Rob van Gerwen Ethical Autonomism. The work of art as a Moral Agent 1. Moral Evaluation of Art Within our culture, art is considered to be a practice both important and autonomous. Within the limits of art or in its name we endorse events and actions which would be subject to judicial constraint in everyday life. Some artists, however, go a long way in what seems to be the wrong direction. We might mention: Stockhausen s and Hirst s remarks about the attack on the World Trade Centre; or the Austrian Aktions-artist, Wolfgang Flatz, who dropped a bull filled with fireworks from a helicopter; or automutilating performance artists; or Orlan who with no apparent physiological or psychological cause had her appearance rebuilt through plastic surgery, to reflect facial traits of famous women from art history, such as Boticelli s Venus, and Leonardo s Mona Lisa; or, Günther von Hagens, a German professor in anatomy who applied artistic procedures to real life human corpses, even though the educational benefit of that seems doubtful. 1 One can think, also, of the recent boost in pornography in all layers of art: think of the large pictures of Jeff Koons doing it with Cicciolina, rap singers posing as pimps, or French taboo-breaking sex-novels. 2 Should we be open-minded about these experiments and acknowledge that art s outward borders are fading? Or is art, much like the child gone too far, patiently awaiting the moment of parental reprimand that shall allow the child to finally lay off that responsibility which has outgrown his powers? The motivation to morally evaluate works of art seems to follow no more than three routes. First, one may find out that in the creating of a work immoral activities were involved. For example, Bernardo Bertolucci supposedly had Maria Schneider raped in front of the camera in order to make it look more real (in Last Tango in Paris, 1973). Secondly, one may assume that certain works cause immoral conduct, either directly e.g. a film showing sexual activities involving children is nowadays condemned on the assumption that it will be used by criminal paedophile networks to sustain their criminal activities; or indirectly, if certain works are held to sustain certain fantasies, which may eventually lead people to immoral conduct. Motivations for moral condemnation such as these are heteronomous, and, in contrast with their denouncing a work because of actions preceding or following upon it, one may, lastly, morally denounce a work because of what it is: such moral evaluations take place within the boundaries of artistic practice. These judgments are my subject matter.
2/13 2. A Recent Debate s Assumptions In a recent debate in The British Journal of Aesthetics more than ten positions are put forward with regard to art-internal moral evaluation. 3 This is a confused debate though. The confusion seems due to an old dualism in aesthetics: defenders of autonomism are supposed to deny the sheer possibility of moral evaluation, whereas one who defends moral evaluation presumably denies art s autonomy. Moralists point to the moral nature of a work s represented contents, whereas autonomists refer to a work s artisticity. No middle way seems to be available. The idea that art s autonomy and its moral evaluation are mutually exclusive may point us back to the shared premise that moral evaluation is about propositions (those that are incorporated in or supported or expressed by the work of art, or are caused in the work s beholder). 4 The temptation to yield to this premise may be due to the demand of universalizability inherent in the moral stance. Yet it is individual acts (or works) that are morality s subject matter albeit in the light of their relevant resemblances to other acts, which can be expressed in propositions. Concentrating on a representation s contents leads to a disregard of many aspects of works, thus adding to the uneasy rapport between aesthetic and moral values. My taking agency itself as the exemplary object of moral judgement motivates my effort to treat works of art as moral agents and their effects as the effects of an agency. I hope that this provides an escape route for the aesthetic dualism between autonomism and moralism. Both positions also seem to share a single enemy in radical moralism. Radical moralism is the shortsighted view that a work of art which shows morally objectionable actions is itself morally objectionable. This view assumes that an event s moral qualities transfer to its representation. Of course we may immediately want to ask why the radical moralist does not object to articles in the papers reporting murders and rapes? He may answer that with journalistic reports the moral qualities of the events seem not to transfer to their representation. Maybe this is so, because here the primary question is, whether or not a text speaks truthfully. Maybe, art can be evaluated moralistically because in it the issue of truth is suspended. 5 The argument can therefore be seen to become: Who, in his sane mind, would want to represent immoral deeds without any epistemological necessity? This must be immoral of itself. What is being overlooked by radical moralism, as the modest moralist, Noël Carroll, puts it, is that it is a major task of works of art to allow their audiences to enter an absorbing experience. 6 Works mobilize the spectator s empathetic imagination: they presuppose a contribution from their beholders. 7 Radical moralism neglects art s performative nature. As reports in the papers aim to tell the truth, so works of art too can be seen to do something. All positions in the named debate seem vehement on
