Philosophy by Other Means

The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226770949
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. His latest book, Philosophy by Other Means, extends this trajectory, offering a collection of essays that present profound considerations of philosophical issues in aesthetics alongside close readings of novels by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee.The arts hold a range of values and ambitions, offering beauty, playfulness, and craftsmanship while deepening our mythologies and enriching the human experience. Some works take on philosophical ambitions, contributing to philosophy in ways that transcend the discipline's traditional analytic and discursive forms. Pippin's claim is twofold: criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophical reflection, and philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. In the first part of the book, he examines how philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Adorno have considered the relationship between art and philosophy. The second part of the book offers an exploration of how individual artworks might be considered forms of philosophical reflection. Pippin demonstrates the importance of practicing philosophical criticism and shows how the arts can provide key insights that are out of reach for philosophy, at least as traditionally understood.

PART 1

The Arts in Philosophy

1

Philosophical Criticism

A Continuation

What follows is an attempt to develop an approach to understanding aesthetic objects. The approach is a form of criticism that I want to call philosophical, a contribution to philosophy, even if not in the analytic and discursive form traditionally characteristic of academic philosophy. The claim is twofold: that criticism properly understood often requires a form of philosophic reflection, and that philosophy is impoverished if it is not informed by critical attention to aesthetic objects. Misunderstandings are inevitable in this context. A philosophical illumination of artworks and a philosophy illuminated by attention to artworks are not offered as a delimitation of the only or main value of the arts. The arts are valuable for all sorts of reasons: enjoyment, play, beauty, or simply as an enrichment of the human experience of the human. Different works have different ambitions, some closer to the ambition of craftsmanship, some closer to the ambitions of mythology. This notion of philosophical illumination applies where it does and doesn’t apply where it doesn’t.1 I’ll begin by trying to contextualize the project.

This volume is a continuation of attempts made in other work, in four books on film—Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010), Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012), The Philosophical Hitchcock (2017), and Filmed Thought (2019)—in an earlier work on literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000), and in a volume on the philosophical dimensions of visual modernism, After the Beautiful (2013). In the discussion of various aesthetic objects in these books, whether of filmed or fictional narratives, or visual objects suffused with intelligence and purpose, the claim was that we could not fully understand the works, or understand them at all, without somehow dealing with the fact that integral to their meaning was some clearly philosophical issue, raised in a way that invites and guides reflection.

In the case of Henry James, the attempt was to show what moral experience in later modernity had become: an emerging form of life in which conventional reliance on an assumed hierarchy of values, role-defined obligations, religion, or a shared sense of moral rules had collapsed, but in which some sense of the inappropriateness of mere self-seeking had survived. The value of James’s phenomenology of this new moral experience is that he does not suggest through his characters’ reflections and actions that some new moral consensus and general principle has emerged. It is the absence of any such consensus that allows James to portray contingent forms of social interaction and dependence that force characters with some good faith to find their way to what we can now be said to owe each other in various cases difficult to compare with each other and so difficult to generalize from. I can imagine that economic or social research and analysis could also help with this sort of exploration, but I find it hard to imagine how either empirical research or a philosophic insistence on some new principle or law could illuminate such an unprecedented situation, our situation. That situation seems to me much more accessible to philosophically minded literary critics like Lionel Trilling: “Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue. This ready recognition of change in the moral life is implicit in our modern way of thinking about literature” (Trilling 1982, 1).

In the case of Hollywood westerns, in following the stories of the transition from a prelegal to a bourgeois rule of law, no intelligent viewer could avoid reflecting on the nature of the political allegiance necessary for that transition, on how there could arise the bond that unites subjects to one another in a collective submission to political order and the rule of law. It is highly unlikely that this acceptance has much to do with an appreciation of the quality of the argument strategies for exiting the state of nature or counterfactual state of original contracting. Some appreciation of the psychological dynamics of political life is necessary, especially American political life in the aftermath of the Civil War (the shadow of which still looms over our political life today). This political psychology is not well captured by the unavoidable abstractions and conceptual distinctions in traditional philosophical terms and is not accessible by any empirical research program.

