Category: philosophy

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (2)

I left off in the last post on Danto’s book wondering just what to make of his identifying the essence of art as the material embodiment of a meaning to be communicated from artist to audience. Just what that meaning is (how an audience is supposed to grasp it) is radically context-dependent in Danto, which explains the historicism that exists side by side with his essentialism. (See my previous post, where I quote the passage on page 95 where Danto explains how he is both an essentialist and a historicist.)

Starting with the essentialist part, Danto is (as I read him) substituting an emphasis on “meaning” for any attempt to describe the material features that reveal a thing as a work of art. “Modernism,” he tells us “came to an end . . . when it became imperative to quit a materialist aesthetics in favor of an aesthetics of meaning” (77). The difference “between works of art and mere real objects could no longer be articulated in visual terms” (77).

Quoting a long passage here will provide Danto’s understanding of 1) how his essentialism and historicism co-exist and 2) how he believes art works are to be recognized as instances of art. (He doesn’t use the word “recognize,” but I think its Hegelian echo appropriate for understanding his position.)

Here’s Danto:

The difference, philosophically, between . . . Dickie and myself is not that I was an essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the art world in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions form being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth I felt that according the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The experts really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something is a star. They saw that these works had meanings which their indiscernible counterparts lacked, and they saw as well the way these works embodied those meanings. These were works simply made for the end of art inasmuch as there was very little to them in terms of sensuous presentation, and a sufficient degree of what Hegel terms ‘judgment’ to license the admittedly somewhat reckless claim I sometimes made that art had nearly turned into philosophy.

There is a further consideration bearing on the institutional account, and which has played a considerable role in my thinking about art, namely, that an object precisely (or precisely enough) like one accorded the status of artwork in 1965 could not have been accorded that status in 1865 or 1765. The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed—it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history, which is part of what Wofflin may be taken to have implied in saying, ‘Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development.’ History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and again with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical dimension of art. . . . [B]oth content and means of presentation are themselves historical concepts, though the faculty of the mind to which they answer is not perception but, once again, ‘judgment.’ (195-96, my italics).

As I complained in my last post, the “essence” seems vapid, an empty container into which the historical contents (the actual meaning and the means of its presentation) are poured. Especially since humans have multiple ways of conferring and communicating meanings, many of which ways we don’t call art and all of which arguably require “judgment” in order to be interpreted and understood. But this passage clarifies why Danto wants to be an essentialist. He wants to avoid “arbitrary” judgments and seems to think only essentialism offers such a guarantee. The historical conditions prevailing at any given moment are not enough since, obviously, such conditions can and do change. But whether such changes are “arbitrary” (surely Hegel wouldn’t find them so) and whether the fact of their existence means chaos reigns is debatable, to say the least.

But I want to focus here on the conditions that would trigger or underwrite the “judgment” that something is a work of art. The search is for what Wittgenstein would term the “criteria.” Danto it seems to me offers three candidates for those conditions.

The first is context. Here Danto goes very far in Wittgenstein’s direction, even as he tells us that his essentialism means he stands “resolutely against the Wittgensteinian tides of the time” (194). However, he embraces Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” when he comes to fleshing out what he means by context.

Here’s Danto:

The expression ‘form of life’ of course comes from Wittgenstein: he said, ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’ But the same thing must be said about art: to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role. . . . I want heavily to stress a philosophical point about forms of life: a form of life is something lived and not merely known about. For art to play a role in a form of life, there has to be a fairly complex system of meanings in which it does so, and belonging to another form of life means that one can grasp the meaning of works of art from an earlier form only by reconstituting as much of the relevant system of meanings as we are able. One can without question imitate the work and the style of the work of an earlier period. What one cannot do is live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life. Our relationship to it is altogether external, unless and until we can find a way of fitting it into our form of life. (pp. 202-203).

Not only is this position radically historicist, but we get here context on steroids. The ‘judgment’ that allows us to grasp a work’s meaning is utterly dependent on a “complex” set of background assumptions and understandings. And this complex set is not something known, but something “lived.” Meaning emanates like mist from a swamp—a swamp that is the murky (never fully cognized) water we live in.

