote Thomason ignores, Schutz indicates that his thinking has been informed by what Husserl says about science. For Husserl science can only proceed by taking the achievements or outcomes of past scientific enquiries for granted, that is to say Indexically within its own advancement, so ignoring “the clear support of presentation” within which these outcomes arose originally.25 Nonetheless, Thomason uses this passage to legitimate his own ‘Schutzian’ definition of ‘reification’: “a cognitive process whereby various aspects of experience came to acquire a kind of inappropriate ontological fixedness”. Thomason then uses the term more broadly held at Petts Wood Quaker Meeting House in East London on Sept. 7th. 1997, the day after Princess Diana’s funeral. 23 B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification: Alfred Schutz and Constructionist Theory London: Macmillan Press, 1985 ch. 4. 24 “A scheme of our experience is a meaning-context which is a configuration of our past experiences embracing conceptually the experiential objects to be found in the latter but not the process by which they were constituted. The constituting process itself is entirely ignored, while the objectivity constituted y it is taken for granted” (A. Schutz The Phenomenology of the Social World tr. by G. Walsh & F. Lehnert, London: Heinemann Ed. Bks., 1980, p. 82). “For all reification is forgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continual presence of their other aspects: when something of them has been forgotten.” (T. Adorno to W. Benjamin 29th. Feb. 1940, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 ed. H. Lonitz, tr. N. Walker, Harvard UP 1999, p. 321). 25 A. Schutz The Phenomenology of the Social World p. 82 and note.

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in speaking of the adoption of a ‘reifying attitude’ in granting the world an autonomous externality and regarding people objectively as embodying role-performances.26 ‘Reification’ now becomes identified with ‘typification’. Schutz writes: When I board a train, for instance, I orient myself to the fact that the engineer in charge can be trusted to get me to my destination. My relationship to him is a They-relationship at this time, merely because my ideal type “railroad engineer” means by definition “one who gets passengers like myself to their destination”. It is therefore characteristic of my social relationships that an orientation by means of ideal types is mutual. Corresponding to my ideal type “engineer” there is the engineer’s ideal type “passenger”.27

In the light of this treatment, Thomason can claim that Schutz “provides no basis for labelling any forms of realism or reification as ‘distortion’, ‘error’, ‘false consciousness’ and so on”.28 Nonetheless, different kinds of experiential phenomena are lost within Thomason’s account. How does this loss arise? Thomason seeks further legitimation for his stance by referring to the work of Joseph Gabel29 on people who, through brain damage, display an inability to express their thoughts in words. At a memorial service, there may be those unable to speak, as though aphasic. Their condition, however temporary, might be compared to that of Benji’s in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury; because they were more immersed in reality than people usually are, they were handicapped by this “concrete mode of being-in-the-world by the loss of the use of the linguistic tool”. If in their “morbid realism” such people can only enjoy or—in this case—suffer intuitions about what has happened, an ability for identification and objectification is not displayed since their consciousness is dominated by the ‘Here & Now’ sense of experience. Gabel reaches a Whiteheadian conclusion: the normal social functioning of intelligence requires a certain degree of reification and above all it is our use of language which impoverishes direct experience as it seeks to make that experience communicable.30 Thomason concludes: “We cannot live 26

B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification pp. 88 & 98. A. Schutz The Phenomenology of the Social World p. 202. 28 B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification p. 127. 29 B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification p. 181 n. 2. 30 My emphasis, see J. Gabel False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification tr. by M.A. & K.A. Thompson, Oxford: Blackwell 1975, pp. 157–8, 155 & 158. 27

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meaningfully, consciously, in a world of pure becoming.” Hence objective interpretation “and thus a kind of reification” “is essential”.31 What Thomason’s conclusion glosses, however, is that Gabel’s work identifies three possibilities here, not two—the aphasic and the normal alone—as Thomason implies; the case of over-reification is ignored. The aphasic, where there is insufficient objectification, we have considered. The case of those who are adapted to the world displaying excessive reification requires separate treatment. Let us begin with normal adaptation. We have already noted that those who did speak at the memorial service displayed an uneasiness with what they said about the deceased. They couldn’t be said to be overreifying since what they said about their feelings in regard to that deceased person’s life resonated in their hearers’ own experiences with respect to the feeling-tones interweaving within the latter’s intimate inter-relations with a former friend. Consider Whitehead’s remark: “A note on a tuning fork can elicit a response from a piano.” He adds a condition: “the piano has already in it the string tuned to the same note”.32 Iconic Reification implies such objectification. For Whitehead objectification is not merely a cognitive matter, but ontological: “The term ‘objectification’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of one actual entity is realized in another actual entity”. Indeed an “actual entity as felt is said to be ‘objectified’ for that subject” as the one actual entity or ‘drop or experience’ prehends another (PR pp. 23, 41 & 52). This inheritance of feeling from one entity to another is, in his metaphysics, felt as a vague, inarticulate efficaciousness from the past. This is a crude, more primitive, causal form of perception. Such causal efficacy is often contrasted with another pure mode of perception—presentational immediacy—“of importance in high-grade organisms”33 where “there is clear, distinct consciousness of the ‘extensive’ relations of the world” rendered through data that are confined “to a certain contemporary region”, which, though sharp, vivid and precise, remain isolated, separate and

31

B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification p. 94. It is this sense of the inadequacy of language to express what humans really feel—emphasized by my emboldening—as opposed to its general use in the busyness of life, which the followers of the late Wittgenstein and Kuhn obfuscate. 32 A.N. Whitehead Religion in the Making IV/2/par.3. 33 A.N. Whitehead Symbolism p. 16.

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self-contained in a temporal sense (PR pp. 61,121 & 179). He remarks: “Presentational immediacy is the enhancement of the importance of relationships which were already in the datum, vaguely and with slight relevance”. It “is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy”. Our language use, however, focuses primarily on the former leading us to overlook the fact that “clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process: the opposite doctrine is more nearly true” (PR pp. 173–4 & 173). We are reminded of Cressida’s observation: “this fault in us I find, /The error of our eye directs our mind: What error leads must err; O, then conclude,/Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude.” (Troilus and Cressida v. ii. 109–12). So we face a paradox: “what we want to know about” resides in the realm of causal efficacy whereas what consciousness directly registers, especially in the use of everyday language, is limited to “the percepta in the mode of presentational immediacy” (PR pp. 173, 263, 169 & 257), a mode of perception rendering us “with no reference to past or future” (PR pp. 179 & 272), but only a sheer immediacy. If these two modes of perception can supplement each other at the level of feeling so that “what would have been vague” can be distinct and “what would have been shallow” “intense” (PR pp. 173, 169, 179 & 180) we have a perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference, rendering what Judith Jones refers to as “a refined intensity of experience”.34 So far we have considered two cases: the first examined underreification and the second Iconic reification. Gabel also considers the case of someone who displays an abstract attitude, whose words seem to devalue what is being described and where a person’s form of expression seems to remove any qualitative features in relation to what is described. In this context, imagine a landscape and environmental consultant speaking on behalf of an application to develop an area with some desirable landscape features into a waste-tip. He used words readily such as the “topography” of the area, describing the site as “unremarkable” as “a landscape resource”. His only real concern seemed to be to play-down the “visual impact” of a “landfilling activity” upon this “former quarry”. Now what are we to make of his confident use of language? On the one hand we might say

34 J.A. Jones Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology Nashville: Vanderbilt UP 1998, p. 152.

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that he is simply performing a role at the Inquiry as described by Schutz, since he is paid to be there by those forwarding the application. On the other hand, he could be accused of ‘false consciousness’; another term for the state of over-reifying characterized by Gabel as “a loss of the dialectical quality of thought”, “a social form of morbid rationalism”35 “caught in the snares” of such rationalistic concepts as Cassirer might have said.36 His form of consciousness could be characterized as typifying that “of the practical men”, those “who carry on the business of the world” for whom nature, as we noted earlier, is seen “as an opportunity” to make money (CP 1.43–5). In Heidegger’s words, “the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthrals us as landscape, remains hidden” for them.37 Such a perspective undermines what Adorno called the “preponderance of the object”.38 The landscape is not viewed as such, but rather only as potential for resource purposes: the creation of voidspace!39 That ‘expedient’ way of seeing de-emphasizes the aesthetic dimension.40 It fails to allow the mind to function symbolically by responding to experience so that “consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience” can be elicited in novel ways.41 Accordingly, Rosen’s first sense of false consciousness can be identified: a falling away from “standards of rationality” which has political consequences.42 What is associated with Thirdness—our attempt to be rational—in this case does not grow from Firstness in an originary, reflective, meaningful way. In Vico’s terms, a

35

J. Gabel False Consciousness p. xxi. E. Cassirer “Descartes, Leibniz and Vico” in Symbol, Myth and Culture ed. by D.P. Verene, New Haven: Yale UP 1979 pp. 95–107, p. 103. 37 M. Heidegger Being and Time tr. by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell 1978 p. 100. 38 T. Adorno Negative Dialectics p. 189. 39 N.E. Boulting To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical: A Tiptree Inspector Decides Leicester, UK: Upfront Pub. 2003 chs. 7 & 8. 40 What is meant by the aesthetic dimension is developed in my “Edward Bullough’s Aesthetics and Aestheticism: Features of Reality to be Experienced” Ultimate Reality and Meaning vol. 13, No. 3, Sept. 1990, pp. 201–21 & my “The Aesthetics of Nature” Philosophy in the Contemporary World Vol. 6, Nos. 3–4, Fall/Winter, 1999, pp. 21–34. 41 A.N. Whitehead Symbolism p. 8. 42 M. Rosen On Voluntary Servitude p. 10. He connects this notion with distortions of identity (p. 31), which he then hooks to the appreciation of what is experienced and felt (p. 41). I came across his three ways of distinguishing false forms of 36