3/13 denying the viability of radical moralism. However, it is evident from the names chosen by the moralists among the participants which vary from modest to more modest moralism that they assume that what does radical moralism in is its radicality. 8 Yet, what seems wrong with radical moralism is its thesis of the flawless transfer of moral qualities of events to their representation. This thesis mistakenly positions the moment of judging prior to the work being experienced. Since, however, any defect, even a merely alleged one, can cause a beholder s refusal to carry out, and be committed to, an empathetic appraisal of a work, what needs to be shown is why an overruling of artistic considerations by moral ones is relevant to art-internal considerations. I am not denying the availability and legitimacy of overruling considerations whatever their nature, but their art-internal pertinence. Refusing to take a work in, is like bombing a museum: it bashes all the objects in it, irrespective of their aesthetic nature. 3. The Nature of Moral Judgments of Art Berys Gaut, much like Carroll, gives some weight to moral considerations of art. 9 His ethicism holds that moral defects of works of art are pro tanto also aesthetic defects. Gaut does not think that some moral flaw can overrule all aesthetic merits, as the moralist submits. According to Gaut, an art critical judgement contains aesthetic considerations together with moral ones, and both together sustain the final critical verdict. The moral considerations concern the attitudes that a work incorporates, or causes in its beholder, or presupposes in its maker. If there is a moral flaw in these attitudes, then this can legitimately be subtracted from the overall merit of the work. 10 This criterion is elaborated in Gaut s merited response argument, which says that the relevant attitudes must be merited. This is an interesting demand because, as said, not just any attitude will be relevant for the assessment of a work of art, but only those that are somehow appropriate to the work. This, however, is not what Gaut means. He is not so much interested in whether or not someone s pleasure in a presentation of sadistic cruelty is merited by the relevant novel, i.e. whether the novel is so good as to merit our pleasure, and the pleasure can be said to fit the novel. Gaut (on p. 194) calls such merits merely aesthetic. In its stead, Gaut judges morally the pleasure itself, and this particular pleasure, he says, can never be merited. I have two quarrels with that claim. When someone values positively the film Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1990), does this mean that he applauds antisocial and addictive killing? If one were to judge the film because one applauds killing, then one would be judging on irrelevant grounds perhaps to frighten off one s friends. 11 In such a case the verdict is not merited (in the sense of: not induced) by the work. The history of aesthetic theory is
4/13 replete with warnings against such interested judging. 12 If after (or by) seeing the film someone were induced to actually kill and rape, surely this would say more about his personality than about the (moral) value of the film? 13 One might also object to the psychological naivety of the ethics in Gaut s merited response argument. When someone enjoys a violent scene in a film that is morally to be condemned, a rape for instance, this means that he apparently has desires that are morally to be condemned, but, on my, broadly Kantian, view this does not yet mean that he fails morally assuming that we take moral failure to concern one s actions let alone, and this seems crucial, that the work which makes him conscious of the psychological frictions in his experience of reality is to be condemned because of it. Fantasies are better controlled once we are conscious of them, than by rejecting whatever brings them to the fore. Art allows us to entertain fantasies in reflection, even when we would rather not recognize them as ours. While thus entertaining our fantasies, we are not supposed to activate their complex psychological causality and to act upon them. If one neglects that psychological reality, one denies art s biggest potential: art can induce its audience to experience something without having to act accordingly. 4. The Work of Art as a Moral Agent With this, I return to the thought that moral judgments primarily concern actions. If we are to morally judge works of art, perhaps we must understand them as instances of moral agency. For that, we must, first, view them as a realization of intentions of a moral mind, or minds. Secondly, we must conceive of that realization as psychologically real, i.e. as unaccountable without reference to a psychology. 14 (We are not principally interested in the strictly causal effects of works of art, nor merely in the intentions.) Lastly, we must conceive of works as doing something to their audiences (which can then be judged morally). Treating works of art as realizing intentions is part and parcel of our approach to works. Even if we get the feeling that certain aspects of certain works were introduced randomly, or via some mathematical algorithm, we would still resort to the idea that a human mind decided to leave these aspects where they are found, or to have the algorithm produce this work. We will also standardly view a work s intentional structure as the product of a human mind, with a psychology relating the manipulation of the material in one particular work to other works the relevant person produced, or to works of other artists, either contemporary or from the past. 15 The last desideratum, of conceiving works of art as doing something to their audiences (an agency then to be judged morally) is met by acknowledging that works guide their ever beholders into thinking and feeling specific things either along with the work, or in response to it.
