Serious Larks: The Philosophy of Ted Cohen 9780226511436

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s e r iou s l arks

Serious Larks the phi lo s oph y of

Ted Cohen Edited and with an introduction by

Daniel Her witz

t h e u n i v e r s i t y of c h icag o pre ss c h ic ag o a n d lon don

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­5 1112-­2 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­5 1126-­9 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­5 1143-­6 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226511436.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cohen, Ted, author. | Herwitz, Daniel Alan, 1955– editor, writer of introduction. Title: Serious larks : the philosophy of Ted Cohen / edited and with an introduction by Daniel Herwitz. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017032679 | ISBN 9780226511122 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511269 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511436 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, American. | Popular culture—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B945.C641 H47 2018 | DDC 191—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032679 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

North by Northwest: The Face of America  1 Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy  14 Notes on Metaphor  27 What’s Special about Photography?  49 Sports and Art  66 Clay for Contemplation  85 There Are No Ties at First Base  93 A Driving Examination  105 Objects of Appreciation  115 And What If  They Don’t Laugh?  142 Liking What’s Good: Why Should We?  153 Language Games  168 Ethics Class  169 Kings and Salesmen  175 One Way to Think about Popular Art  185 Caring 194 The Idea of Absolute Gin  201 Playing by the Rules  211 Freedom from Rules  220 Acknowledgments 231 Index 233

Introduction Dani e l H erwit z

Ted Cohen was chair of the Department of Philosophy when I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1977 as a graduate student. The first time I met him, he gave me an extended lecture on the problem of penile frostbite and how it affects joggers in the Chicago winter. A dazzling array of riffs followed over the next thirty-­ seven years, a number of which became the essays of this volume. Each of these essays began in conversation, and they retain that Socratic freshness in their essayistic forms here. The subject matter of Cohen’s riffs included which university gyms have stained-­glass windows, why Americans enjoy fast food, the way the lapels of an Italian suit should be tailored, the reasons why Poles are so funny and Dubrovnik is so beautiful, the nature of the beautiful and why Hegel was a million miles from understanding it, how being a Cubs baseball fan is an exercise in altruism, whether one has a moral duty to visit Auschwitz, America’s ambivalence toward Europe and how this is expressed in Hollywood movies, and why if he were the czar of Russia he would be richer than the czar of Russia, which is my favorite of the millions of jokes I learned from Ted Cohen. Two Jews from Odessa are talking and one says to the other, “If I were the czar of Russia I would be richer than the czar of  Russia.” “That’s impossible,” says the other. “It’s ridiculous. If you were the czar of Russia you would be the czar of Russia, ergo you would be exactly as rich as he is because you would be he.” vii

“Oh no,” the man says. “So how would you be richer, Mr. Big Shot?” “It’s very simple. I’d give Hebrew lessons on the side.” Cohen was a master at inflecting philosophical ideas through deftly discussed ordinary examples (here the issue is what makes this joke so funny, so philosophical, and, most important, something called a joke at all). He wrote about Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s monument to America (that essay begins this volume and is in many ways its masterpiece). Cohen was fascinated by the use of razors in that film and how the tiny razor that Cary Grant (a.k.a. Roger Thornhill) uses to shave after he exits the night train in Chicago magnifies the size of his face, preparing its merger with the monumental faces of the presidents cut from the granite of Mount Rushmore, on which a vertiginous chase scene takes place at the end of the film. Cohen said that for Hitchcock, a Brit, America’s vast spaces appear either too crowded or too empty and share with cinema the astonishment and anxiety of the larger-­than-­life. And yet the film is about Hitchcock’s becoming at home in America, becoming an American. Cohen also wrote a wonderful short story about driving, which featured his grandfather Max, and another about an old philosophy professor’s encounter with a know-­it-­all student, casting the old professor as an unblemished version of himself. (These stories are also included here.) Cohen grew up in a tiny Illinois town with the unlikely name of Hume (no known relation to David). Everyone played basketball. He was athletic but quite a bit less than the required six foot four. And he was brainy, and Jewish, although in such a place he hardly knew what that meant and would spend a good bit of the rest of his life in the discovery of it. The aloneness made him a lifelong joiner, wonderful in James Joyce or Torah study groups, president of the Quadrangle Club and the Temple, eager to share experiences with people in whatever currency. His philosophical writing shares this temperament; it is often peppered with “What would you think?,” “How would you decide?,” and other conversational techniques to include the reader, as if that reader were sitting across from him

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in a café or visiting him in his office. He abhorred condescension toward ordinary people and celebrated ordinary life for its inventiveness. Some of his finest ideas were about the ways prosaic uses of language in jokes and metaphors turn out to have the crystallized power of works of art, being superlatively imaginative, cultivating intimacy, refining and deepening emotion and recognition, allowing one person to take up the world of another. Then there was the wit. I once had occasion to mention the old adage that it takes all kinds. He said, “I don’t know if it takes all kinds but there certainly are all kinds.” To Nietzsche’s famous remark that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” Cohen replied, “Apparently Nietzsche was not thinking about being shot in the stomach or the knees.” Ted Cohen never lost his boyish enthusiasm for the wide world, even if he brought a grown-­up’s ironic twist to it. He felt if you study the world with a bemused, humane, honest attentiveness, you can find something to philosophize about more or less anywhere: in reading the newspaper, drinking your morning coffee, wandering the malls of southern California or the bazaars of Istanbul. He was rewarded by places like truck stops across this country’s continental divide and its small towns and “second cities,” parts of Eastern Europe few venture to visit, obscure parts of Oxfordshire and the New Zealand shire: he would return filled with anecdotes, bursting with new ideas. These things are not peripheral to the charm, power, and proclamation of freedom central to the essays in this volume, nor to what is philosophically unique in them. Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist, someone who, like Stanley Cavell (his teacher and an important source of inspiration), reflected deeply on what it meant to have studied in Emerson Hall (at Harvard University) and sought to become someone in the spirit of that great thinker of the new, with more than a little midwestern Mark Twain adding spice to his projects. I refer to the Emerson who, delivering the graduating address to the students of Harvard in 1837, some fifty years after American independence,

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stated in boldface that there were as yet no American scholars—­ the project of America, its newness, requiring the invention of new forms of thinking adequate to its state of becoming. This announcement of what is now called American exceptionalism was not without its defects. I believe these are defects central to all settler societies, which are uniformly plagued by xenophobia, deriving from their breakaway from the European host country about which they are so ambivalent, not to mention from their projects of asserting the destiny of conquest over land and peoples within. They are loath to learn from others (even today, America seldom studies how Canada, its neighbor to the north, and Europe have gotten health care right, believing it has to invent everything for itself, which is a sign of its omnipotent and self-­righteous superiority). And there is the tendency toward communalism: if you are not one of us you cannot understand us, and this is because we are so different from you, a belief that has been used to justify American slavery, the place of the Afrikaner in the South African apartheid state, and Israel’s brutal “security” policies. Today exceptionalism is the object of much criticism, some of the knee-­jerk variety, but Cohen understood that there is also something profoundly right about the Emersonian vision, a vision demanding of philosophy that it participate in the invention of character, culture, the soul of a place and people—­a vision that William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey took very seriously, along with Emerson’s “student” Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ted Cohen. Cohen begins his essay on North by Northwest with these words: If one could be an American philosopher—­if that were a kind of thing to be—­then one would have to be an American. What would that be? That is a very hard thing to say, perhaps an impossible thing to know; but the first part of an answer is the discovery of something it cannot be to be an American. It is a marvelous and possibly painful irony that this discovery, which seemingly must be accomplished over and over again in every time, in our time was made and presented by an Englishman. It was a discovery of Alfred Hitchcock’s

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[and screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s, also an immigrant], and it is presented in North by Northwest. North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s complete discovery of America and his revelation that he has become an American.

The film is about an advertising man, Roger Thornhill (a.k.a. Cary Grant), from the Madison Avenue of the 1950s who drinks too much and cannot or will not tell the difference between truth and expedient spin. It spins out his transformation into what Cohen calls an American worthy of the name and identity, which requires Thornhill’s discovery that truth is shattering and absolutely must matter and his (related) assumption of individual agency (freedom). The film monumentalizes him while simultaneously humanizing him, finally merging his face with those American presidents carved into the granite of that mountain (north by northwest of New York City in a place as vast and daunting as the American landscape). This duality, that America, if decent, is or can be or must be both monumental and humane, is so brilliantly crafted in the script of cinema as to make one feel Hitchcock is doing the same for cinema—­Americanizing it. For cinema shares with America a size, scope, and daunting emptiness demanding to be filled in, which is to say fulfilled, according to a similar promissory note. The market has largely taken over American culture, not to mention politics, courtesy of its media forms and corporatizing strategies. Americans have been turned into producers and consumers. This extends to the culture of universities, which resemble huge, corporate, multinational forms as they churn out science, social research, and philosophy according to market-­driven routines, modes of production that in the humanities often go under the name of “theory,” especially in philosophy, which makes a racket of this, allowing an endless stream of PhDs to enter PhD programs and spin out their five cents according to the reigning dollar brand. I exaggerate of course, but not so very much, and this was the America that Ted Cohen’s childhood among farmers, his studies in Emerson Hall, and his own sense and sensibility refused. It is the