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“barbarism of reflection” is introduced, initiating “under soft words and embraces” a psychic gap between thought and the use of language.43 This distorted Thirdness—referring to a deficient Thirdness, say, as it is driven by the Hobbesian vision that “profit is the measure of right”44—determines Firstness. Such distorted Thirdness employs ‘a bird’s eye view’ of the land in seeing landscape just as a resource. The land is assessed to ascertain its typical characteristics so that one landscape type can be distinguished from another. To do this, ordnance survey maps, field survey information and aerial photographs are employed. Aesthetic considerations are treated quite separately from physical or geographical considerations, the former labelled ‘subjective’, the latter ‘objective’! Any human perspectival views are merely an optional extra.45 Readers of Whitehead’s philosophy, however, aware of his admiration for Henri Bergson, know what this attitude manifests: spatialization! In the words of Gabel, false consciousness exhibits “the preponderance of the spatial element in relation to the temporal element in the perception of the world”.46 But that implies that consciousness is determining what is felt or enjoyed in experience through some accepted cognitive categorization, in which case we are dealing with a different kind of reification, not Iconic Reification but Intellective Reification, a form awaiting delineation. Intellective Reification Peirce defines an argument, rather than a rheme or a proposition, as “a sign which distinctly represents the Interpretant, called its conclusion, which it is intended to determine”. In other words, an arguconsciousness after writing the first version of what appears in this chapter, delivered at the Silver Anniversary International Whitehead Conference Process Thought and the Common Good at the Centre for Process Studies, Claremont School of Theology on Thursday August 6th. 1998, where it benefited from remarks by Dr. James Miller and Dr. Yutaka Tanaka. 43 G. Vico The New Science of Giambattista Vico tr. by T.G. Bergin & Max H. Fisch (1948) Ithica, New York: Cornell UP 1994 (Nos. refer to pars. not pages) par. 1108. 44 T. Hobbes De Cive Ch. 1, art. 10. The notion of Distorted Thirdness is explored in my “Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914): Peirce’s Idea of Ultimate Reality and Meaning Related to Humanity’s Ultimate Future as Seen through Scientific Inquiry” American Philosophers’ Ideas of URAM ed. by A. Reck (et al.) Toronto UP 1994, pp. 28–45, p. 35ff. 45 For a critique of this way of viewing landscape see To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical especially chapter 13 and my “Aesthetics of Nature”. 46 J. Gabel False Consciousness p. xxi.

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ment “is a representamen which separately shows what interpretant it is intended to determine”. We focus here not on what is felt or with what can be taken to exist but rather with “any process of thought” (CP 2.95, 5.139 & 6.456). That is why Peirce regards this representamen symbolically as “a sign of Law” rendering this interpretation as “the learning” (CP 2.252 & 7.536). Now consider what Whitehead said about ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’: “This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories. Thus the success of a philosophy is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of this fallacy, when thought is restricted within its categories” (PR pp. 7–8). Earlier, Whitehead had focused more on the way “high abstractions” are treated as “concrete realities”, “the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete”.47 He invokes Bergson at this point but claims that he does not regard this “intellectual ‘spatialization’ of things” as a vice necessarily. We can appreciate his reluctance by citing an example of Hartshorne’s. Consider the proposition “John spoke and John was silent”. The correct way of interpreting this statement is to say that it is ‘John-at-time-t1’ who spoke and ‘John-at-time-t1’ who was silent. To regard John as a single subject who was speaking-at-time-t1 and silent-at-time-t1 is to spatialize time as Bergson claimed. To ignore this fallacy is to regard John simply as an existent—an abstraction from the actuality of events “standing for nothing concrete”—as a single enduring subject.48 This example helps us to see that although Whitehead agreed with Bergson’s protest against distorting nature by the “intellectual ‘spatialization’ of things”, he subsumes this error under the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.49 Whitehead’s own examples are indeed in relation to conscious-

47 A.N. Whitehead Science and the Modern World New York: Free Press, 1967 Ch. III pars. 36 & 23. 48 C. Hartshorne Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays 1935–70 Lincoln: Nebraska UP 1972, p. 180. 49 A.N. Whitehead Science and the Modern World Ch. III par. 23. This agreement with Bergson is re-iterated in PR: ‘spatialising the universe’ by the intellect tends “to ignore the fluency” constituting experience “and to analyse the world in static

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ness, “by a process of constructive abstraction”,50 arriving at such theoretical notions as “material” and “minds”. Whitehead’s ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ can be understood then in terms of what he has to say about “the role of mental functions” in Adventures of Ideas. Far from such functionings adding “subtlety to the contents of experience” the opposite is true—“Mentality is an agent of simplification”.51 It deals with “very abstract notions”; for example “mere awareness, mere private sensations, mere emotions, mere purpose, mere appearance, mere causation” without considering from whence, ontologically, “such abstractions” arise (PR p. 18). Whitehead cites “another instance” of this fallacy, namely a further “presupposition of thought”, “the two correlative categories of substance and quality”,52 referred to elsewhere as “the false notion of a substratum with vacuous inherent qualities”.53 Nonetheless, he does admit that the “simple notion of an enduring substance sustaining persistent qualities, either essentially or accidentally, expresses a useful abstract for many purposes of life” (PR p. 79). Yet it is because such Intellective Reification can enable us to act successfully in our everyday lives that Thomason is provided with his legitimation for prescribing what he takes to be Schutz’s approach to these matters: “To a considerable extent, then, we experience the sameness of our world just because we trust (or take it for granted) that there is already a kind of (reified) sameness intrinsic to the ‘things’ which we all experience”. He quotes Schutz as claiming that without such interpersonal agreement on the nature of experience of the substantial identity of things, communication between humans would be impossible, though he doesn’t consider what kinds of communication arise in this context.54 Yet, despite identifying theoretically the danger of such abstractive processes, one wonders whether “like Columbus who never visited America” Whitehead too may have “missed the full sweep of

categories”. Yet again, Whitehead is reserved in his agreement since, as we have already seen, ‘objectifcation’ is a fact of life both within cognitive processes for experiencing human subjects and ontologically in relation to “the physical constitution of every actual occasion belonging to the life-history of an enduring physical object” (PR p. 321). 50 A.N. Whitehead Science and the Modern World Ch. 4 par. 3. 51 A.N. Whitehead Adventures of Ideas New York: Macmillan 1933, p. 273. 52 A.N. Whitehead Science and the Modern World ch. III pars. 28 & 26. 53 A.N. Whitehead Adventures of Ideas p. 281. 54 B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification p. 98.

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his own discovery” (cf. PR p. 159). True he does recognize that “substance and quality, as well as simple location, are the most natural ideas for the human mind”, a matter of “individual psychology”.55 But he fails to show fully how the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ can become Intellective Reification as it enters or is employed in the cognitive activity of the ordinary person in what must be regarded now as the central tenet of modernism. It was Georg Lukacs writing four years before Science and the Modern World was published, in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”, who indicated the very grounds that Whitehead could have used to create a more powerful tool to analyse the phenomenon of reification: a re-examination of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’.56 Lukacs is concerned in a way Whitehead isn’t with the source of this idea of “rational knowledge as the product of mind” arguing that it doesn’t originate with Kant. He credits the originality of the ‘knowing is making’ metaphor to Vico rather than to Hobbes despite the latter’s claim that to know “truth is nothing else but to acknowledge that it is made by ourselves”.57 Mathematics then becomes the paradigm and guide for philosophy under modernism. Hobbes recommends this methodological model: Geometry, therefore, is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable because we make the commonwealth ourselves.58 55 A.N. Whitehead Science and the Modern World Ch. 3, par. 27. Indeed he sees the ‘fallacy of simple location’—the ‘presupposition of individual independence’ (PR p. 137)—as deriving from this pre-supposition of thought, namely that “the subject-predicate form of statement conveys a truth which is metaphysically ultimate”. In Science and the Modern World, he says it is inadequate—if the nature of experience is to be represented properly—to state where an entity is within “a definite region of space, and throughout a definite duration of time” without referring to “other regions of space” besides “other durations of time”. This fallacy generates the Problem of Induction (Ch. IV, par. 3 & Ch. III, par. 24). 56 After all, Whitehead did regard his own philosophy of organism as “the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of the objective world.” He continues: “The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction. For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism the subject emerges from the world—a ‘super-subject rather than a ‘subject’” (PR p. 88). 57 T. Hobbes De Cive Ch. 18, art. 5; cf. G.B. Herbert, “The Passions”, ch. 4 of his Thomas Hobbes: The Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom Vancouver: British Columbia UP 1989 & J. Watkins Hobbes’s System of Ideas London: Hutchinson UP 1973 p. 45. 58 T. Hobbes The English Works of Thomas Hobbes quoted on p. 280 n. 2 by

