Once one fully sees the nature of improvisatory intelligence that is simultaneously musical and ethical, then, Hagberg argues, it seems obvious that utilitarian and deontological theories of right action at a moment are desperately over-simplified, inattentive to what responsiveness, respect, the avoidance of cliché, and the projection of a future out of a remembered past really involve. … The idea that one improvises intelligently in the moment, drawing on a background of both training and talk, so that one is able after the fact to give a learned, retrospective justification of what one did by specifying a process of reasoning that one didn’t just then, in the moment, explicitly go through, further undoes the Cartesian picture of an action as consisting of a bodily movement plus an (explicit, inner, guiding) intention. That picture, like the utilitarian and deontological accounts of right action, both oversimplifies and misdescribes our (sometimes intelligent) being in the world and with others.
I doubt that the above (which is about jazz musicians, but I take to be about artists in general) is sufficient to disconnect us from “the Cartesian picture”, but for the moment I’ll suspend my disbelief because I would very much like to think that it does.
That quote and all that follow are from an excellent review of a book of collected essays, Art and Ethical Criticism, Garry M. Hagberg editor reviewed by Richard Eldridge in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here are some further, rather disjointed extracts that I like:
… Noël Carroll’s essay, substantially the richest in Part II, addresses exactly these questions. Narratives, fictional and otherwise, Carroll argues (following Aristotle), are marked by their possession of selected detail. They thus combine particularity and generality, as details are selected for their significance, especially their significance in displaying attitudes and the affective coloration of an experience of a situation. The selection of details as attitudinally and affectively colored matters because of the natures of virtues and vices. Virtues and vices are i) temporally extended dispositions to act or respond, ii) that have ‘insides’ or affective dimensions, and iii) that are displayed differently in different circumstances (45). A narrative is then able to show the interplay of outside (what is done in a context) and inside (attitude and feeling) over time (46). By following a narrative, we may then achieve fuller orientation in the development of our own dispositions (virtuous, one hopes) that are suffused with feeling. We may see how, in this new setting, to go on more coherently in the expression of our attitudes and commitments. “The notion of a meaningful life,” in which the sustained, coherent exercise of virtue is achieved, “is parasitic on the notion of a meaningful narrative” (57), for the relevant coherence just is essentially narratival. One might perhaps wish for a fuller, more historical account of exactly why we moderns are especially prone to forget the powers of narrative to present the universal (shared possibilities of life) in the particular, in favor of the presentations of more immediately sortal, measurement-related universals (mass, velocity, etc.) that are a central business of the natural sciences. This forgetting must have something to do both with the rise of modern science and with the development in modernity of (increasing awareness of) cultural diversity, so that we have, if anything, too many narratives on hand rather than too few, so that general revelatory power may be harder to discern. Given, however, Carroll’s masterful constructive analysis of the powers of narrative, it would be churlish to complain much.
… Paisley Livingston reads Virginia Woolf’s 1920 short story “Solid Objects” as a reduction of Clive Bell’s formalism, showing that it is an absurd characterization of aesthetic experience as a self-sufficient pleasure in pure form. “Rapture does not suffice” (138); there are “cognitive, . . . content, . . . and axiological conditions” (139) for the proper experience of art. Catherine Wilson balances the thoughts, drawn from Bernard Williams, that risk is unavoidable in life and that no value obviously has categorical force in all circumstances of personal life against the thought that we moderns tend to accept some form of (political?) equality as an absolute value. The task is then to develop so far as possible institutions of equal political citizenship without self-piety and the refusal to recognize contingency and complexity. J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace usefully tracks the complexities and difficulties of this task.
… Davies turns to the photographs of Diane Arbus, framed by Susan Sontag’s criticism of them, in order to illuminate the interest of photographic art. Sontag notoriously charged that Arbus’s images exploit their subjects and function pornographically to titillate their viewers and to desensitize them to the grotesqueries of their subjects’ appearances. How, Davies wonders, could a photograph even be charged with doing such things? — Only if, contrary to Roger Scruton’s reading of photographs as necessarily inartistic, merely causally engendered ‘direct’ transcriptions of their subjects, these images do embody thoughts about and attitudes toward their subjects. Since, however, the visually grotesque subjects are presented with striking directness as “confident and accepting of their lives” (225), and so presented, moreover, with their consent, the images are specifically not demeaning or horrible. In representing their subjects both as subjects and as subjects of thought, they are not pornographic, but rather successfully artistic. Here too, as with Landy and Green, one would like to hear more about how and why such artistic success matters ethically. It is clear that there is an achievement of art about which ethical questions have been raised (by Sontag) and settled (by Davies), but then how and why does this work really matter to viewers who do understand what is going on?
Even with all those quotes, I would have liked to include more. I found this to be a wonderfully provocative review. Highly recommended. [ link ]
-Julie
