Abstract
I hate the fact that I have to call for phenomenological description when I turn to philosophical topics. I am the principle object of my anger since I have insufficient skill at philosophical argument, but some capacity to describe states of mind. Yet there seems to me an intellectual justification for thinking such description may play a useful role in philosophy at a time when the major figures in the philosophy of mind are embarked on reductionist programs. So I hope here to deploy the one undeniable power of description—the power to embarrass by soliciting agreement about complex features of situations that emerge when we indulge in patient acts of attention.
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Notes
- 1.
By this reasoning we almost have to begin with a rough catalogue of prevailing justifications for the values possible within specific reading practices. I think there are two basic models. One is primarily descriptive. We could invoke much of the discourse that has gone under the names of poetics and narrative theory, since these discourses try to produce self-consciousness about the instruments one deploys in constructing assertions about particular texts. Description also proves central to establishing the provenance of new perspectives on criticism—what traits warrant invoking queer theory or how can one relate to one another the subcategories that come into play when one talks about globalization. The second kind of theory is primarily speculative: its task is to develop frameworks for talking about conditions of agency visible in and projectable for what writers make and what audiences perform in conjunction with those makings. Here again two major models emerge, closely entwined with all too easily parodied figures of the “realistic” reader bound to critique—in the service of myths of the labors necessary for freedom in an interpellated world—and the celebrator of Romantic genius who raises self-consciousness to the level of theology.
I think it fair to say that despite powerful criticisms of models of suspicious reading, the character traits cultivated by ideals of Critique dominate contemporary theory because it is so insistently resistant to any kind of ideal of the unified self or triumphant moments of dialectical solution. These stances stress the critical forms of thinking that ideally expose illusions about social practices and pursue democratic interests in disestablishing problematic modes of authority by accurately displaying actual costs and benefits of certain ways of treating practices of reading. But if we look at the models of agency such positions idealize, it may be possible to define basic weaknesses in those perspectives that justify alternative paths of speculation. This is one reason why I want to put conditions of agency at the center of our theorizing about theory. A second reason is that I do not know any contemporary work in theory considering classical texts about the arts as providing powerful idealizations of agency worth recuperating in an academic literary culture. We are increasingly interested now in characterizing our responsiveness to the arts in empiricist terms that consider these idealizations fantasies oriented toward maintaining cultural capital. So by focusing entirely on agency conditions made possible by responsiveness to works of art I hope to revive those discourses—not primarily as argument but as projections of imaginative orientations that we can now test by how they might afford phenomenological accounts of who we become as self-conscious participants in providing audiences for these works.
- 2.
Here I hope I am working in the spirit of Terence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Nature (New York: Norton, 2012). I think Deacon coined the term “ententionality” in order to include features of mind stressed by phenomenology and so to reconfigure what materialism might involve.
- 3.
Participation provides a mode of activity quite distinct from the understanding. The understanding positions the subject as someone who can accomplish something in the actual world. Participation positions the subject to experience who one becomes as one comes to feel identifications with the power of the making to produce inner states.
- 4.
The passages are taken from Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 5.
I have to relegate to a footnote the specifics of Kant’s moving art from the domain of pleasure to the domain of the aesthetical idea, where he can make good on his claims about the epistemic force of what cannot be gathered by the understanding. He first gets the domain of content into his vision of aesthetic purposiveness by treating genius as both a mode of making and an activity seeking to complement the understanding, so its difference from the understanding is built in from the start:
[In cognition] the imagination is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the limitation of being adequate to the concept; in an aesthetic response, however, the imagination is free to provide, beyond that concord with the concept, unsought extensive undeveloped material for the understanding, … (CJ 194)
The art object demands distinctive powers of judgment that not only supplement the understanding but establish conditions where understanding has to yield to more sublime modes of attention. Genius ultimately becomes a mode of expression inhabiting worlds rather than describing them:
The mental powers, then, whose union (in a certain relation) constitutes genius, are imagination and understanding. … Thus genius really consists in the happy relation … of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, though which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. The latter talent is really that which is called spirit, for … [expressing} what is unnameable in the mental state in the case of a certain representation and to make it universally communicable. (CJ 194–5)
“Genius is the exemplary originality of the natural endowment of a subject for the free use of his cognitive faculties” (CJ 195) because it invents what turns out to stand on its own as a purposive particular that takes on the status of an aesthetic idea. This idea is something anchored in subjective experience that nonetheless has inexponible objective engagement with the cognitive order. The free work of genius demonstrates something close to self-interpreting cognitive status.