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If Vico’s last work had been On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians of 1710, then against Lukacs, Hobbes could have been credited with this ‘knowing as making’ metaphor. Vico’s New Science transforms that position.59 Hobbes’s interpretation was scientific: Vico’s was historical. Hobbes uses evidence to support his historical rationale his scientific approach disavows,60 making his stance less satisfactory than Vico’s more rounded conception of knowledge allows. Whereas for Hobbes the civil society was grounded in the social contract, for Vico it emerged historically from creatures subject to myth integrated within religious forms of awareness, embodied in poetic forms of expression. Following Lukacs, didn’t Hobbes commit an Intellective Reification in applying his rational science to history, for it ignores human beings’ spontaneous creativity in initiating social changes generating the stage of “fully developed human reason”, “the true and proper nature of man”? At a later stage in human development Hobbes’s own philosophical reflections become possible, even if they take the form of the conceit “of scholars” who think that “what they know is as old as the world”.61 Lukacs continues his case about this epistemological development by arguing that despite the apparent opposition between empiricism and idealism—the former expressed as a scepticism as to whether our knowledge does grasp the true essence of things, the latter “an unlimited confidence” that it does so—neither questioned the implied methodology that our systems of knowing, employed. That methodology was used to comprehend matter of fact, to provide humans with appropriate understandings rather than the “unknowable nature of the content” of the knowledge systems themselves. Lukacs can

J. Hintikka “Transcendental Arguments Genuine and Spurious” Nous IV part 3, 1972, pp. 274–81. 59 In his Second Response in the Disputation Concerning the De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia (1711–12) (The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians tr. L.M Palmer, Ithaca: Cornell UP 1988) Vico wrote: “man works in the world of abstractions in the same way that God works in the real world. Hence, the best way to understand the generation of things can be learned from geometry and arithmetic, which differ only in the type of quantities they treat and are the same in every other respect” (p. 156). For an account of his transformation see my “The Mythico-Poetic and Recollective Fantasies as Routes to an Ideal History Grounding a New Science: G. Vico’s (1688–1774) Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning” URAM Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 93–126, sec. 2.3.1. 60 R.S. Peters Hobbes Baltimore: Penguin 1967, p. 62. 61 G. Vico The New Science of Giambattista Vico pars. 326, 973 and 127.

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make the move that because humans, following in the spirit of Hobbes’s philosophy, take it “that the rational and formalistic mode of cognition is the only possible way of apprehending nature”, they are provided with the warrant for “constantly smashing, replacing and leaving behind” the ‘natural’, irrational and actually existing bonds. At the same time they erect “in the new reality”, “created and ‘made’, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier on with the irrational forces of nature”.62 Hegel, within the modernist tradition, developed Vico’s distinction between two entities, “a natural being” and an individuality moulded “by culture into what it intrinsically is” so that the actuality of the social self “consists solely in the setting-aside of its natural self ”.63 Lukacs drew on this distinction so as to refer to man’s “second nature”, “the nature of man-made structures”, “not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings— which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority”.64 Peirce offers a rationale for this transition from first to second nature—in the interests of what he called ‘improvement of the situation’65—but these reasons become lost to subsequent human beings, so that a world created by their forefathers now becomes one unfamiliar to those living in the present, particularly that created within modernism. The kind of rationality which, once used, brings success rather than an “old fashioned happiness”—a procedural rather than a substantive one66—is clearly associated, as Horkheimer argues in Eclipse of Reason, with instrumental rationality. It is this sense of rationality, informing law, language and political 62 G. Lukacs History and Class Consciousness tr. by R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press 1990, 111–2, 121 & 128. 63 G.W.F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit tr. A.V. Miller New York: Oxford UP 1977 sec. 489. 64 G. Lukacs The Theory of the Novel London: Merlin Press 1978, pp. 63–4. 65 “But fortunately (I say it advisedly) man is not so happy as to be provided with a full stock of instincts to meet all occasions, and so is forced upon the adventurous business of reasoning, where the many meet shipwreck and the few find, not old fashioned happiness, but its splendid substitute, success. When one’s purpose lies in the line of novelty, invention, generalized theory—in a word, improvement of the situation—by the side of which happiness appears a shabby old dud—instinct and the rule of thumb manifestly cease to be applicable” (CP 2.178). 66 Cf. N.E. Boulting “Hobbes and the Rationality Problem” Hobbes: War Among Nations ed. T. Airaksinen & M. Bertman, Brookfield, Avebury: Gower Pub. Co. 1989, pp. 179–89.

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power, which Shakespeare anticipated in such tragedies as Troilus and Cressida, Othello and King Lear. Consider Ulysses’s argument in the first: “Then every thing include itself in power, /Power into will, will into appetite;/And appetite, an universal wolf, /(So doubly seconded with will and power), /Must make perforce an universal prey, /And last eat up himself ” (I. iii. 119–24); Iago’s soliloquy in the second: “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse;/ For I mine own gained knowledge should profane, / If I would time expend with such a snipe/ But for my sport and profit” (I. iii 375–8); and Cornwall’s rationale for his sadistic act on Gloucester in the third: “Though well we may not pass upon his life/Without the form of justice, yet our power/Shall do a courts’y to our wrath, which men/May blame, but not control” (III. vii 24–7).67 This ‘thingification’ of what were originally not things but processes, activities or social developments can be traced back well before the development of modernism but, as Horkheimer puts it, “the transformation of all products of human activity into commodities was achieved only with the emergence of industrial society”. As use-value became transformed into exchange-value so the very institutional structures which rationality’s substantive sense legitimated—“objective reason” sustained within ‘the Divine Right of Kings’ for example, “authoritarian religion” or “by metaphysics” itself—these structures were “taken over by the reifying mechanisms of the anonymous economic apparatus”.68 What Horkheimer is referring to here—legalism, the idea that any kind of activity social or non-human can be understood as subject to law—became transformed “by the unholy alliance of bureaucracy and commercialism”.69 Under these condi-

67 Cf. H. Grady Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Reification Oxford: Clarendon Press 1966, pp. 61–2, 102 and 168. 68 M. Horkheimer Eclipse of Reason New York: Continuum 1974, pp. 40–1. 69 P. Piccone, “Modernity, Liturgy and Reification: Remarks on the Liturgical Critique of Modernity” Telos 113 (1998), pp. 11–18, p. 13. Vico could be commenting on the doctrine of legalism when he draws attention to Aristotle’s claim that, concerning private injustices in the heroic age, there were no laws: “first came real examples and later the reasoned ones of logic and rhetoric. But when intelligible universals had come to be understood, that essential property of law—that it must be universal—was recognized, and the maxim of jurisprudence was established that we must judge by the laws, not by examples (Legibus, non exemplis, est iudicandum)” (The New Science of Giambattista Vico par. 501). Moreover, Vico’s The Neapolitan Conspiracy of 1703 and The Life of Antonio Carafa of 1716 could be read as offering a critique of this positivistic sense of law exemplified in the politics of the day, which these historical studies delineated (my “The Mythical-Poetic & Recollective Fantasies sec. 2.3.2).

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tions, values become realised through what Habermas has called ‘a technical cognitive interest’ ensuring man’s survival on earth by manipulating nature successfully. So human beings become reliant on the natural sciences and mathematics—forms of knowledge with which Hobbes was pre-eminently concerned—so as to expand continually powers of technical control. As inquiry advanced beyond the simple step by step process of human trial and error, so man’s scientific knowledge was acquired and applied in all human activities, subject to the technical rules derived from that accumulated empirical knowledge. That advance has served to validate scientism, “science’s belief in itself ”, that is to say NOT that science is to be understood as one form of possible knowledge but rather our understanding should grant that something only counts as knowledge if it is scientific.70 Scientism then accompanies commodification and hence Intellective Reification; as science develops, its application through technology can produce man-made products according to any human whim, which may emerge, and these products can be bought and sold in the market place. Now all human activities become valued in terms of products or things; so the value of learning lies in the achievement of learning outcomes, of medicare the number of operations, which take place a year, and of artistic activity how much money can be earned. In all three cases, there is less concern with the nature of these activities in themselves since the only interest lies in extrinsic concerns. And if a sense of false consciousness is involved here, it concerns what Rosen identifies as his second sense: the idea that it is the content of claims to knowledge, referring to particular kinds of subject matter, which distinguishes it.71 Moreover, as our examples from Shakespeare’s plays indicate and as Adorno points out, these notions are carried in the language we speak so that we either buckle before its edicts or recognize it for its banality. We can now appreciate another aspect of those tribute speeches at the memorial service. What may have been sustained in each case was a “passionate endeavour to express oneself in language, keeping banality

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J. Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests 1968, London: Heinemann 1978,

p. 4. 71 M. Rosen On Voluntary Servitude p. 10. He calls this form cognitive false consciousness (cf. pp. 31–7).

