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Below: Plato’s Attack on the Poets | Aristotle’s Defense of the Poets | Marcuse on Art & Negation | Danto & Artistic Identification | Pornography & Censorship | Key Concepts

About Philosophy 9^th ed., Chapter 9
Philosophy of Art

Plato's Attack on the Poets

•  Irony: Plato, the most poetic of philosophers, denounces poetry
• The cave revisited: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/images/PlatoCave.jpg
• shadows: the appearances (or imitations of things)
• things: the visible imitations/expressions of invisible realities
•  forms: the invisible realities things imitate/express: spiritual ideals or intellectual patterns  according to which things are made & categorized
• eternal & unchanging
• transcendent: not in the things: the things merely resemble or imitate them
• the timelessness of scientific & mathematical generalizations: humans beings are   rational animals
• true of all humans in principle or essentially
• if anything were a human then it would be a rational animal
• water is H20 was true even before there was water
• if anything would have been water then it would have been H20
• if anything had been H20 then it would have been water
• math example
• mathematical: the diagonal theorem about "the square" and "the diagonal"
• visible squares & diagonals rightly so-called insofar as they resemble the perfect intelligible (not visible) square
• there are no "visible" squares but it's true always & everywhere that if there were then the square on the diagonal would be half the area to the original square
• is true approximately of actual (approximate) squares
• moral example
• justice is not perfectly embodied by any earthly government or society
• we deem various governments or societies "just" insofar as they resemble the intelligible ideal of perfect justice
• scientific example
• no body of water is absolutely pure H₂O
• we call things water to the extent that they resemble pure H₂O
• Plato's indictment of poetry & art generally
• epistemological complaint: art misleads us about the nature of reality
• being themselves just appearances or "shadows" of things works of art
• lead away from the true realities -- the invisible forms of things
• by focusing on the outward appearances of things
• psychological complaint: art impedes the exercise of reason
• art stirs up the emotions & stimulates the senses
• and this interferes with thought: to reason well a body must be calm & undistracted
• emotions cloud reason & usurp it's proper function
• emotional upset leads us to act irrationally
• e.g., words said in anger, against our better judgment
• the senses distract us from contemplation

Aristotle's Defense of the Poets

• Contrary irony: Aristotle, a most prosaic philosopher, extols poetry
• Aristotle's theory of the Forms or Essences
• immanent forms or essences: they inhere in the things they are forms of
• dynamic formative principles in things: e.g., living things
• in science: more empirical approach
• observation can bring insight concerning the essences of things
• not just a distraction but evidence about the nature of things
• science not just armchair speculation & contemplation (a la Plato)
• Aristotle's theory of art: in particular tragedy set out in his Poetics
• epistemological value of art (contrary to Plato's epistemological indictment)
• possibilities more directly related to essence than actuality
• hence fictional drama can be truer than factual narrative
• so art is edifies us about rather than distracting us from the underlying realities
• actual people & events have all kind of extraneous, accidental details: they're not pure types
• fiction can dispense with all this and cut to the essential
• Othello teaches us more about the nature of jealousy than any number of biographies of actual jealous husbands or wives
• psychological value of art (contrary to Plato's psychological indictment).
• catharsis: the stirring of the emotions has a purgative or cathartic effect
• rather than really riling people up so that they leave the theater disturbed
• tragedy gives potentially disturbing emotions a harmless release: catharsis
• tragedy evokes pity & fear
• a good but flawed person (with whom we identify)
• is undone by the unlucky coincidence of circumstances leading to        · misjudgment due to his flaw
• the audience leaves this pity and fear behind when they leave the theater
• not in an emotionally disturbed state: unable to concentrate
• but in a relieved state: better able to concentrate
• Continuing Controversy: Plato's view v. Aristotle's still being debated
• some hold portrayals of sex and violence in the arts
• aggravate peoples sexual desires and stirs them up to sexual misbehavior
• the rapist or child molester who views pornography & gets so stirred up
• he goes out and rapes or molests to let off the steam
• stirs them up to violent behavior: e.g., violent video games
• others maintained that such portrayals, on the contrary
• let off sexual steam: so people are better able to channel their desires appropriately
• the husband who views pornographic depictions
• of other women
• "kinky" activities: threesomes, etc.
• takes the edge off his desires
• for extramarital sex
• kinky activities his wife wouldn't go in for
• instead of acting them out to the detriment of his marriage & his happiness
• ditto for violence

