Sportive Thoughts

I suspect the online philosophy community has much more elaborate things to say on this topic, but I think it important for me to address the issue (if you can even call it that) on my blog so as to clear up a point I have tried to make at various times. Recently, I argued

[T]he "good" in and of art [...] is precisely what we are looking for when we seek an aesthetic experience in the first place; it is what works to fulfill our need for meaning, and to acknowledge us as seers of the world.

I think many will find that conclusion impotent if I do not also make clear my understanding of reasons as opposed to conditions for both knowledge and action.

Let me echo my clarification off yet another quote from Stanley Cavell, this time from "The Thought of Movies" in Themes Out of School:

How could we show that [the "Golden Era" of Hollywood film making] is equally, or anyway, sufficiently, worth studying? Now we are at the heart of aesthetic matter. Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discovered in your own experience, in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence the willingness to challence your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounter with specific works.

Cavell in this lecture deliberately avoids giving reasons (as I shall shortly define them) for the academic study of films. He merely says that (for him and presumably for a good portion of his audience) the interest in film was there, prior to academic life, and the inclusion of a disputable canon within highly specialized and advanced academic study (like philosophy or English literature) constitutes an idiosyncratic decision by the scholar. It is not the case (as with formalized logic or linguistics) that discussing film helps solve complex problems. Discussing film and literature helps illustrate certain ethical (eg. Cavell's Cities of Words), moral (eg. Candice Vogler's "The Moral of the Story"), or even epistemological (eg. Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory) issues and topics; but in no way do discussions about fiction sovle related problems. When we study and discuss fiction as it pertains to real life issues, we use reason for our problem-solving; the solutions are not illustrated for us even if the illustrations make it easier for us to arrive at a conclusion.

I will thus define reason as the deduction and/or induction of knowledge A, and practical reasoning as the deduction from knowledge A the grounds for acting out X. (I know many of you will be unsatisfied with my definitions here; please feel free to comment. So that you know, my views on this topic are tempered by reading Kant, AJ Ayers, JL Austin, Wittgenstien and Cavell.) We reason by examining the rational continuity of our knowledge, the commensurability of knowledge to experience, and by the expectation that acting out X will fulfill a goal pertaining to our reception of knowledge A.

Hence, what reason does is enable us to understand the world and act within it. Reason does this according to certain patterns that philosophy seeks to identify, evaluate, and promote if/when helpful, such that our overall lives will flourish insofar as we are able. It is this caveat ("insofar as we are able") that suggests reason is not alone among our conscious activities, and this is where conditions enter in the discussion.

Among so-called "Continental" philosophers, the conditions for living a certain kind of life--be it the serene rationalism briefly pictured in the above paragraph or be it a kind of happy-go-lucky existence that lacks rational reflection but somehow always turns out pleasant--are the primary concern when deciding what's of scholastic importance. Someone like Marx or Foucault would argue that the condtions for living govern how Sally goes about her daily life, and especially governs whether Sally is capable of being satisfied with her daily existence, regardless of how often or how well she may exercise reason. Marx argued (much more expansively) that these conditions are primarily economic, i.e. a matter of the material interactions between individuals on the one hand and societal classes of individuals on the other. Foucault argued that these conditions are a matter of how society is structured with regard to the very definition of human being. That is to say, how you conceive and discuss the finer aspects of human life (from health to sickness, from sex to friendship) has an effect on what you do with your life.

So it would seem the definition of condition is the sum of experiences and reflections of Sally that make her more likely to act out X over other possibilities. Notably, for Sally to be conditioned to act out X she does not need to exercise reason; readers of 19th century fiction can easily list a half-dozen examples where Sally's reason may be thwarted by her condition. For me, this means that the human being is not predicated upon reason, it is instead a condition of this life of Sally's, or the lives of this society. One might object to this on more than one ground, not the least of which is the possibility that I may be read as advocating hedonistic, Epicurean, dogmatic, or ascetic pursuit of a better human condition, sometimes at the expense of reason. But I'm arguing for no such position(s); rather I mean to point out that human life is not complete on the grounds of reason alone, and sometimes those non- or extra-rational conditions outplay reason for the cause of human behavior.

Now return to what I wrote in Acknowledging Aesthetics. The conclusion looks vapid without even this simple contrast between reason and conditions. But I hope that highlighting this contrast will help show what I was trying to get at in that article, and how I think aesthetic theory in general delivers important theses on the conduct and value of human beings. Art is commentary on the human condition. Sometimes that means illustrating the content of religious salvation; sometimes it is the banalities, joys, frustrations of contemporary life (depending on when and where the artist lived). Sometimes, as will Modernism, commentary means a focus on the art itself, hopefully with recourse to what technological advancement concurrently means for humanity (Both Da Vinci and Jeff Koons can do this). So you see how wily the definition of "good art" can become when the lives it comments on can vary so widely.

But the take home message is this: when we show that a subject is "worth studying" or that a piece of art, book, or film is "good", we in fact show two things. On the one hand, we show that we have lived in such a way that that these things have been incorperated into our wider sense of being, such that to care for them is also to care for ourselves. This is Cavell's point, and he also makes it with regard to other people. On the other hand--if we are to have others care for the same subjects or works that we care about, and/or if we are to have others care for us--we must exercise our responsiveness to others, make them in a sense "ours" while acknowleding their own being and tastes. That is precisely not achieved by reason; one can not argue for friendship or for recognition. Value is shown by extra-rational means.