5/13 If we are allowed to view the work of art as a moral agent, what, then, shall we take that agency to consist in? The answer to this question comes in two parts: one general, the other particular. 16 Generally, a work of art mobilizes its beholder s mind by activating his body. The agency of particular works is already determined a priori by the phenomenological restrictions on the beholder s perceptual apparatus and bodily movements that come with the art form the work instantiates. Paintings activate their beholder s bodies in ways different from music performances or film projections. We confront a painting in the room where it is exhibited at a particular distance; a jazz performance in The Village Vanguard we can enjoy while walking around in the room: the music surrounds us. What we see (of the musician) does not literally belong to the music although it may inform us of what does. Film, lastly, is enjoyed in a (normally) large, dark room, where one is seated in a fixed place. The particular aspect of a work s agency lies both in its contents and the ways in which this is made lively and plausible a work s style. It makes a difference, for example, whether in a film a fight between two men is shown in a parsimonious way that enables one to recognize the impact, both physically and morally, of being hit in the face, or more explicitly by way of a number of kicks and slapping making it look easy to deliver such blows and unhurtful to receive them, etc. The difference lies not merely in the events shown, but, rather, in the way they are shown. If we are to understand how the style of a work links up with the phenomenology of the relevant art form, we must address the autonomy of artistic practice. 5. Autonomy and the Artistic Attitude I submit that art s autonomy must be understood as applying to the practice as a whole. In Western societies we think it an intrinsic value that there be such a practice where people can entertain thoughts and feelings with regard to issues deemed important, without immediately being affected by these thoughts and feelings in more usual agentrelated ways. All works of art, qua art, partake in this autonomy. What turns the moral evaluation of art into such a confusing issue is that works that confront their audiences with escapes from moral taboos but they do this against the very background of this practice s moral autonomy. 17 It may appear an undue abstraction to state the autonomy of the artistic practice as a whole, and to attribute it to individual works of art only insofar as they are art, instead of contingently, in regard of their particular contents or meaning. The way to grasp this is by way of the notion of the artistic attitude. I give an imaginary example. Imagine this situation: I am on my way from Utrecht to Amsterdam to visit the Stedelijk Museum for an exhibit of installations, when a terrible accident takes place, which fully
6/13 blocks the road. I get stuck and leave my car to see the wrecked driver, clamped between his seat and the deformed steering wheel: moaning, and bleeding heavily. I realize immediately that I will never get to Amsterdam in time to visit the exhibition, and decide to take the situation I am confronted with as the installation I am not going to see. I enter an artistic situation where some sort of accident has taken place and the audience is asked to empathize aesthetically. I let myself in with the work, and get really involved, absorbed (Carroll s term) in it. Intensely, I watch the face of the main persona, the victim, wincing with pain; his expressive gesturing. I notice the newspaper lying across the wheel, and the cover story about huge fires in Indonesian forests the paper all crumpled, dirty and bloody. The victim s blood gushes from his left shoulder. Its gulfing pulse, the syrupy substance and its deep colours fascinate me. I appreciate how the victim s blood mingles with the photograph of the wounded face of one of the Indonesian fire s victims. Both tragedies, of the accident and of the fire, mix into one. The man in front of me brings the loneliness of the fire s victim to life: a singular morally profound representation. A deep sympathy overtakes me. More and more I identify with the suffering of humanity. This installation works, it has great artistic merits. The reader probably agrees that my attitude in this story is unfit, morally wrong. But why is it? It can hardly be the problem that I do not treat the victim as a real man, because actors and performers are real people too and we are supposed to see them too as parts of works. All I do, is things we are supposed to do when aesthetically appreciating works of art; I attentively watch the installation from all angles, interpret it, have