Marcuse and the Uses of Negation

• Introduction
• Plato & Aristotle
• Plato argued that art is disruptive & misleading & irrational consequently, bad
• Aristotle agreed that if art were disruptive & misleading it would be bad
  • but claimed it's not disruptive & misleading
• LH surmises
  • Aristotle was right about true art which provokes thought, gives insight, and opens new vistas
  • Plato was right about kitsch which is dulls thought, inhibits insight, and dulls perceptions
• Kitsch: Bad or inferior art, that is formulaic, trite or banal, expressing or evoking phony sentimentality instead of genuine feeling and unquestioning acceptance of the popular or orthodox opinion instead of genuine insight into underlying issues and realities.
  • Examples: http://www.worldofkitsch.com/about/definition.html
    • poetry: Joyce Kilmer's "Trees"
    • music: "How Much is that Doggie in the Window"
      • MacArthur Park ... not! (IMHO)
    • painting: Norman Rockwell
  • Discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch
    • The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), defined it as “the absolute denial of shit.” His argument was that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view of the world in which “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”
    • art for Adorno is supposed to be subjective, challenging, and oriented against the oppressiveness of the power structure. He claimed that kitsch is parody of catharsis, and a parody of aesthetic consciousness.
• Marcuse ( 1898-1979): a Marxist
• art is negative, destructive, and even irrational
• and it's good for that reason
• Phenomenon of co-option: dramatic powerful words, ideas, & artistic expressions that challenge existing social conventions, assumptions and arrangements: e.g., sixties rock & roll; rap
• rapidly become domesticated, sanitized, and used to bolster the very conditions it was originally created to challenge.
• taken out of context
• robbed of their thought-provoking & radical-act-provoking abilities
• in a word "co-opted"
• examples
• musical
• use of rap music in commercials for malt liquor
• use of the Rolling Stones music at the Republican post election celebration
• use of the Who's anthem "I'm Free" from the rock opera Tommy in anti-drug  propaganda
• "Power to the people!"
• a black power slogan.
• a liberal democratic campaign slogan
• a Richard Nixon campaign promise
• questions
• Can modern American society absorb anything into itself without fundamentally changing?
• Must every protest turn into this year's fad and next year's ancient history?
• Should we just give up in despair, tune on the TV, and vote every four years for the Republicrat "of our choice"?
• Freudian Theoretical Assumptions underlying Marcuse's Answer
• Ego & Id
• Id: our inner child -- Blake's"soul of sweet delight" that "cannot be defiled"
• operates on the pleasure principle: if it feels good do it
• the source of our inner psychic energy or libido
• aggressive urges
• sexual urges
• its desire is infinite (from There is No Natural Religion)
•  "More! More! is the cry of the mistaken soul; less than all cannot satisfy Man."
• "The desire of Man being Infinite"
• Ego: our inner adult
• operates on the reality principle
• forced to restrain & regulate the id's desires
• to insure their actual realization as best as can be managed
• given real-world constraints" e.g.,
• limited resources & time
• romantic rivals
• unwilling objects of our affection
• Two desire suppressing control mechanisms
• Repression: forcibly pushes desires, thoughts, and feelings that the ego considers unacceptable and dangerous out of consciousness
• repressed material doesn't go away
• remain in the unconscious with power to affect
• dreams & slips of the tongue ("Freudian slips")
• other behavior & thought, e.g.,
• compulsive behavior
• obsessive thoughts
• Sublimation: redirects libido into socially acceptable channels
• e.g., aggressive urges into work & economic & intellectual competition
• e.g., sexual urges into marital & other loving & committed relationships
• Repression
• Necessary repression: repression required for civilization (as Freud held it is)
• the kind and amount of repression necessary at a given stage of social development in order for individuals to survive & prosper.
• required by the objective constraints of existing material realities: the means and forces of production.
• Surplus repression: repression over and above what's materially necessary
• over and above what's required not for the sake of individual survival & prosperity at the present stage of material development
• required by the specific system of domination and submission that exists in society at a given time:
• for the maintenance of existing relations of domination & control
• insofar as these are not necessitated by material conditions
• Marcuse's Analysis of the present
• what could be if not for surplus repression
• technological advance that enables lightening of the work-related burdens: back to Eden
• advances in birth control enable greater scope for sexual experimentation & greater possibilities for fulfillment
• what have we instead: surplus repression
• the burden of work necessary to support a family actually increasing despite the "labor-saving" advances in technology
• two-income households now the rule
• long-hours including take-home work
• less sleep (it's a fact)
• pressure to get kids into -- and on kids to perform in -- elite preschools
• neo-puritan backlash
• laws to restrict divorce
• antiquated laws criminalizing consenting sexual acts -- including normal heterosexual foreplay -- kept on the books in many municipalities
• anti-pleasure laws e. g. prohibition of recreational drugs
• etc.
• The proper function of art is revolutionary: a negative oppositional function
• keep alive the possibility of transcendence of existing oppressive social relations: the  imaginative negation of existing restraints
• enable imaginative leap beyond the existing arrangements and their so-call "necessary sacrifices"
• to conceive of possible rearrangements in which more of the repressed libidinal energy can be liberated
• by so doing art "keeps alive our repressed dreams of liberation and gratification" -- our  hope
• art presses these dreams into the service of "revolutions that reduce surplus  oppression and bring us closer to conditions of genuine human satisfaction."
• enlists the impossible dream of complete liberation from restraint in the service of the  possible dream of overthrowing surplus restraints

