Art for Art’s Sake

I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan. It may have once seemed brave and insightful, but now it reveals a complete failure of moral judgment (and intelligence). It is the opposite of the truth. First, let’s parse it, because it conceals a slyly tendentious ambiguity. It clearly means “The purpose of art is art” (art is autotelic, in the lingo). Equally clearly it is intended as a normative statement not a descriptive one: it doesn’t say that all art is actually done for itself, but rather that this is how art ought to be. There would be no point in saying it if artists already conformed to it. It is presupposing that many artists don’t proceed according to its prescription, but they should. And what is that they do so faultily? They treat art as a means to a moral end: they think the purpose of art is promoting the good—the moral good. So, the proponent of the autotelic view is saying that art is an end in itself not a means of making the world a better place. We can agree that the artist is doing art not morality—he is an artist, after all—but the slogan is urging artists to do only this: to have no moral intentions, to advance no moral cause. The artist is concerned solely and wholly with non-moral objectives—say, aesthetic experience or emotional response. Of course, the artist has artistic intentions, but we are being told that he should have no other intentions. So, the slogan becomes “The purpose of art is only art, not morality”. It is like saying “The purpose of art is only art, not brick laying”. Morality is extrinsic to the work of art. No novel, say, should concern itself with moral themes, with good and evil, on pain of not being art (or artistic). You disqualify yourself as an artist by building moral content into your work. Perhaps the reader can now see why I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan; it is patent nonsense, pure rubbish. All art has, or should have, moral content, especially the written kind: it is concerned with good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. It would have no human interest if it were not. Of course, it should not be inartistically concerned with such themes, but it is not a condition on being art that it not be concerned with them (pace Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov). Nor should it be concerned didactically to support received morality, conventional bourgeois morality; and in fact, art frequently makes a point of criticizing such morality. It would be absurd to announce that the purpose of art is only morality, but it clearly is a concern of the artist. Why would anyone want to deny this?

Compare science: “Science for science’s sake”. Suppose we paraphrase this as “The sole purpose of science is science—and certainly not the promotion of the good”. That is, we insist that science (the institution) is concerned only with scientific standards: truth, evidence, theoretical interest, and nothing else. This is obviously not so: we have pure science and applied science, and applied science is often concerned with human (and animal) welfare (medical science). Why would we want to preclude the scientist from having moral concerns, such as the desire to cure cancer—would this make him a bad scientist?  This is palpable rubbish, is it not? The scientist is quite capable of having several distinct aims at the same time: achieving scientific truth, improving the lot of mankind, earning a living, impressing his colleagues, etc. He presumably also believes that scientific truth is itself an intrinsic good, so to that extent is enmeshed in normative notions—as is also true of the value of artistic good (beauty is a good). The moral aims have to be the right ones, naturally, but assuming they are, there is no discredit to the scientist in pursuing them. He might well be criticized for not pursuing them. There is no incompatibility between science and morality, as there is no incompatibility between art and morality. Indeed, morally bad science should not be undertaken, as morally bad art should not be. We can make the same point with respect to many human activities: history, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, mathematics, cookery, entertainment, education, etc. Try substituting these into the slogan and see if you like the result: for example, “Philosophy for philosophy’s sake, not for goodness’s sake”. Should philosophy never be concerned with morality—is ethics not part of its remit? It can be concerned with other things too, as art can also be. The right thing to say is that art is properly concerned with beauty, truth, and goodness; they are all part of its plural purpose. In this it is like many other human activities. It is quite wrong to maintain that art is only about aesthetic thrills (Nabokov) or pleasure (Wilde). A novel, say, is generally about all these things, with morality surely at the center; some novels are clearly intended to make a specific moral point, and are no less artistic for that (e.g., Black Beauty). Contrary to what its author insists, Lolita is in fact a deeply moral novel and gains much of its aesthetic impact from that fact. How could a novel not be occupied with morality, since it concerns human action, into which morality is woven. Drama is about good and evil, and drama is the point of a great deal of art.