it absorb me; I build experiential dimensions in my imagination, find the aesthetic qualities of the installation, make connections with relevant other circumstances. And I am actively engaged: spiritually by introducing all sorts of relevant associations and physically by walking around the wreckage, gazing through the shattered windows, reading the texts in the newspaper, concentrating on all the details whichever of my senses deliver to me: on the sounds, the smells, the images, temperatures, etc. Only one thing I fail to do: I do not respond morally adequate to what shows itself to me. I should try to rescue the man from his awkward position, should try to stop his bleeding, should provide first aid, or, at the least, should call for an ambulance. One might want to argue that the failure in my treatment of the victim was more complicated psychologically and involved a reduction of the man s personhood. Yet I merely treated the person as a persona and reduced, quite properly I think, his personhood to his role in the whole of the installation. 18 With works of art it is the norm to refrain from moral actions in this sense, and this, I suppose, is what it means to take on an artistic attitude. Another objection might go like this: certainly we might try to help the victim and yet notice the beauty of the thick blood, i.e. without thereby leaving
7/13 our moral stance. I would agree, but fail to see this as an objection to the thesis that taking on an artistic attitude (such as we do when we approach something as a work of art) does involve among other things an abstraction from the moral stance. I agree with the gist of the objection that aesthetic appreciation is integral to our everyday moral perception of the world. Aesthetic appreciation is integral to the artistic attitude as well, but that attitude goes well beyond mere attention to aesthetic properties. This should have some consequences for our distinction between our approaches of aesthetic qualities in art as opposed to nature. An account of natural beauty might run much like Marcia Eaton proposed in recent writings, viewing aesthetic appreciation as aiming at properties deemed valuable in one s culture. 19 This should be so because all events and things and persons have, or show forth aesthetically valuable aspects and to perceive in whatever way such events, things and persons includes taking in their aesthetic properties as well. The exemplary moral situation man confronts a traffic accident is a perceptual situation. The agent-perceiver and his object are in one and the same space and time. Whatever enters his senses reaches his mind synchronically. 20 Within the exemplary moral situation all data provided by all of one s working senses belong to the one spatiotemporal continuum one is in: if nothing can be smelled, then this is in itself instructive as to the things that are seen and heard. Also, persons encountered in such situations will have rich and complex psychologies with large temporal dimensions (memories of their past, projects for their futures) which are expressed in their faces and attitudes, as a slice of their lives, etc. When, however, one appreciates a representation of whatever kind, this allows the space and time represented to be different from the space and time of the perception of the representation. And represented persons (or fictional characters) will have only so much mental lives as is allotted to them by the representation. 21 A beholder of a representation, also, has to behave in certain ways to allow the representation to make manifest its particular meaning. The beholder somehow removes his beholding body from the centre of his perceiving, 22 and thus abstracts from this exemplary moral situation he is in, which has a painting hanging on the wall which he might (or might not) cut with a razor. The notion of an artistic attitude explains the a priori nature of art s autonomy by showing the difference between realities perceived directly and realities perceived through representations. It also explains how abstaining from direct moral agency is of the essence of representation, as it is, I submit, of art. 23 6. Ethical autonomism Ethical autonomism assumes that an artistic variety of the aesthetic attitude-theory can provide a correct characterization of the moral significance of the sheer act of taking