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America that, new on the scene of history when Hitchcock made his masterpiece, was the condition to be overcome. And that meant creating a new kind of person, which Cohen believes is the point of the film. The essay was a crucial philosophical form for him, but this also isn’t quite right, because the tenor of his essays is that they read like presentations or talks given to small audiences, which in many cases they were. They actively solicit the input of that actual audience of their presentation, as well as the virtual audience of we the readers. In short, they are really closer to speech than writing (this is not true of his wonderful short stories), and here the model is the great Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin. Austin delivered the lectures subsequently published as How to Do Things with Words at Harvard in 1955, and apparently Stanley Cavell was among the few people in the audience. Cavell claims never to have recovered. Austin ends those lectures with the statement that he has throughout the lectures been doing two things he dislikes, the first being “lecturing.” This code of dislike could be transcribed into any of Cohen’s essays, which eschew the formality of the lecture, much less the polished version of the written text, and instead seek to approximate an intimate seminar gathering or office tutorial (which remains a preferred Oxbridge knowledge-­ producing form also). Austin’s close attention to the features of ordinary language as it is actually in use by speakers serves as a clearinghouse now, as it did then, and with consistently surprising and profound results. These results range from a new way of thinking about linguistic practice in terms of force, effect, and both in relation to the declarative sentence, to amazingly interesting implications for the stability, trust, and fallibility of knowledge as it is actually relied on by speakers and encoded in their beliefs about and knowledge of the meaning and power of words. Austin sought to liberate the study of language in relation to truth and knowledge from the ideology of logical empiricism and logicism, which, to boil things down far beyond what is adequate, were positions that claimed language has truth and knowledge functions only by virtue of its approximation—­messy, inadequate, but close enough to xii  in t roduction

work sometimes—­to idealized logical structures. These structures were concatenations of words that mirrored the structure of the world, allowing correspondence between the two in the right circumstances, and it was a goal of the ideology to specify what the right circumstances were. By the 1950s this ideology was widely challenged, first and foremost by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his rejection of the “picture theory of meaning” in the Philosophical Investigations, but also by antipositivist thinking by W. V. O. Quine, Norwood Russell Hanson, and others in the philosophy of science. Austin was a key player in this palace revolt within the ranks of analytical philosophy, his goal, shared by Wittgenstein, being to understand and limn the ways ordinary speakers of a language know how to use the words they know, and to understand what it is to have such knowledge and trust and acknowledge it under certain circumstances. Austin called this knowing “how to do things with words,” the acknowledgment of which could no longer be encapsulated in the philosophical project of essential definition, a definition that would in Platonic form capture the necessary and sufficient conditions that putatively comprised the building blocks of our metaphysical world, from scientific truth to linguistic assertion to the nature of the self (personal identity) to the world of art and aesthetics, not to mention morals. Rather, as Austin suggests, attention must be paid to what it is we know how to do when we use words like “art” or “beauty” or, in Cohen’s universe, “baseball” or “American,” and to how well we know it, with what degrees of certainty or uncertainty, amenable to what kinds of diversity and unresolved or unresolvable quarrel. This would involve rethinking the very ideas of certainty, trust, authenticity, aesthetics, virtue, the right and the good, and so forth. Equally important for Cohen’s work was a well-­surveyed idea of Wittgenstein’s that to know the meaning of a word is to understand the kind of “tool” it is in the linguistic practices in which the speaker is embedded with others. And this is to be part of what Wittgenstein calls a “form of life.” If meaning is approached through use, it turns out that many words have families of overlapping uses, the word “game” being Wittgenstein’s iconic example, where there are in t roduct ion  xiii

a number of different kinds of games with no essence common to them all—­not even the idea of   “winning,” which pertains to many games but not all, and certainly not all “gaming.” Wittgenstein’s idea is that most if not all words share this overlapping family of uses with the word “game,” hence he speaks of   “languages games.” What then becomes of interest is diversity, the various ways games/ words are interrelated, their overlapping systems of intersection, their synergies between contexts, and their variegated characters. This in turn focuses philosophy on the central role of comparison, something Voltaire has his protagonist Candide proclaim in his first criticism, mild to be sure, of the philosopher Pangloss—­he of the rose-­colored glasses—­when arriving at the best of all possible worlds somewhere in the mountains of Peru. Overwhelmed by the splendor and moral perfection of that place, Candide realizes there is more to life than dreamt of by Pangloss’s philosophy. It shows, he tells his servant Cacambo, that one ought to travel—­meaning broaden the field of comparison. Which exactly puts Cohen in business, since he revels in such connections as thinking about being a baseball fan in the light of issues of altruism and Kantian morality; comparing jokes, metaphors, and works of art so that each is illuminated through the acknowledgment of linkage; and focusing on connections between sports and art along the lines of the importance of  virtuosity. Cohen is a surfer who glides across the divides between high and low, canonical and fresh, refined and popular. And his purpose in doing so is to expose fusty ideology and liberate a deeper acknowledgment of what the objects of alternately adulation and disdain or condescension really have to do with each other, not to mention what the real uses of words like “high,” “low,” “popular,” and the like are. Many of these inherited distinctions are the result of social history and class, of economy, markets, nationalism, and colonialism, which are not—­for better or worse—­part of Cohen’s purview but are very much part of the larger story of what it meant to inherit and use a language, with its accrued and often unconscious terms of inequality. (Derrida of course made a racket out of exposing

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the depths of these inheritances, and Foucault, and Marx, and Nietzsche.) The result of Cohen’s expansions and comparisons were a lot of raised eyebrows from various colleagues. As he puts it in the opening beat of “Objects of Appreciation”: Some of my friends and colleagues, including some who have a good opinion of my philosophical sense and capacities, have wondered about my seriousness, . . . that I have become less philosophical. Those with a deep interest in the history of philosophy had expected more work on Kant’s aesthetics, a monograph on Hume’s marvelous essay on taste. . . . The less historically minded expected a theory of art or a theory of beauty, or perhaps a sketch of the logic of fictional speech acts. . . . But I . . . moved off . . . producing remarks on Hitchcock’s movies, jokes, and baseball. All this has made me dubious in the regard of both philosophers of art and philosophers in general. Many philosophers already regard the philosophy of art as a relatively unserious kind of philosophy, and philosophers of art are apt to suppose that the serious part of their study concerns (1) the understanding of art as a general philosophical problem, and (2) the specific study of the abstract characteristics of painting, literature, and music. When I moved, seemingly, to the periphery of even the philosophy of art, I wandered to the circumference of one of philosophy’s more distant epicycles.

He then shifts to a direct mimicry of the style of  J. L. Austin: 1. I am learning a great deal out here. The air is fresh. The view is not cluttered with moribund theories, and the terrain is not littered with monuments of Great Historical Importance. 2. I would like to ask: Who is being serious and philosophical, and who is not? My critics, friendly and otherwise, are sure that when I collaborated on a paper about Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, I was being more serious and more intellectually respectable than when I wrote a piece on baseball. Why do they think that? What

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makes them so sure? Is it obvious that the paintings of the Spanish Renaissance are more important, culturally and philosophically, than American baseball? I am a philosopher, after all—­at least I have the customary credentials—­and I should like to observe that declaring something obvious is one of the most antiphilosophical maneuvers I am aware of. It is a device that smells bad, like its companion declaration that something is natural. When someone tells us that something is obvious (and therefore true) or natural (and therefore good), if we have any drop of true philosophical blood in us, we will demand a general account, a theory in fact, of obviousness and naturalness. There has to be some non-­question-­begging way of telling the obvious from the unobvious, the natural from the unnatural, besides simply accepting the pronouncement of a self-­appointed judge. I know of no tenable theory along these lines. If the critic has no theory, and he has nothing to rest on except his conviction that this is the way things have always been done, or that these are the things that have always been believed, then he has no claim worthy of a philosophical response.

Nowadays these ideas have become increasingly accepted, but when Cohen wrote, he was early. What does it mean to be early? Emerson was, and Nietzsche, and Charles Sanders Peirce. It means one is opening a new form of thinking where there are not a lot of precedents, much less routines, for how to do it. One is on one’s own, bucking the crowd, trying to get a general picture of the lay of the land rather than refining things already known. Wittgenstein urged his readers to go “back to the rough ground,” which is where Cohen lived: among the truck stops and the card games, the baseball pitches and the television programs, and these in relation to the smoother registers of Renaissance art and symphonic music. In “Objects of Appreciation,” Cohen says, If an American has any birthright at all, it is one that releases him from the need to dance to the tunes of others. I have not said that baseball is more noble than Spanish painting. I have not said that it is as noble. I have not said anything. xvi  in t roduction