For me, this kind of historicist rendering of “form of life” (with its hint that one form of life is incommensurable with all others) pushes me toward nominalism rather than essentialism, especially when it comes to cultural (as distinct from biological) phenomenon. If a work is to be understood as “art” in relation to the “role” it plays in a form of life, then it seems to follow that different forms of life will call something “art” in relation to different criteria. (Danto would not dispute this point; he just doesn’t think it undermines essentialism.) So, for example, (following Walter Benjamin here), things are produced for and embedded in ritual practices in certain cultures, but then cross over into being thought “art” when abstracted from their original context of production and use to be placed in a Western museum. In such cases, the effort seems less to reconstitute the system of meanings in which the object once had a role than to identify some features of “beauty” that can float free of context altogether. It is a sign of our times that such abstraction from context is now frowned upon and museums displaying such objects nowadays at least gesture toward indicating the original context.

Additionally, accepting this understanding of the holistic determinism wielded by “form of life” commits one (I think) to Wittgenstein’s insistence on “meaning as use”. Danto’s reference to the “role” a work plays points in that direction. A work’s meaning is revealed by the “use” to which it is put within a form of life. So an object being used in a ritual has a different meaning than an object placed on a museum wall. That, again, seems to me to point in a nominalist direction. The same painting displayed in a museum or displayed on the wall of the billionaire’s mansion communicates different meanings. The “essential” fact that it communicates a meaning, that it is put to some use, seems incapable of constraining its radical shape-shifting.

Although he touches on it only lightly in After the End of Art, Danto’s second criteria for art has been “the transfiguration of the commonplace.” Think here of James Joyce—and transubstantiation. What the artist does is take the ordinary (a Brillo box; life in dull, dreary Dublin) and transform it (like the priest turns wine and bread into the godhead) by some magical derring-do. Art transforms the mundane into the sacred. It reveals the divine that lurks within even the most neglected, even despised, items of everyday life. Danto (to my knowledge; I haven’t read all his work by a long shot) does not indulge himself in such transports. And what gives Joyce his dizzying edge is how we are left uncertain as to whether he celebrates such priestly powers in his art or mocks the pretension of artists to possess such power. Is Joyce stealing for the artist religion’s power, or telling us the artist has no such power–and religion never really had that power either? It’s delusion–and disillusion–all the way down.

But to return to nominalism. (Again, perhaps Danto goes in this direction in his book on the transfiguration of the commonplace.) It seems to me the transfiguration effect is very dependent on the conditions of display. In other words, the aesthetic is a bounded sphere. Its actual boundaries at any given moment are a matter of social convention. But an object is transformed into an art work when it is moved into that sphere. Once in that sphere, the object’s possible uses (to go back to meaning as use) are also changed. You don’t put steel wool pads into Warhol’s Brillo Box even if you can. And that box is in a gallery or a museum not a grocery store. Different social conventions apply in these different spaces. Danto’s historicist point is not just that different social spheres co-exist at one time, but the same physical spaces mean very different things at different historical moments. Going to visit Santa Croce in Florence in 2025 to view the Giotto frescoes is vastly different from being in the same church in 1515.

That the boundaries and significances of various social spheres are thus susceptible to change explains much of the point of Brillo Box—and of many of the avant-garde practices from 1890 to the present. The aim is to reconfigure the space that is “art.” In some cases, as in much of avant-garde practice, the goal is to eliminate the distinction between art and other spheres (often just designated generally and vaguely as “life”) altogether. Collapsing the distinction will lead, in the most utopian visions, to a glorious transformation (for the better) of life itself. The end of art will liberate art and its users from the constraints of art’s being limited to a bounded sphere. Everything that leads us to cherish art can be brought into every moment of our lives.

A more limited ambition is to expand what gains admission to the sphere of art. That seems to me a better way of understanding Warhol. His is a protest against the exclusions that define “high art.” He is thumbing his nose at such snobbery—in a sly, ironic, and close to cynical way no doubt. It’s all a species of joke, aimed at deflating the Arnoldian “high seriousness” of the gatekeepers of culture. That a philosopher like Danto then writes volumes of philosophy spurred on by the Brillo Box can look like one of the high serious ones taking the bait. His inability to see the joke becomes a new addition to the joke.