It is hard not to see the autotelic view of art as reflecting a general cynicism about morality and wanting to protect art from the taint of the moral. If morality is subjective, relative, shapeless, and conventional, we won’t want it infecting the artistic work; but that sophomoric position is hardly compulsory (in fact, it is ridiculous). Sound morality elevates the novel (as in the work of Jane Austen, among many others). It is interesting that the form of our slogan is correct only for morality: “Morality for morality’s sake, not for money’s sake or power’s sake”. The only purpose of morality is to secure morally right conduct, however that may be defined—doesn’t that sound eminently reasonable? The novel should be proud to contain a large helping of morality; we expect nothing less. Morality isn’t the opposite of art but its backbone. It may well be true of music, painting, and dance that they have little or nothing to do with morality; but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they are not narrative forms. The ear and eye can be aesthetically stimulated by these art forms without any moral thoughts flowing through the mind of the observer, but the same is not true of narrative art—i.e., stories. If someone asserted “Stories for stories’ sake, only”, we would recoil in disbelief. The original slogan possesses what prima facie plausibility it does by suggesting non-narrative art, but narrative art is transparently morally imbued. And it is surely a wild exaggeration to try to assimilate narrative art to music, painting, and dance—as if we are responding to what our eyes present to us in reading a book. It is true that the written word can possess internal artistic features, but the novel is not about such features—and we surely don’t want to suggest that the novel is only artistic in virtue of such features. Sometimes the moral shape of a novel is the main part of its artistic appeal.[1]

[1] I rattle on about these themes in Ethics, Evil and Fiction and Shakespeare’s Philosophy. I know for a fact that I had covert moral intentions in writing my two novels, Bad Patches and The Space Trap, as well as narrowly artistic intentions. Wilde and Nabokov were stern moralists, if very funny and artistic ones.

Cognitive Closure Generalized

Transcendental naturalism (TN) is the idea that nature naturally transcends our ability naturally to know about it. Ignorance is real and natural—a biological fact.[1] Cognitive closure (CC) is the fact of being cut off from nature cognitively; not all of it, to be sure, but some of it. TN is a metaphysical doctrine; CC is an epistemological doctrine. Nature is transcendent to the degree to which we are cognitively closed to it. Generalizing, any cognitive organism (conscious, sentient) has a cognitive horizon beyond which it cannot reach—a subjective view it cannot transcend. There are limits to what can be cognized. Nature exists whether it can be cognized or not; reality is not beholden to cognition. Thus, we combine metaphysical realism with epistemological modesty: truth and knowledge do not necessarily coincide. Knowledge is part of nature not the whole of it, and this is a natural fact. In this paper I will expand the concept of closure beyond what we might think of as intellectual closure—what we cannot theoretically understand. It will turn out that cognitive closure is the rule not the exception; indeed, it is a law of nature. This will be a taxonomy of mental limitation, or natural transcendence, depending on which way you look at it.

First, I will give a list, eloquent in itself: perceptual closure, sensorimotor closure, attentional closure, memory closure, temporal closure, knowledge closure, linguistic closure, logical closure, mathematical closure, emotional closure. Most of these will be obvious, some perhaps less so. Perceptual closure is just sensory limitation—what we can see, hear, smell, etc. The visual field is limited, the eyes have limited acuity, and they are not in the back of the head. There is only so much of nature the eyes (any eyes) can take in—this is a complete truism. Sensorimotor closure relates to motor skills: we (and animals in general) don’t have every motor skill, as a matter of principle. Skills tend to be species-specific. Don’t jump off a building hoping to fly. Attentional closure is the familiar idea that we can’t attend to everything simultaneously; indeed, attention is sharply limited, severely bounded. This fact limits our cognitive powers considerably. Attention has limitation built into it. Memory is notoriously partial, unstable, and selective; we remember hardly anything of our past. Short term memory is extremely confined and perishable. By temporal closure I mean knowledge of the past and future: there is an awful lot about both that we don’t possess knowledge of. Nor can we ever know everything about past and future facts; here reality vastly exceeds the humanly knowable. Knowledge closure is what the skeptic fastens onto: we just don’t know much, including what we think we know. Skepticism is only too easy to fall into, because it exposes a weakness in the foundations. Linguistic closure concerns sentence comprehension: sentences easily get too long or involved for us to understand, what with iterations, embeddings, and relative clauses. Logical closure pertains to our ability to construct or follow a logical argument: this becomes a strain even when the number of premises and deductions is relatively small, but we quickly become logically incompetent once complexity mounts. Mathematical closure concerns mainly the infinite and unsurveyable: unsolved conjectures, endless decimals, etc. Emotional closure (which I add for completeness) is the fact that our emotional responses are not as elastic and generous as we might wish: often we just cannot summon compassion when we should, or suppress anger, or love our neighbor. We are emotionally circumscribed beings, like other animals. Then there are individual variations of CC on a vast scale: some people are just better at some things than others, as a result of genetics or upbringing—music, mathematics, writing, observing, science, art, etc. We are all educationally closed to some degree, but some of us are more closed than others (some even find philosophy difficult). The intellect is not an infinitely malleable substance or a universal machine—any more than the body is. We all have cognitive biases and no-go areas.