He has a reason for harping on Spanish painting, namely that he has written on it, and well, in an essay with Joel Snyder on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, published originally in Critical Inquiry. He knew the extraordinary power of that painting, and yet he asked (as I quoted above), “Is it obvious that the paintings of the Spanish Renaissance are more important, culturally and philosophically, than American baseball?”—­a truly philosophical question. Later, in the essay “Liking What’s Good,” he reinforces this refusal to speak in the traditional voice, as he sees it, of philosophical aesthetics, with its canons of taste and excellence: “By now, whether or not you agree with me, you can see, surely, (1) that I don’t believe in any compelling argument to the effect that one thing is (aesthetically) better than another, and (2) that I don’t believe it possible to show that it is better to like better things. Where does that leave me? You might say, Nowhere, but I prefer to think that I’ve been freed to start again, to try to understand what to make of the communities of people who care for the things they care for.” He isn’t entirely left nowhere because he chooses a different route into questions of taste and value than that given by tradition, with its certainty about rankings and who is capable of doing the ranking. Above all tradition favors Hume, who is sadly not the patron of Cohen’s little town in Illinois (that would be a connection too good to be true), but still the object of lifelong reflection by him. Hume begins from the observation that while people tend to believe taste is an individual and subjective matter, if you study their practices they are ready to lambaste those whose taste seems to them deeply inferior, and moreover they believe strongly in the values of lifelong practice, talent, and genius, which privilege some over others. The question is what this state of privilege amounts to, and Hume says it amounts in rare instances to the “true judge,” the one who has practiced and made comparisons, is blessed with natural subtlety (the ability to detect all the parts of the object) and strong and vibrant sensibility, and is “free of all prejudice,” clearly an ideal state but one to which those rare individuals meaningfully approximate. And Hume believes that over time these worthies tend to reach the same kind of overall consensus and internal correction that judgments in in t roduct ion  xvii

the law achieve—­it’s not perfect but good enough for a standard of taste along the lines of a legal standard. Hume’s idea is clearly elitist because the club of judges is so few, rather like the best men’s clubs in Mayfair where port, cigars, and a great deal of red meat are consumed and conversation flows witty and subtle like fine wine. This club that is meant over time to set the standard of taste would convulse if the terms of comparison were broadened in the manner of Candide to include Peru, baseball, Japanese koto music, township jazz, and a great deal of whatever else occupies the vast diversity of the human race. It would have no way of proceeding. Law can only be formulated within a subscribed community, and there are many. So Cohen thinks, Why not begin with the intersecting strands of similarity and difference between appreciators, or what Kant calls communities of taste, rather than a body corporate? He begins, like so many philosophical essayists (Montaigne and Saint Augustine among them), with himself: I like, he says, Mahler but also baseball and also percussion, I like certain types of jazz, and all this places me in various communities of taste, comprised of persons who might well have nothing to do with one another; I am the middle term between them. Instead of rankings, which are either obvious or absurd or both, the question is reformulated to, What kinds of people care about this or that, what else do they care about, and what does this say about them? It might say they are lousy and racist, or that they are uneducated but subtle, or very American, or very French, or very well-­dressed, and on and on. There is of course no end to the story once its telling is begun, for it invokes the narration of humanity in its various differences. Today it would be called crowdsourcing. So instead of obsessing about what is better than what or why, whose taste represents authority, and the like, the issue becomes the study of people. Cohen once told me that he believed the only metaphysically interesting thing in the world was people. I would add animals, but you see the point. There is something deep in Cohen’s ability to reformulate the terms of discussion. Now John Dewey proposed what might seem a similar thing when following the naturalism of Hume. He said the best way to xviii  in t roduction

understand values or “the valuable” is in terms of what we actually value. This approach inevitably leads to circularity, because if we ask what it is to value some X or why people value X, the reasons they give will involve features of X. It is because X has some Y and Z that I care about it, the remarks will go, where Y and Z are properties or features of X. But you cannot define the value of X in terms of how it’s valued, on pain of circularity. That is, if that is what you want to do (define X in terms of the communities of persons who value it). But Cohen has no such philosophical interest, knowing its history of bankruptcy. He simply wants to establish how human beings form circles of appreciation around ranges of objects and what the vectors and matrices of these communities of appreciators (and depreciators) are, as a way of deepening the sense of difference: of how X differs from Y, and of how much alike they are. The overlapping nature of these communities can reveal both lines of difference and likeness in a way that, before you know it, reformulates the terms of taste across a broad colloquy of humanity, which is quite far from the men’s club. Again, this is more like crowdsourcing than conceptual analysis or definition. What are wanted then are stories of high/low and in between (to borrow the title of a book from Imraan Coovadia, my fine writer friend in South Africa). I think Saul Bellow told stories like this about guys who grew up raunchy in Chicago and remain attached to the grime and grease of their old neighborhoods while pigging out on James Joyce and, as Philip Roth puts it in I Married a Communist, “boxing with Shakespeare.” Cohen is himself a fine storyteller with an uncompromisingly honest view of himself. Read “There Are No Ties at First Base,” a fascinating excursus on rules in the form of personal memoir. It is a little story about a big thing: the failure to share perspective and the solitude that comes from that. A kind of metaphysical story, it is also about the pain of a universe of rules whose tidiness betrays hidden contradiction and about who negotiates that, how, and to what effect. Rules are a central Cohen preoccupation, and a different, more beneficent view of the role of rules in peoples’ lives can be found in t roduct ion  xix

in his story “A Driving Examination,” about his grandfather Max and how, aged and infirm, he manages to “pass” the driving test by virtue of having been a good and well-­intentioned citizen of a very small town. “Don’t worry,” the driving examiner tells Ted Cohen’s father over the phone. “Max will have a license as long as I’m in charge of this office.” Then there is the bitter story about an aging philosophy instructor and a blasé, blustering student, which is a glimpse into fading masculinity and the receding world of age, with significant moral dimension. One could not be more razor-­sharp about oneself. These stories are all part of this volume. Cohen was throughout most of his life what Nietzsche calls “untimely.” He was out of step with much of the profession’s canons of philosophical practice and aspiration while being early to new vistas. Part of the problem of being “early” is that one’s work can seem dated very quickly. Television is no longer an art form or form of communication or entertainment that requires defense as to its seriousness. This is not only because television is now a canonical subject in universities, but also because the medium has evolved since the decades when Cohen wrote about it. Television and film have become much more alike. Television now carries the power of the cinematic and can rightly stand as the heir to the great works of novelists of the eighteenth century—­Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac—­that were sometimes similarly serialized. Some of these novels, like some of current television, were lumbering to the point of being what Henry James derided as “baggy monsters,” but the public loved to follow through their endless threads of life. The television serial does the same, its difference from life being not only that it is fiction, but also that its level of control over the contours of life is of a different order from actual life. The beauty of the medium (to take an older example) is that we know every time we watch I Love Lucy Lucy will fight with Desi, who will be delighted and exasperated by her ability to turn otherwise dull domestic routines (housework, the paying of bills, hosting a dinner party) into the stuff of screwball and silent comedy, a legacy of early television that should not be underestimated. Desi loves her for her zaniness, xx  in t roduction

even if it makes him crazy. Perhaps he likes to be made crazy. The comfort taken in a universe where the contours of plot, and therefore of lives, are predictable and expectations are manageable in a way our own lives cannot ever be is deep, as if courtesy of television our lives were vicariously ordered at the very moment anarchy is released onto the episodic screen, as if television were a distant mirror brought sufficiently close (thanks to the television screen) to allow us to recognize ourselves in this ordered and routinized form. Cohen did not suffer fools gladly. His writing could turn into harangue. But the essays are matched by deep self-­skepticism, full of “I really don’t understand this very well” in a way that is not fatuous but really means it. This is as refreshing as the old and dusty brand “Wisdom philosopher.” My own favorite Hollywood line comes from the film that is the subject of the first essay: North by Northwest. The line comes late in the film. Roger Thornhill has throughout been a pawn in everybody’s game, including and especially that of “the Professor,” an FBI type (“FBI, CIA, we’re all in the same alphabet soup”). The Professor has abandoned Thornhill to his fate, pursued as he is by international spies of a distinctly European variety who believe he is an FBI agent called Kaplan, even though Kaplan does not exist and is the invention of the Professor and his gang to throw these agents off the track of the real agent who is operating “right under their noses.” Challenged by the Professor to cooperate, Thornhill blurts out, “Nobody has to do anything.” In a closely related context the composer John Cage was fond of saying: “Permission granted, but not to do anything you want.” This is how Ted Cohen was as a teacher: permission granted, but not to do anything you want. He never sought to turn his students into clones of himself or to get them busy on various tasks that would make them cooperators in whatever the current philosophical routines were. He strove to allow them to become the persons and thinkers they themselves were or could become, even though they often only glimpsed it. Cohen read into his students more than they read into themselves; certainly this was true for me. His role was to train, to encourage, to set an example through the freedom in t roduct ion  xxi

and clarity of his own work and its range, to listen and to allow separation to happen without seeking to curtail it. And so he guided me in my own becoming. I shall never forget it. In many ways my own writing, both in conception and in range, owes everything to his. But I have my little differences. I am less clever at logic. I am certainly less optimistic about America, and far more political. I’ve lived around the world and have very different cultural interests than he did. Times have changed so rapidly that the world I write about differs from his in ways he only glimpsed at the end of his life. I have my style, which took years to achieve. To which he would only respond, “Bravo.” I imagine him reciting the final words Adam (Spencer Tracy) utters in George Cukor’s film Adam’s Rib (written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon): “Vive la différence!” Actually, these words don’t quite end the movie, for when Adam’s wife Amanda (Katharine Hepburn, a.k.a. Pinkie to his Pinky) inquires what it means, he replies with all the gusto he can muster: “It means hurrah for those little differences.”