8/13 in a representation of whatever kind: 24 first, representational perception can be characterized by phenomenologies distinguishable from the phenomenology of exemplary moral situations. It is these phenomenologies, which, secondly, prevent in the beholder all anticipation of any actual interaction with the represented, 25 without in that same move, preventing the beholder from holding all the thoughts and feelings which would normally come up with one who were confronted with the situation in real life. 26 It is not the case, as is often held against aesthetic attitude theories, that they forbid audiences to even have any desires or emotions with regard to what a work of art means. There is no (theoretical) need to transform into a will-less, apolitical person without a personality if one is to appreciate a work of art as long as the impetus to instantly act according to them is out of the way. 27 Nor is the artistic attitude reducible to mere attention, as George Dickie has famously argued. Our interests are problematic only when they get too close to feeling satisfied by an anticipated consumption of the represented object. 28 To enjoy a painting that depicts a trout because one is hungry, to admire Henry. Portrait of a Serial Killer because one rejoices antisocial behaviour, or pornography because one is out to find sexual gratification: these are all exemplarily moral experiences at odds with the nature of representation and, I submit, of art. 29 We find here an important indication for a possible criterion for moral judgments of art. After all, taking on an aesthetic attitude means treating the perceived as lying outside the exemplary moral aspect of one s perception. 30 The beholder is, temporarily, to put his present moral surroundings on hold, i.e. he is to suspend anticipating on moral constraints that might emanate from his surroundings. Assuming it to be morally significant to relate to the world and to other persons in a moral manner, to give in to the phenomenology of some art form is a morally relevant choice. Demanding the audience to take on an artistic attitude, as any work of art a priori does (even the ones that pretend not to 31 ) is a moral act. It is the artistic attitude which allows the work of art to speak to one. 32 As there is no need for the beholder to think about the represented object s reality or to concoct a real context for it, he is capable to also take in the processes with which the work guides him, the beholder, through the life of the work. For lack of such ontological considerations the beholder can inspect the structuring of the material, the way in which the artist has laboured it and the art historical, political, psychological, diegetic, etc. contexts where that manipulation appeals to. 33 The processes of structuring, guidance and reference form a work s performative aspect which can and must be judged morally. Works must not merely merit our aesthetic experiences our thoughts and feelings and our critical judgments; they must first and foremost merit our artistic attitudes. When ethical autonomism asks whether a work is respectful, it does not merely ask for the measures of respect with which the depicted (persons) are represented or which inheres in the attitudes endorsed (Gaut). It asks, more delicately,
9/13 whether the beholder s attitudal switching is respected. And what else merits the attitude of the beholder, if not the manner in which it and its subject matter acquire psychological reality for its beholder? To morally evaluate the merits of some work we must therefore approach it in the way of art criticism. 34 Such criticism, of course, is relative to an artistic practice, such as ours, whose concept allows art its moral relevance in the first place. Aesthetic flaws, as I hope to have convincingly argued, are performative defects, and are, therefore, pro tanto moral flaws. With this, I do not merely refer to the measure of absorption offered by a work (Carroll). They may also be cognitive defects as in the caricature Hollywood picture where the camera zooms in to the tears on a woman s face after she was slapped by a man implying that there is no real need to represent any of the morally profound aspects that come with such a slap in the lives of normal people. The caricature Hollywood picture just wants the story to go on, and to convey a necessary bit of information: a proof that she was slapped and saddened by it. Ethical autonomism might have a problem with that. Then again, it is radically opposite from Gaut s ethicism, as it takes artistic merit to be a moral category. 35
