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On Reading Scruton: Art, Truth, and Temperament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2019
Abstract
Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our presence there the only thing that is demanded of us is a passion for representation. In other places our passions are conditional and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, rules and regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her brilliant standard floats the need for apologies and exonerations is over; there it is enough simply that we please or that we are pleased. There, the tree is judged only by its fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to pluck them.1
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019
Footnotes
1
Henry James, Portraits of Places, Macmillan & Co, 1883, p. 68.
References
2 Art and Imagination, London: Methuen, 1974, Chapter 16, p. 249.
3 Wollheim's principle is given a good critical discussion in Budd, Malcolm, Aesthetic Essays, Chapter 3, ‘The Acquaintance Principle’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See Scruton, Art and Imagination, Chapter 5, for a sensitive exploration of the function of propositional form. The gap in question is one that I once christened Frege's abyss, and much of my own work in ethics has been preoccupied with crossing it.
5 In one of the few papers that have really tied sympathy to a quasi-realist approach to aesthetics, Robert Hopkins, although generously recognizing the attractions of the approach, eventually sees it as failing to do justice to Wollheim's principle. This paper is in part an answer to his doubts. Indeed my own view is just the reverse: the emphasis on an affect-laden perception couples nicely with a ‘quasi-realist’ account of the role of aesthetic predications. It makes what truth there is in the principle of acquaintance explicable and at the same time frees the predications at which we arrive from being so closely tied to experience as to fail to be publicly transmissible. See Hopkins, R. (2001), ‘Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgment’ European Journal of Philosophy, 9: 166–189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 A potential complication comes from music. Great conductors have been known to say that they get more pleasure from reading a score and imagining it played in their mind's ear, than they do from actual performance. Perhaps similarly a super-programmer could get the same pleasure from imagining the picture that a gigabyte of code might denote, as he could get from seeing it. But such abilities are far from normal, and for the purpose of this discussion we can confine ourselves to what is normal. In these extraordinary cases the pleasures are still aesthetic, in that the exceptional imagination is conjuring a work to which the subject is responding rather as she would to sensory input.
7 A further question would be whether Wollheim was entirely right about the contrast with morality. Certainly there are cases in which we can be told what was awful about someone's behaviour, in a way that we cannot be told what is magical about Titian's portrait, or Op. 132. But then there are other cases, as situationists in ethics insist, where it takes acquaintance. You may have to live with a couple for a while to understand just what is so awful about their relationship, just as you have to be acquainted with someone's demeanour and ways of behaving to find him rebarbative. It can take Henry James much of The Portrait of a Lady to make us feel just how creepy Osmond is.
8 Given that literary criticism is similarly open ended one might need to accept that the words of a poem or a novel can also be worth more than a thousand words.
9 Although James wrote of himself that he ‘incurs the stigma of labouring uncannily for a certain fulness of truth—truth diffused, distributed and, as it were, atmospheric’ The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard Blackmur, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947, p. 154. I agree with Frege. James indeed gives an atmosphere of there being more to be said, hidden layers of complexity, but he does not thereby locate further truths.
10 Bird watchers actually have a word for the incommunicable aspect of experience that enables them to make fine discriminations. They say that a candidate has the jizz of one species or another, meaning the something-I-know-not-what in perception that marks the difference. I owe the example to Mynott, Jeremy, Birdscapes, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 55Google Scholar.
11 Tellingly, just the same qualities need to belong to the creator. The flowers of art only grow in deep soil.
12 A similar constructivism across the board wrongly leads to coherentist notions of truth.
13 Wiggins, David, ‘A Neglected Position?’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. Haldane, John & Wright, Crispin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 331Google Scholar. As Wiggins saw it is completely foreign to Hume's approach, here and elsewhere, to think of him as trying to provide a “truth condition” for a description of the value(s) in a work of art in terms of the responses of any identifiable group of people.
14 Art and Imagination, p. 247
15 Leavis, F. R., ‘Imagery and Movement’ in A Selection from Scrutiny, v. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 243Google Scholar. The final sestet, he tells us, ‘adds saccharine to syrup and makes the sonnet positively distasteful’. An equally convincing essay, ‘Reality and Sincerity’ follows immediately in the same anthology.
16 Cézanne is reported as saying of fruits ‘they love having their portraits done. They sit there are if demanding pardon for changing colour. They come to you in all their perfume, speaking of the fields they have left, the rain that nourished them, the sunsets they have seen’.
17 Nietzsche, himself a considerable musician, laments that ‘the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe…’. The Case of Wagner, trs. Anthony Ludovici, Edinbugh, T. N. Foulis 1911, 1st Postscript, p. 39.
18 Henry James, Portraits of Places, p. 69.
19 Or, in connection with the examples in his following paper, ‘Reality and Sincerity’, imagine someone who preferred the noble but theatrical declamations of Emily Bronte to the sincere expression of loss in Thomas Hardy.
20 James, Henry Partial Portraits, London: Macmillan, 2011, pp. 395–6Google Scholar.
21 Art and Imagination, p. 243.
22 This was Laurence Nemirow's reaction to Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment. See Nemirow, ‘Physicalism and the Cognitive role of Acquaintance’ in William G. Lycan, ed, Mind and Cognition, Blackwell, 1990.
23 See, for instance, Wellek, René, ‘Henry James's Literary Theory and Criticism’ American Literature, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Nov., 1958), pp. 293–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24 Henry James, The Art of the Novel, p. 155.
25 James, Henry, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ in Henry James: Literary Criticism: European Writers and their Prefaces, ed. Edel, Leon (Library of America, 1984), p. 115Google Scholar. I owe the reference to Adrian Poole.