In any case, the notion of display, and of a bounded sphere in which the art works resides and is thus recognized as an art work), points to an institutional or conventional understanding of “art.” Danto in Chapter Ten of After the End of Art has shrewd things to say about museums—and certainly understands the crisis they face under attacks about their elitism, their gate-keeping role, and their extraction of works (often stolen outright) from their original contexts. It is striking, however, how long this crisis has lasted (well nigh upon fifty years now) with no resolution. Well meaning (and sometimes well executed) efforts at “public art” aside, the effort to displace the museum as the primary site of display have not gained much traction, partly because no feasible alternative has been found, and partly because our billionaire art collectors are in love with the museum as the suitable site to display their Verblenian grandeur.

Danto’s third criteria is narrative. He seems to understand the necessity of narrative in two different ways, one fairly parochial, the other very wide-ranging. The parochial sense is easily stated. It is, Danto insists, impossible to judge the significance of Warhol’s Brillo Box unless you know how it is in conversation with abstract expressionism. In other words, to state Danto’s point in Bahktin’s idiom, every utterance is a response to a prior utterance. Words—and works of art—are not created ex nihilo, and they do not stand on their own. Danto here fully agrees with various theoretical attacks on the notion of autonomy, on the false belief that anything can stand on its own two feet, disconnected from others, from context, from institutions, from (in short) history. Hence truly understanding something means locating it within the narrative of which it is part. Most museum visitors, in Danto’s view, have no idea of what they are looking at because they lack the relevant knowledge. They don’t know the narrative.

This more specialist knowledge, however, yields to a more global claim about knowledge. Here’s the version of that large claim in relation to museum visitors. This “is knowledge of a different order altogether than art appreciation of the sort transmitted by docents, or by art historians, or by the art education curriculum. And it has little to do with learning to paint or sculpt. The experiences belong to philosophy and to religion, to the vehicles through which the meaning of life is transmitted to people in their dimension as human beings. And as this point I return to Adam Verver’s [a character in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl] conception of the thirsting millions. What they thirst for, in my view, what we all thirst for, is meaning: the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing, or philosophy, or finally art—these being, in the tremendous vision of Hegel, the three (there are only three) moments of what he terms Absolute Spirit. I think it was the perception of artworks as fulcrums of meaning that inspired the templelike architecture of the great museums of [Henry] James’s time, and it was their affinity with religion and philosophy that was sensed as conveying knowledge. That is, art was construed as a fount rather than merely an object of knowledge” (pp. 187-88).

Although this passage mentions neither “narrative” nor “form of life,” I understand it in relation to those two concepts. Meaning for Danto, as we have already seen, only arises within the context of a form of life. And I take it that a “form of life” (given Danto’s historicist leanings) is neither static, nor of a single moment. It is dynamic and constituted (at least partially) by its history, by the unfolding of multiple relations over time. In the exalted passage just quoted, art becomes a concentrated focal point, a resonant embodiment, of a form of life’s possible meanings. The art work becomes a “fount” when it grants us insight, provides an opportunity to grasp meanings previously hidden. Art is a means for a Hegelian coming to consciousness, even to self consciousness.

I will end by saying I am deeply attracted to such an exalted view of art. Certainly, I am very inclined to see art works as instances of communication. And often what the artist wants to communicate is a fairly (or even unfairly) grandiose vision of how a form of life hangs together (or fails to hang together)—as well as a vision of how a life can be lived ethically and meaningfully within a form of life. Explaining the hold that art has over us who are addicted to it as related to the insights it affords makes sense to me.

Except. There is also another feature of the experience of art works that seems separate from, albeit not necessarily antagonistic to, a focus on the communication of meaning. That feature is the more mystical sense of participation in some fundamental, hard to describe (hence mystical) communion with forces (energies) greater than the self. Rather than providing access to meanings, there is what Nietzsche saw as the Dionysian collapse of meanings and of the self offered in ecstatic states that art provokes. Danto’s neglect of that side of art goes hand in hand with his rejection of the material, of the sensuous. His is a very intellectual understanding of art, one that drains it of some elemental powers that cannot be easily captured by or reduced to philosophy.

