Category: philosophy

Further Thoughts on AI

This post is based on some conversations I have been having with friends, plus reading things written by child psychologist Alison Gopnik and listening to her interview with Timothy. Links to the relevant Gopnik materials at the end of the post. More generally, my thoughts on AI are deeply influenced by Henry Farrell and his ongoing discussion of it on his substack blog Programmable Mutter.

It’s easy to see why the whole AI question is obsessing all the philosophers because it opens all the big questions. It all seems connected—agency, individuality, other minds, consciousness, reason and reasoning, learning, novelty (creativity)—the whole enchilada. Figuring out what AI is doing—and what is can and cannot do—challenges us to have coherent notions of consciousness, agency, reason, and all the rest. And we, in fact, don’t really have coherent concepts of those biggies. But thinking about them from the specific angle of AI might actually help bring conceptual clarity. At least that’s one hope—what we might call the meta-hope in all the conversation around AI.

I have just about finished The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik [The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life; Picador, 2010] and find it somewhat useful in trying to think about some of these things. So, to just address one issue: when it comes to Gopnik’s views on AI, the argument is about learning as contrasted to brute force. Or maybe more accurately, how learning is different when brute force is the path taken instead of the experimental method Gopnik ascribes to babies. AI needs huge data centers because it learns by crunching its way through all the data as its way to a conclusion about what is the most probable “correct” prediction. This is the basic Bayesian model that is thought to underlie both a human’s predictions and a computer’s. It’s just that the computer reaches its prediction by a different path. Humans can’t access such massive amounts of data, so need to make inferences from a smaller sample.

Gopnik believes all babies are good Bayesians. That is, babies assess a situation in terms of expectations formed from what has been learned in prior experiences. They then revise their expectations in light of new information—or because this new situation has not disrupted (in some way) their expectation. One key point is that expectations (predictions) are probabilistic; the baby has a hypothesis about what is most likely to happen. But the baby may also have some notions of less likely (but still possible) outcomes. It’s not all or nothing; it’s about what is likely to happen, not what must or necessarily will happen. The current vogue for considering how minds process their relation to the world as Bayesian processing fits with 1) the current received wisdom that perception and cognition are active predictions of external states, not passive receptions of those states and 2) the salience of algorithms, that is, a conception of thinking as mathematical. Bayesian predictions are statistical (literally so for large language model AI) and intuitively so for human processors. Here’s Wikipedia’s pocket definition of Bayesian inference (leaving out the fairly complicated math that comes with a fully statistical account of Bayesian reasoning: Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes’ theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available.

Of course, from where I stand, all this looks very Peircean to me. Doubt generates inquiry when the expected outcome of a situation fails to materialize. We update predictions in light of non-confirming experiences, developing new theories or hypotheses or expectations, after a process of inquiry. And those new theories are fallible because only probable—and thus will also be revised the next time we encounter non-confirming evidence. Necessity is downgraded. There are not scientific laws, only probabilities, even if some predictions are more stable than others. Ideally, persons are open to non-confirming evidence, which is how learning occurs and more supple expectations are formed. In reality, various forms of closed-mindedness (conformation bias etc.) means expectation/hypothesis revision is less frequent than circumstances would warrant.

Presumably, however, the computer (like the child) can learn something when its prediction proves false. That experience leads to a revision of one’s picture of the world, of one’s expectations. And that revision doesn’t seem, either in principle or in fact, different for the computer than it is for the child. The feedback loop works the same in both cases. The only differences are 1) the sample size and 2) maybe something about how the data is “felt” or “processed.” In Peirce, the upsetting of expectation generates doubt, which is an uneasy feeling, one we try to dispel through our process of inquiry. Presumably, the computer is not experiencing doubt. It’s drive to find the most plausible explanation or next step derives from other sources.

But Gopnik is saying (see her conversation with Timothy) that the computer is still not “reasoning.” The feedback it receives is just more data—and is taken to be authoritative, at least until another iteration justifies another revision. This is the puzzle. What is the nature of “reasoning” that makes it different from revising one’s views based on feedback offered by the data. The answer seems to be something like “assessment” or “judgment,” which then gets connected to “logic.” But trying to build an AI that works by being “logical” didn’t pan out. A computer cannot get to predictions that way; it needs the brute force method. (Or, at least, up to now brute force has proved much more successful than logic for AI.)

The attempt to base AI on logic occurred in the 1980s and 1990s when “cognitive science” tried to uncover the laws of thought and the laws of language use. Chomsky’s project was central If Chomsky could identify the fundamental grammar from which all languages were generated, then the computer that was given those fundamental structures would be able to talk. Similarly, if the basic elements of logic were correctly identified, a computer with those elements installed would be able to think. That project proved a failure. No program that successfully produced thought or speech was developed. Current AI works by brute force; it surveys a massive number of instances and then “guesses” (via Bayesian inference) what the most probable response (next step) would be.

Human judgment, human reasoning, is notoriously fallible. And despite computer hallucinations, AI is, in many instances and in many ways, less fallible than humans. So it’s not clear what hinges on insisting on a difference between reasoning and brute force. Two ways to skin the cat—and it is far from clear that reasoning is the better way to do the job.