10/13 Literature Anderson, J. C. en J. T. Dean (1998) Moderate Autonomism, in British Journal of Aesthetics 38:2, 150-66 Batteux, Charles (1746) Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe. Paris: Chez Durand Bell, Clive (1977) Art as Significant Form. a.o.. in: Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology. Eds. G. Dickie and R. J. Sclafani. New York Brand, Peg (1998) Disinterestedness and Political Art. Aesthetics: The Big Questions. Carolyn Korsmeyer, (red.) Oxford, Blackwell, 155-170 Carroll, Noël (1996) Moderate Moralism, in British Journal of Aesthetics 36:3, 223-38 (1998) Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism, in British Journal of Aesthetics 38(4): 419-24 Conolly, Oliver en Haydar Bashshar (2001) Narrative Art and Moral Knowledge, in British Journal of Aesthetics, 41:2, 109-24 Crowther, Paul (1991) Creativity and Originality in Art, in British Journal of Aesthetics, 31, 301-309 (herdrukt met aanpassingen als het laatste hoofdstuk van Art and Embodiment. From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness.) Davies, Stephen, (red.) (1998) Art and its Messages. Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press Dickie, George (1984-85) Stolnitz Attitude: Taste and Perception, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43, 195-204 Eaton, Marcia M. (1997) Aesthetics: the Mother of Ethics?, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55:4, 355-64 (2001) Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000) A Sustainable Definition of Art In Noël Carroll (ed.): Theories of Art Today, The University of Wisconsin Press, 141-159 Feagin, Susan (1998) Paintings and Their Places, in Art and its Messages, S. Davies, (red.), Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 17-25 Fenner, David (1996) The Aesthetic Attitude. Humanities Press Gaut, Berys (1998) The Ethical Criticism of Art, in Aesthetics and Ethics. Essays at the Intersection, Levinson, J.(red.), New York, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 182-203 Gerwen, Rob van (1999) Kant on What Pleases Directly in the Senses, in Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics 9, 71-82 (2001) Hegel s Dialectics was Geared to Art. He Had No Business Ending It, in A. Arndt, et al. (red.), Hegel-Jahrbuch. Hegels Ästhetik, vol. 2, 68-74
11/13 Address or Intimation? Jaarboek voor Esthetica 2002. Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica, 2002, 126-37. Gombrich, Ernst (1963) Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London, Phaidon Press Goodman, Nelson (1978) When is Art?, in Goodman Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, Hackett, 57-70 Hegel, G.W.F., (1832-1845) Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Frankfurt (1969-1971) Kant, Immanuel (1790) tr. Werner S. Pluhar (1987), The Critique of Judgement. Indianapolis, Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company. (Kant/CJ) Kemp, Gary (1999) The Aesthetic Attitude, in British Journal of Aesthetics, 39:4, 392-99 Kieran, Matthew (2001) In Defence of the Ethical Evaluation of Narrative Art. British Journal of Aesthetics 41:1, 26-38 Kristeller, Paul Oskar (1980) The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, in Renaissance Thought and the Arts, P.O. Kristeller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 163-227 Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haughom Olsen (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press Levinson, Jerrold (1990) Defining Art Historically, in Music, Art, & Metaphysics. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 3-25 (ed.) (1998) Aesthetics and Ethics. Essays at the Intersection. New York, etc.: Cambridge University Press Savile, Anthony (1982) The Test of Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press Schopenhauer, Arthur (1977 (Pt. I: 1819, Pt. II: 1844)) Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Zürich, Diogenes Tye, Michael (1995) Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge (Mass.), London: The MIT Press Wollheim, Richard (1988) Painting as an Art. Princeton/London, Princeton University Press/Thames and Hudson (Wollheim/PA) (1993) Pictorial Style: Two Views, in The Mind and its Depths. Cambridge (Mass.), London (England), Harvard University Press, 171-84 1 Stockhausen s remarks were discussed in the Dutch journal NRC-Handelsblad of 19-9- 2001. See for Orlan: Gavin, Dawn, Orlan, in Transcript. A Journal of Visual Culture,
12/13 2(2) 5-17. For Von Hagens, see the catalogue: Körperwelten. Einblicke in den menschlichen Körper, Heidelberg 1998. 2 The French authors include: Nicolas Jones-Gorlin, Louis Skorecki, Catherine Robbe- Grillet, Christian Authier, and Catherine Millet. 3 See for other recent work on the intersections between moral and aesthetic evaluative considerations: Marcia Muelder Eaton, Aesthetics: the Mother of Ethics?, and Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical, Jerrold Levinson, (ed.) Aesthetics and Ethics, and Stephen Davies, (ed.) Art and its Messages. 4 Oliver Conolly and Haydar Bashshar, Narrative Art and Moral Knowledge, distinguish several types of propositions. In what follows it shows why I do not address their subtle distinctions. 