In the case of the best film noir, the problem was whether we adequately understand common assumptions about intentional action, an issue that requires an exploration of the nature of self-knowledge and its relation to knowledge of others. Those assumptions are that ex ante reflection leads to the formation of intentions to act, which intentions explain and possibly justify the action (in some accounts, cause the action). If some narrative could show credible cases where characters have no idea what they are doing or why, and where their ability to understand the possible implications of what they do is undermined by an ever more corrupt and chaotic social and political world, the sources of whose corruption are maddeningly hidden and unaccountable, then a number of these common assumptions cannot hold. Not only do these films pose as problems issues like “what it is like” to live in a world like this, and how that illumination might bear on any reflection about agency, responsibility, and individuality, as if such issues were just provocations for reflection, but the narrative itself offers us a distinct form of reflection. (The “results” of such reflection are not comforting.)

With Hitchcock, the interpretive question is why his films, especially the most ambitious ones, concentrate so often on how bad we are at understanding each other, why the wrong person is often so confidently blamed for something he or she is innocent of. The general default position in Hitchcock is “unknowingness,” not complete ignorance as in a thoroughgoing other minds skepticism, but a depiction of our fragile (if also ultimately correctable) grasp of what others mean to do or say and why; who they are, who I am. This all reaches a kind of cinematic and philosophical culmination in Vertigo, the subject of a scene-by-scene analysis in The Philosophical Hitchcock. The important contribution made by his films about this condition of unknowingness is showing us not merely that it exists, at a far deeper and more frequent and consequential level than we appreciate, but also how we might begin to think about how to live with this condition, honestly, without self-deceit or wishful thinking. It is not that he reaches any “conclusion” about this; it is not as if there is any reachable conclusion (as is so often the case and sometimes confidently denied in philosophy). The experiences involved are too variegated, not suitable for any generalization. But any reflection on the issue can certainly be informed, both negatively and positively, by what those films show us.

The collection Filmed Thought attempts to show that such an approach does not require the contrast and choice between “immanentist” and “contextualist” approaches to aesthetic objects. Many of the films discussed in the volume can easily be shown to have a bearing on both sorts of questions. One of the main arguments in After the Beautiful is not only that there is no tension between these approaches, but that they are complementary and indeed mutually required. The main continuous task in the book is to show how the films at issue involve a demand for philosophical reflection as part of the attempt to understand them, that we could not understand the point of showing us what they do, as they do, without such reflection. Films and aesthetic objects generally are said to embody implicitly a self-reflective sense of their own form, and so a conatus toward the realization of that form, the point or purpose of making the object. Often this sense of purpose is minimal and unambitious, but in the cases under consideration, that is not so, and this more ambitious purpose cannot be described as anything other than philosophical. And the attempt was to show that this is true not only of films that might be identified as art films, like those by the Dardenne brothers or Malick or Almodóvar, but also in commercial Hollywood cinema: Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Polanski, and Douglas Sirk.

The inspiration for the approach in Filmed Thought and throughout this book is Hegelian and is more explicit still in After the Beautiful, an attempt to construct a Hegelian approach to post-Hegelian art, modernism in particular. That inspiration in that book, the others, and this one is mostly from Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Arts (“Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought” [Hegel 1975, 74]). And After the Beautiful takes as exemplary his interpretations of Greek tragedy, lyric poetry, modern painting, Shakespeare, and Goethe. More important, in the light of the controversy over whether the arts, literature and film especially, should themselves be considered instances of philosophy or not, Hegel’s approach usefully reframes the whole question. In effect, he splits the difference. He claims that the fine arts are not “philosophy,” but that they have the same content as philosophy, and that they treat these philosophical issues in a different modality than discursive, argument-driven analysis, and yet that this modality is indispensable in any full understanding of what he called the Absolute, which for our purposes we can treat as simply what the final satisfaction of philosophic inquiry would look like. That modality is said to be sensible, but while there is a difference in Hegel between sensible and conceptual apprehension, the two elements are also inseparable, and so there is no restriction of aesthetic experience to “feeling” alone: “Of course, the work of art presents itself to sensuous apprehension. It is there for sensuous feeling, external or internal, for sensuous intuition and ideas, just as nature is, whether the external nature that surrounds us, or our own sensitive nature within. . . . But nevertheless the work of art, as a sensuous object, is not merely for sensuous apprehension; its standing is of such a kind that, though sensuous, it is essentially at the same time for spiritual apprehension; the spirit is meant to be affected by it and to find some satisfaction in it” (Hegel 1975, 35).