Arthur C. Danto's Theory of Artistic Identification

• What is art?
  • Plato: examples he has in mind
    • painting: represents, e.g., a bed
    • poetry: "represents the actions and fortunes of human beings together with the joy or sorrow they experience" (Wolff)
    • music: "he explicitly warned us against the power of music to stir unmanly emotions in the soul" (Wolff)
  • Aristotle: "concern was with dramatic poetry, particularly tragedy, although his philosophy of art surely has application to other arts as well"
  • Marcuse
    • examples he cites
      • concert
      • opera
      • theater
    • art concerns how things "are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak" (Marcuse)
• Boundary Issues
  • recently invented & previously dismissed disciplines
    • handicraft
    • photography
    • assemblage
    • jazz
  • art that more or less deliberately pushes the boundaries
    • "'Found art' raises ordinary objects of ordinary significance to the level of art." (Wolff)
      • Duchamp's famous urinal
    • John Cage's "Solo to be performed in any way by anyone": 4 minutes & 23 seconds of silence executed on the piano
    • Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs at the MOMA featuring
      • a wooden folding chair
      • the photograph of a chair
      • a dictionary definition of "chair"
    • Andres Serano's Piss Christ: "a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine"
• Danto's theory of art
  • though he rejects Plato's theory of art, he accepts the Platonic challenge to provide a definition
  • "The Artworld"
    • Rejects Plato's "Imitation Theory": much modern art is avowedly nonrepresentative
    • Danto's "Reality Theory": modern art aims "not at illusion but reality"
      • "a poem should not mean but be" (Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica)
    • The two mirrors (Danto)
      • "Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit whatsoever."
      • "Hamlet, more acutely, recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive -- or own face and form -- and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is ... of some cognitive utility after all."
      • "'Is an imitation' will not do as a sufficient condition for 'is art.'"
        • "if art is imitation, mirror images are art" but they're not
        • "the insufficiency of the [Socratic] theory was not noticed until the invention of photography"
        • "once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was quickly discarded as even a necessary one"
    • "Some such [anomalous for the IT] episode transpired with the [late 19th century] advent of post impressionist paintings."
      • by IT definition "it was impossible to accept these as art, unless inept art"
      • "So, to get them accepted as art ... required not so much a revolution in taste as a theoretical revision ... involving not only the artistic enfranchisement of these objects, but an emphasis upon newly significant features of accepted artworks, so that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would now have to be given ...."
      • The emerging RT alternative
        • "the artists were to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as successfully creating new ones"
        • "post impressionists were to be understood to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming ... 'not at illusion but reality.'"
        • "By means of this theory (RT), artworks re-entered the thick of things from which socratic theory (IT) had sought to evict them: if no more real than what carpenters wrought, they were at least no less real...."
      • A tale of two beds
        • Rauschenberg's bed: hangs on a wall
        • Oldenberg's bed: "I want the object to have its own existence." (Oldenberg)
  • The is of Artistic Identification & the Artworld
    • A tale of three 'is's
      • the 'is' of identity: the morning star is Venus; groundhogs are woodchucks; etc.
      • the 'is' of predication: Venus is hot; groundhogs are herbivorous
      • the 'is' of artistic identification: "identifies an object as a work of art, is what makes an object a work of art"
        • comparable to the "is in accordance with which a child, shown a circle and a triangle and asked which is him and which is his sister, will point to the triangle saying 'That is me.'"
    • Artworld: "To see something as art requires ... an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."
    • Andy Warhol's Brillo Box:
      • "Never mind that Brillo box may not be good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art at all. But if it is, why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the storeroom? Or has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?"
      • "What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is a theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification.)