5 Often art even concerns fictional worlds. See Peter Lamarque and Stein Haughom Olsen Setting the scene in Truth, Fiction and Literature; Matthew Kieran (2001) In Defence of the Ethical Evaluation of Narrative Art, replaces the question of truth with one concerning intelligibility. 6 According to Carroll Brett Easton Ellis American Psycho describes events so vulgarly that this prevents the readership from reading the book as it was meant, as comical. Thus, Carroll argues, sometimes a moral judgement determines one s judgement of a work s artistic merits. Because one s moral disgust prevents the absorbing experience of American Psycho, the book fails aesthetically. Yet, this failure would indeed be nothing but an aesthetic failure of the work (which happens to go back to an ethical scruple). Carroll s absorption thesis allows illegitimate, sentimental judgements. What ought to be established in every case is whether it is the work itself preventing an empathetic uptake, because of its own flaws, not, for instance, because of the audience s prudishness. See Carroll Moderate Moralism and Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism. 7 Art s direction of fit is not work to world, but work to beholder s mind, which introduces a reciprocity that can be seen as an artificial analogue of the second-person reciprocity that characterizes the exemplary moral situation.. 8 Carroll calls his position Moderate Moralism, Kieran his: More Moderate Moralism. Carroll reproaches Gaut s ethicism its extremism, an excess in other words. 9 Berys Gaut, The Ethical Criticism of Art.
13/13 10 if a work manifests ethically reprehensible attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically defective, and if a work manifests ethically commendable attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically commendable. (o.c. 182). I do not address the question whether the calculus that Gaut suggests here forms an adequate picture of aesthetic appreciation, which criteria are at stake in it: how to weigh such incomparable aspects and properties? 11 Anthony Savile would call such irrelevant judgments sentimental, given his definition: a sentimental mode of thought is typically one that idealizes its object under the guidance of a desire for gratification and reassurance. (The Test of Time, 226). 12 Cf. Kant/CJ, 10-16, or Savile, see note 24. 13 Psychopathic crimes can also hardly be taken to be the effect of a singular work (or representation, generally). Maybe they are effected by a series of representations together with some sort of social stimulants what does psychology allow for here? but the evaluative issue involved in such gross cultural peculiarities would ask for a vastly different approach than the one at stake here, which concerns the viability and pertinence of ethical evaluation of singular works. See for the cultural approach the work done by Monique Roelofs. 14 As Richard Wollheim did in Pictorial Style: Two Views, and in PA. 15 Cf. Jerrold Levinson s historical definition of art, in Defining Art Historically, Music, Art & Metaphysics, 3-25, and Wollheim, PA, Chapter One, and Pictorial Style: Two Views. 16 In neglecting this difference I see a major reason for the failure of formalist theories. The formalist (Bell: art is significant form ) argues that works cannot be autonomous once their significance is to be found in their subject or the emotions they express as artistic practice seems to require us to think. If, in contrast, artistic autonomy pertains to the practice as a whole, then it describes the attitude we are assumed to take on with regard to objects and events presented within that context, instead of the question whether or not these objects and events are allowed to refer beyond themselves. Obviously, as Nelson Goodman argued convincingly in his When is Art, there is no way to keep the outside outside. 17 Which is a historical phenomenon: Charles of Batteux introduced in his Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, the new system of the arts. See Paul Kristeller, The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics. Hegel signalled correctly how previously the arts served religion, and later (in our times) presented directly mind s self-