xxii  in t roduction

1

North by Northwest: The Face of America If one could be an American philosopher—­if that were a kind of thing to be—­then one would have to be an American. What would that be? That is a very hard thing to say, perhaps an impossible thing to know; but the first part of an answer is the discovery of something it cannot be to be an American. It is a marvelous and possibly painful irony that this discovery, which seemingly must be accomplished over and over again in every time, in our time was made and presented by an Englishman. It was a discovery of Alfred Hitchcock’s, and it is presented in North by Northwest. North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s complete discovery of America and his revelation that he has become an American. As William Rothman suggests, it is Hitchcock’s acknowledgment that he is at home in America.1 That acknowledgment articulates a deep insight into what it must be for any American to find himself at home in America. In particular, it is an understanding that an American is not the same as a European who happens to live in America. If North by Northwest is about Hitchcock himself—­and surely it is exactly that, along with being many other things—­in the movie it is given to the Cary Grant figure (Roger Thornhill) to make the discovery, to accomplish his own citizenship. Along the way Hitchcock will show us this figure taking the false step that nearly every would­be American is tempted to take, and we will see that although it is

1

not clear just what is the right step, this false way will always beckon and seem to be exactly the right way. The figure of Cary Grant and, in particular, its face constitute a visual theme in the movie. During the course of Grant’s adventure this face will be shattered and then remade, and the figure will, fi­ nally, surrender its elegant costume and accept off-­the-­rack goods as all it needs. The American parable I find in the movie is carried in those changes of face and figure, but before I set out that story I will mention two large, bold concerns of the movie, mainly in order to put them aside. The first is the Hamlet connection. That North by Northwest remembers Hamlet, thinks about Hamlet, and competes or at least compares itself with Hamlet is clear as can be, especially after the utterly persuasive documentation given by Stanley Cavell.2 I shall have nothing much to say about the Hamlet connection except to note that as clear as it is that there is this reference, it is not at all clear why Hitchcock makes it. I will make a guess about this, but not until I am nearly finished. The other concern is with the continental movement of the action. Cary Grant moves (roughly) north by northwest, from New York to Chicago to Rapid City, and in this travel he discovers America and therein discovers himself (or—­it would be better to say—­he makes himself ). This journey begins with his flight from the United Nations building, shown in the famous overhead shot. One sense of this shot is clear. Cary Grant is leaving the nations, the established cultures, all that is old and traditional in the world; he is fleeing all that and going elsewhere: he is going to America. He is going to discover America, which is to discover himself; and it is the principal task of this little essay to chart that discovery. This sense of the overhead shot is clear, and it is made even clearer by the camera’s subsequent search for Cary Grant. It looks for him, and finds him, in the main lobby of Grand Central Station, and the opening shot in the terminal immediately shows the immense American flag draped across the left-­hand wall, and when the camera moves down and in to discover Cary Grant in a phone booth, that flag remains visible, framed in the glass window of the booth. 2  chap te r 1

But what about the overhead shot at the United Nations, the shot of the start of Cary Grant’s exodus? It has become one of the best-­known shots in American movies, but from the start it was an extraordinarily striking shot. It is bright and beautiful, somehow representational and abstract at once—­reminiscent of de Chirico—­ and it seizes the visual concentration of the audience because Cary Grant’s figure is barely visible, a tiny speck moving through an intricate composition. However much any audience may concentrate on any particular shot in this movie or any movie, every viewer will concentrate on this shot. And as the schematic sense of the shot becomes clear, it is tempting to take it as a compass and to suppose that it is plotting the movie’s course, which is to say the course of Cary Grant’s subsequent movement. But the Cary Grant figure is not moving north by northwest; it is moving roughly south by southwest. Why? I have a guess about this, too, which I will also defer, noting here only that in this gesture Hitchcock is referring to himself, partially identifying himself with the Cary Grant character. If the story of North by Northwest is the story of Cary Grant’s transformation into an authentic self, a man who is capable of and deserves marriage to Eve, a man who can be a savior of himself and others, an American man, then that story can be located with reference to Cary Grant’s clothing, face, and acting. Maynard Mack and others have noted the importance of Hamlet’s clothing. Mack says, “What we must not overlook here is Hamlet’s visible attire,” and surely he is right. It is significant that Hamlet is seen in his inky cloak, or his unkempt stocking, or his simple trav­ eler’s garb. It is no less significant what Cary Grant is wearing: ei­ ther he is wearing that elegant suit or he is not, and although from time to time he takes it off, it is always a temporary change until the moment at which he abandons it altogether, and that is the moment when his inner change is complete. We see him in that suit the first time we see Cary Grant, and in the opening sequence the suit is modeled for us. The quality of his dress is unmistakable, even to the perverse villain Leonard, whose first words, uttered when he first sees Cary Grant, are “He’s a well-­ tailored one, isn’t he?” The suit will have disappeared, never to be north by north west  3

seen again, when we see Cary Grant in the hospital room in Rapid City. Between those two times Grant will be without all or part of the suit three times—­in Mr. Kaplan’s room in the Plaza Hotel, when he tries on Mr. Kaplan’s suit jacket; in Eve’s drawing room on the Twentieth-­Century Limited, when presumably he undresses for lovemaking, although we don’t see this; remaining without the suit in the LaSalle Street Station (in Chicago) where we see him dressed as a redcap and then partially undressed as he shaves in the station’s men’s room; and in Eve’s room in the Ambassador East Hotel, where he allows her to take his jacket and then gives her his pants. Each time he will put the suit back on until he finds himself in the hospital room in Rapid City and realizes that he no longer needs that suit. No actor’s face has ever filled and animated the screen more than Cary Grant’s, and no movie has ever dwelled on any face more than North by Northwest dwells on Grant’s. It is a task of the movie to make that face—­or, better, to remake it. Is a face a picture of a soul? A soul, a complete one, a genuine self must be made, and it is made by oneself. The movie hints at this broadly in the hilarious shaving sequence, and partially covers its own deep point with the hilarity. Cary Grant has covered his face with more lather than he could need, thus making the task of shaving yet more Herculean than it would already be because it has to be done with Eve’s tiny razor. We have not yet seen Mount Rushmore, but when we do we will think of what it means to hack faces out of that stone—­especially if the task is to make a preeminently American face out of an inert landscape—­and what it might mean for Cary Grant to carve out his own face. And when we think of that we will also think of what it means that for Grant this feat is impossible without the help of a woman’s device. A face that is only stone is not the picture of a soul (or it is the picture of a dead soul), and Hitchcock offers a profound meditation on this truth, beginning with the shaving in the LaSalle Street Station and then developed in three stages. First is the marvelous sequence beginning at Midway Airport and ending with Mount Rushmore. 4  chap te r 1

When the Professor tells Grant who Eve is, we are given a long, close shot of Grant’s face as he registers the terrible information he has been given. The dimly lit face is motionless, and yet it shows an unmistakable emotional torment. Then the face is brilliantly illuminated in stages, made so bright it feels painful as the light (from a taxiing plane) whitens and freezes the face, and this shot dissolves to the Mount Rushmore monument. The dissolve is long enough to achieve two separable images: first Cary Grant’s face becomes one of the faces on the mountain, and then it whites out completely, leaving the presidents’ faces alone atop Grant’s necktie and suit jacket. There has always been that marvelous Cary Grant face, that mask of infinite charm, but now it has been petrified so that a real face, a true face, a face of genuine meaning might be made out of it. In the second stage of Hitchcock’s meditation he shows us that it is necessary that the old face be destroyed, and that happens as soon as Cary Grant makes his preliminary (and abortive) attempt to act. It happens when the ambulance driver punches the old face out of the picture. When we next see Cary Grant, in the final stage of this meditation on a face, he will have no face at all. We see him through the window of his hospital room. He has lost the suit—­he is wearing only a towel—­and we can see no head as he paces before the window. As he paces, thinking and feeling, he still shows no face until, I think, he is fully ready to be his own man; then the camera pulls back far enough to begin to reveal his new face. Shortly after this he will put on his new clothes—­the shirt, pants, and shoes brought by the Professor—­and then, like Hamlet with whom we also waited and waited and waited, he will at last do something. When he sends the Professor out for bourbon (a thoroughly American drink), Cary Grant undertakes an action that is entirely his own for the first time. He accepts the clothes he needs and makes them his own, and then he goes to save Eve.3 Grant’s capacity to act, to do a thing of his own, has been developing throughout the movie, but it is first marked as nearly north by northwest   5

complete in his remark to the Professor when he learns that Eve is meant to leave the country with Vandamm. He says, “You lied to me!” The Professor answers, “I needed your help . . . ,” a perfect reply to the man who once said, “In the world of advertising there is no such thing as a lie, Maggie. There is only The Expedient Exaggeration.” It is a perfect reply to a man who has himself lied about helping a sick woman; suborned his own mother; lied about being Mr. Kaplan; lied about being Jack Phillips, Western sales manager of Kingby Electronics; pretended to be a redcap; pretended to be crazy; pretended to be shot; and lied about whether Eve Kendall was expecting him in her Ambassador East hotel room. Grant’s whole world has been “the world of advertising.” The Indiana farmer is one of the American emblems he has encountered, and the farmer replied to the question of whether his name was Kaplan by saying, “Can’t say it is, ‘cause it ain’t.” But for Cary Grant the question of whether something is true has had no bearing on whether it can be said. Now, however, for the first time, Grant has left the world of advertising, a world where no one does a real thing, and he says in a stony, definitive tone, as if he were speaking to Ananias, “You lied to me,” and sets out to rescue Eve, his first attempt to do a real thing, but he fails. He fails because he is not yet quite ready. He must first be completely reborn, and that will happen in the hospital room. Cary Grant’s rebirth, or, let us say, his birth as an American man, requires two people, himself and Eve, a man and a woman giving birth to the man who can be her man. Eve’s capacity to do her part is rich and subtle. In part it is a matter of feeling and desire, the fact that when she seduces Grant on the Twentieth-­Century Limited she is brought—­through him—­to ecstasy. (“Ecstasy” is Rothman’s excellent word for Eve’s state, and his description of the complexity of the drawing room seduction, of Eve’s ambivalence, is superb.) When Grant says to her later, thinking that she has betrayed him, “Who are you kidding? You have no feelings to hurt,” he could not be more wrong. She has feelings he has never suspected in her nor known in any woman. Those feelings of hers ultimately will be the ground for a kind of action Grant has never before undertaken. Eve is a very complex character, and no less complex is her role 6  chap te r 1

