The Role of Theory in Aesthetics
Morris Weitz
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. XV, no. 1, 1956
Copyright by the American Society for Aesthetics
Theory:
Has been central in aesthetics
Still a preoccupation
Main concern: the nature of art/ a definition of it
Definition: necessary and sufficient properties
A true or false claim about the essence of art
Great theory of art: were attempts to state the defining properties of art
“Each claims that it is the true theory because it has formulated correctly into a real definition the nature of art; and that the others are false because they have left out some necessary or sufficient property.
Many argue that this is a necessity for any understanding of art
Knowing what art is requires knowing its necessary and sufficient properties
This is turn serves as a foundations of both appreciation and criticism of art.
Weitz asks however whether this is correct. That is:
“Is aesthetic theory, in the sense of a true definition or set of necessary and sufficient properties of art, possible?”
The history of aesthetics indicates “No.”
…we seem no nearer our goal today than we were in Plato's time.”
Weitz suggests that “answer” is simply to reject the problem.
Wants to show
Aesthetic theory is wrong in principle because it radically misconstrues the logic of the concept of art.
"Art" is not amenable to true definition.
“Art, as the logic of the concept shows, has no set of necessary and sufficient properties, hence a theory of it is logically impossible and not merely factually difficult.”
But is does not follow from this that art is a meaningless or worthless concept.
Surveys famous extant aesthetic theories
Formalist theory: (Clive Bell and Roger Fry)
Its defining property is significant form, i.e., certain combinations of lines, colon, shapes, volumes-everything on the canvas except the representational elements- which evoke a unique response to such combinations.
The nature of art then is the unique combination of certain elements and their relations (formal principles of arrangements).
Emotionalist Theory:
Essential property is the expression of emotion in some sensuous public medium. (Tolstoy, Ducasse)
Intuitionist Theory:
Art is not the physical, public object but with a specific creative, cognitive and spiritual act. (Croce) It is an awareness, non-conceptual in character, of the unique individuality of things; and since it exists below the level of conceptualization or action, it is without scientific or moral content.
Croce singles out as the defining essence of art this first stage of spiritual life and advances its identification with art as a philosophically true theory or definition.
Organicist Theory:
Art names a class of organic wholes consisting of distinguishable, albeit inseparable, elements in their causally efficacious relations which are presented in some sensuous medium. (Bradley)
Voluntarist Theory:
Parker:
"The assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence of some common nature present in all the arts.[1]" All the so popular brief definitions of art-'significant form,' 'expression,' 'intuition,' 'objectified pleasure'-are fallacious, either because, while true of art, they are also true of much that is not art, and hence fail to differentiate art from other things; or else because they neglect some essential aspect of art."[2]
Advocates a complex definition rather than a simple one.
"The definition of art must therefore be in terms of a complex of characteristics. Failure to recognize this has been the fault of all the well-known definitions."[3]
His own version of Voluntarism is the theory that art is essentially three things: embodiment of wishes and desires imaginatively satisfied, language, which characterizes the public medium of art, and harmony, which unifies the language with the layers of imaginative projections. Thus, for Parker, it is a true definition to say of art that it is ". . . the provision of satisfaction through the imagination, social significance, and harmony. I am claiming that nothing except works of art possess all three of these marks."[4]
All of these are inadequate in many different ways.
Each purports to be a complete statement about the defining features of all works of art
Each of them leaves out something which the others take to be central.
Some are circular, e.g., the Bell-Fry
Some of them emphasize too few properties
Some are too general and cover objects that are not art as well as works of art.
Still others rest on dubious principles, e.g., Parker's
Even if “art” did have a set of necessary and sufficient properties no theory proposed so far seems to provide them in a non-question-begging way.
Further complication:
What would confirm or disconfirm the theory that art?
Seems nothing can act as a test of correctness for these theories.
“They are perhaps honorific definitions of "art," that is, proposed re-definitions in terms of some chosen conditions for applying the concept of art, and not true or false reports on the essential properties of art at all.”
Weitz wishes to make a more fundamental criticism:
aesthetic theory is a logically vain attempt to define what cannot be defined, to state the necessary and sufficient properties of that which has no necessary and sufficient properties, to conceive the concept of art as closed when its very use reveals and demands its openness. (My emphasis)
The fundamental question I not: “What is Art?” but “What sort of concept is ‘art’?”
Paraphrases Wittgenstein:
Not “What does “x” mean? but rather,
“What is the use or employment of “x”?”
“What does “x” do on the language?”
The goal then is to give a logical description of the actual functioning of the concept, including a description of the conditions under which the we correctly use it or its correlates.
Derives from Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein raises an illustrative question: “What is a game?”
Traditional theoretical answer would seek to offer necessary and sufficient conditions.
Wittgenstein:
“Don't say: 'there must be something common, or they would not be called "games" , but look and see whether there is anything common to all.-For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships…”
We find no necessary and sufficient properties, only "a complicated network of similarities over- lapping and crisscrossing,"
They form a family with family resemblances and no common trait.
“If one asks what a game is, we pick out sample games, describe these, and add, "This and similar things are called 'games'." This is all we need to say and indeed all any of us knows about games. Knowing what a game is is not knowing some real definition or theory but being able to recognize and explain games and to decide which among imaginary and new examples would or would not be called "games."
Weitz is claiming the same thing is going on with Art. Understanding what art is is not posiessing a definition…
“but being able to recognize, describe, and explain the things we call "art" in virtue of these similarities.”
Paradigm cases can be given, about which there can be no question as to their being correctly described as "art" or "game," but no exhaustive set of cases can be given.
However, unforeseeable or novel conditions are always forthcoming or envisageable.