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at a distance”, “the attempt, however, hopeless, to extricate experience from its mortal enemy, which engulfs it in late bourgeois society”.72 To overcome such an Intellective reification would require a new inquiry. Instead, let us turn to a third form of reification: the Indexical. Indexical Reification Peirce distinguishes a proposition, a Dicisign or Dicent Sign from a term by defining it as “a general description” different from the latter “in that it purports to be a real relation” to what is taken to exist. It is formed by “the conjunction” of a rheme and an index. Something is asserted; “definite information” is conveyed since a quality, the iconic, is connected to “the object meant” (CP 1.372, 2,436 & 5.76) “regardless of anything else”. What is taken to exist is emphasized since the qualitative expression of “what is believed” is tied to something “of what it is believed” (CP 8.313 & 5.542). When we believe something “there is a proposition in our minds” determining our conduct. Knowing someone’s belief then enables the way in which they will behave to “be surely deduced”.73 But a given proposition may be taken as true which is not so. It then becomes a presumption, even a prejudice,74 thereby losing what Whitehead calls “the essence of truth”. He defines the word “dogma” in terms of “opinion”, guiding what we do.75 But that term dogma may mislead.76 It is better associated with collective beliefs manifested in action. At the level of ideology, dogmas—ideological propositions—

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T. Adorno Prisms Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982, p. 224. S. Buck-Morss’s The Origins of Negative Dialectics pp. 118–9. 74 ‘The 7.50 is running today’ is a proposition which may be merely a presumption if I have forgotten it is a National Holiday, as I wait for it at the station. If I continue to stand at the station saying to myself or someone else “The 7.50 is coming”, then I am treating the proposition as a dogma, refusing to consider the possibility of the train’s not coming. This dogma expresses a bit of the truth—that trains do indeed run along this track, that there is a train on most days at this time—but it is “over assertive” in claiming that the train runs today. 75 A.N. Whitehead Religion in the Making IV/3/par. 15 & IV/I/ par. 16. 76 It might be better to say that I am holding the proposition about the train dogmatically, so that other propositions are invoked to save its refutation: ‘The 7.50 is late’, ‘My watch is behind time: we missed it’. These are all propositions which might be used to sustain the basic one: ‘The 7.50 is running today’. They can be regarded as rationalizations to justify my sustaining the latter. 73

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provide a justification for collective beliefs. In the case of both rationalizations and ideological propositions—despite their implied autonomy—their manifest content “is falsified by consciousness’s unreflected tie to interests”77 in their practices. Indexical Reification can then be defined as false consciousness unreflectively tied to interests manifested in what is taken to exist within our actions and accompanying attitudes in every day life. Whitehead, however, is much more interested in how such consciousness is manifested religiously rather than politically, in idolatry rather than in ideology.78 Provided, however, that we bear in mind Whitehead’s claim that religion “is what the individual does with his own solitariness”, then Whitehead’s remark on idolatry can provide a key to the understanding of ideology: “The keynote of idolatry is contentment with prevalent gods”.79 Today, that contentment has become much more temporal—contentment with the way things are—save for the occasional mass protest about specific causes of grievance, whether politically over high petrol duty or the activities of the IMF or socially over the right to life. Furthermore, outside the kind of readership of the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, there is no real interest in the economic factors giving rise to the way things are. Thirdly, increasingly activities have become much more centred on the concerns of individuals and their wants, rather than with wider community needs taken as a whole. Finally,80 in order to get people to vote, political activities are increasingly aestheticized: politicians like to be seen at football matches where national teams compete against each other, protest on behalf of a character in a “soap”81 or be photographed shopping where everyone else goes to buy what is regarded as the ‘in-thing’; ‘national 77

J. Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests p. 311. For some reason I refuse to believe the train is not running—it may help to provide a reason for my lack of inquiring into proper train times to cover my failure to keep an appointment—just as Whitehead points out that some Greek physicians were called “dogmatic” rather than “empiric” since only the latter “contended that” “experience was the one thing needful” (A.N. Whitehead Religion in the Making IV/I/par. 16). 78 Hartshorne in 1935 indicated why this might be so though he withdrew this reflection in a later footnote: “excessively unappreciative” understanding of Marx (Whitehead’s Philosophy p. 39 & n. 21). 79 A.N. Whitehead Religion in the Making I/I/ par. 9; Adventures of Ideas p. 12). 80 Cf. S. Buck-Morss’s The Origins of Negative Dialectics pp. 118–9. 81 As PM Tony Blair did in the case of Deirdre Rachid, the fictional character in ITV’s Coronation Street during the first week of April 1998 (cf. Richard Ingrams col., The Observer 5th/04/1998, p. 27).

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produce’, ‘environmentally-friendly’ products or whatever! Here false consciousness is characterized by the manner in which it is determined, as Rosen puts it following Rousseau, determined by an interest in being identified with a social group: to be seen as worthy in the eyes of its members.82 If “the received text” of Western ideology is “edited by” those who own the media, through whose messages societies transform themselves—rather than for Marx, those who own the means of production—then an examination of that text may prove useful critically as the Western theological one did religiously for Whitehead. He pointed out how idolatry fashioned God “in the image of an imperial ruler”, “personification of moral energy” and as “an ultimate philosophical principle” (PR pp. 342–3). But these images of God represented projections from what was accepted as required at the level of values in the social order of the day. In respect of our more contemporary ‘gods’ contentment with the way things are leads to an acceptance of social events as if they were ‘natural’; that the value of a thing is its price; that individual choices determine what is desirable; that success in a competitive context is an end in itself. The values presupposed then in the activities pursued in a person’s leisure time are just the ones which underpin the time s/he spends labouring in the duty of someone else to earn the money to pay for them. But the real issue here is that, whether the case be that of idolatry or ideology, human understandings of reality, as Marx saw, are treated as though they “are not susceptible to rational control”. Moreover, again as Marx argued most clearly in On The Jewish Question, because these representations become so understood, the individual—with his acquired “second nature”—becomes “the football of alien powers”83 just as primitive man—understood in terms of his “first nature”—can be regarded as powerless before natural powers. But whilst the latter powers are to be understood as ontologically grounded with respect to the natural world, the former conditions are created, as Vico anticipated, by what humans think and do!

82 M. Rosen On Voluntary Servitude pp. 10–11. Rosen hooks this form of false consciousness to the practical (cf. pp. 31 & 92). 83 J. Sensat “Reification as Dependency on Extrinsic Information” p. 365; K. Marx “On the Jewish Question” The Portable Karl Marx ed. Eugene Kamenka, New York: Penguin 1983, pp. 96–114, pp. 102.

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Actions, however, emerge, indeed are to be seen as intimately related to how human consciousness understands what is taken to exist. So, does it make sense to distinguish different kinds of reification as has been done in this chapter so far? That question constitutes one of the objections to this analysis to which we must now turn. Objections to the Analysis The first objection has been noted already: there is no need to distinguish between these three kinds of reification since all three involve false consciousness and the ‘thingification’ of experience. Secondly, someone might say: “There is no harm in reification provided it is done nicely!” The rationale for this claim might be that, unlike Thomason, who offers a descriptive account of reification, a normative account has been forwarded: reification is a bad thing. Thirdly, surely one person’s false consciousness can be another’s enlightenment! Let us consider then the first objection: reification involves ‘fixing’ processes whether of feeling, thought or what is taken to exist in influencing action or creative activity. This criticism can be granted. But it simply does not follow that because a form of symbolism, through which we render experience in an Iconic Reification, can be fallible that such a symbolic form must be false necessarily. All that can be said, according to Whitehead’s quotation from Symbolism is that such a form of symbolism may be false. IF its fallibility is ignored then we do indeed risk falsity. As Merleau-Ponty once put it: “To say that it is “false consciousness” is not to state the thesis of an essential “falsity of consciousness”. Rather something within the former should warn us of its fallibility and thereby invite us to rectify it if necessary. “This fundamental relationship with truth allows past literature to furnish models for the present”.84 But what about that second objection, that there is no harm in reification provided “it is done nicely”. The remark seems innocuous for Iconic Reification.85

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M. Merleau-Ponty Adventures of the Dialectic tr. by J. Bien, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1973, p. 42; “—it has become increasingly obvious that whatever viability modernity may still have is a function of its parasitic reliance on that same traditional cultural patrimony it otherwise tends to replace.” P. Piccone “Modernity, Liturgy and Reification” p. 11. 85 In Chapter 4, Cox’s argument that the idea of emphasizing the significance

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Something sung from the heart, as occurred at the memorial service, some speech act framed so that its utterer comes to realize what s/he feels for the first time, perhaps in an original mode of expression, is acceptable provided it is done nicely! Here a poem, letter or a picture might be appropriate but whatever expressive form is chosen, the remark about reification states simply a commonplace about an aesthetic expression. The situation is not nearly so convivial for Intellective Reification, characterized in terms of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, lending to a set of abstractions a concreteness they lack in themselves. Not only do they hide the roots of their own origination but in being foisted upon experience—consider the case of our very practical landscape and environmental consultant—they can obfuscate the very qualitative dimensions, which made the original experience they were meant to illuminate, possible. This fallacy could occur in relation to any system of metaphysics for example, including that of Whitehead’s own, where terms such as ‘actual entity’, ‘eternal objects’ and ‘creativity’ for example could be regarded as conjuring away the problems of formulating in consciousness what is so eagerly sought in experience: sheer concreteness itself.86 Yet there may be no alternative but to find the right terms to express what it is we feel our direct experience of the world holds for us despite the anthropocentric bias such expressions return to our efforts. But the fact that such expressions—as indubitables—may be free from doubt on one occasion does not prevent them being doubted subsequently. The thesis that all our ideas can be doubted on some occasion is, of course, the heart of Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism (CP 1.147, 149 & 171). Consider “There is no harm in reification provided it is done nicely” in relation to our third sense of reification in its ideological or political sense: Indexical Reification. We are immediately in trouble. The world has already suffered this last century from one polit-

of creative activity in terms of a product is just the outcome of “focussing on the small class of artworks on which philosophers of art overwhelmingly” tend to emphasize (C. Cox “Versions, Dubs and Remixes pp. 286–7) was considered. Now we are able to see that he uses the notion of Reification in two ways, which he runs together. First there is Iconic Reification, which has to occur if any kind of entity is to emerge from creative activity. Secondly, there is an Indexical form of Reification referring to how this creativity activity is regard in the market place, its display value or its price. 86 T. Adorno Negative Dialectics p. 75.

