The Cultural Spaces of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism by margolis, joseph

Abstract

Margolis, Joseph. The Cultural Spaces of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism. Columbia University Press, 2010, xvi + 213 pp., $24.50 cloth. For over fifty years now, Joseph Margolis has systematically explored the concepts of art, person, understanding, and culture and the relations among them. This book is both a short summa of and an argumentative coda to those wide‐ranging explorations. Here Margolis initially elaborates his view of both persons and artworks as essentially cultural objects by drawing on two remarks from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (§580), and the sensation of pain is “not a something, but not a nothing either” (§304). These remarks lead Margolis to the thought that explanations of meanings (of sentences, of actions, of works of art) cannot intelligibly invoke anything inner as a (contingent, externally related) cause of an outer performance. Instead of appealing to inner intentions as causes of cultural outputs, we must focus on “the sui generis nature of a cultural world” (p. 181). What happens in the production of meaningful sentences, actions, or works is that culturally “emergent aptitudes” (p. 6) that presuppose but exceed merely biological endowments are exercised within “the flux of history” (p. 121). In order to understand the performances that yield culturally meaningful products, we need “sui generis explanatory innovations tethered to the emergence of language, culture, history, and art” (p. 9). What is not needed is either talk of self‐standing, nonemergent inner mental entities or materialist explanations that put a neural event in place of a mental one as inner cause of outer performance. Margolis advances this line of thinking in three very general ways. First, he offers largely phenomenological remarks about what seeing, hearing, and reading are actually like. We see physical objects, often with cultural identities, such as pencil, directly, and we likewise see paintings in at least many cases directly as representational, not as bare surfaces. We hear speech as consisting of meaningful words, not uninterpreted sounds. And we see and read words as already meaningful marks, as significant cultural tools in use, not as bare configurations of ink on a surface. In no case is an interpretive act of finding an externally related cause for the meaningful object necessary. Likewise we can and mostly do read a poem such as William Blake's “The Sick Rose” or even Paul Celan's all but impenetrable poems directly. We may reflect on what we experience initially as meaningful, and we may compare the meaningful object (sentence or artifact or image or work) with further meaningful objects in order to enrich our interpretive accounts of what a difficult object means. But in no case do we revert to something mental or physical that is simply independently given behind the object, as it were. Phenomenologically, this seems right, and Margolis's point here is continuous with critiques of impoverished, empiricist conceptions of experience that are familiar from Hegel, Dewey, and Gadamer, among others. What is less clear, however, is whether these correct observations about the phenomenology of the experience of meaningful objects rule out seeing them as expressing intentions that are internally related to them and partly constitutive of their identities. Contra Margolis, the experience of sentences, utterances, or works of art as directly meaningful may presuppose at the same time seeing them historically produced by intending agencies that make them what they are, albeit as internally related expressions rather than as wholly contingent mere effects of independent inner causes. Sometimes, moreover, if we are not conversant with the historical practice within which a work is produced, we are puzzled and do see a physical something that we are first unable to identify and to interpret, even if subsequent interpretations are essentially historical and comparative. Second, Margolis directly criticizes general views in the philosophy of mind that run counter to his own cultural emergentism. The primary point here is that what Margolis calls “Intentional attributes” (with the capital I indicating the bearing of meanings as a cultural object, not relation to something inner or intentional with a lowercase i) are collective and determinable, not individual and determinate (p. 115). Dualist, materialist semantic‐naturalist, and eliminativist stances in the philosophy of mind one and all presuppose in different ways the existence of an inner cause of outer performance that is individual and determinate (at least in principle). Hence they are one and all misbegotten, in being insensitive to the kinds of things bearers of meanings are. For example, “analytic semantics” or the effort to explain the meanings of public, cultural objects by reference to inherently meaningful, given, individual, inner representations in a material language of thought (whatever that is) indulge in “a premature tendency to ride roughshod over cultural and historical sensibilities in the direction of some sort of globalized uniformity [via reference to an innate language of primitive mental representation] that treats local diversities of language as largely apparent, superficial, [and] utterly misleading if read literally” (p. 134). This too seems right, and it is a point that should be taken more seriously in the philosophy of mind than it typically is. Semantic naturalisms in the style of Fodor are largely conjectural and rest on spectacular “it must be so stories,” with very little attention to how interpretive work is actually done, or in Margolis's terms, to how Intentional attributes are actually ascribed. Eliminativism seems to make the very phenomena of meaningful utterance, action, and art making—and so the very lives of persons—unrecognizable. It is again, however, not clear that this point about the collective and determinable character of Intentional attributes will defeat forms of intentionalism that see the inner, the intentional, and the psychological as themselves historical and internally related to their outer products—that is, forms of intentionalism that are consistent with Margolis's own intentionalism and emergentism. But one very valuable moral here is that the philosophy of mind might itself be much better off if it took into account what we as persons are actually doing when we are either producing or undertaking to understand some complex and difficult works of art. In these cases, intention, historical language of the expression of meaning, and work on a material object just do not come apart very readily. Hence the eliminativist thought that we can just ignore meaning and the reductionist thought that we can reduce these complexities to multiple but ultimately individual and momentary