Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
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Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS |
Anna
Bergqvist
Sibley and Defeasible
Reasons: Holism in Aesthetics and the Theory of Aesthetic
Evaluation
In this paper, I outline
a new reading of Sibley’s conception of prima facie reasons in
aesthetic
evaluations,
which he outlines in his article, ‘General Criteria and Reasons in
Aesthetics’.1 Sibley seems to think
that there are general defeasible or prima facie
aesthetic
reasons
because he maintains that there are general features or criteria whose
aesthetic
value-polarity
is inherently positive or negative when taken in isolation from
other
features with
which they may interact.2 So there is some excuse for approaching
Sibley’s
position in
terms of Rossian intuitionism. Nevertheless, I argue that Sibley’s
overall
discussion of aesthetic
reasoning and aesthetic evaluation is more akin to a
version
of moderate
particularism that employs the notion of a default reason rather
than
that
of a prima facie
one, a view that has recently been defended by Jonathan Dancy.3
The
leading thought in
my new approach to Sibley is that he would do better to abandon
the
notion of inherent
or prima facie aesthetic polarity of an art work’s
features (and
hence
to aesthetic
evaluations) because this conception is at odds with his discussion of
the
way the actual aesthetic
polarity of a work’s features is contextually determined, that
is,
dependent on what
other features are present or absent in the context of the particular
work.
To
lay the groundwork
for my interpretation of Sibley’s remarks about general aesthetic
criteria,
and, in
particular how the resulting picture would relate to Rossian
intuitionism
and
to Dancyan
particularism, it will be crucial to introduce the distinction between
holism
and atomism in
the theory of reasons. This contrast underwrites the version of
particularism
that Dancy
defends in his most recent book 4, but this metaphysical resource
was
not available to
Sibley at the time. This consideration furthers my claim to be
providing
a new reading
of Sibley, because it highlights an aspect of moderate
particularism
that is
not often discussed in the literature about particularism in aesthetics.
The
particularist
commitment to holism (as identified above) implies that the
applicability
of a given
concept F at the contributory level can bear positively on the
applicability
of G in
one context and negatively in another, in a way that cannot be
captured
in a rule or
principle, whether explicit or implicit, and no matter how sensitively
done.5
The immediate
consequence of Dancy’s moderate particularism with regard to the
epistemology
of
aesthetic judgement is this. Unless one knows the relevant sorts of
difference
that the presence of humour or dramatic intensity can make to how
one
should
act
as an art critic,
that is, how one should judge their relative aesthetic contribution to
the
artwork
as a whole, you
are not competent with the relevant concept. For, in order to
make
adequate aesthetic
evaluations in a situation where the concepts of humour and
dramatic
intensity
apply, one must understand the sorts of ways their presence can
function
as an aesthetic
reason in favour or against the work as a whole. I think one may
take
Sibley to endorse
such a position, and I will argue for this claim.
Finally,
I should stress
that this understanding of Sibley goes against John Bender’s
influential
interpretation6. The motivation for Bender’s reading of Sibley is to
‘negotiate’
or
reconcile the claims
of particularism with the generalist claim that aesthetic reasons
have
a general force and
applicability. Bender’s solution is to avoid construing prima
facie reasons
in terms of
inherent polarity in favour of regarding them as general
defeasible
criteria
that, as he puts it, ‘function to express the general tendencies of
certain
aesthetic
properties or
features to contribute or detract in various degrees for the overall
value
of artworks that
possess their instances’.7 The contextualist or particularist aspect
of
this position, in
turn, is incorporated in the notion of defeasibility; prima facie
aesthetic
reasons are
always defeasible for it is always possible that they may holistically
interact
with other
features of the artwork in way such that the ‘general tendencies of
prima
facie merit and
defect’ are undermined or overridden.8 I argue that
this
interpretation
is
unsustainable because it goes against the distinctively holistic argument
against
Beardsley’s
atomistic conception of general (primary) aesthetic criteria in terms
of
complexity,
consistency and unity that Sibley puts forward in the article. To
make this
explicit,
I provide a
critical analysis of Sibley’s the difference between, on the one hand,
overall
evaluative judgements
of things such as butcher’s knives where the relevant
evaluative
criteria of
merit are independent of each other and, on the other, overall
evaluative
judgements of
what are sometimes called ‘organic wholes’ (which, for Sibley,
includes
art-works)
where the relevant evaluative criteria are interacting.
1 Sibley, F. (2001):
‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’, in Benson, J., Redfern,
B. &
Roxbee
Cox, J. (eds.) Approach
to Aesthetics – Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics by
Frank Sibley (
2
Sibley , F. (2001),
especially p. 105.
3
Dancy, J. (2004): Ethics
Without Principles (
Particularist’s
Progress’, in Little, M. and Hooker, B. (eds.), Moral Particularism
(
4
Dancy, J. (2004), pp.
73-74.
5
Dancy, J. (2004), p.
106.
6
Bender, J. (1995):
‘General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluations: The
Particularist/Generalist
Dispute’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 53,
no. 4,
pp.
379-392.
7 Bender, J.
(1995), p. 388.
8 Bender, J.
(1995), p. 388.