Perhaps it is possible to mute the mysticism of the prior paragraph by returning to Danto’s insistence that a form of life is something lived not merely know about p. 203, quoted above). If that is the case, and if art works provide a focal point for experiencing a form of life, then an emphasis on what knowledge the art work conveys somehow misses the point. Such an emphasis sustains too great a distance between art work and audience. What we want to capture is the immersion in the work that is the experience of encountering it, not some nugget of insight we extract from it. New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase” is not just about trying to convey the art work’s meaning in terms different from those of the work itself, but also about standing apart from a work instead of leaping into it, which may be a way of saying one has prioritized “judgment” over experience.

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art

I have recently finished reading Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997).

What follows are some fairly non-systematic reactions. There will be a second post on Danto that follows up on this one.

For starters, the title is odd since Danto strongly distinguishes art from aesthetics, and his thesis (it seems to me) is that art after modernism is still art but has jettisoned the aesthetics. That is, we haven’t seen the end of art, but the end of aesthetics. Or perhaps more accurately, the severance of art from aesthetics. Thus he writes: “art before and after the ‘era of art’ shows that the connection between art and aesthetics is a matter of historical contingency and not part of the essence of art” (25).

This all suggest a very de-materialized notion of art’s essence. He is very clear that art after modernism can no longer be distinguished by its visual “look” or by any other sensuous quality. Modernism “came to an end when philosophy was separated from style because the true form of question ‘What is Art?’ emerged . That took place roughly around 1964. Once it was determined that a philosophical definition of art entails no stylistic imperative whatever, so that anything can be a work of art, we enter what I am terming the post-historical period” (46-47, my italics). “Greenberg believed that art alone and unaided presents itself to the eye as art, when one of the great lessons of art in recent times is that this cannot be so, that artworks and real things cannot be told apart from visual inspection alone” (71).

Strange that he wants to talk of a “post-historical” period since he is very Hegelian in the belief that certain ideas can only arise and certain questions can only be asked at specific historical moments. Unless he is saying (super-Hegelian if he is) that reaching the historical moment when the question of what is art can be asked in its “true form” means history has come to a close. There will be no further progress, no future paradigm shift (Danto invokes Kuhn several times). Art will now only and always be pondering the question of “what is art?” Really?

Danto does seem to accept that one can practice aesthetics and thus sidestep being an artist who concentrates on the philosophical question. [See p 33 and its discussion of impressionist painting as “aesthetically pleasing,” a source of “immediate enjoyment” that is separate from (innocent of) any “philosophical theory.”] At this point, Danto seems to favor asceticism over aestheticism, coming across as a stern philosophy master who has no truck with mere “enjoyment.” But he does, begrudgingly, admit that one can apprehend art, even “post-historical art,” apart from any engagement with the philosophical questions that animate his relation to art works. “It is always possible to learn to respond sensitively and with discrimination to works nothing in one’s experience especially prepared one for. For someone whose interaction with art is of this order, a theory about the end of art makes no sense at all: one continues adjusting and responding to whatever comes along without benefit of theory” (56). The tone of this passage is very difficult to describe—and priceless as well as comic.

In any case, to move away from art’s sensuous qualities facilitates a move toward something non-material. We need, Danto says, “a general theory of quality” (95). And then immediately thereafter, we get his most explicit statement of what he wants a philosophy of art to achieve: “As an essentialist in philosophy, I am committed to the view that art is eternally the same—that there are conditions necessary and sufficient for something to be an art work, regardless of time and place. I do not see how one can do philosophy of art—or philosophy period—without to this extent being an essentialist. But as an historicist I am also committed to the view that what is a work of art at one time cannot be one at another, and in particular that there is a history, enacted through the history of art, in which the essence of art—the necessary and sufficient conditions—are painfully brought to consciousness” (95)

So much to unpack here. But to be schematic. 1) Note the word “painfully.” What kind of pain are we talking about here?