in the creation of the new Roger Thornhill. She is a seducer and a lover, and a kind of mother, and she will become a wife. In some dimensions she is a typical Hitchcock woman—­blond, seemingly fragile, and detached, yet filled with an incredible power and knowledge. And she is the cause of the Americanization of Cary Grant. Hitchcock’s treatment of women bears comparison with Shakespeare’s but I will not go into that, and I must slight the character Eve in North by Northwest. In assessing the indispensable capacity of a woman to make an American man, I will content myself with supposing that Hitchcock agrees with an earlier European observer who said, “If anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.”4 A persistent characteristic of North by Northwest, one of Hitchcock’s funniest movies, is that the cues it gives are often given in contexts of humor. The cue that Eve is an essential agent in the making of this new man is the sequence in which she uses the porter’s key to let Grant out of the bed. This berth/birth image will be completed in two separate pairings: one is with the emergence of the microfilm from the opened belly of the pre-­Columbian figure, and the other is with the successful birth of the new man in the hospital room, a place where babies are born, when he allows the Professor to dress him, as newborns are dressed in hospitals. I say that Cary Grant does not act before his re-­creation in the Rapid City hospital room, but of course he has been doing things all along. Seldom has anyone done as much in three days as Grant has done since being kidnapped from the Plaza. All that he has done, however, has been, as I could call it, either inauthentic or incomplete. Nothing has been a complete expression of a self. There are two pivots in Grant’s doings after the initial, precipitating action, the move that lands him in the adventures that follow. That move, the attempt to reach his mother, fails utterly and leaves him a kind of nonagent, all of whose actions either are directly dictated by someone else or are reactions to what someone else does. The first pivot occurs at Midway Airport when the Professor makes himself known to Grant and tells him what has been north by north wes t  7

happening. The second pivot occurs in the Rapid City hospital room. At the first pivot, Grant learns that everything he has been doing has been directed by Vandamm. He has known this vaguely, but he has not known who Vandamm is or what he has been up to. Now that he knows this, that he has been under the direction of Vandamm, he will exchange this direction for the direction of the Professor. At the second pivot, Grant throws over the Professor and thus refuses anyone the authority to direct him. He will now act. Before his transformation is completed, Grant has not been inert. He has exercised remarkable initiative and imagination. He has pretended to be Mr. Kaplan and a redcap; he has feigned being shot; he has acted like a lunatic; et cetera. But in no case has he been anyone, or anything. He has been the kind of fraud who is truly empty. He has been, in a phrase, an advertising man. His splendid, elegant suit has been a perfect emblem of that emptiness, the rot he returns to after each escapade. When, finally, he gives up that suit because, finally, he knows that it confers no real identity on him, he will take upon himself the direction of his own action, and in that action he will undo the plots of both his former directors. And now, unquestionably, the only director is Hitchcock. I think, “I am an American,” and I wonder what that means. I wonder, “What is my culture? What is my tradition? What kind of thing am I?” When one of us Americans thinks those things, perhaps the most natural outcome—­anyway, the most nearly inevitable as far as I can tell—­is to suppose that to be an American is roughly the same as being a European but doing it on this continent, and that my culture must roughly be the culture of Europe somehow transplanted to North America.5 Thus when Cary Grant discovers that all that has happened to him has been under the direction of Vandamm, the European, he reacts by accepting a new director, but this time an American one. But the Professor is no different from Vandamm. Indeed they are a perfect pair, and Cary Grant’s proto-­ American task is not to find the right director but to exist and act with no director at all except himself. Hitchcock’s pronouncement on the Professor is carried in an amazing shot. We first see the Professor in the CIA conference room where he is explaining—­proving 8  chap te r 1

with iron, deductive rigor—­that no help can be given to Cary Grant. The next scene is of the lobby in Grand Central Station, with the American flag on the wall. This scene is reached by a dissolve, and for an instant the flag comes right into the conference room where the Professor and his underlings are seated around a table, and it falls directly on the Professor. The Professor is just another Vandamm covered in the American flag. In fact the Professor is less attractive than Vandamm. Vandamm at least feels, and feels strongly. He is repelled by the thought that Eve might belong to someone else, and he is so upset by Leonard’s revelation that he strikes him. The Professor is unfeeling throughout. He does not seem to care who belongs to whom, and when it becomes necessary for a punch to be delivered the Professor does not throw it, he commissions it. Most important, Vandamm comes closer than anyone else, except Eve, perhaps, and certainly much closer than the Professor, to appreciating Cary Grant. He has an intimation that Cary Grant has a power fit to match or better his own. When he first meets Grant he says, “not what I expected. . . .” The idea that America is just Europe moved west is the idea Cary Grant accepts when he agrees to the Professor’s plan. There is an American version of the spying business, one might say, indistinguishable from any other version except for being American, and its being an American version is enough to justify it for an American and command his allegiance. That is the Professor’s thesis, and for a time Cary Grant accepts it. But it is wrong. The truth is that the idea of America is deeply subversive, and it is not to be formulated as some other idea set with a US subscript.6 Then what must I do to be an American? “Nobody has to do anything,” the new Cary Grant tells the Professor. This is the newly American Cary Grant proclaiming the radically subversive idea that is the idea of America. If all there were to America were Europe with more room, then there would be no point to America. When Cary Grant realizes that, he will know that no one can tell him how to be an American, not even an official, licensed American-­maker. He will then take the right step. north by northwest   9

What that step is, the step into America, is very hard to say, and it is difficult to say what resources are required of a person who would take that step. Cary Grant is a man of resources and great implicit power. Despite his Madison Avenue vacuity, he has shown himself very able. He has, while drunk, thrown a man out of a car and then driven the car well enough to survive the ride; he has escaped from an elevator two killers had trapped him in; he has discovered how to find refuge in America (corn is not a European crop). He will use all his resources—­physical, mental, spiritual—­when he succeeds in his great quest to save Eve. The miraculous, mythic rescue on the mountain is an explicit summary of his talent. In every shot of his stretch to reach Eve, it looks impossible that he can do it. And then one remembers his slightly offended tone when he said, upon trying on Mr. Kaplan’s suit, “Well, obviously, they’ve mistaken me for a much shorter man.” Indeed they have, although Vandamm had a premonition: “not what I expected—­a little taller. . . .” Vandamm is an exceptional character. He is a man of remarkable talent. He is cultivated, refined, powerful, and resourceful. I think of him as one kind of quintessential European, a man of great culture. The emblem of this aspect of his personality is his position in the movie as theatrical critic. The question of acting is as much a topic in North by Northwest as it is in Hamlet. What is it to act? What is the difference between pretense and reality, between pretending to be mad and being mad, between acting a part and being that part, between pretending to be an American and being an American? Throughout the movie Vandamm appraises Thornhill’s acting. Mostly he finds it wanting, although he commends Cary Grant’s performance at the auction. But it is at the auction that Vandamm has an intimation that, like his earlier premonition about Cary Grant’s height, he does not follow through on. Thornhill/Cary Grant says, “Apparently the only performance that’s going to satisfy you is when I play dead.” Vandamm/James Mason replies, “Your very next role. You will be quite convincing, I assure you.”

10  chap te r 1

Vandamm turns out to be exactly right about this. In the cafeteria near Mount Rushmore, Thornhill plays dead and Vandamm is the one who is quite convinced. There is irony in this, that Vandamm, the most European person in the movie, is the one who most nearly appreciates Thornhill, the one who is to become the most American man in the movie. And there is subtle, further irony in Vandamm’s failure: his European cosmopolitanism makes him the most perceptive viewer of Thornhill, but his limitless self-­assurance finally blinds him to what Thornhill is becoming, a dangerous American. If we cannot say exactly what it is to be an American—­and that might be just the point, that there is no formula to give—­we can say something about what it is that Cary Grant does when he becomes a new American man. What he does is to save things. He ruins the Professor’s plan as well as Vandamm’s and therein saves himself: he is no longer an empty thing that rots. And he saves Eve: he saves her life, and he saves her soul for he will make her an American woman by joining her as an American husband. They are reborn together, and that birth is in the berth she took him from when they first met, now with Eve dressed in bedtime elegance and Cary Grant in the clothes he has grown into. This is scarcely a Hamlet ending. Then what does the Hamlet reference come to? Perhaps only this: Hitchcock wants his work—­this movie—­to be thought of in terms of the standards and expectations one associates with the most unproblematic examples of high, serious art. Does North by Northwest merit this attention? I think so, but there is no way to prove a thing like that. There is only looking at, thinking about, and seeing the movie for oneself. Certainly Shakespeare is in Hamlet, if any artist is in any work, and just as surely Hitchcock is in North by Northwest. Marian Keane has charted his presence in her sensitive piece “The Designs of Authorship.” 7 All I wish to add is a reading of the beguiling compass shot. When the speck is seen running from the United Nations building, it does not move in the direction of Chicago from New York.