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ical development which, not only aestheticized politics, but also systematically destroyed any criticism, never mind opposition, to its domination in 1930s Germany. Martin Heidegger at least offers us a lesson in his Introduction to Metaphysics, a warning as to what happens when such an Indexical Reification is approved;87 it was hardly done nicely! It remains to be seen how far our Western social experiment in making all our concerns subject to exchange, even display value, can be sustained in terms of its consumption of natural resources without initiating a global disaster, or in relation to some nuclear accident or more large-scale ecological catastrophe. Yet, even those who do suffer from some form of false consciousness need not thereby engage in an Indexical Reification. So Gabel considers an extreme form of false consciousness: racism. A racist false consciousness may deny history, simply labelling a Jew as being concerned for money, characterized perhaps in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. But an Indexical Reification would go further, legitimating a racist ideology by constructing a pseudo-history to sustain such a false consciousness which “instead of explaining the Jew through history, claims to explain History through the Jew”. Again Gabel points out, in citing McCarthyism—particularly its “loss of historical temporalization”—in 1950s America, how false consciousness can arise without any “true ideological development”, though there could not be any ideological manifestation without the underpinning a form of false consciousness provides:88 no Indexical without Iconic Reification! As implied, in relation to the landscape and environmental consultant, Intellective Reification too presupposes Iconic Reification. And the relationship between Intellective and Indexical Reification? Surely someone could be unaware of employing an Indexical Reification, that is be subject to an ideology, without being cognizant that s/he was doing so. In that case it might appear that this Indexical Reification need not imply Intellective Reification. But that admission cannot be taken as implying, that, under challenge, the former will not have to invoke the latter. 87 “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and goodness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)—have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’ ” (M. Heidegger An Introduction to Metaphysics 1935, New Haven: Yale UP 1976, p. 199). 88 J. Gabel False Consciousness p. 13 & n. 30.

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Does Intellective Reification imply Indexical Reification? Say Gabel is right: “As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity”. Must such a person be subject to ideology in his behaviour, subject to “depersonalising”, “dissociative existence” and to processes of “devaluing”?89 It could be so, especially if we consider the experiences say of a human being in Western culture today. It might appear that what constituted firsthand experience for someone living in the nineteenth century has now been pushed to the peripheries of human existence today. Such a person drives to the workplace looking through a car screen, examines a screen at work and relies on a TV screen for entertainment in the evening.90 But surely there remains the possibility that such ‘screen’ experiences can be deconstructed so as to undo that Intellective Reification embodied in such mediated experiences, so that the human being may not then be made subject to its Indexical form. In that case, s/he might form an alternative set of interpretative ideas—in the spirit of some of the indications given in this chapter—which can serve as a weapon against a current Intellective Reification serving to mask alternative ways of conceiving human life. But then we run into our third difficulty; might not such an alternative set of interpretative ideas reconstruct another form of Intellective Reification which in its turn legitimises a further kind of Indexical Reification so that what appears to be informed by enlightenment turns out to be another form of false consciousness? Consider Lyotard’s definition of the term “modern”. He uses it “to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind (i.e., “a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy”) making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth”. He could have added, “Whitehead’s philosophy of organism” or, Peirce’s theory of Categories. ‘Post-modern’ for Lyotard is defined as incredulity towards such metanarratives.91 So there could be no unmasking of any kind 89

J. Gabel False Consciousness pp. 151 & 22. Issues surrounding a life subject to specular images are examined in my To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical Ch. XIII. 91 J.-F. Lyotard quoted by R. Rorty in “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” 90

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of Reification; we would be simply faced with competing attempts to engage in it! To deal with this claim would require examining the adequacy of his The Postmodern Condition as an adequate response to this problem. Relating the three Kinds of Reification to each other Bringing these various strands together, we have the following result: Iconic Reification seems basic to the origination of Intellective Reification. Both could exist without necessarily grounding a particular form of Indexical Reification, though where the Indexical can be identified its roots lie in an Intellective Reification and, in its turn, an Iconic one. But if without the latter we would be in the position of the aphasic, it seems some form of Reification is indispensable. At the Iconic level it can take one of two forms: objectification or over-reification, the latter making a particular kind of Intellective Reification possible: spatialization, the conversion of processes of formation into their products or things, a trick made easier in language by the transformation of verbs into nouns, as we saw at the start of this paper. Two options opened for us. On the one hand, we can acquiesce in this cultural shift: surely the new form of Intellective Reification enables us to complete our mission statements in everyday life. It is just this fact which provides Thomason with his legitimation for prescribing what he takes to be Schutz’s approach to these matters: “To a considerable extent, then, we experience the sameness of our world just because we trust (or take it for granted) that there is already a kind of (reified) sameness intrinsic to the ‘things’ which we all experience”. He quotes Schutz as claiming that without such interpersonal agreement on the nature of the experience of the substantial identity of things, communication between human beings would be impossible, even if he doesn’t consider what kinds of communication might arise in this context.92 We are close to Winch’s conceptual essentialism: “Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The

in Habermas and Modernity R.J. Bernstein (ed.) Cambridge: Polity Press 1985, pp. 161–75, p. 161. 92 B.C. Thomason Making Sense of Reification p. 98.

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concepts we have settle for us the form of experience we have of the world”.93 Could fresh forms of Iconic Reification displace this new form of over-reification embodying the new kind of Intellective Reification, to weaken the indexical over the iconic and interpretative functions of language? Such a move recalls Ponty’s distinction between “authentic speech” and the “general run of empirical language”, the latter “a second-order expression”, what he calls “speech about speech”, whereas the former is closer to being “identical with thought”. Yet Lyotard’s post-modernist might imply that there could be many forms of Iconic Reification avoiding over-Reification, leading to an array of Intellective Reifications to become the focus of philosophical activity. As Ponty suggests, don’t such activities offer their interpreter different styles “either a Spinozist, criticist or phenomenological one” which can be explored as we feel our way into the “existential manner” of a philosopher’s activity?94 This move indicates one reaction in response to the increasing use of a public language employed to “keep pointing us, involuntarily, to this or that other thing” advantageous “for the manipulators to keep pushing our thoughts towards”.95 Rather than reducing philosophical activity to a new technized form, a thinker can seek to weaken the claims of indexicality entirely by focusing upon interpretative activities. Here language would be regarded as what “constantly eludes us, teases us, promises some meaning and at the same time absconds any meaning” into ongoing continuous interpretative activity.96 This is hardly Merleau-Ponty’s option. His remarks about entering the existential style of a philosopher are only important in seeking, initially, an understanding of how that philosopher’s language conveys a particular teaching or is successful in mediating something to an interpreter’s mind. But there is still the question as to whether this teaching is valid in relation to an experiencer’s first hand experience. So Merleau-Ponty returns us to a concern with authentic or “first hand speech”: “that of the child uttering its first word, of the 93 P. Winch The Idea of a Social Science 1958 London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 15. 94 M. Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception tr. by C. Smith, London: Routledge & K. Paul 1966, pp. 178, n. 1 & 179. 95 J. Ransdell “Semiotic Objectivity” pp. 244–5. 96 Cf. S. McLean “The Water Runs over the Words” in The Idea of the Forest K.L. Calhoon (ed.) New York: Peter Lang 1996 Sec. IV.

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lover revealing his feelings, of the ‘first man who spoke’, or of the writer and philosopher who reawaken primordial experience anterior to all traditions”.97 Our awareness that such originary attempts to make contact with this pre-predicative realm are, of course, exceedingly fallible should not blind us to their significance nor to a more modest approach in characterizing the nature of philosophic activity. Philosophy is the critical interpretation of experience in which our normal or conventional ways of rendering it meaning can be offset to reveal experience’s more redemptive, felt yet fleeting character. Is this characterization so far from Whitehead’s claim that in philosophical activity abstractions governing special modes of thought can be criticized so that philosophers can “attempt to make manifest the fundamental evidence as to the nature of things”?98

97 98

M. Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception p. 179. A.N. Whitehead Modes of Thought p. 67.