2) If something can be an art work in 1965 that could not have been an art work in 1765, then what kind of “essence” are we talking about? A version of historical or cultural relativism seems much more likely. In fact, Danto will go on to invoke the Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” (see 202-203).

3) So why the fervent attachment to essentialism? Why is “philosophy period” undercut if one does not believe there are entities (concepts? practices? truths?) that are “eternally the same”? Wittgnestein, for one, was trying to cure philosophy of this (to him fruitless) search for eternal verities.

4) Finally, there is the commitment to a kind of Hegelian progress. History has a direction and leads to a clarification of some idea, follows a path toward bringing that idea to consciousness. A pretty dubious assumption—and one that requires a rigorous pruning of the canon, so that one can tell a story about how Giotto leads to Massachio and so on down to Van Gogh yielding Pollock. Works that don’t easily fit into this narrative are sidelined, they are not part of the “mainstream.” Since, as we will see in my second post, Danto is strongly committed to pluralism of practice in “post-historical art” and also adamant that “narrative” plays a crucial (dare I say “essential”) role in our understanding of art works, why not entertain the idea of multiple different narratives co-existing at any historical moment. Why think there is only the one grand Hegelian narrative leading “painfully” to be sure but apparently inexorably to a destined end?

It seems that the “essence” Danto finally offers us is one centered on “meaning.” Here Danto once again leans heavily on Hegel. “[A]s Hegel puts it in speaking of the work of art, ‘It is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit.’”(97-98). To which Danto immediately adds: “And that is true of Morris as of Warhol, of Pollock as of Mondrian, of Hals as of Vermeer” (98).

Danto elucidates: “Hegel speaks of intellectual judgment of ‘(i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation.’ Criticism needs nothing further. It needs to identify both meaning and mode of presentation, or what I term “embodiment” on the thesis that artworks are embodied meanings” (98, my italics).

It really does seem that that’s it. The essence of art is that it is embodied meaning. There are several consequences of this “thesis.” For starters, it brings the material back in. Meaning may not be visual, but it is also not fully spiritual. It has a physical presence in the world, at least in works of art. We might very well wonder, however, if it is possible to speak of meaning, especially of a meaning that is communicated, apart from some kind of physical embodiment. And that raises the question of what is distinctive about art all over again. Because if embodied meaning is the focus, language itself qualifies. Words spoken and/or written are embodied meanings.

From my perspective, Danto’s discussion of meaning and of art’s communicative aim is way too passive. He is not interested in what works do, what motivates a person’s desire to communicate, and what means they use toward that end. That’s partly unfair since Danto is in fact a truly gifted commentator on individual works of art. But my comment is meant to illustrate how general—and to that extent, in my view, vapid—his identified “essence” is. Knowing the “essence” does very little to contribute to the work of understanding. And surely understanding is the goal of communicative acts. The speaker wants to be understood; the auditor wants to understand.

To be told that an act of communication is taking place and that it uses material means to gets its message across does very little, it seems to me, to advance the work of understanding. It does, as Danto tells us, lead us to focus on just what material means the person chose to employ. So we would want to know why this means, rather than that. Why painting instead of words? Why abstract painting rather than mimetic? Beyond that interest in means, the work of interpretation still needs to unfold. Yes, it may help to know that here we are dealing with a work of art rather than a medical report, but concentrating on what makes it a work of art is separate from considering what the artist is using art to convey. And if the artist is using art to consider what makes something art or not, well and good. That’s one thing to be thinking and communicating about. But surely it would get tiresome rather quickly if all art were devoted to navel gazing about what art is, what’s its true or essential nature is. That seems like contemplating the essence of love as opposed to the practice of living out love, with all its joys and difficulties, in a relationship with another person. Which is to say that Danto, even as he considers art as a communicative act, rarely talks as if the practice of art is a two-way street, one in which an audience is a crucial as a producer.

The Strong Programme: Issues of Method and Advocacy in Presenting Intellectual and Political Positions

This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/

In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought. Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms. With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers. Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc. Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?