north by north wes t  11

I put it to you that the direction is just about the direction Hitchcock traveled when he came from England to Hollywood. In that shot Hitchcock is showing Cary Grant fleeing into the heartland of America, and he is also showing himself coming to America and declaring himself to be at home there. It is not only immigrants who must learn to inhabit the land: we natives also must make ourselves into Americans. What else has the Roger Thornhill/Cary Grant/Alfred Hitchcock figure done? Above all he has been a savior, and we must not forget that he has saved the film, those spools that fall from the smashed figure. What film is that? A typical American sentiment, even now and most certainly in 1959 when North by Northwest appeared, scorned the idea that movies are serious art or, if it conceded any artistic stature or cultural significance to movies, insisted on finding it only in European movies, called “art films,” and certainly not in American ones. The last thing I put to you is that Hitchcock is stating and showing that this is a deeply misguided and mistaken sentiment. If it matters whether something is art, then movies are art, and they are, above all, an American art. There is an American culture—­derived from, historically dependent on, and linked to Europe, perhaps, but different—­and movies are at its core. What Cary Grant/Alfred Hitchcock is doing is saving film for America. Let us rejoice in that salvation and make the most of it.

Notes 1. Rothman develops this point in his superb “North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s Monument to the Hitchcock Film,” first published in the North Dakota Quarterly 51, no. 3: 11–­24, and included in his remarkable collection, The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 241–­5 3. 2. The argument is given in “North by Northwest,” which was first published in Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 761–­76, and reprinted in Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 152–­72.

12  chap te r 1

3. After putting on the clothes brought by the Professor, Cary Grant stuffs his portable possessions into the pockets. This is a gesture in which Grant fully accepts this new clothing, but in this movie that is so completely, tightly, and precisely constructed, it is more. It is only because he has thought to transfer his things to his new pockets that Grant will have a handkerchief to bind his scraped hand, coins to throw at Eve’s window, and a ROT matchbook with which to signal her. 4. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 576. 5. I have allowed myself an intemperate outburst against the idea that America has no culture unless it has one like the culture of Europe. It is in a piece called “Inventing Philosophy,” Philosophic Exchange 21/22, no. 1 (1990–­1991; published autumn, 1992): 4–­19. 6. America is both a piece of geography and an idea, a state and a state of mind. When Cary Grant leaves New York, he is leaving the westernmost part of Europe, but of course in the end, when he has found America and found a way to live there and someone with whom to inhabit America, he will return with Eve to New York. Whether New York is part of America depends on whether those who dwell there are Americans, and not the other way around. Stanley Cavell has noted that the magical green place where wonderful and incomprehensible unions are wrought in Shakespeare is that same place where those things happen in the American film comedies of sixty to seventy years ago. In those American comedies, as Cavell observes, that place often is called “Connecticut.” But it should also be called “America.” 7. Marian Keane, “The Designs of Authorship,” Wide Angle 4/1 (1980): 44– ­5 1.

north by northwest   13

2

Metaphor and the Cultivation of  Intimacy These are good times for the friends of metaphor. They are so salutary that we are in danger of overlooking some very thorny underbrush as we scramble over the high road to figurative glory. Metaphor is a wonderful topic, and its new students are apt to be so enchanted by it that they never learn that the respectable road to its study was blocked until recently. Older students have been quick—­ perhaps too quick—­to suppose that the road has been cleared and that it is the only proper road. Now that the respectability of metaphor seems to be acknowledged all round, the only serious questions that are thought to be open concern how metaphor is to be described, in particular (1) how to understand the relation of “poetic” metaphors to metaphors in ordinary speech and prose (about which Karsten Harries’s paper has interesting implications), and (2) how to incorporate an account of metaphor into more general theories of language or meaning (a major ambition of Paul Ricoeur’s paper). There are other questions, and to indicate them I will note, very schematically, how we came to these good days. There has been a very strong line in Western philosophy, especially in that strain running from British empiricism through Vienna positivism, that has denied to metaphors and their study any philosophical seriousness of the first order. Here it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan (pt. 1, chap. 4): 14

The general use of speech, is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts, into a train of words. . . . Special uses of speech are these, first, to register, what by cogitation, we find to be the cause of any thing, present or past; and what we find things present or past may produce, or effect, which in sum, is acquiring of arts. Secondly, to show to others that knowledge which we have attained, which is, to counsel and teach one another. Thirdly, to make known to others our wills and purposes, that we may have the mutual help of one another. Fourthly, to please and delight ourselves and others, by playing with our words, for pleasure or ornament, innocently. To these uses, there are also four correspondent abuses. First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conception, that which they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they used words metaphorically: that is, in other senses than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others. . . . And therefore such [inconstant] names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can metaphors, and tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.

Far less generous and forgiving is Locke’s Essay (bk. 3, chap. 10, section 34): Since wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement, and so indeed are perfect cheats, and, therefore, however m e ta phor and t he cult ivation of i nt i m ac y  15

laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. What, and how various they are, will be superfluous here to take notice; the books of rhetoric which abound in the world will instruct those who want to be informed: only I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind; since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation: and, I doubt not, but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality in me, to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.

(Paul de Man will soon be doing an extraordinary reading of Locke, and perhaps you will read this passage again. It is, however, a good passage to have more than one look at, and I cannot resist reading it out loud at a conference where Wayne Booth is present.) Although these remarks of Hobbes and Locke may seem remote, their import has prevailed until quite recently. The works of many twentieth-­century positivist philosophers and others either state or imply that metaphors are frivolous and inessential, if not dangerous and logically perverse, by denying to them (1) any capacity to contain or transmit knowledge, (2) any direct connection with facts, or (3) any genuine meaning. In what seems to me a peripheral consequence of the move away from classical positivism, this opinion about metaphor has been abandoned, and it is becoming common—­almost customary—­to credit metaphors with all three virtues. This conversion in the estimate of metaphor is very recent. The pivotal text, I think, is Max Black’s “Metaphor.” 1 It has been an extremely influential and provocative piece, and it continues to 16  chap te r 2

hold a central position in contemporary discussions. It is also something of a period piece in what its terminology suggests about its presumed readership. Black, refusing to concede that metaphor’s only legitimate capacities are emotive, argues for their “cognitive” status. He is thus, up to a point, arguing the case within the categorical constraints imposed by positivist philosophy of language. There is a tacit acceptance of the idea that metaphors are relatively inconsequential unless they are cognitive; that is, unless they meet this canonical test of respectability. Black’s essay became an important stimulus to the theory of metaphor adopted by Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art.2 Goodman very easily credits metaphorical statements with truth values exactly on a par with those possessed by literal statements. Although Goodman does not assign meaning to metaphors,3 and Black does not explicitly treat them as bearers of truth values, their work, along with that of some others, has created within even the most severely analytical circles a climate in which metaphors are treated comfortably as if they were thoroughly “descriptive” (of facts), were potential vehicles of knowledge, and possessed a special meaning other than that belonging to their literal readings. A considerable benefit of this new attitude has been the attraction to the topic of metaphor of a number of talented philosophers and linguists who otherwise might not have been interested. And anyone who, like me, values the topic must be pleased to see it come into its own. Metaphor’s elevation in status is precipitated, nonetheless, on two counts. The major, straightforward reservation ought to be that it has not yet been argued decisively that metaphors have this logically respectable status. The central, fundamental question concerns meaning. Does a metaphorical statement possess, in addition to its literal meaning (with respect to which the statement will be, typically, absurd or false or pointless), another (metaphorical) meaning wherein resides its capacity to be true as well as to provide the twist of insight we derive from some good metaphors? Or is the magic of metaphors not a matter of the meaning of their words, but a feature of the contexts of their use, of their “pragmatics”? This question cannot be argued completely m e ta phor and t he cult ivation of i nt i m ac y  17

or even sensibly for very long, without the background of a general theory of meaning.4 Both Hobbes and Locke have such theories that dictate their assessments of metaphor. I risk the opinion that only Donald Davidson and Paul Ricoeur, among the speakers at this symposium, possess developed theories of meaning, and their views of the semantics of metaphor are consistent with their general semantic theories. They give opposite answers to the question: Ricoeur invests metaphors with meaning; Davidson denies that they mean anything besides what they mean literally. Each answer has as much to do with a conception of meaning and the theory of meaning as with an attitude toward metaphor. The other objection to the hasty assimilation of metaphors to the class of semantically normal sentences is oblique and a bit diagnostic. Why quarrel with the negative assessment of the meaning of metaphors? Because it’s wrong? That would be a good reason. There has been, however, an equally compelling, implicit reason in the conviction that unless metaphors are full-­fledged entities of the preferred sort, there can be nothing in them worth true philosophical investigation. If metaphors are not the sort of thing that bears knowledge, then they could be left to psychologists, anthropologists, and literary critics or theorists but could not support philosophical attention. Locke and others hold a conception of the most, or only, valuable kind of  language and then observe that metaphors do not qualify. The apparently most satisfying response, and what is becoming the dominant one, is to insist on the qualification of metaphors; but this is to meet the challenge on its own grounds. The whole progression recalls the Aristotelian response to what is taken to be Plato’s denigration of art. If Plato castigates art because it lacks a direct relation to knowledge, then the sharpest possible rebuttal would seem to be one that asserts that art is an implement of knowing. But in this response’s implication that art is, therefore, worthwhile, there is the further implication that Plato was right about the main point, that knowledge is what matters. Should we accept that point? Should we accept the correlate point about metaphor? Even if we did and supposed that metaphors could share in the preeminent philosophical prize only if they partook of meaning, 18  chap te r 2