A concept is open if its conditions of application are emendable and corrigible; i.e., if a situation or case can be imagined or secured which would call for some sort of decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover this, or to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case and its new property. If necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept can be stated, the concept is a closed one. But this can happen only in logic or mathematics where concepts are constructed and completely defined. It cannot occur with empirically-descriptive and normative concepts unless we arbitrarily close them by stipulating the ranges of their uses.
This goes on within the media of art as well: e.g."Is Joyce's Finnegan', Wake a novel?"
The decision has to be made whether the work under examination is similar enough in certain respects to other works, already called "novels," and thus warrants the extension of the concept to cover the new case.
"Art," itself, is an open concept.
New works will constantly demand new decisions on the part of those interested, usually professional critics, as to whether the concept should be extended or not.
The conditions of application for “art” can never be exhaustively enumerated since new cases can always be envisaged or created by artists.
The…
“… very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, make it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties. We can, of course, chose to close the concept. But to do this with "art" or "tragedy" or "portraiture," etc., is ludicrous since it forecloses on the very conditions of creativity in the arts”.
There are legitimate and serviceable closed concepts in art:
Greek Tragedy (versus the open concept “tragedy”)
Aristotle's definition can be viewed as a real (albeit incorrect) definition of Greek Tragedy
But once misconceives it if one reads it as a real definition of "tragedy,"
The latter suffers from the logical mistake of trying to define what cannot be defined
Trying to squeeze what is an open concept into a closed concept.
The critic must not become “muddled”
Must get clear about the way in which he conceives his concepts.
Must not confuse recognizing members of certain legitimately closed classes of works of art with recommended “the” criteria for evaluating any putative member of the class.
Weitz claims that:
“The primary task of aesthetics is not to seek a theory but to elucidate the concept of art. Specifically, it is to describe the conditions under which we employ the concept correctly. Definition, reconstruction, patterns of analysis are out of place here since they distort and add nothing to our understanding of art. What, then, is the logic of "X is a work of art"?
"Art" is both descriptive and evaluative.
When descriptive:
There are no necessary and sufficient conditions, but there are the strands of similarity conditions, i.e., bundles of properties, none of which need be present but most of which are, when we describe things as works of art.
There do appear to be some necessary conditions:
being an artifact
made by human skill
with deliberate ingenuity and imagination
embodied in its sensuous, public medium
possessing certain distinguishable elements and relations.
To say "X is a work of art and contains no emotion, expression, act of empathy, satisfaction, etc.," is plausible, but one can even say "X is a work of art and . . . was made by no one," or . . . "exists only in the mind and not in any publicly observable thing," or . . . "was made by accident when he spilled the paint on the canvas" .
“…in each … a normal condition is denied, are also sensible and capable of being true in certain circumstances. None of the criteria of recognition is a defining one, either necessary or sufficient, because we can sometimes assert of something that it is a work of art and go on to deny anyone of these conditions, even the one which has traditionally been taken to be basic, namely, that of being an artifact: Consider, "This piece of driftwood is a lovely piece of sculpture." Thus, to say of anything that it is a work of art is to commit oneself to the presence of some of these conditions. One would scarcely describe X as a work of art if X were not an artifact, or a collection of elements sensuously presented in a medium, or a product of human skill, and so on. If none of the conditions were present, if there were no criteria present for recognizing something as a work of art, we would not describe it as one. But, even so, no one of these or any collection of them is either necessary or sufficient.
The Evaluative Use of “Art”
Considers a typical example of this evaluative use: to say of something that it is a work of art is to imply that it is a successful harmonization of elements.
On such a view, to say "X is a work of art" is
Theorists are never clear whether it is (1) or (2) which is being put forward. Most of them, concerned as they are with this evaluative use, formulate (2), i.e., that feature of art that makes it art in the praise-sense, and then go on to state (1), i.e., the definition of "' Art" in terms of its art-making feature. And this is clearly to confuse the conditions under which we say something evaluatively with the meaning of what we say. "This is a work of art," said evaluatively, cannot mean "This is a successful harmonization of elements" -except by stipulation- but at most is said in virtue of the art-making property, which is taken as a (the) criterion of "Art," when "Art" is employed to assess. "This is a work of art," used evaluatively, serves to praise and not to affirm the reason why it is said.
The evaluative use of "Art" are not true and real definitions of the necessary and sufficient properties of art. Instead they are honorific definitions, pure and simple, in which "Art" has been redefined in terms of chosen criteria.
Historic definitions of art are better understood as elements in the perennial debate over criteria of evaluation (the honorific use of art)
This makes the history of aesthetic theory an important object of study.
Example: Bell/ Fry
Importance is what lies behind the formula:
“In an age in which literary and representational elements have become paramount in painting, (they champion a ) return to the plastic ones since these are indigenous to painting. Thus, the role of the theory is not to define anything but to use the definitional form, almost epigrammatically, to pin-point a crucial recommendation to turn our attention once again to the plastic elements in painting.
Incorporated in every supposed definition is actually the debate over and argument for emphasizing or centering upon some particular feature of art which has been neglected or perverted.
Taken literally, aesthetic theories fail
Re-construed as serious and argued-for recommendations to concentrate on certain criteria of excellence in art, we shall see that aesthetic theory is far from worthless.
It teaches us what to look for and how to look at it in art.
“What is central and must be articulated in all the theories are their debates over the reasons for excellence in art -debates over emotional depth, profound troths, natural beauty, exactitude, freshness of treatment, and so on, as criteria of evaluation- the whole of which converges on the perennial problem of what makes a work of art good.
“To understand the role of aesthetic theory is not to conceive it as definition, logically doomed to failure, but to read it as summary of seriously made recommendations to attend in certain ways to certain features of art.