By Jon Cogburn
In his wonderful textbook, Philosophies of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and canonical book on the aesthetics of horror, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart, one finds Noël Carroll over and over again making an argument that goes like this.
- Preliminary – Present in the most charitable possible manner a putative theory of X as Y, for example art as (alternatively) expression, representation, form, or that which gives rise to aesthetic experience.
- First step – Show that to the extent the theory on offer provides sufficient conditions for X, it fails to provide necessary conditions for X. That is, describe some xs that are clearly not instances of Y.
- Second step – Argue that at best theories of X as Y articulate good-making features of Xs, but that such theories are not theories of X because what we want are classificatory theories that give necessary and sufficient conditions, not commendatory theories that articulate good-making features.
Two paragraphs of his discussion of H.P. Lovecraft's theory of horror compress the two-step (albeit in reversed order) in a particularly elegant fashion:
Earlier it was noted that Lovecraft not only locates what is positively compelling in the genre in virtue of provoking cosmic fear; he also takes cosmic fear to be definitory of the genre of supernatural horror. In other words, he both classifies and commends works of horror by means of the same standard. Thus any candidate for the class of supernatural horor will not be included in that class if it fails to perform the commendable service of engendering cosmic fear.
But surely there are many horror stories that fall short of raising cosmic fear – a felling that is bound up with a world view and that borders on a religious experience. Indeed, many horror stories seem oblivious to the grand (philosophical?) project of engendering cosmic awe. Perusing my bookshelf, I come upon Crabs on the Rampage by Guy N. Smith (author of The Origin of the Crabs, Crabs' Moon and so on). It is, I submit, undeniably an example of horror, but it neither evokes cosmic fear nor awe. The crabs themselves provoke what we call art-horror, but art-horror need not be the emotional confirmation of one world view (one that is coeval with relgion) nor the denial of another (that of materialistic sophistication) (Carroll 1990, 164)
In the same chapter Carroll makes this kind of argument also against Freudian and Marxist theories of horror.
This would all makes sense if philosophy had any success at offering necessary and sufficient conditions. But, as Graham Harman notes, perhaps Plato presents Socrates as never being able to "give an account" for a reason. In the aesthetics textbook, Carroll's own historic theory of art in a certain sense just changes the subject, as it doesn't provide informative conditions that could be at all epistemically helpful in determining of novel objects whether they are art. Forfeiting the main virtue of the definitions game is not a way to win at playing it. And one can apply the Carroll two-step to Carroll's own theories in the horror book (I'll do this in another post; THIS EARLIER POST on the role disgust plays in gustatory delicacies contains an argument against part of one of Carroll's theories).
One response would be to respond to Carroll that in light of the failure of analysis the best we can come up with are commendatory theories. This is an attractive view, because it retrospectively makes sense of what analysis is good for. Presenting and debating commendatory theories as if they were classificatory gives us insight into the properties that ground our use of important terms like "art," even if we can't define those terms. The insight primarily concerns how the objects in consideration succeed or fail at instantiating the predicate. In the art textbook, Carroll comes close to hitting on this in his discussion of "Wittgensteinian" theories of art of the sort we associate with Morris Weitz.
I think something stronger can be said though. Let's say that a condition Y is genetically necessary for an X practice if, and only if, instances of X that do not instantiate Y would not be instances of X if no X's were Y. The intuition I'm trying to articulate here is that non-Y X's are in a sense parasitic on X's that are Y. Consider non-representational painting. Assume that Danto's ingenious interpretations of them in terms of representational content fails. It is still the case that they only make sense as paintings if we group them together in a category that includes canonical representational paintings. One could, and should, make similar claims about our best theories of form, expression, and aesthetic experience (and Carroll's book is brilliant at articulating these).
Art is a particularly good example of this. As I argued in THIS POST, modernism can be fruitfully typified by artistic awareness of criticism. This leads to canonical responses where artists self consciously either flout the conditions upheld by the critique or passive aggressively follow them, albeit in ways unintended by the critic. It is no accident that the best counterexamples in Carroll's books are either hyper-modernist (there is no difference between postmodernism and modernism on my account) or bad art. On the latter, bad art couldn't exist (at least qua art) without good art, because it is an attempt to instantiate good art. On the former, the manner in which canonical modern works themselves engage with and in criticis always to some extent makes them a commentary on previous works. If none of the previous works had the goodmaking features articulated by the theories that Carroll criticizes, the practice also couldn't exist.
I would be very interested if understanding classical analysis as specifying genetically necessary conditions makes sense of S knows that P type epistemology. As a good (as opposed to bad) Heideggerian I think that propositional knowledge is parasitic on non-linguistic behavioral sensitivity to modal (alethic and deontic) reality. This is analogous with what's going on in modern art with respect to form, expression, representation, and experience. But most epistemology concerns propositional knowledge itself, so the proper analogue might be with respect to theories of modernism. But most such theories are not going to see modern art as intrinsically parasitical in the way I do. So I'm not sure this would help. Still, it would be interesting if one could argue that various inconsistent epistemological theories are providing genetically necessary conditions for knowledge, which itself is unanalyzable in the sense suggested by Plato at the beginning of Western Philosophy.
Hi Jon,
Apologies for my long-windedness. I have a few thoughts for you:
First, I have to confess that I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do with “genetic necessity”. I’m probably missing something (I’m running on fumes at this point), but it seems to capture a pretty trivial feature of contrary types: the existence of the one is only really meaningful in contrast to the possibility of the other. Similarly, we might say that the notion of ontological failure in an artistic context (generating failed-artworks, Xs that are the non-art results of art-attempts) presupposes some kind of success-condition for art-attempts, just as the possibility of successful art-making seems to require the possibility of failure. That seems true and fairly informative for art-attempts, but I’m less certain about the generalization to things like art-kinds.
I also have to confess, however, that I’m not sure the second half of your biconditional holds. Suppose X is an artmaking practice and Y is expressiveness. So expressiveness is genetically necessary for an artmaking-practice iff instances of an artmaking practice that don’t instantiate expressiveness would not be instances of an art practice if no art practices were expressive. It seems plausible to me that, in a world without expressive art practices (whether that means emotionally- or psychologically-expressive), there might still be artworks (i.e., objects which result from art-attempts). In worlds where expressiveness is a necessary condition on art-making that won’t be true, of course, but there the biconditional is question-begging. Plus, I think we want to allow for the development of new artistic practices, even in the absence of other artistic practices. So, anyway, it’s not really clear to me that *anything* is ever going to be genetically necessary, except perhaps for really basic properties like intention-dependence (i.e. artworks are the result actions, which take an intention as a central component).
Another, smaller quibble. You write: “On the latter, bad art couldn’t exist (at least qua art) without good art, because it is an attempt to instantiate good art.” But that can’t be right (if it is, it’s manifestly false), since bad art need not be an attempt to instantiate *good* art; all it needs to be is an attempt to instantiate art (broadly construed). Proof by intuition: I want to make an artwork for a charity auction. I am under no illusion about my technical skills (or lack thereof), I merely care that the finished product be an auctionable artwork. I might try to make a good artwork, but then again I might not. What matters is that there’s an art-attempt, not the particular character of that art-attempt. Or, indeed, the product of my attempt might be art in virtue of an attempt on my part to realize other properties which happen to suffice for art-status, but which don’t suffice to make it a *good* artwork (e.g. it might be a work in a low-status artistic tradition). In that last case, I wouldn’t even need a concept of art to make art, let alone any notion of what constitutes “good” art.
Wow, thanks! These are fantastic comments.
I’ll do a response a stand-alone post either tomorrow or the next day.