Chapter Summary

Both the modest and the robust realist hold that aesthetic properties supervene on non- aesthetic ones, and that supervenience captures much o f the practice o f defending aesthetic judgments. As I have argued, however, the intuition is utterly uninformative if true, because it says nothing about how specific aesthetic qualities arise or emerge firom specific non- aesthetic ones. At best we have the trivial assertion that the total array o f aesthetic qualities depends on the total array of non-aesthetic ones. This is no more than a denial of platonism and reductionism. What a supervenience account should provide is an explanation o f when certain aesthetic judgements are licensed and when they are not, and supervenience plainly fails to deliver this. Most lüœly, the supervenience thesis is utterly incoherent.

Worse still, supervenience must be asserted as an a priori thesis by the realist. The faith in the legitimacy of such an assertion surely lies in a more basic commitment to some version of physicalism, and the same sort o f worry that drives others into non-cognitivism, namely, that aesthetic qualities could not be anything but occult unless somehow constituted by natural properties. Should the realist be asked to justify her adherence to supervenience, she encounters a dilemma, in which she can only justify supervenience by invoking truth as warranted assertibility.

Even if these two problems can be dealt with in a satisfactory fashion, the realist is left with a strong commitment to there being but one correct comprehensive aesthetic judgment for any given artwork. That commitment is called into question by the fact o f icresolvable critical disputes throughout the artworld. Pluralism dissolves such disputes whüe upholding realism only if it is in fact relativism. I have argued that relativism is unsatisfactory as a solution to a great many disagreements, and so the realist commitment stands in opposition to an art critical practice that hosts a great many o f these disputes. Indeed, it is often taken to be criteiial o f great works o f art that they support a wide range o f judgments and

interpretations, including some inconsistent with one another. The realist disallows this, and consequently, diminishes the explanatory appeal o f her theoretical position.

* For example, in “Realism”, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) 145-165. 2 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience”, Music, A rt, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 149.

^ ibid.

** The formulation is from Blackburn, Spreading the Word, but supervenience is frequently formalized in this way elsewhere.

5 This second relation, a rig^d linking between a and p, is a stronger daim than supervenience. Supervenience does not enable one to infer that something is a when it is (3; rather, when one knows that something is both a and p, one can be sure that another thing that is P is also a. See Blackburn, Spreading the Word, 183-184. ® Blackburn, Spreading the Word 184.

^ See especially his B£alBeauty (University Park: Peon State University Press, 1997) 96-112, ® Eddy Zemach, Beal Beauty 102.

’ ibid. ibid.

" Greg C urrie,^/ Ontology of A rt (London: Macmillan, 1989) 79.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author o f Ùie-Quixoté’ in Tabyrinths, Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, eds. (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1962) 43.

‘3 Tliis observation is due to Crispin Wright, review of Spreading the Word, by Simon Blackburn, Mind 94 (1985) 316-317.

See Appendix 2 for proof.

3.5: Chapter Smmaty

16ibid%9.

17 Dalia Drai, Stpervenieme and Beatism (Aldershot, UK; Ashgate, 1999) 46.

m See Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity, especially 18-29. From 24: “Nothing can deserve the title o f a truth predicate unless it coincides in normative force with warranted assertibility but is potentially divergent in extension.”

19 See Paul Horwich, Truth 2"‘i edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 20 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience” 149.

This terminology is introduced by Frank Sibley in his “Aesthetic Concepts”, to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 1-23.

^ Francis O ’Connor,, electronic review o f Mark Rothko exhibition at the National Gallery o f Art, 1998 (URL: http://members.aol.eom/FVOC/archive.html).

23 David Anfam, Mark Bothko: Catalog Baisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 11.

John Bender, “Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes”,/oz/wc?/ of Aesthetics and A it Gz/zV/r/;;54(1996)373.

Frank Jackson, From Metaplysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 125. 26 ibidI2S.

27 See John MacKinnon, “Heroism and Reversal: Sibley on Aesthetic Supervenience” for an argument that the negadve-condition governed feauture o f aesthetic qualities or concepts tells against a supervenience claim.

Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle o f Structure”, t949,hiU teraiy Opinion in America, ed. M.D. Zabel (New York; Harper and Row, 1962) 736.

29 F.W. Bateson, English Poetry: A Critical Introduction 2«‘^ edn (London; Longman’s, 1966) 59. Hugh Sykes Davies, “Another N ew Poem by Wordsworth”, Essays in Criticism 15 (1965) 138. 31 a w 156.

John House, “Manet’s Maximilian: History Painting, Censorship, and Ambiguity”, Juliet Whson-Bareau, ed. Manet: The Execution ofMaximilian (London: National Gallery Publications, 1992) 108.

33 Micheal ¥n<e.à,Manefs Modernism (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1996) 358. 3“^ Georges Bataüle, Manet (Geneva 1955), quoted in Fried, 354.

33 See, on this point, Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2"^ edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11.

36 See Roger %zsyx\.os\, A rt andlmagination (London: Routiedge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Matthew Kieran, 'In Defence o f Critical Pluralism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36 (1996) 239-251; Stephen Davies, 'Relativism in lnX&tpï.ç,tà.ûorl,JoîiînalofAestheticsandArtCriticisrn,Yo\. 53 (1995) 8-13.

37 Nils Gosta Sandblad, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund: Publications o f the New Society o f Letters, 1954).

38 Joseph Margolis, 'Plain Tallr About Interpretation On A Relativistic M .oàéi, Journal of Aesthetics and A rt Criticism, vol. 53 (1995) 1-7.

30 For example. Prior’s suggested interpretation o f a four-valued lo^c as 1 = true and known to be true; 2 = true but not Imown to be true; 3 = false but not Imown to be false; 4 = false and known to be false. See Susan Haack, Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1978) 213.

Margolis, “Plain Talk About Interpretation” 3. This point is fully developed in Chapter 6, Section 4. ‘*2 Margolis 6.

43 f W .

44 Though this is not uncontroversial. If “good” is in fact “good according to the standards o f X”, in what way do our thoughts not play a value-constituting role in the formulation o f standards which are incommensurable across the values of X? I leave this point to the side here.

43 Robert Stecker, 'Art Interpretation’ Journal of Aesthetics and A rt Criticism, vol. 52 (1994) 193-206. 46/W 194.

47 ibid. 48 aw 195. 49 aw 194.

In this chapter, I talce up largely metaphysical problems associated witli the two realist positions left standing at the end o f Chapter 2. In the previous chapter, I argued that supervenience was a deeply troubled notion, so much so tliat modest aesthetic realism and robust aesthetic realism risk losing one o f the core theses tliat distinguish those positions from platonism and reductionism. That may appear to be a largely metaphysical issue, and indeed it is. But its interest lies also in the purported contribution it makes to the analysis of aesthetic judgments: what are tliey, what counts as a good supporting reason for them, and how are we to understand the appearance of conflict between them?

In this chapter, I examine more straightforwardly metaphysical issues, taking up

supervenience only toward the end. Whereas robust and modest realism share much the same epistemological problems, the metaphysical issues are quite different. The strategic claims o f the chapter are:

1. The argument for the primary quality status of aesthetic qualities rests on a confusion