Contemporary Application: Pornography, Art, and Censorship

• The Debate over Public Funding (NEA grants)
• Don't Cave in to the NEA (Jeff Jacoby)
• National Endowment for the Arts Grants should be abolished
• It's good for artists to struggle: public support is bad for them
• Only the audience -- the market -- is fit to decide artistic value
• Attack on the NEA is an Obscenity (Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs)
• NEA grants do good things: promote valuable artistic endeavors -- most of them completely noncontroversial -- which would not otherwise be undertaken.
• With regard to that which is controversial: it is a necessary and legitimate function of art to be provoke us and challenge conventional values.
• Opponents of NEA grants are "Philistines"
• Decency a Valid Concern for the NEA (Atlanta Constitution editorial)
• The NEA is right to make decency a criterion for making its grants
• Artists have a right to challenge conventional values and assumptions -- to be upsetters.
• But society has no obligation to pay for "art" that it finds indecent.
• Pornography & Censorship
• Pornography, Art, and Censorship (Paul Goodman)
• arousal of sexual passions is a legitimate artistic aim
• so is mockery of established conventions
• if we censor such expression "we doom ourselves to a passionless and conformist community"
• Pornography vs. Democracy: The Case for Censorship (Walter Berns)
• legal definition of obscenity
• appeal to prurient interests
• lack of redeeming artistic merit
• trouble: obscenity is hard to define & artistic merit even harder
• nevertheless we need to try: censorship of obscenity is necessary to preserve civilization.
• self-control goes out the window without decency
• and democracy goes out the window without self-control
• Summer Storm (Meg Greenfield)
• Empirical argument: nowadays, generally, "the result of state intervention [in the arts] is something foolish or hideous or oppressive -- or, in rare cases, all three."
• Inherent tension exists between
• "the socially defiant nature of our contemporary art"
• "the socially conservative nature of most of the people who go into government"
• the inspired artist and the uninspired patron
• Shutterbuggery (William F. Buckley)
• Great art may be immoral: "There is no strict correlation between the moral and the aesthetic."
• Art that's immoral -- e.g., Mapplethorpe's -- shouldn't be publicly subsidized.

Questions for discussion

1. Might art -- despite being natural to us humans -- nevertheless be something bad in and of itself?
2. Is there any legitimate distinction between the fine arts and the folk arts and crafts?  Between high art and popular art?
3. Pornography is condemned for its tendency to "arouse prurient interests": what's wrong with that?  Why should arousing prurient interests have it to be offset by some other element giving the work "redeeming social importance"?
4. Should morality trump aesthetics in regard to works degrading to women (the literary works of the Marquis de Sade) or glorifying Hitler (The Triumph of the Will) or the Ku Klux Klan (The Birth of a Nation).
5. If Marcuse is right and artistic value comes from being "negative, offensive, a reproach to decent people" then "do we not destroy arts positive function by tolerating it?"

Chapter 7:  Philosophy of Art Key Concepts aesthetic appearance/reality catharsis censorship co-option form immanent/transcendent intrinsic/instrumental kitsch obscenity repression sublimation   LH's Mostly Modern Philosophical Glossary

 

Above: Plato’s Attack on the Poets | Aristotle’s Defense of the Poets | Marcuse on Art & Negation | Danto & Artistic Identification | Pornography & Censorship | Key Concepts

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