external relations between an inner that is already determinately given and an outer that is its contingent, causal product just do not seem very plausible. In short, maybe the philosophy of mind should pay more attention to art and to the philosophy of art, rather than the philosophy of art taking on its procedures from implausible stances in the philosophy of mind. Third, Margolis criticizes views in the philosophy of art that reject, as he sees it, his own Intentionalism or cultural emergentism and thus drift toward what he calls “piecemeal reductionism” or display an unacknowledged tendency to reduce the cultural to the determinately individual–psychological. His primary targets here are Kendall Walton, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim in the philosophy of painting and Walton, Noël Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson in the philosophy of literature, with Monroe Beardsley as a presiding background figure who prepared the way for these later “intentionalisms” by way of his own narrow, empiricist conception of experience. Contra Margolis, however, it is far from clear that each of these figures is rightly read as either a piecemeal reductionist or “new intentionalist” concerned to understand poems or paintings as outputs of determinate inner givens. With regard to painting, Paul Guyer rightly observes in an online review of this book (http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20670) that Margolis reads what Walton, Danto, and Wollheim take to be conceptual distinctions among internally related elements that are playing different but meaningfully related roles in a work's carrying meaning as instead distinctions among genuinely separable, externally related components of the work. According to Margolis, either the intention is taken as the prior, external cause of the marked surface, as in Wollheim, or it is imputed after the fact, as in Danto; hence the Intentional (the culturally emergently meaningful) is taken by Margolis to be denied by these figures in favor of the intentional–psychological merely externally coupled to the material–physical. As Guyer further comments, however, this objection seems simply to miss the continuing emphasis in at least Danto and Wollheim on art as a historical phenomenon, where intentions are historically enabled within an ongoing practice of art and are both embodied in and subject to development within the material media of art. In talking of intentions, Danto and Wollheim are distinguishing from one another the aspects of the historically produced work that typically are fused with one another (internally related), not isolating externally related components. The point of doing this is to elucidate the character of a historical practice involving agentive doings, not to reduce the historical–cultural to the individual–psychological plus outer–material. So Margolis seems right in his own substantive views but wrong in his targets, with whom he shares more than he supposes. With regard to literature, Margolis criticizes the staging of the debate between Carroll favoring actual intentionalism and Levinson favoring hypothetical intentionalism. Here he is on somewhat firmer ground. It may well be that reference to a historical agent is necessary to fix work identity and that that reference constrains possibilities of interpretation. But very rarely, if at all, do we identify the meaning of a literary work with any intention, actual or hypothetical. To the extent that there is a debate between actual intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism, both camps seem to rely on Gricean views about meaning that are too individualist, psychological, and reductionist. If, however, these competing intentionalisms were taken only as diverging views about how to fix work identity while allowing that the relevant intentions may themselves be culturally enabled and emergent, then there seems to be more heat than light to the debate. Surely it is the actual historical intentions that are relevant for work identity, but surely these very intentions are historically emergent and ascribed on the basis of our best overall interpretive efforts (including but not at all limited to attention to facts of biography) rather than through any more direct glimpse into the mind of the author. Margolis's criticisms of Walton on literature and painting are somewhat more convincing. In general, contra Margolis, Walton holds the view that the relations between historical practice (mode of game playing) and work identity and meaning are internal. The point is that we have practices of making and understanding art (art games, as it were) that have developed historically. In discussing interpretation, however, Walton introduces the language of make‐believe or of following the work's prescription to pretend that things are thus and so. This seems to be a more imputationalist view, coming closer on the ground to regarding meanings as external to the work as prop (that is, as bare, nonrepresentational marked surface or as mere or at least not literally assertational text). As Margolis objects against Walton, this comes close to regarding all art making and understanding as involving oneself in a kind of fiction or pretense. (What about the lyric or the historical novel?) It confuses the imaginative with the imaginary (p. 135). As I have suggested, the general metaphysical stance that Margolis favors about art, persons, actions, works, and meanings seems to me to be plausible and important, even true. The philosophy of mind (and metaphysics) would do well to take the phenomena of art and its interpretation more seriously and to learn from them rather than pushing these phenomena aside for later work, leaving concentration on the “literal” and the material as primary. No one has been more resolute than Joseph Margolis in reminding us of this. It is therefore perhaps somewhat odd that Margolis himself has produced a fairly abstract metaphysics of art, persons, and culture. That is, one wants, while accepting his general view, also to see more history and critical interpretation of practices and works of art and perhaps somewhat less general metaphysics, however sound it may be. Margolis talks much more readily of Culture as an always necessary and always present enabling medium for the lives of persons, meaningful utterances, and works of art than he does of specific, historically developing, and varying cultures, and he talks much more readily of the importance of taking our actual interpretive and critical practices seriously than himself actually doing any interpretation or criticism (as Walton, Danto, and Wollheim, in contrast, do). But to say this is just to ask for more specific, focused, detailed work that brings criticism, interpretation, and philosophy more closely together than they are often held, in a style that Joseph Margolis has usefully been urging on us for many years.