14/13 consciousness. See G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. On his thesis on the end of art, see my Hegel s Dialectics was Geared to Art. He Had No Business Ending It. 18 Cf. Marian Abramowicz performance Rhythm 5. Abramowicz was lying in a star of lighted petrol, a meritorious performance which had the audience worry about the vulnerability of the human body. At a certain edition of the performance one man jumped from the audience and pulled Abramowicz out of the fire. He disturbed the work, but, it turned out, rescued the woman. Apparently she had gone out of consciousness for lack of oxygen and the man, a physician, had concluded this from the fact that Abramowicz did not retract her foot, which had come into contact with the fire. By rescuing the person he had destroyed the persona of the work. 19 Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical, and A Sustainable Definition of Art. 20 This is neutral with regard to the question whether or not we should hold a causal account of perception. Necessary synchronicity distinguishes perception from imagination. 21 As I argue in An Ontological Fallacy in Analytical Aesthetics, ms. 22 Cf. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind. Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 73-8. 23 I realize that many present-day works set out to implicate their audience s responsive actions, but take this merely as an indication of the appropriateness of my analysis, since, evidently, the split between worlds caused and sustained by the aesthetic attitude which is essential to art, provoked many artists (starting with DaDa, and ever since) to try and cancel it out. This split can, however, only be cancelled out by a (body of) work at the cost of losing the right to be treated as art. 24 See George Dickie s many attacks on aesthetic attitude theories, and the defences by David Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude and Gary Kemp, The Aesthetic Attitude. 25 Let alone to consume it which is what I think Kant s notion of an interest in the existence of the represented (one of the factors to be excluded from our judgments of taste) amounts to. See CJ, 3. One might, thus, interpret Kant s argument as a realization of the fact that holding such an interest involves a mistaken view of the thing one is confronted with, to wit a representation, instead of the thing that is represented. 26 Which is for the good, as those desires, thoughts and feelings are what a good work supposedly brings to life in its ever beholder. See Lamarque and Olsen ( Setting the
15/13 Scene ) on the mimetic aspect of literature, and Gombrich s Meditations on a Hobby Horse on the distinction between denotation and substitution, and, lastly, Susan Feagin, Paintings and their Places. 27 Pace Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, who puts a high premium on this absence of will, and Peggy Zeglin Brand who resists any such temptations, in Disinterestedness and Political Art. 28 Such anticipations for an actual satisfaction require one to assume (and to find crucial) that the represented object exists which is why Kant characterized the aesthetic attitude as devoid of an interest in the existence of the object. But abstracting from the moral stance seems to me to be the genus term for the artistic attitude (much like the artistic attitude seems more of an attitude that the so-called aesthetic attitude). 29 See Kant/CJ, 2 for the demand of disinterestedness and 13 for the irrelevance of what pleases directly in the senses. The connection of these arguments with the notion of consumption is mine, based among others on remarks by Kant on the distinction between our chemical and mechanical senses: the chemical senses (taste and smell) supposedly are enjoyed directly in the senses, as they presuppose a mixing of foreign materials with materials provided by one s own body. Such perceiving can best be understood as a consuming: transcendentally, with the chemical senses consumption precedes perception. 30 Outside of the artistic context the responsibility for taking on an aesthetic attitude lies wholly with the beholder; inside that context, however, it is shared with, because demanded by, the practice. 31 See note 18. 32 And see my Address or Intimation, for qualifications with regard to how art addresses us. 33 According to Michael Tye (Ten Problems of Consciousness) perspective is one of the characteristics of consciousness. Forms of art can be seen to mesh thoroughly with consciousness. 34 Such a theory must relate to an account of individual style, like Richard Wollheim proposed in Pictorial Style: Two Views. See also: Paul Crowther, Creativity and Originality in Art. An artist s individual style must be distinguished from his signature his conscious signing the canvas as much as those his manipulations of the material whose characteristics depend solely, and contingently, on the artist s physique.
16/13 35 I thank Jerrold Levinson, Marcia Eaton, Berys Gaut, Andrew Ballantyne, Peter Lamarque, Graham McFee, Matthew Kieran, Henk Oosterling, Rutger Claassen as well as members of the audience at conferences of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics (1998) and the British Society of Aesthetics (1999), and the ANVW (2001) and the ASA (Miami, 2002) for their critical remarks.