I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing. I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages. Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me. Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.

On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace. (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project.

But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview. What about it resonates with them? We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question. Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color. All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class? Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards? Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty?

All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden. Fair enough. He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets.

His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s). Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent. In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false. Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine. So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme

And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea. (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).

“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one). The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on. Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .

[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true? Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?) Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe). That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”

The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.

I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry. And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology. I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.

The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views. Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense. She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents. It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.

Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project. The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis. I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups. I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university. But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.

Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.” That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)

Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation. 1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work. However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally. Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19^th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche). So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude. I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases. So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal. I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.

2) In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now). But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of. And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere. All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.

3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work. The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question. The first person was strictly absent. I was not evaluating this writer’s views. I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been. All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field.

I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project. But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to. One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring. The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while. Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it. So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest. I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible. I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.

4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.” My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms. To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21^st century America fall short of the ideal.

In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word. I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work. So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal. I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty). I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position. Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point. But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say. Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”

OK. So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat. I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.

Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain? Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs. The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations. So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.

But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them? Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be? In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies). But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse). Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at. Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking? In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted. The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism. Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)

Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation. As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid. But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions. Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc. This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in. So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology. In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.

Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views. Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences. To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs. But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit. In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering. I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy. So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?

Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/

The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups. Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be. Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.” And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality. That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to. Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified.

My point is that recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic. Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability. Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism. His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect. He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing. As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it.

Life as No One Knows It

Sara Imari Walker is a physicist, (or more properly, an astrophysicist, or even more properly, an astrobiologist since she is looking for “life” in the universe) who has written a book to introduce “assembly theory” to a wider public: Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead Books, 2024). I was drawn to read it because a superficial notice about it in the New Yorker suggested that her positions aligned to some degree with the issues I tangled with in my two recent posts on “Consciousness and Life.” (Links: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/ and

https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/13/consciousness-and-life-response-and-clarification/).

Reading the book showed that those links were not all that substantial. But Walker does declare outright that “to this day . . . we cannot derive life from the known laws of physics, even if we are pretty sure it must be consistent with them” (21). Hence, she shares my view that physics as the science of matter cannot account for life—which leads us to biology, or biochemistry, as the appropriate sciences if we want to get a handle on life.

Interestingly, because “life” stumps physics, there are various physicists who claim life does not exist: since “modern science has taught us that life is not a property of matter” (6), the very category of life is a mistake, “not a natural kind” (22), but a figment of human thought that doesn’t map onto the way the world really is. The parallel with those who declare consciousness an “illusion” is fairly direct. Faced with something we can’t account for within our current scientific paradigms, some just insist those unaccounted-for somethings are not real.

Walker, instead, thinks the available paradigms are insufficient, not that the data (the fact that life exists) should be discounted. Her book is going to introduce the “new paradigm” she and her colleagues are attempting to put into place. That paradigm is called “Assembly theory.”

Before diving into that theory, I must applaud Walker’s quick, but sharp, dismissal of panpsychism. She describes the panpsychist position succinctly: “perhaps consciousness is fundamental, and therefore all matter is conscious” (40). Her dismissal is just as succinct: “an easy way to kill two hard problems [i.e. the nature of matter and the nature of consciousness] with one stone is to make the unexplained thing fundamental” (41-2). Moving the counters around is not a solution (or explanation), but just a way to duck the problem.

So what does “an explanation” look like? “[B]etter explanations are those that explain more observations, change surprising facts into a matter of course, yield accurate predictions of what one should and should not observe, are falsifiable, rest on relatively few assumptions, and are hard to vary such that changing the details dramatically changes the predictions” (152). It doesn’t help that Walker uses the word “explain” in this definition. What does it mean to “explain more observations”? Usually, I dare say the notion of “explain” is linked to some designation of the causal processes that bring the observed thing into existence. And that does seem to be what “assembly theory” attempts to do. I will get to that. In the meantime, we can register Walker’s assertion that “scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts are driven by new explanations, not necessarily new evidence” (152). The observables are there already (in some cases), we just lack a good explanation of them. Such, Walker argues, is the case for “life.” But we should note that, in other cases, there are new observables because new technologies of perception (microscopes, telescopes etc.) bring new objects into view.