The upshot of all this is that closure is a fact of nature—a natural law, in biological fact. The law is this: every organism has cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Every organism is built not to know some things and to know others. Ignorance is natural and universal. Let’s call this “the law of biological closure”; it’s like the law of natural selection. Natural selection weeds out the good from the bad; the law of biological closure enables some cognition but precludes other cognition. It is epistemically selective. We can now connect this law with three general types of closure: descriptive, analytic, and explanatory—in ascending order of magnitude.[2] By descriptive closure I mean the inability to describe experience: I cannot describe in words what it is like to feel pain or see red or hear bells ring. I can’t convey these things to people who never experience them (and if they did, I wouldn’t need to describe them). I could convey this by making them experience the things in question, but not by uttering a bunch of words. Thus, people say “I have no words”, and they are right: language is limited as a method of communicating knowledge. Language is communicatively closed with respect to subjective experience. By analytic closure I mean the inability to analyze one’s own concepts: it isn’t easy to analyze concepts, and in some cases downright impossible; we just don’t have that much insight into our own conceptual scheme. The concept of knowledge is still refusing to submit to analysis! The concept of the good is remarkably recalcitrant. The concept of beauty eludes us analytically. If we are honest, we recognize that many of our concepts resist (complete] analysis. The concept of a concept itself is remarkably difficult to articulate. The whole business of conceptual analysis is deeply mysterious. Explanatory closure just means the difficulty of explaining things—consciousness, the origin of the universe, the nature of numbers, meaning, the a priori, etc. This is the field covered by the label “mysterianism” (not my coinage). It is one form of CC among many others (the CC family is extensive and various). Cognitive closure is everywhere, with us always, a fact of nature, a biological law.

But what explains it? Suggestions have been made, but they are not very impressive. Is it that everything good has a downside, like the giraffe’s neck? But if that is so, it isn’t obvious in the cases I have listed: it isn’t written into these cases that closure should hold. Knowledge doesn’t entail its own limitations, or else the concept of omniscience would be contradictory (we can’t disprove God’s existence this way). The limitations appear to be contingent. Is it that everything has a nature and so not another nature? Is it that cognition must be bad at some things because by nature it is good at other things? Is it that the eyes are bad at seeing behind you because they are excellent at seeing in front of you? But this lacks self-evidence, to put it mildly: why should being good at knowing some things make you bad at knowing other things? Some animals do have eyes in the back of their head, after all. Or is it that biological resources are scarce, so evolution doesn’t install cognitive capacities that are energy-costly? This strikes me as on the right lines: it isn’t that omniscience is logically impossible; it’s just economically impossible—just too expensive. Animals have the traits they need to survive, physical and mental, not traits that can do absolutely anything—including things that have zero payoff. There don’t seem to be any cases of closure about things it’s vital biologically to know. The closure is all about things it might be nice to know, but evolution doesn’t care about nice. It cares about necessary or needed. Thus, closure is a fact of nature not logic (or meaning or metaphysical necessity). We are cognitively closed de facto not de jure—like other animals.

Lastly, I want to talk about Russell’s so-called Principle of Acquaintance: “Every proposition we understand is composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted”.[3] This is clearly a closure principle: it says that any proposition not meeting the stated condition cannot be understood by us (but may be by others). And it is not difficult to fail to meet this condition: you won’t be able to understand a proposition about red unless you are acquainted with that color. So, blind people will be semantically closed with respect to such a proposition. Indeed, you won’t be able to understand a proposition about a particular person if that proposition contains a logically proper name of that person (you will need a definite description instead). This is actually a strong empiricist principle, limiting all graspable meaning to acquaintance-based knowledge, and threatening to make a great many propositions inaccessible to us. But even if we relax the principle a bit, as Russell does, we still get a rather restrictive result: all understanding requires some kind of direct acquaintance with respect to all constituents of the proposition. The fact that this principle is so restrictive doesn’t strike us as absurd; it merely reflects the truism of cognive closure. Yet we easily forget that we are imprisoned in our own little world—the world of our senses and inherited cognitive structure. The genes that construct our brains are not miracle workers; they are laborers in a stingy biological universe that won’t finance anything exceeding its limited budget. They are not going to buy a Rolls-Royce if a VW will do. We live in a need-to-know world.[4]

[1] See my Problems in Philosophy (1993).