truth, and knowledge, it would still be worth knowing whether they serve a lesser good. To learn this we will have to understand better than we do how metaphors are actually created and reacted to, whether or not these are matters of meaning. This is a major concern in the papers of Booth, Harries, de Man, and Ricoeur. For my part, I will take another look at the half  loaf  left to metaphor by those who meant to deny it any serious philosophical importance. If metaphors have no “cognitive content” and, therefore, no part in the canonically serious use of language, then of what use are they? Even critics as harsh as Hobbes and Locke cannot think that every metaphor must result from either a lapse in linguistic competence or a perverse wish to mislead or inflame. Then what is the point in making a metaphor? Think of a relatively mundane metaphor. Make it one about which there would be little quarrel: both camps (the detractors and the appreciators) would agree that however things stand with potent, fecund, generative metaphors, this one does nothing spectacular or exotic. It can be paraphrased literally with so little remainder as makes no difference, and those who believe that metaphors say something and have a truth value will concede about this one that the same thing could be said literally. Then why might you, or anyone, use this metaphor instead of a literal remark? To decorate? To say something beautiful? Of course these could be your reasons, these “aesthetical impulses,” and they are the kind of reasons suggested by those who condemn metaphor outright or consign it to the class of the inconsequential. Because I subscribe to the opinion that metaphors are peculiarly crystallized works of art, I am not surprised by this convergence of arguments about legitimacy. Just as self-­appointed followers of Aristotle have swallowed Plato’s pill and then found they could treat art with respect only if they could find knowledge in it, so latter-­day friends of metaphor have thought that only if metaphors have all the semantic possibilities of literal language—­and more—­could metaphors be intellectually respectable. Otherwise they could be nothing more than small-­scale art. But why? Is knowledge the only, or even the most important, concern? Is its formal semantics all that matters in the use of language, or the only correct and proper m eta phor and the cultivation of i nt i m ac y  19

subject? Is a joke less important than a theorem even if it’s a good joke and a trivial theorem? I want to suggest a point in metaphor that is independent of the question of its cognitivity and has nothing to do with its aesthetic character. I think of this point as the achievement of intimacy. There is a unique way in which the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another. Three aspects are involved: 1. The speaker issues a kind of concealed invitation. 2. The hearer expends a special effort to accept the invitation. 3. This transaction constitutes the acknowledgment of a community.

All three are involved in any communication, but in ordinary literal discourse their involvement is so pervasive and routine that they go unremarked. The use of metaphor throws them into relief, and there is a point in that. An appreciator of a metaphor must do two things: he must realize that the expression is a metaphor, and he must figure out the point of the expression. His former accomplishment induced him to undertake the latter. Realizing the metaphorical character of an expression is often easy enough; it requires only the assumption that the speaker is not simply speaking absurdly or uttering a patent falsehood. But it can be a more formidable task: not every figurative expression that can survive a literal reading is a mere play on words. (You will not find more artful changes rung on this theme than those in the first sentence of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”) In both tasks—­realizing that the expression is intended metaphorically, and seeing what to make of it—­the hearer typically employs a number of assumptions about the speaker: what the speaker believes, what the speaker believes about what the hearer believes (which includes beliefs about what the speaker thinks the hearer can be expected to believe about the speaker). During a departmental meeting you call your chairman a Bolshevik. How does he take that? He does not think you are simply 20  chap te r 2

describing his formal political persuasion. Why not? Because he knows that you know he isn’t a Bolshevik.5 So you aren’t transmitting a fact because there is no fact, and everyone knows that and knows that everyone else knows that. Thus the chairman knows that you were not bent on reporting or recording a fact: you were speaking figuratively. This sounds very complex, and of course nothing like the time and difficult effort suggested are actually undergone by the chairman just to realize that your expression is a metaphor; but, thought of as a reconstruction, this, or something like it, must underlie the chairman’s realization that he has been offered a metaphor. Once the chairman knows that you speak figuratively, he has then to unpack the figure to understand why you call him a Bolshevik. In doing this he again moves through a network of assumptions, hypotheses, and inferences, at the core of which is the literal sense of the expression and some part of which overlaps the complex gone through earlier in achieving his realization that the utterance was a metaphor. I have toyed with the idea that there is an inverse correlation here, that the complexity of the reasoning that leads to “p is a metaphor” is inversely related to the complexity of unpacking p once it’s seen to require unpacking—­the idea being that the more unearthed in order to detect a metaphor, the less has to be added to decipher it. This is not the place to explore this idea; nor will I say anything about what must be called into play by the hearer when he works out the metaphor—­what is meant by “Bolshevik,” what the speaker knows the hearer believes about Bolsheviks, and the rest—­ for you can set that out as well as I. The question is, why do you put the chairman through all that trouble? Why does the chairman allow it and expend the effort? What is gained? One answer is that a transaction is precipitated in which you and the chairman actively engage one another in coping with a piece of language. He must penetrate your remark, so to speak, in order to explore you yourself, in order to grasp the import, for that import is not exactly in the remark itself. Furthermore, you know that he is doing this; you have invited him to do it; you have, in fact, required him to do it. He accepts the requirement, and you two become an intimate pair. m eta phor and t he cult ivation of i nt i m ac y  21

There is certainly intimacy in the literal use of language. Not even the most routine literal exchanges are passive—­on either side. And the idea that language, used only literally, keeps us from really reaching one another’s minds—­because language is conventional and static, predetermining what can be said regardless of what we may want to say—­is typically not only a sophomoric idea, but a deeply confused and mistaken one. And yet sometimes there is this wish to say something special, not to arouse, insinuate, or mislead, and not to convey an exotic meaning, but to initiate explicitly the cooperative act of comprehension, which is, in my view, something more than a routine act of understanding. The sense of close community results not only from the shared awareness that a special invitation has been given and accepted, but also from the awareness that not everyone could make that offer or take it up. In general, and with some obvious qualifications, it must be true that all literal use of language is accessible to all whose language it is. But a figurative use can be inaccessible to all but those who share information about one another’s knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes. I think the community can be as small as you like, even a solitary pair: perhaps only the chairman knows enough of what you think and feel (along with knowing that you know that he knows this) to take the point of your remark. And the group might be even smaller: surely the self-­dialogue of the soul is often figurative. In these respects metaphors are surprisingly like jokes. With a joke, too, there is first the realization that it is a joke and then the understanding—­what’s called “getting the joke.” I have refrained from supplying examples of metaphor, but I won’t resist the chance to recite some jokes (for illustration only). I give three, in an effort to associate myself with Kant. 1. In the Soviet Union it is time for the national elections. Finding their voting machines in much the same condition as their combines at the time of the Russian wheat harvest, the Soviet election officials are unable to proceed. But then, availing themselves of a détente, they appeal to the United States Department 22  chap te r 2

of State. The State Department discovers some unused voting machines in Chicago and lends them to the Soviets. The election is held on schedule, and Mayor Daley becomes a member of the Praesidium.

Understanding this joke requires little more than a very general background. It is not even necessary to know who Mayor Daley was, although knowing that will add something, as will knowing that he is no longer alive. Metaphors are often like this. It requires little beyond the most elementary linguistic competence to detect and comprehend the metaphor in “Juliet is the sun,” but the more you know about the sun, the more you will make of the metaphor. 2. What is Sacramento? It is the stuffing in a Catholic olive.6

This will be understood by considerably fewer people than grasp the first joke. Children, for example, are unlikely to get it, even children who know of the Sacrament, for “pimento” is one of those words children seldom can recall. It is like the first joke in requiring two relatively discrete apprehensions: first, understanding that it is a joke and what the joke is, and then, second, finding it funny (if one does). This separation is even sharper in the second example, for there it is easier to imagine someone understanding perfectly well how the wordplay goes and yet finding nothing funny because the thrust seems anti-­Catholic, or otherwise offensive. A metaphor is like this when, although it is clear enough what connections are intended and how they are supposed to be made, there is still no magic click, no real point in forcing those connections. 3. What is a goy? An answer recently current at M.I.T. is that a goy is a girl if examined at or before time t, and a boy if examined after t.7