APPENDIX

OBJECTIONS TO THE ICONIC CONCEPTION OF ARTWORKS Critic: I have some misgivings with what has been written in this book. Advocate: Are you not happy with the Indexical conception of an artwork? C I admit that there is a concern in Horkheimer’s writings to identify such an entity when he refers to artworks as ahistorical products subject to commodification, becoming thereby part and parcel of the culture industry they were meant to transcend or perhaps transform. A In other words, the significance of the artwork under such conditions is related neither to the artist’s creative powers, nor to its place within some historical tradition. Consider Munch’s The Scream. It has been used widely for commercial purposes whilst the actual existence of that painting has now become problematic. C Or consider, I guess, a remark of a potential ‘consumer’ in the recent Tate Britain’s exhibition devoted to the work of Turner, Whistler and Monet. Of a small Monet landscape, an ‘appreciator’ said: “It couldn’t have taken him long to knock that up!” Clearly this ‘commodity’ was not a work whose ‘after-life’ could be eased into the dream world of this consumer! But I guess your reference to the artist’s creative processes, as opposed to the work’s place in a pictorial tradition, might be one way of distinguishing an Iconic from an Intellective conception of an artwork. A The Iconic conception is concerned with the qualities of feelings leading to the generation of and their embodiment within an artwork, representing the character of something originating in the imaginative processes of its creator— C But aren’t these qualities to be subsumed within the experience of human beings regarded as interpreters of works of art when

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they are free to recognize aspects of themselves “in works of art, in so far as they have not succumbed to the general levelling” as Horkheimer puts it.1 In other words, any such creative processes, such as those you refer to, have to be grasped within an artwork’s place in some historical tradition, accounting for the way a work, in its physical embodiment—through paint, sounds, words, images, material construction—can reveal something about and within that tradition. In your terms, there can be a play within the appreciator’s interpretative experience between an imaginative speculation as to what the work meant in its own time and what it might mean for us today. A The Iconic sense focuses on how an artwork materializes a way of experiencing. What is materialized is a kind of dysfunction— “disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility”:2 intense experiences, putting normal experiencing ‘out of gear’. Consider dreams, anticipations unexpectedly undone, a sudden gesture or a turn of phrase. Horkheimer refers to this in speaking of a person divested suddenly of their function “as a member of society”3 in reacting as an individual experiencer. C What you focus on is to be grasped interpretatively. For Horkheimer, the artwork can reveal “a different world” from that in which we live and it “is that of art”.4 This means we must focus on the created object, which has its own autonomy independent of any considerations as to how it was created, once complete. That sense of autonomy can be captured in the phrase “the gaze of an artwork” accounting for how it reverberated in the later experiences of appreciators.5 For him, in the 1930s, that sense of reverberation indicates the possibility of some utopian vision no longer available in religion, nor illuminated by language use. Works that satisfy this condition can be seen as creative. We apply this term

1 Max Horkheimer Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982), New York: Continuum, p. 273. 2 Paul Valery “The Course in Poetics: First Lesson” in The Creative Process B. Ghiselin (ed.) California UP: A Mentor Book, 1952, pp. 92–106, p. 106. 3 Max Horkheimer Critical Theory p. 223. 4 Max Horkheimer Critical Theory p. 278. 5 T.W. Adorno Aesthetic Theory tr. By R. Hullot-Kentner (1997), London: Athlone Press p.

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to an artist’s activity only because of the work that issues from it, awaiting interpretation. The processes within its creation are thereby simply irrelevant to such a judgment. In other words, the artist is praised, “for what he has accomplished, not for having gone through some special process in accomplishing it”6 as Glickman puts it. A But could such a work be produced without the artist enjoying or enduring certain creative processes?7 Why otherwise should we praise the artist? Indeed, in emphasizing the Iconic conception, it can be seen how the work might be taken as reacting against the usual interpretative framework. Consider Yves Klein being led to monochrome painting through his concern to express just what he regarded as the sense of his own soul through a particular colour namely International Klein Blue (IKB) (Patent No. 63471 (May 19th. 1960)). When contemplated as a block, its experiencer is drawn into the depths of his depiction, transporting both him/her and the experienced into something incorporeally qualitative; a gentle, calm, even serene experience. As Peirce says, such an experience has nothing “to do with the sense of contact with the world, nor with the actual existence of its object. It is a mere dream”.8 The properties of Klein’s block can be regarded as a reaction against the very institutional and cultural framework within which this work has its home. Through the “negation of artistic identifications”,9 characterizing the traditional framework within which this abstract work has resulted, he achieved an abstraction from them, forcing attention on the real physicality of the work itself. C You have now admitted that what is significant about Klein’s work lies in its relationship to a tradition within which, yet against which, it appears. You, as an interpreter, place a theoretical interpretation upon his work that may or may not connect with the intentions the artist may or may not have had.

6

T. Glickman Culture and Art New Jersey: Humanities Press 1976, p. 137. M.H. Mitias “The Institutional Theory of Creative Activity” in BJA 18, 4 (1978): 330–41. 8 Writings of C.S. Peirce Vols. 1–6 (1857–90) Max H. Fisch & the Peirce Ed. Projects (eds.) Bloomington: Indiana UP 1982–2000, Vol. 5, p. 380. See To Be or Not To Be Philosophical Ch. VII. 9 A. Danto “The Artworld” Culture & Art L. Aagaard-Mogensen, N.J.: Humanities Pr. (1976), 9–20, p. 16. 7

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A Klein narrates how a Persian flute player who found the exact note, which he as a player considered all musicians were looking for, and he played just that note. Klein expressed what was for him such a unique quality through his painting. Consider a continuous tone in music and that of “the specific hue of the pigment” engendering “a visual sensation of complete immersion” in his IKB “without compelling the viewer to define its character”.10 C You did not need and indeed did not use any of this ‘intentiontalk’ to interpret Klein’s work, in your first view of it. The kind of musical considerations may well have caused him to paint in the way he did. But they can’t govern the way we interpret that work. Secondly, once painted, his remarks can be regarded as those of another viewer or would-be critic attempting to legitimise his own work in offering this suggestion about listening to a musical note. In Klein we have an artist and a publicist of his own work in one! Notice that the word creative is an ‘achievement word’. We use it to show that a new value has been realized which an interpreter can perceive and enjoy, as in the case of his work. This shows, essentially, why no description of his thoughts, “exertions and feelings” will inform us what he has produced is creative.11 Let’s take another artist—perhaps even a philosopher—Sartre. He remarked: “If I create a picture, a drama, a melody, it is in order that I may be at the origins of a concrete existence”. But to ensure such a work exists “through me”, as creator, would mean generating “a sort of continuous creation” so that its creator can retain his/her “consciousness creation” of it, s/he thereby retaining his/her “consciousness which conceives it”. Even its creator has to endure a “consciousness which encounters it”, a thing existing autonomously and independently of its creator. In order to “establish my ownership of the work”,12 some creators—consider Arthur Miller— can’t stop discussing their works, but what they say is irrelevant to how we view them as an autonomous objects. A We’re going over old ground. Creative works don’t just pop into the world; they are created by someone. Secondly, the kind of 10

H. Weitemeier Yves Klein: 1928–1962 Koln: Taschen GmbH 2001, pp. 11 & 15. Glickman Culture and Art p. 136. 12 J.P. Sartre Being and Nothingness (1943) tr. by H. Barnes, London: Routledge (1972) pp. 576–7. 11

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aesthetic satisfaction realized from an artwork can be compared to other kinds of art enabling me to infer something about the kinds of qualities embodied in it by creative processes in its creator C Back to the Intellective conception, since you have to refer to a tradition— A No! What matters is the way an artist uses the qualitative elements within that tradition to strike a new note, the ‘Tuone’ of a ‘token’— C Peircian jargon A Impressionism is a term referring to what is general about a movement, a ‘type’ of painting. The ‘tokens’ are Pissarro’s works. The artworks’ ‘tones’ are qualitative feelings elicited within one’s experience we enjoy or endure in appreciating one of his ‘tokens’. The label ‘impressionism’ or ‘art-deco’ is a term invented to make sense of a number of ‘tokens’ or art-works characterized by a certain style, so that a ‘type’ is created by its ‘tokens’, whilst the latter, in their turn, differ from each other because of the qualitative feelings or ‘tones’ they embody. C Feelings are the sort of things humans undergo. What are you saying? Does the artist have to undergo such feelings so as to produce the work, which transfers them to us as experiencers? At least Tolstoy was more honest than you when he wrote: “whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings”.13 Secondly, it seems to me that what you refer to as a work’s tone is something which an interpreter can enjoy as an experiencer of the artwork, and that interpreter is a social creature who has learnt to employ language in a certain way to identify the qualitative aspects of that work. A But we are considering experiences not thoughts in appreciating the artwork—. C Experiences are culturally mediated. To make sense of a work’s ‘tone’ is to refer to the way we appreciate artworks culturally,

13 L. Tolstoy “What is Art?” Aesthetics ed. S. Feagin & P. Maynard, Oxford UP 1997: 166–71; p. 169.

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consistent with my claim that any features of an artwork, identified as qualitative, can only be realized within an interpretative context. Back then to the Intellective conception, relating artworks to some historical tradition within which they were created. A You will not face the validity of talking about a work’s tone will you! Look at those dark, grey clouds gathering on the horizon of today’s clear blue sky— C In different cultures, such a vision would have different implications: the wrath of God; rain to come; premonition of evil events; an indication of a live volcano— A But all such interpretations presuppose some kind of qualitative change in what is to come. The fact that a cultural context can influence the significances attached to such qualitative differences in no way shows that such a context causally determines the nature of these qualitative ‘tones’ themselves.14 C The imputation of such qualitative features occurs within a cultural context. Secondly, you ignored my Tolstoy reference. It ascribes to the artist just those feelings, which are aroused in us in grasping an artwork. Here is the lesson you have to swallow, taking the position you do: “To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art”.15 A The first Tolstoy quotation you gave is a nonsense! Only a naïve thinker could be impressed by the claim that by using words, one person can transmit a thought to another. What is transmitted is not just words, but their tone, which can undermine what is being said. Consider: “Of course, I will be voting Tory!” This statement could be interpreted literally by a canvasser or, if s/he was sensitive to the manner and tone in which it was expressed, as indicating just the opposite. C Only through words can we gain any sense of what is being thought. No locutionary act—saying something —then no per14 C. Hartshorne The Philosophy & Psychology of Sensation (1934) New York: Kennikat 1968; 170–1. 15 Leo Tolstoy “What is Art? p. 170.