[2] I discuss this further in “Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy”.

[3] See his The Problems of Philosophy (1912).

[4] Of course, qualifications need to be made to this blanket statement, which do nothing to blunt its force. Clearly, we know many things not necessary to our survival, just as we see and feel things not necessary to our survival; but these are inevitable by-products of faculties that do serve our survival (the same thing is true of other animals). However, there are other areas of potential knowledge that are closed off biologically because they are not by-products of useful faculties. These have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The general point is that knowledge exists because it is useful, like other evolved traits; it doesn’t exist because it would be nice to have it. Solving philosophical and scientific problems is not part of the biological agenda.

Universal Prescriptivism

It used to be held that there are two types of speech act: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive speech acts state facts; prescriptive speech acts recommend acts. The fact-act dichotomy underlies the description-prescription dichotomy. I think this is completely wrong: there is no such thing as a descriptive speech act in the intended sense, and all speech acts are prescriptive. There are prescriptive facts but no facts prescribed (as opposed to acts). The reason there are no descriptive speech acts is that there are no purely fact-stating speech acts: no one merely states a fact, as it were into thin air; an assertion of fact is an act designed to secure a certain audience-directed result. Assertions are communicative not solitary. The aim of assertion is belief creation or knowledge transmission: one states a fact in order to secure that result. It is like a request to believe or a belief recommendation: “Please believe that p”.[1] We need not accept that belief-formation is an intentional act in order to accept this, but it is a kind of quasi-voluntary transition. The illocutionary force of assertion is captured by “Please believe me when I say that p”. We could also paraphrase it as “You should know that p”. You are not just giving voice to a fact but causing belief in that fact in your audience. That is the whole point of the speech act. Thus, the act is prescriptive. Certainly, you can describe something to someone, but your purpose is to instill a belief or item of knowledge; it isn’t purely an exercise in one’s descriptive abilities. What would be the point of that? It isn’t as if facts need you to state them in order to be facts. You aren’t talking to them! If you went round simply stating facts, people would think you insane, not someone with a secure grasp of the practice of assertion.

Thus, it is not distinctive of moral speech acts that they are prescriptive. They may well prescribe bodily acts as well as mental acts, but they don’t differ from assertions in point of their prescriptiveness. The prescription not to steal is a prescription just like the prescription to believe that it’s raining outside; it merely prescribes a different kind of thing. The language-game is always prescriptive; moral recommendations are just a subclass. Questions are requests for information: the speaker is urging the audience to supply a certain piece of information, i.e., prescribing that action. All communicative speech aims for a response of some sort. One speaks to someone in order to secure a certain end concerning that person. In a sense, all communicative speech is pragmatic and social. Prescription is the common factor—not truth-stating or fact-representing. So, speech is not about expressing one’s thoughts in a solipsistic manner; and moral speech is likewise not expressive in the sense typically intended. One is not expressing emotion in a social vacuum; one is recommending something to someone. Often it takes the form of a proscription: Do not steal! That is, the negation of a recommendation. It may be said that one is expressing oneself to someone in order to secure a certain result, but the idea of solitary self-expression is alien to speech as we know it. One may express moral contempt or disgust about something to someone, but not in order to bring about personal nirvana or for artistic purposes. In a sense all speech is normative or evaluative: it would be right to do such-and-such (morally, epistemically). You ought to believe that it’s raining outside and you ought to avoid treading on people’s toes—that sort of thing. No speech is norm-neutral.

There is a kind of use-mention confusion running through these discussions: we should be able to read the linguistic off the metaphysical and vice versa. If there is a metaphysical distinction between facts and values, that should be reflected in the taxonomy of speech acts; so, the speech act can give us a clue to the metaphysics. There should be a principled semantic dichotomy between factual discourse and moral discourse. But this is not true: the world is one thing, language is another. Language has its own nature and purpose; it isn’t a faint copy of reality. Nor is human action somehow isomorphic with the world. All speech is prescriptive because of human purposes, not because its subject matter is somehow objectively prescriptive. Indeed, that is a kind of category mistake—a confusion of words and things. Prescriptivism is not a type of metaphysics but a contribution to anthropology—the anthropology of language. If you want to find out about facts and values, you need to look at the world not at language use.[2]

[1] The Beatles: “Believe me when I tell you, I’ll never do you no harm”.