Furthermore (and this was Timothy’s argument in his conversation with Gopnik), it is at least debatable to claim AI does no reasoning. This is where the novelty point comes in. The cultural technology people (the multi-authored essay cited below) are saying AI is only capable of giving us new combinations of the archive; AI produces mash-ups. Sophisticated mash-ups sensitive to context, audience, persona etc., but mash-ups just the same. But Timothy says that’s just not true. Give AI certain mathematical problems and it produces novel solutions, ones that no human mathematician has ever come up with, and those solutions prove, to the best of expert human opinion, correct. So the machine is doing something beyond mash-up—even though we don’t know how it is doing that something more. So that’s one thing that has people intrigued, worried, puzzled. Something’s going on and we don’t know what it is.

I think once you grant that AI has the ability to produce novelty, the cat is out of the bag. Arendt’s definition of agency is precisely the “introduction of something new into the world.” Traditionally, that notion of agency is connected with consciousness. A person thinks of (or imagines) something and then acts to make it come into being. In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik seems to be on both sides of this traditional view. On the one hand, her emphasis on “counterfactuals” absolutely fits the traditional model of imagining alternatives in thought and then acting on one of them. For Gopnik, the very ability to act is based on being able to imagine multiple possible scenarios, to think not only of what is, but also of what might be. And she identifies such counterfactual thinking as present very early in babies (as early as nine months). But, on the other hand, when she gets to her chapter on consciousness, she is skeptical that our phenomenological experience of consciousness is an accurate picture of what is actually transpiring. “In experiences of executive control, we often feel sure we are making a rational choice when, in fact, we are in the grip of some irrational unconscious bias. And in all of these cases we experience a homunculus, the inner observer, biographer, and decider that we know just can’t exist. . . .The gap between the way the mind functions and the shape of conscious experience is even greater for children than for adults. . . . Consciousness isn’t a transparent and lucid Cartesian stream. Instead it’s a turbulent, muddy mess” (161, 163).

It would seem, then, that human actions (creative productions of novelty or even simple effective procedures of daily activities like cooking food; activities that require adjustments in response to current conditions as we go along ) are as mysterious as the “black box” of generative AI. In both instances, we do not have a good account of novelty. In the human case, we fall back on notions of intuition, genius, unconsciousness, adaptation—or to material, bio-chemical processes that we say must be doing the job even though we still don’t know how those processes actually work, actually produce their magic.

I’ve got plenty more to say about all these topics. But I am going to finish up today with just one more issue. Individuality. An account of action seems to cry out for a complimentary account of “an agent.” Not only what happens in the world, but who has made it happen. Which then opens up the questions of motivation (why did the agent want to make that happen?) and of effectiveness (was the action successful?; was it based on a good enough assessment of what the context afforded or on a grievously fallacious misreading of the context?). And also the old Aristotelean question of the interrelation of action and character. Does one’s actions shape one’s character or does one’s character determine what actions one finds desirable to undertake?

A quick aside on action. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that any theory of action must take into account how the agent interacts with (has to negotiate) three different spheres (for lack of a better term): the material external world; the people among whom she dwells; and internal desires, moods, emotions, thoughts, fantasies, physical capabilities and/or their lack. Just how those relations are established and played out by a machine as contrasted to a human has to be part of the larger puzzle in trying to characterize AI. For example, what does it do to our conception of action if we have an agent (the computer) to which we ascribe no internal sphere (no thoughts, emotions, desires etc.)

Since, so far, most people want to resist anthropomorphizing our machines (i.e. to deny that they have “characters” and certainly to deny them individuality—which would mean my computer’s character was different from your computer’s), we now have a disconnect between action and agent. The computer acts, but it isn’t an agent. I think the general speculation is tangling with this dilemma. People like Gopnik want to deny that the computer acts. That way they can preserve their conviction that the computer is not an agent. Some AI enthusiasts will go the other direction. The computer acts and it is an agent. And then those in the middle are agnostic for the moment, trying to figure it out.

All of which might just be a way to say that the AI debates are reproducing fairly faithfully the consciousness debates. After all, much of the consciousness debate (not all of it, but much of it) is about agency. What is the source of human action? And does consciousness have any role to play in the production of action? The positions taken on these questions range all the way from saying consciousness has no role to saying that consciousness is the determining factor. But there are lots of people in the middle who hedge their bets, saying consciousness is one factor among others.

So maybe what this means is that the AI debate is misguided from the start because contaminated by the debate/puzzles about human action. Maybe we need a whole new paradigm to think productively about what machines are doing. To stop comparing them to humans; to stop worrying whether they act or think like humans. We need a whole new set of terms and questions. Which would mean a way of thinking the non-human or the un-human. An uncanniness that does not, in the long run, reference home. That takes up its abode in an absolutely foreign place.

Bibliography:

Gopnik’s web site can be found at https://alisongopnik.com/ You can access all her various essays and interviews from that site (although not the text of The Philosophical Baby).

Here’s a link to her conversation with Timothy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIFdeXPB1Pg

And a link to the cultural technologies essay: https://alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/science.adt9819.pdf

Henry Farrell’s blog is on Substack, called Programmable Mutter, and is free to all: https://www.programmablemutter.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

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.