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locutionary act to generate some kind of effect. And both are intentional in your canvassing case! A But it is the utterance, not the actual words that is significant here. And I admit to my canvassing case being dependent on the intentional. But, as in the case of ‘Fraudian’ slips, the unintentional can slip out, to reveal an intensional meaning contrary to the utterer’s spoken word, what might be called the utterer’s intent! C Do we really need to get into speech-act theory? To do so would make it possible for you to avoid the significance of the other Tolstoy quotation. Is that your intention? A I think different issues are intertwined within it. First all there are two sorts of feeling, which Tolstoy runs together. The feeling the artist may be experiencing or could be seeking to evoke in his art, which must be distinguished from the qualitative feeling undergone by an appreciator of that work. C So you dissent from Tolstoy’s position? At least his position is clear— A Take the first sense of feeling. In Dickens’s case it is said that in a small room in Bleak House, Broadstairs, he used a mirror and costumes to create a figure whose life might be evoked to create the mood, attitudes and speech-acts corresponding to the fictional entity he was creating. Dickens, the man, is not to be confused with that created character. But that was the exhausting way in which the fictional character was created. That was how Dickens evoked in himself a feeling that this persona was to experience. The second sense of feeling is indicated in the musical solos of Johnny Hodges in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. He could use the ravishing saxophone sounds played with his eyes shut, convincing his hearers that they were being blown from his heart, as the silken dalliance of his sonorous, soulful, smooth melodies rose up in the concert hall. Suddenly one of his eyes would open to see if his swinging saxophone playing was really affecting his audience properly, so that, perhaps disappointedly, we realized that the saxophonist himself may not have been experiencing those sensuous musical feelings, embodied in his playing.

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C Who or what is creating these feeling then—either for those enjoying Dickens’s novel or hearing Hodges’s solo—if experienced by those either reading or present in the concert hall? How are they embodied in the words or in the notes played—? A It is best to speak of the feeling of soulfulness, say, as emerging within the aesthetic experience. The feeling-quality or Tuone is not simply ready made, ready-to-hand or finally formed as a feeling but rather a potential for actualisation within experience formed relationally between the sounds and an appreciator hearing them16—. C —who has learnt what they stand for within the tradition of musical interpretation. His interpretation is an achievement because of his/her cooperation with the artwork, as a physical entity, and thereby as a percipient in grasping it. A That is not an intellectual but an experiential achievement. C But that achievement would be impossible if the would-be appreciator lacked the cognitive background to interpret what was experienced, a background determined by the culture where s/he lived, sustaining certain institutional, traditional practices. A What you won’t face is the idea that an individual artwork has its own ‘logic’, its own novel way in which different qualities— whose values may have emerged within that artwork’s traditional manner of creating such entities—interact uniquely to produce a ‘symphony’ of such qualities to constituting the aesthetic object.17 C As opposed to an Intentional one? How can such feelings be IN the music or artwork; they can only be aroused in us as we impute them to the music or artwork. A Any artwork appreciator will tell you they belong to it, and that his/her own state is transformed by art: the artwork has the capacity to realize such feeling-qualities— C —which the artist intended when he created the artwork?

16 M.H. Mitias “Mode of Existence of Aesthetic Qualities” in Possibility of the Aesthetic Experience ed. by M.H. Mitias (ed.) Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff 1986: 159–68, p. 163. 17 M.H. Mitias “Mode of Existence of Aesthetic Qualities” p. 167.

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A Not the human as such but an ideal author or persona—an “imaginary being who made the thing”18 to whom we can attribute creative processes so as to interpret the claim that the artwork expresses something. This persona is someone constructed, a fictional entity evoked by an interpreter. As Vermanzen says: “The persona is made to order for whatever mental property the interpreter finds the work to express”.19 C In different cultural traditions many interpretations will apply. So your persona— A Will endure opposing states of mind people enjoy. Strindberg found career-centred women very attractive yet he thought they must be at home seeing to the children. C And what about natural objects, supposed to be expressing feeling-qualities: consider the anguished tree, the smiling field, a melancholy sea— A I admit an author of nature has to be imagined or granted. But granting the Divine such a reality, as Peirce saw, does not attribute an existence to God’s condition! C Are you saying that important issues with respect to the aesthetic dimension are to be settled by taking a religious point of view? If so, a religious person is not likely to be satisfied with the idea that God is a mental construct on the part of humans— A A way has to be found for realizing what has been referred to as an artwork’s tonal patterns, just has it has for the experience of orderings in the natural world20— C To lend credence to Peirce’s idea that artists see nature as a picture, a notion with which this book began? A Perhaps, so as to render an Iconic conception of the natural world, so lacking in the onrushing development of modernism. But that would be to develop a project in ecological ethics, a rather different form of inquiry.21 18

Paul Valery “The Course in Poetics: First Lesson” p. 97. B. Vermazen “Expression as Emotion” Pacific Phil. Quart. Vol. 67 (1986): 196–223, p. 200. 20 Allen Carlson “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature” Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts ed. by S. Kemal & I. Gaskell, Cambridge UP 1993, pp. 228–243. 21 N.E. Boulting To Be Or Not To Be Philosophical Peterborough: Upfront Pub. 2003, Ch. XIII. 19

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INDEX

Adorno, T. 75 n. 60, 79 n. 2, 81 n. 10, 83, 85 nn. 18–19, 87, 90, 95 n. 48, 100, 127 n. 1, 128 n. 6, 133 n. 24, 137, 137 n. 38, 145, 146 n. 72, 150 n. 86, 158 n. 5 Apel, Karl-Otto 21 n. 16, 23 n. 18, 24 n. 19, 35, 35 n. 11, 41, 113 n. 33, 129 Appleton, J. 83, 83 n. 16 Aristotle 2, 144 n. 69 Benjamin, W. 79 n. 4, 80 nn. 6–7, 81, 85 n. 19, 86, 88 n. 31, 89–90, 96, 98–99, 133 n. 24 Bergson, H. 138–139, 139 n. 49 Boler, J.F. 18 n. 7 Boulting, N.E. 81 n. 9, 83 n. 16, 88 n. 29, 137 n. 39, 143 n. 66, 165 n. 21 Buck-Morss, S. 85 n. 19, 88 n. 30, 127 n. 1, 146 n. 73, 147 n. 80 Bullough, E. 70 Bunge, M. 40–41, 41 n. 27 Carlson, A. 28 n. 25, 165 n. 20 Cassirer, E. 137, 137 n. 36 Cezanne, P. 98, 99 Chekhov, A.P. 106 Columbus, C. 56, 140 Constable, J. 88 Cornman, J.W. 63 n. 25 Cox, C. 90, 90 n. 35, 91 n. 38, 92 n. 41, 93 n. 43, 129 n. 11, 149 n. 65, 150 n. 85 Danto, A.C. 94, 94 n. 46, 159 Da Vinci, L. 112, 121 Dewey, J. 70 n. 45 Dickens, C. 163–164 Diffey, T.J. 118 n. 48 Dubiel, H. 87 n. 28 Dziemidok, B. 117 n. 44, 118 n. 47 Ellington, D. 163 Emmet, D Faulkner, W. 134 Fell, J.P. 32 n. 3

Ford, L. 106 Freud, S. 26, 85–86 Gabel, J. 134, 134 n. 30, 136, 137 n. 35, 138, 138 n. 46, 151 n. 88, 152 n. 89 Geertz, C. 79 n. 3 Gehlen, A. 51 n. 53 Glickman, T. 159 n. 6 Grady, H. 144 n. 67 Grossman, M. 128 n. 5 Habermas, J. 18 n. 8, 35 nn. 12, 14, 109 n. 21, 145 n. 70, 147 n. 77 Hampshire, S. 75 n. 61, 101 Hardwick, N. 67 n. 34 Hare, P. Hartshorne, C. 91 On Actuality and Existence 2 n. 9, 112 n. 31 Hausman, C. 20 n. 14, 58 n. 10 Heelan, P. 34, 34 nn. 8–9 Hegel, G.W.F. 49 n. 45, 143 n. 63 Heidegger, M. 31 n. 1, 32 n. 5, 42 n. 31, 137 n. 37, 151 n. 87 Held, D. 83 n. 15, 86 n. 22, 86 n. 24 Hobbes, T. 138 n. 44, 141, 141 nn. 57–58 Hocks, R.A. 20 n. 13 Homer 90 Horkheimer, M. 81 n. 10, 86 nn. 20–21, 87, 144, 144 n. 68 Horvath, T. Hudson, Y. Hughes, C. 15 n. 5 Husserl, E. 133 Ihde, D. 96 n. 53 Iseminger, G. 70 n. 46 James, H. 130, 130 n. 15 James, W. 2, 20 n. 13, 59, 63 Jay, M. 82 n. 11, 86 n. 22, 87 n. 27 Jones, J. 136, 136 n. 34 Jones, J.F. Joyce, J. 6, 85, 100