Walker’s approach is not to ask “what life is,” but to ask “what life can do”? And that approach starts from consciousness. “Here we are not measuring whether something has experience (what consciousness is), but instead whether something that has experience can do different things because it has an internal world (what consciousness does)” (45). “Does anything in the universe exist that might not be possible if subjective inner worlds did not exist?” (45). The syntax is tortured here, but the question is whether there are existing things that could not exist if consciousness did not exist. Walker’s answer to this question is a resounding Yes. Everything in the built world—cities, technologies, books—depends on humans imagining those things first (in some kind of embodied thought space) and then doing the work of constructing them. “Some things that exist are imagined through abstraction (are counterfactual) and become physical (made actual) through a phenomenon deeply connected to what we call consciousness. It is not that all matter is conscious, but that consciousness is potentially a window into the mechanism for bringing specific configurations of matter into existence across time. If this conjecture is true, consciousness creates the possibility for things to exist that otherwise couldn’t because they did not exist in the past” (47-8). “The key feature is the ability to imagine or represent things that do not exist, such that the act of imagination becomes causal to the existence of some objects” (73).

Construction is, as its name suggests, central to assembly theory. What Walker wants to locate in the universe is causal power (my term, not hers), or to be more Promethean about it, creative power. Basically, she is going to make the same claim about “life” that she makes about consciousness. “Life is the only thing in the universe that can make objects that are composed of many, unique, recursively constructed parts” (90). The word “many” is crucial to this description of life. There are simple objects in the universe, ones that are “prebiotic” (her term); that is, they existed before the emergence of life—and, in some cases, still exist in their simple a-biotic (my term) way. These a-biotic objects are not “life” because they do not possess the capacity to generate new objects. Also, they are generally not complex. Living objects contain many parts. (It seems, although I am not sure I understood this correctly, that Walker tells us that only objects that are comprised of at least 15 different biochemical components cross the threshold over into “life.”)

Walker begins from a variant of a traditional philosophical conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing? Her variant is: why does the universe contain these specific objects instead of the many other possible objects that do not exist? Why possible in this posing of the question? Because there are molecular combinations that do not exist even though they, according to the laws of physics, could exist. In fact, humans have managed to create some of these non-existants in the lab. Humans have added to what nature produced on its own. So there are more possible objects than actually existing ones.

So: what caused some objects to come into existence and others not? The causal mechanism Walker turns to is no surprise: evolution and selection. Evolution here is doing its usual work, producing random variations over time as organisms reproduce. Coming into existence takes place over long stretches of time. It is not clear to me how radically Walker wants to upset the idea that all the matter that ever existed or will ever exist was present from the very start. But she does want to insist that “time” is an intrinsic component of (living?) matter, not just the stage upon which matter does its thing. (My “living” with the question mark indicates I am not sure if she is saying “time” is an intrinsic property of all matter, or only of living matter. I am clear that she does divide matter into that which has life and that which does not.) In any case, evolution over time means the emergence of new forms of matter, including forms we would designate as “living.” Life is not there from the beginning, but emerges somewhere down the line. But what emerges as evolution unfolds sets up a variety of constraints; some possible objects become very improbable, close to impossible, once evolution produces a different group of possible objects. The chain of causes is pretty determinative (even if there is always some randomness in reproduction).

Evolution, thus, produces variants (but within fairly predictable ranges once things are fairly launched), just as it does in modern-day (i.e. genetically informed) Darwinian theory. More novel is Walker’s understanding of “selection.” Assembly theory asserts that objects that are “alive” are too complex to simply emerge as products of random genetic mutations, or through any other random physical process. “Some objects require information—an algorithm—to make them. These objects will never spontaneously form and must always be constructed via selection and evolution. . . . All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute ‘life’” (146). “Complex objects, such as molecules, can come into existence only if there is something that can build them reliably, whether it is a cell, an environment, or an intelligent agent. These objects require an algorithmic process to assemble them. Assembly theory considers the algorithm to be an intrinsic property of the object, rather than a feature of the machine that outputs it” (143). [Sidenote: Walker does seem to reproduce the very error she mocks the panpsychists for making; she takes the causal mechanisms she needs, namely time and the informational algorithm, and make them “intrinsic” to matter.]