[2] I don’t like the traditional distinction between facts and values, because it suggests that values are not facts (whatever they are). I prefer to speak of facts of value and facts of non-value. We don’t seem to have a term for the latter kind of facts, so we get horrors like “descriptive facts” and “genuine facts”. It is the non-value facts that seem suspiciously indefinable; the category is probably spurious.

Body Mentalism

We are all too familiar with attempts to describe the mind in terms of the body, the better to integrate the two. Behaviorism and materialism spring to mind (in both senses). These attempts are seldom if ever convincing, at first glance or after many glances. They seem to put the mind where it is not. But we never hear about the converse procedure: describing the body in terms of the mind. Is it possible, and what would it show? We might think of this as reductive mentalism—reducing the physical (bodily) to the mental. What would it look like? A behaviorist view of the mind would say that seeing is what eyes do; a mentalist view of the eyes would say they are the organs of seeing. The bodily behavior corresponding to seeing is eye-centered; the mental process corresponding to using the eyes is seeing. Definitionally, seeing is eye behavior, or eyes are the organs of seeing. In these definitions we ignore the intrinsic properties of the defined thing in favor of its extrinsic relational properties: we don’t refer to the phenomenological properties of seeing, and we don’t refer to the physical properties of the eyes. The eyes and seeing are clearly connected, so we exploit this connection to give a reductive definition: seeing is what the eyes do, and the eyes are what is used to see. The inner becomes the outer and the outer becomes the inner. Hey presto, we have a reduction. Occam is a happy man. Pushing further, we can give a similar treatment to the other sense organs: the ears are the organs of hearing, the nose of smelling, the mouth of tasting (etc.), the skin of feeling. We could replace, in a spirit of reduction, our familiar terms for sense organs with these contrived mentalistic definitions: the ears are the organ of hearing, the nose the organ of smelling, etc. If we are very scrupulous, we can stipulate that the word “organ” doesn’t mean “organ of the body” as a physical thing, but rather whatever plays the right role vis-à-vis the mind. We call this word topic-neutral. We have thus mentalized the sense organs of the body. We have re-conceived the body as the embodiment of mind, where “embodiment” is understood neutrally as “whatever realizes the mind” (it could be immaterial).

Following this general pattern, we can move on to the limbs. The hands are defined as organs of desire satisfaction: they serve to relieve hunger, among many other things, all psychological (produce aesthetic pleasure, keep us feeling warm, etc.). The arms are part of this general organ of mental well-being. The legs take us to other places that give us new experiences, or enable us to enjoy a game of football, etc. As for the internal organs, they enable us to live long happy lives, maximize pleasure, be living conscious beings. The body is conceived as the servant of the mind, its ancillary. We think of it from this psychological perspective, which is by no means unnatural—though somewhat exclusionary corporeally. But isn’t this precisely what troubles us about the converse attempt at reduction? The mind no doubt is connected to behavior, but it isn’t just behavior—it has its own intrinsic nature. We can re-describe each in terms of the other and succeed in referring to the thing in question, but the exercise strikes us as ignoring what is essential—the materiality of the body and the mentality of the mind. The same trick can be performed with respect to the brain and the mind: we can describe the brain as “the organ of the mind” and C-fire firing as “the correlate of pain”—we don’t haveto describe them by their usual names. The pre-frontal cortex can be described as “the place where thought takes place” and not fail to refer to the corresponding part of the brain. Thus, we can mentalize the brain; we might even venture to claim that we have reduced the brain to the mind—and certainly we have subtracted a lot from the brain by this maneuver (“reduced” it). Similarly, we can describe the mind by the brain, as in “the mental state realized by C-fiber firing”, and again the feeling is that we have missed the essence of pain. We have referred to pain, but not as pain. A simple verbal trick has been converted into a metaphysical vision, all too easily. The truth is that such re-descriptions are just that: they establish precisely nothing of metaphysical (ontological) significance. In effect, they misinterpret correlation (causal or not) as constitution. When you feel pain, C-fibers fire in your brain, and when C-fibers fire in your brain you feel pain, and we can describe one by reference to the other—so what?[1]

[1] The same reasoning applies to functionalism, as elementary reflection will reveal. I have never heard of anyone trying to define the body by the mind in the way described, and it must surely strike us as bizarre. Why is describing the mind in terms of the body any better?