176



Kamber, R. 118 n. 51 Kandinsky, V. 71 Kant, I. 6, 67, 80–82, 141, 141 n. 56 Klein, Y. 72, 72 n. 52, 73, 73 nn. 53, 56, 74, 74 n. 59, 159–160, 160 n. 10 Krausz, M. 6–7, 29, 90, 92 n. 39, 101 nn. 2, 4, 105 n. 11, 107 n. 17, 109 n. 20, 110 n. 22, 111 n. 25, 112 nn. 27, 29–30, 114 n. 36, 115, 115 nn. 38–39, 118 n. 50, 129 n. 10 Kuhn, T. 129 n. 12 Lamarque, P. 74 n. 58, 101, 101 n. 3, 107 n. 14, 114 n. 35 Lauden, R. 36 n. 17 Liszka, J.J. 71 n. 47 Lukacs, G. 49 n. 46, 53 n. 3, 143, 143 nn. 62, 64 Lyotard, J.F. 152, 152 n. 91, 154 Maitland, T.R. 73 n. 54 Marcuse, H. 87 n. 28 Margolis, J. Canonical view of Science 42 Classification of the Arts 103 Continuity Thesis 47–48, 95–96 On Aesthetics 4 On Benjamin 85 n. 19 On Cezanne On Embodiment 41, 56, 60, 157–158 On Extensionality 61, 61 n. 20, 70, 117 On Intensionality & Culture 62 n. 21, 107 n. 16, 111 n. 26 On Intentional Properties 68, 105–106, 111, 111 n. 26, 112, 115, 119, 119 n. 53, 121–124, 124 n. 63 On intentionality 63 n. 25, 106 On Scientism 1, 1 n. 3, 18–19, 22–23, 27–28, 32–33, 145 On Technology 4, 33–40, 42, 47–48, 50, 50 n. 51, 51, 51 n. 53, 53, 96 n. 52 Marx, K. 47 n. 35, 148 n. 83 Matisse 79 McBride, W. McLean, S. 154 n. 96 Merleau-Ponty, M. 39 n. 24, 98 n. 58, 149, 149 n. 84, 154, 154 n. 94, 155 n. 97

Miller, A. 49 n. 45, 143 n. 63, 160 Mitcham, C. 33 n. 6 Mitias, M.H. 159 n. 7, 164 nn. 16–17 Monet, C. 57, 157 Mumford, L. 4, 4 n. 13, 42–43, 43 n. 33, 44, 51, 96 Munch, E. 6, 157 Novitz, D. 6, 108, 108 n. 18, 110 n. 23 Onians, J. 128 n. 6 Peirce, C.S. and Heidegger 33 Categories: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness 55–57, 58, 61–63, 63 n. 26, 64, 71, 74–75, 102–103, 108–110, 116, 137–138, 138 n. 44 Fallibilism 150 His Insights 51 Iconic conception of Science 10–12, 14, 16, 28, 38 Iconic conception of Art 79, 81, 99–100, 157 Indexical conception of Science 3, 14–15 Indexical conception of Art 8, 88–90, 94, 100 Intellective conception of Science 4, 12–13, 15, 28, 37 Intellective conception of Art 84 Interpretative Disagreements 123 Logic of Abduction 4, 16, 28 On Attitudes 33, 63 On Pragmatism 18, 20–23, 23 n. 18, 24 On Reality and Existence 2, 5, 56, 59, 80, 103, 109 n. 21, 112 n. 31, 165 On Science 3–4, 9–11, 13–15, 18–19, 22–23, 26–29, 34, 36–37, 39, 47, 51, 78 On Technology 33–34, 36 On Tokens and Types 57, 57 n. 9, 58, 60, 70, 72, 102, 124, 161 Sign Theory 54 System 2 Tuone 5, 5 n. 16, 6–7, 58, 58 n. 10, 75, 77, 103, 115–117, 123–124, 161, 164 Peters, R.S. 142 n. 60 Pharies, D.A. 131 n. 17 Piccone, P. 144 n. 69, 149 n. 84

 Pissarro, C. 5, 57–59, 161 Polanyi, M. 38–39, 39 nn. 22, 25, 40, 40 n. 26, 41 Popper, K. 4, 39, 39 n. 23, 41 Pott, A. 128 n. 6 Putnam, H. 101, 101 n. 1 Ransdell, J.M. 127, 154 n. 95 Rolston, H. 49, 49 n. 47, 95–96, 96 n. 51 Rosen, M. 128 n. 6, 137 n. 42, 145 n. 71, 148, 148 n. 82 Rousseau, J.J. 82, 148 Roth, R.J. 27 n. 24 Sartre, J.P. 32 n. 3, 69, 128 n. 5, 160, 160 n. 12 Scalfani, R.J. 74 n. 60 Schelling von F.W.J. 86–87, 87 n. 26 Schopenhauer, A. 82, 99 Schutz, A. 133, 133 nn. 24–25, 134, 134 n. 27 Sensat, J. 128 n. 6, 148 n. 83 Shakespeare, W. Hamlet 84 n. 17, 121 King Lear 58, 102–103, 105, 105 n. 12, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118–120, 123–124, 144 Merchant of Venice 151 Othello 65, 68, 74 n. 58, 144 Troilus and Cressida 144 Shipman, H. 64, 64 n. 28, 65, 65 nn. 29–32, 66, 66 nn. 32–33 Shusterman, R. 101 n. 6, 115 n. 37, 120, 120 n. 54, 121, 121 n. 58 Soothill, K. 64, 64 n. 28, 66

177

Stanislavsky, K.S.A. 106 Starling, S. 91 Strindberg, J.A. 165 Thom, P. 101 n. 3, 116 n. 40 Thomason, B.C. 133, 133 n. 23, 134, 134 nn. 26, 28–29, 135, 135 n. 31, 140 n. 54, 153 n. 92 Tolstoy, Count A.N. 161, 161 n. 13, 162, 162 n. 15, 163 Turner, W. 91, 157 Valery, P. 158 n. 2, 165 n. 18 Van Gogh, V. 102–103, 106–107, 112, 112 n. 28, 114–115, 124 Vermazen, B. 165 n. 19 Vico, G.B. 48, 48 n. 40–41, 49, 49 n. 48, 62 n. 21, 79–80, 80 n. 5, 81 n. 8, 87 n. 26, 87 n. 28, 99, 109 n. 21, 137 n. 36, 138, 138 n. 43, 141–142, 142 n. 59, 142 nn. 59, 61, 143, 144 n. 69, 148 Warhole, A. 94 Weil, S. 69 n. 41 Weitemeier, H. 72–73, 160 n. 10 Whistler, J.A.M. 157 Whitehead, A.N. 56 n. 7, 127 nn. 3–4, 131 n. 16, 132 nn. 18, 20–21, 135 nn. 32–33, 137 n. 41, 139 nn. 47, 49, 140, 140 nn. 50–53, 141, 141 n. 55, 146 n. 75, 147 nn. 77, 79, 155 n. 98 Whitney, B. Wilson, D. 64 n. 28, 65 n. 30 Winch, P. 86 n. 25, 154 n. 93 Wittgenstein, L. 101, 101 n. 5, 129, 132 n. 19, 135 n. 31

Philosophy of History and Culture

1. HERTZBERG, L. and J. PIETARINEN (eds.). Perspectives on Human Conduct. 1988. ISBN 90 04 08937 3 2. DRAY, W.H. On History and Philosophers of History. 1989. ISBN 90 04 09000 2 3. ROTENSTREICH, N. Alienation. The Concept and its Reception. 1989. ISBN 90 04 09001 0 4. ORUKA, H.O. Sage Philosophy. Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy. 1990. ISBN 90 04 09283 8 5. MERCER, R. Deep Words. Miura Baien’s System of Natural Philosophy. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09351 6 6. van der DUSSEN, W. J. and L. RUBINOFF (eds.). Objectivity, Method and Point of View. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09411 3 7. DASCAL, M. (ed.). Cultural Relativism and Philosophy. North and Latin American Perspectives. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09433 4 8. WHITE, F.C. On Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root of the Principle of SuYcient Reason. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09543 8 9. ZEMACH, E.M. Types. Essays in Metaphysics. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09500 4 10. FLEISCHACKER, S. Integrity and Moral Relativism. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09526 8 11. von WRIGHT, G.H. The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09764 3 12. WU, Kuang-ming. On Chinese Body Thinking. A Cultural Hermeneu-tic. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10150 0 13. ANDERSSON, G. Criticism and the History of Science. Kuhn’s, Lakatos’s and Feyerabend’s Criticisms of Critical Rationalism. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10050 4 14. VADEN HOUSE, D. Without God or His Doubles. Realism, Relativism and Rorty. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10062 8 15. GOLDSTEIN, L.J. The What and the Why of History. Philosophical Essays. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10308 2 16. BARRY, D.K. Forms of Life and Following Rules. A Wittgensteinian Defence of Relativism. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10540 9 17. van DAMME, W. Beauty in Context. Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10608 1 18. CHATTOPADHYAYA, D.P. Sociology, Ideology and Utopia. SocioPolitical Philosophy of East and West. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10807 6

19. GUPTA, C. and D.P. CHATTOPADHYAYA (eds.). Cultural Other-ness and Beyond. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10026 1 20. WU, Kuang-ming. On the “Logic” of Togetherness. A Cultural Hermeneutic. 1998. ISBN 90 04 11000 3 21. DESJARDINS, Rosemary. Plato and the Good. Illuminating the Darkling Vision. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13573 1 22. MOFFITT, John F. “Inspiration”: Bacchus and the Cultural History of a Creation Myth. 2004. ISBN 90 04 14279 7 23. MOU, B. Davidson’s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy. Constructive Engagement. 2005. ISBN 90 04 15048 X 24. BOULTING, N.E. On Interpretative Activity. A Peircian Approach to the Interpretation of Science, Technology and the Arts. 2006. ISBN-10: 90 04 15409 4; ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15409 4

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