Selection, then, is made by the algorithm that informs (quite literally) the reproduction of the object—or, maybe it is better to say the persistence of the object over time. It is not the individual who possesses life so much as it is the “lineage” of information that causes the continuity of life forms over time. This shift in locus can be illustrated even in the case of the individual human being. “Over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself—what persists in the informational pattern over time, not the matter (at least not in the traditional sense of the word ‘matter’). . . The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time” (150).

Life is a process—a process of regeneration where the information to bring new forms into existence (or to continually reproduce existing forms that substitute in for prior ones) plays the role of selection. Without that information’s causal power, no life. It is clear that, in Walker’s view, information is necessary to the existence of life, is, in fact, the distinctive “marker” of life. But whether information is also sufficient to the existence of life is less clear. Presumably, there is physical “stuff,” the “objects” she keeps talking about. Information, it would seem, needs to be embodied. There has to be “matter” for information to be “intrinsic” to. I don’t think Walker would deny this. She wants to retain all the laws of current-day physics; she just wants to supplement its accounts of matter and causation with this addition of information as a causal agent embedded in matter. She is not such a complete “process theorist” as to deny any “objectivity” to objects (as William James and Alfred Whitehead at times approach doing.) Or if she is that radical a process theorist, her continual (unexamined) talk of “objects” (possible and existing) undermines that radicalism. Life in her view, it is clear, is a continual making and unmaking, but some of the made things have a relatively stable existence for at least some duration.

In sum, the basic innovation of assembly theory, its supplement to contemporary physics, is the claim that information is causal—and that we cannot explain life without seeing information as its basic cause. There are secondary innovations about how “life” designates complex objects that are “assembled” out of earlier existing objects which embody the information required to construct the new forms. That view opens up vistas of novelty and creativity a more straight-jacketed physics might deny. As usual, the precise biochemistry of information’s creativity is not specified—just as the neural correlates of consciousness continue to elude researchers. Like panpsychism, assembly theory works to animate matter, to introduce principles of motion within matter that do not reduce to the laws of gravity, acceleration, and entropy found in standard physics.

I have left out of my account, Walker’s interest in finding out if life exists in worlds (planets) other than Earth. That’s her astrobiology hat. I will confess to having little interest in that question. Life here on earth is more (in fact, too much!) than enough for me. But to offer a quick and dirty summary of her position (especially since it explains the title of her book, which from my summary of it thus far would be utterly mysterious): since the emergence of life on this planet followed a determinant path set out by the earliest moves in the game, there is no reason to believe that life outside Earth would follow a similar path. Thus, looking for “signatures” of life on Mars (or anywhere else), such as water or oxygen or amino acids, is the wrong way to go. Life on other planets might very well have developed from completely different material bases. The key is informationally driven reproductive processes, not specific molecules or elements. So “life” elsewhere might differ radically from “life as we know it.”

How does Walker’s book—and assembly theory more generally—jive with the questions I raised about consciousness and life? Certainly, I have to appreciate someone who is a real scientist asserting that physics does not have a way of addressing the concept (the fact) of living beings. And Walker, as well, must be counted among the thinkers who is trying to advance new accounts of causation, ones that supplement (at least; perhaps they supplant) traditional mechanistic understandings of cause. Which reinforces my sense (derived from a number of writers) that Darwinian theory does not align with mechanistic (“efficient” in Aristotle’s terms) models of causation–and thus calls for other ways of understanding causation. I also think Walker’s focus on what life and consciousness do (their observable effects) as contrasted to worrying about what they are seems a fruitful and sensible way to proceed. Finally, although she never explicitly says so, I think Walker would agree that consciousness is a feature of “living matter,” not of all matter–and that addressing the puzzle of what life is and does is prior to understanding the nature of consciousness. Understanding life is the best way to make progress in understanding consciousness.