I don’t mean to suggest that everything about Hegel’s Encyclopedia approach, from his metaphysics to his political philosophy, must be taken on board for the approach sketched here to make sense. I consider this passage from Northrop Frye (as does he, apparently) to reflect what it means to consider criticism as “Hegelian” even if not Hegel’s.

As soon as Adam falls, he enters his own created life, which is also the order of nature as we know it. The tragedy of Adam, therefore, resolves, like all other tragedies, in the manifestation of natural law. He enters a world in which existence is itself tragic, not existence modified by an act, deliberate or unconscious. Merely to exist is to disturb the balance of nature. Every natural man is a Hegelian thesis, and implies a reaction: every new birth provokes the return of an avenging death. This fact, in itself ironic and now called Angst, becomes tragic when a sense of a lost and originally higher destiny is added to it. Aristotle’s hamartia, then, is a condition of being, not a cause of becoming. (Frye 1957, 213)

But the notion of philosophical criticism requires saying some more here about this notion of criticism, before an overview of the chapters that follow.2

Philosophy and Interpretation

What we now call criticism in the arts descended from so-called high or source criticism of the Bible. In the modern age, roughly from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the tasks of aesthetic criticism—literary, art, and music—came to be primarily interpretive and evaluative. Critics, both academic and journalistic, are supposed to help us understand a work and appreciate its quality and value. The object of attempts at understanding is said to be “meaning”: why the work has the appearance and texture it has, how the parts fit into a whole, what the purpose of the work is, how some otherwise obscure element in the work makes the sense it does, how the symbolic and allegorical dimensions should be understood, as well as biographical and contextual details about its place in the author’s oeuvre, its relation to her personal history, the work’s historical period and audience, and so forth, all on the assumption that this should help us in that task of understanding the art. This list is only the beginning of several more characterizations of “meaning,” and that already indicates that the term is so polysemous that it might not get us very far in any general account of criticism. But we can say that criticism, understood in this general way, should not be taken to be the exclusive domain of specialists, trained in a distinct “science.” In this very general sense criticism is simply an extension and deepening of any intelligent encounter between a work and a reader, viewer, or listener, an extension and deepening because some readers and viewers are presumed to have had more experience in these attempts and a broader range of objects to call to mind in pursuing a critical understanding. But any responder to a work has to “follow” the plot, say, its events and characters, understand the intentions and reactions of characters, how the past might bear on a present, whether a claim is self-deceived or hypocritical, whether a character is lying and if so why, why a line in a poem follows another line with which it seems to have no connection, what relation to the beholder a painting seems to assume, whether a revelation is credible or misleading, and any reader or viewer might also be moved to ask about formal characteristics of the work, the point of a narrative or prose style, or an author’s intentions in, say, quoting something from a foreign language in a poem. Each of these interpretive questions implicitly appeals to some philosophical understanding of the questions themselves, and any philosophical position is, or can be with the right attentiveness, distinctively informed by the imagined presentation: What is it to understand another’s intentions? Can we? How does a person’s past bear on the present? Is there such a thing as self-deceit? Can there be? How is it distinguished from hypocrisy? What is the nature of the wrong done another by lying? What is a poem that its sequence of lines can be difficult to follow, or that allusions can be made to other languages? How can a painting be said to assume or construct a relation to a beholder?3 Are there different assumptions in different periods? Why? How are they to be discovered? “Interpretation” in this sense is always implicitly philosophical, and many philosophical claims always already assume that a case under consideration is a case relevant to, potentially clarifying for, the philosophical problem.

This does not mean that any serious critic must constantly be working out these philosophical problems as she attempts to understand the work, at least not in the language of traditional philosophy. The issues can be engaged with, clarified, misleading directions excluded, all in the language of criticism itself, as the examples of Frye, Girard, Trilling, and Cavell cited in this chapter, and the two chapters on Fried in what follows, demonstrate. Moreover, critics who have written on the issue of whether literature can be a form of knowledge often cite the difference between “understanding” a text and possessing “knowledge.” But if this claim about the inevitable role of philosophical reflection (in its own critical modality) is correct, that difference cannot be right. This raises the question of the nature of philosophical knowledge, and that is a weighty topic in itself, but we might do well to remember that long ago when Aristotle distinguished understanding and knowledge, the former was a superior form of knowledge, metaphysics.

In this sense, interpretation is simply identical to fully experiencing a work as a work of art; everybody doe...