Then Kant returns to the status of pleasure in order to stage an antinomy that only dialectic can resolve. And because dialectic sets reason against understanding, it has immense ontological consequences. The aesthetic is raised from a mode of experience to a mode of engaging ideas. And because the work retains the particularity making it “inexponible” the idea has distinctive powers, precisely because it does not submit to the cognitive or the moral mode of discourse. The antinomy serves as a fundamental display of the limitations of the understanding. Aesthetic theory has to argue both that “the judgment of taste is subjective and not based on concepts” (CJ 215) and that the judgment of taste is based upon concepts because we manage to argue about it. The only way out is to take the antinomy itself as requiring a dialectical movement into an apparently paradoxical argument that the judgment of taste is based on a concept but nothing can be cognized because the concept is not involved in the activities of the practical understanding. We must invoke an indeterminate concept that can only be located in terms of this supersensible substratum of appearances:
The subjective principle, namely the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us, can only be indicated as the sole key to demystifying this faculty which is hidden in us even in its sources. … Thus one sees that the removal of the antinomy of the aesthetic power of judgment takes a course similar to that followed by the Critique in the resolution of the antinomies of pure practical reason. (CJ 217)
The theorist is compelled against her will “to look beyond the sensible and to seek the unifying point of all our faculties a priori in the supersensible” (CJ 217). Having reason take responsibility for what it cannot cognize is the only way to make reason “self-consistent.”
Calling on Reason here seems a bit of overkill for dealing with intuition, but that move allows Kant to secure the status of “idea” for the work of art. Operating in terms of ideas allows entry into a transcendental dimension called for by our interest in what remains uncognizable. Treating the aesthetic as involving ideas makes it possible to see works of art as bringing to the surface deep features of subjective life that in fact can be shared because of how experiences coexist in a supersensible dimension. Art intuits the supersensible because it appeals to free subjectivity in relation to materials that have objective existence in their ways of resisting the satisfactions of a cognitive domain. If one is made uneasy by this language of the supersensible, it may be possible to replace Kant’s model of hidden depths for a model of adjacency based loosely on Wittgenstein: the supersensible can be thought of in terms of what can only be seen but not characterized, except as adjacent to what is amenable to causal explanation. This supersensible affords a distinctive social space where agreement is possible despite the lack of determinate truth. For Kant argues that if we probe the subjective principle we find aesthetic experience fundamental to appreciating what social being can be for humans, precisely because we can seek language for the substance of indeterminate concepts so long as we do not demand determinate proof (CJ 217).
- 6.
I think the best social vision deriving from Kant is Max Schelers’s distinction between subjective pleasure as entering us into a zero-sum game and the activity of approval as making possible the kind of pleasure in a symphony that is enhanced by the obvious pleasures taken by other members of the audience. See Scheler,
- 7.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Translated by T. M. Knox, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): 30.
- 8.
Should I lapse into Hegelian language I want to mean by “spirit” only this: the felt challenge of having to respond to the placing of oneself before oneself. Hegel’s most concise generalization about the spiritual in the sensuous is probably this one: “Spirit does not stop at the mere apprehension of the external world by sight and hearing; it makes it into an object for its inner being which then is itself driven, once again in the form of sensuousness, to realize itself in things, and relates itself to them as desire” (LA 36). (see also 35, 38)
- 9.
Chalmers is intensely Cartesian. He is one of the few thinkers who insist that consciousness not be erased into the analysis of causal functions called for by those who trust only the language and the principles of physical explanation. His version of consciousness performs by directly intending a world and asserting its own presence. One is immediately aware that one is conscious so there is no derivation of that fact from any kind of causal change. But there is also very little more that can be said about consciousness in such an isolated position. Chalmers sets off what is radically different about Husserl (and probably Wittgenstein): we risk peril when we separate consciousness from its involvements in forging an orientation within the world of praxis. Not consciousness alone but consciousness as an aspect of some kind of intentional process or disposition for entering some domain of experience. This is clearest when we talk about Intentionality in art—in the making and in the responding—because we can then focus on a relation of display between the senses and processes of reflection that can establish significant affinities between the maker’s offering the work as serious art and the audience’s possible satisfaction with how they experience it.
- 10.
For Chalmers there are three kinds of judgment in terms of their content. All three kinds are “not strictly about consciousness” but “are parallel to consciousness and generally about objects and properties in the environment” (175). First order judgments involve the content of the experience stated as a cognitive claim: “I am sensing something red.” Second order judgments also involve cognitive claims, but about the agent experiencing the sensation as a kind of consciousness experience, like a particularly intense shade of red. Finally, third order judgments “are judgments about conscious experience as a type. …We make third-order judgments when we reflect on the fact that we have consciousness experience in the first place, and when we reflect on their nature” (176).
- 11.
Because I think this poem offers so striking an example of “inner sensuousness” without an ontology claiming an inner life, I modify my essay, “How John Ashbery Modified Stevens’ Uses of As,” in Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, eds, Poetry and Poetics After Wallace Stevens. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016: 183- 2000.
- 12.
Commentators rarely notice that “seeing as” for Wittgenstein activates the force of “Now” as a psychologically active state. “Now I am seeing it as a rabbit” makes the attribution “now” a vital force in time enabling “as” to change what the mind then takes as occupying the space of perception.
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Altieri, C.F. (2019). Aesthetic Agency: Why Art Might Matter to Philosophy. In: Wuppuluri, S., Wu, D. (eds) On Art and Science. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27577-8_4
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