8 - A matter of meaning it

Summary

I

It is not surprising that Professors Beardsley and Margolis found what I had to say about modern art and modern philosophy obscure and, I take it, unsympathetic; I tried, in the opening section of my remarks, to give reasons why these subjects are liable to obscurity and unattractiveness—as it were, to make this fact itself a subject of philosophy. (In perhaps the way Hume suggests, in the Introduction to his Dialogues on Natural Religion, that the subject to follow is characterized by alternating obscurity and obviousness.) It is therefore the more surprising that they find me clear enough to agree in several points of interpretation and in one or two major proposals. (1) Both take it as a central motive of my paper to rule out certain developments within recent music as genuine art. (2) Both object to my insistence on the word “fraudulence,” wishing some more neutral description. (3) Accepting the fact that objects of modern art create a problem for aesthetics, but taking the nature of that problem as known, each suggests an alternate line of solution, and in each case the solution is one which is, and is explicitly said to be, philosophically familiar: Beardsley's solution is to define a notion of art (i.e., music) broad enough to include the problematic objects; Margolis’ is to regard the problem as another instance of “borderline cases” and therefore to require the discovery of criteria for the “propriety” of treating the new music as art. (4) Both suggest that an obvious notion of organization or coherence will supply the (or a) determining ground for including objects under the new classification.