This joke is radically esoteric. It is, accordingly, understood by very few people. A more interesting consequence of its hermetic m e ta phor and t he cult ivation of i nt i m ac y  23

character is that grasping it seems to be an all-­or-­nothing matter. There is not a sharp difference between understanding what the joke is and finding it funny. The recognition that it is a joke and the comprehension of just what the joke is are very nearly all there are to a complete response. Jokes of this kind are the ones most clearly undermined by any need for instruction in the background material. Some jokes can survive a preface of the form “First you will need to know that . . . ,” but example three is of a kind that can’t. I suspect that metaphors are like this when they must, to be effective, deliver their twist compactly and all at once, without exegesis. The property in common with metaphors that all three jokes are meant to illustrate is the capacity to form or acknowledge a (progressively more select) community and thereby establish an intimacy between the teller and the hearer. There may be more features in common. In particular, I am tempted to infer that there can be no effective procedures for dealing with metaphors. This means that there can be no routine method for (1) detecting metaphors when they appear, just as there are no foolproof rules for determining when someone is joking, or (2) unpacking the metaphor once it is known to be one, just as there is no standard method for explaining a joke.8 This must be related to the fact that often a paraphrase fails to do the job of its metaphor in much the same way that an explanation fails to replace a joke. Before leaving off and commending to you this topic of linguistic intimation,9 I would like to warn against a possible misstep. Intimacy sounds like a good thing, and I have been urging attention to the use of metaphor in its cultivation. It is not, however, an invariably friendly thing, nor is it intended to be. Sometimes one draws near another in order to deal a penetrating thrust. When the device is a hostile metaphor or a cruel joke requiring much background and effort to understand, it is all the more painful because the victim has been made complicit in his own demise. Do not, therefore, suppose that jokes are always for shared amusement or metaphors always for communal insight. Some of the most instructive examples will be ones in which intimacy is sought as a means to a lethal and one-­sided effect. I leave the construction of examples to you. 24  chap te r 2

I have just begun to open this topic for myself and hope to participate in elaborating two of its themes. As precisely and delicately as we can describe it, what is the character of this linguistic intimacy, and how, in general and in detail, is it attained? And then what good is it—­what is it for? Perhaps you will find these questions useful when mulling over the rich variety of metaphors used in papers to come.

Notes 1. Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954–­ 1955): 273–­94. 2. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968). 3. He is equally reluctant to use any customary conception of meaning in his analyses of literal statements. 4. It might seem that the question of whether metaphors have meaning could be settled independently, and then theories of meaning themselves could be judged as to whether they give the right answer. I do not see how to do this. What can be done, I think, is to make such a strong case for the indispensability of metaphors that even if the best available theory of meaning won’t give them any, then it needn’t be a defect to be meaningless. 5. It would be different if he were a ninety-­year-­old immigrant, formerly Lenin’s auxiliary (as some chairmen may have been), but even then you would likely be up to something besides recording that long-­and well-­known fact. 6. Thanks to Richard Bernstein for at least half of this joke, and a good bit more. 7. This joke was purveyed and, I think, created by George Boolos, who is free to decline both credits. Guides to its hermeneutics may be found in Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 74–­75, and Leo Rosten, The Joys of  Yiddish (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 141. 8. In earlier papers, while claiming that there is no determinate routine for constructing the meaning or point of a metaphor, I suggested that there is a general scheme for identifying metaphors. I no longer think that must be so. 9. Professor Marie Bergmann, a member of the conference, referred me to Martin Joos, The Five Clocks (Bloomington: Indiana University m e ta phor and t he cult ivation of i nt i m ac y  25

Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, publication no. 22, 1962); it is a remarkably interesting study that discusses ways in which intimacy is achieved by means of linguistic style. Joos is concerned not with figurative uses, but with the use of “incorrect” language—­jargon, for instance—­but the similarities are worth pursuing.

26  chap te r 2

3

Notes on Metaphor This paper is a very informal discussion, mostly of two common theses that, in various formulations, are separately or together at the center of most current theories of metaphor. They are that 1. in a metaphor the meaning of at least one term has changed, and 2. a metaphor taken literally is false.

While articulating the temptation to accept both claims I will show that the easy, ready acceptance of either is a mistake.  Al­ though the first must somehow be true, both are too crude and re­ assuring, and this is probably more important than the fact that the second is simply false. I offer no construction of my own to take the place of these two theses, and I have some doubt that there is any general “theory of metaphor” to be pursued or even any individual “principles” to be found. I do offer a kind of corrective principle in the form of the suggestion that the theses have misled us twice: once, into believing that the main mechanism of metaphor is clear, at least in outline; and again, into looking in the wrong place to dis­ cern the mechanisms of metaphor.

27

I. The Standard View I will restrict the discussion to single statements and, generally, to predicates. This simplifies things, and although it may, in the end, oversimplify, we have little chance of accounting for other things said to be metaphors (for instance, whole poems and novels, or parts of them, and even pictures) until we can give a satisfactory account of simple metaphorical statements. The two theses are related and are often advanced as supporting one another. To put it roughly, they go together in this way: The statement “x is F” is false. But this can be a sign that F is not being used with its customary meaning (call that FL), but with a dif­ ferent, metaphorical, meaning (FM). Thus we come to understand “x is F” not as meaning x is FL, which is false, but as meaning x is FM, which is true.

II. Meaning This rough account cannot be all there is to it. It cannot be that FL and FM are only two different and unrelated meanings of F. If we thought so, we would lose the distinction between terms used met­ aphorically and terms that are ambiguous. Perhaps this distinction is not rigid, and at times it may be drawn arbitrarily, but there is a difference. In “The First National is a bank” and “The side of the Mississippi is a bank,” the term “bank” appears, we may say, with two different meanings. We must not assimilate to this case the behavior of  “pig” as we go from “Porky is a pig” to “Smith is a pig.” There is some connection between what is meant by “pig” when it’s said of Porky and what is meant by it when it’s said of one’s neigh­ bor, the slobbish, brutish Smith. If there are an FL and an FM, then these are not simply two meanings of F. It is easy to see that FL and FM are related and nearly impossible to say clearly what the relation is. If it is impossible, then there is a serious question about what’s 28  chap te r 3

gained by hypostatizing an FL and an FM at the start. One point of this paper is to suggest that perhaps too little is gained to warrant this approach. An eccentric and resourceful view that aims to bypass the ques­ tion of meaning is Nelson Goodman’s. His account, characteristi­ cally, is entirely extensional, and there is no talk of meaning. How, then, do metaphor and ambiguity differ? Chiefly, I think, in that the several uses of a merely ambiguous term are coeval and independent; none either springs from or is guided by another. In metaphor, on the other hand, a term with an extension established by habit is applied elsewhere under the influence of that habit. . . .1

It remains to explain just what it is for a term used metaphorically to be used under the influence of the habitual literal use of the term. Perhaps Goodman does not explain this because he thinks there is no general explanation. I think there is none. But I want to show that in many cases the influence of the literal use is very direct and thorough; in fact, so complete that a customary reason for identi­ fying FL and FM is undercut. This reason is the purported observa­ tion that what follows about x when x is F does not follow when x is metaphorically F. (Just as it doesn’t follow that there is water near the First National from the fact that the First National is a bank, it seems not to follow from the fact that Smith is a pig that Smith has four cloven hooves and a corkscrew tail.) But as a general point the observation is wrong, and the better the metaphor the more the observation is dead wrong. For the best metaphors, at least the best of a certain kind, holding to the point blinds one to the marvel of metaphorical transfer. Try this old favorite: “Juliet is the sun.” Sup­ pose I say this. Then, I think, it does follow that Juliet is the bright­ est thing I know, that everything else is lit by her presence, that I am invariably drawn to her though I know this must be dangerous, et cetera. One will say that at least some of these implications are them­ selves metaphors. Yes, but what does that show? That they too contain terms with changed meanings: GM, HM, and so on? Then to not e s on metaphor  29

prove that in “Juliet is the sun” there is an FM, one must show that “x is F” doesn’t here imply “x is G” and “x is H,” but rather that x is GM and x is HM. No good: this simply takes the burden of justify­ ing a distinction between FL and FM and lays it off on an assumed distinction between GL and GM. We are still at the beginning. I am aware of the feeling that if “x is F” is a metaphor, then at least some of its implications must fail; and I am not concerned to claim that there are sentences all of whose implications go through literally and metaphorically (although some of the examples given in the next two sections may be like that). What I mean to call into ques­ tion are the grounds for the dogmatic claim that some implications must fail. They involve what seem to me unclear conceptions of what a term’s meaning is and of what would constitute a change in that meaning.

Speculative interlude Much of the power of a good metaphor, what Stanley Cavell thinks of as its limitless paraphrasability,2 shows in the startling fact that implications continue to go through. I think of inexhaustibility as the mark of metaphor, in two ways. First, the language itself (say, English) is intrinsically capable of metaphor. We shall not run short of metaphors, and there is no way of generating them in advance. They will outrun any set of grammatical rules. Second, an individ­ ual metaphorical statement may support endless paraphrase. If it is rich enough, then although it can be paraphrased and explicated, it will have no complete “translation”—­there will be no substitute that says all that it says without remainder. I think this is what lies behind the sense that metaphors are irreducible. If one can be para­ phrased without end, then it is irreplaceable. And then, in a sense, it is simple, an element. It is misleading to think of a metaphor as essentially a device of economy if this suggests that a metaphor is principally a kind of abbreviation. A potent metaphor does not abbreviate its paraphrase; it generates it. These two points about inexhaustibility taken together help to

30  chap te r 3

explain how the language has a capacity nearly independent of its users. With regard to metaphor, one does not master a language “from the outside” but learns to move within it. Hence the expe­ rience of finding that one’s words say more than one meant and being willing to mean the rest. Finally, this suggests that metaphor is the device that animates a living language, and that any language with a capacity for metaphor is alive (is a language). When a metaphorical statement displays this inexhaustibil­ ity, this is likely to be because the implications continue to stand: the sentences implied by “x is F” continue to be implied when x is metaphorically F. Still, one wants to say, not all the implications go through. (Juliet is not a burning gas, nor is she 90 million miles from me. Or is she?) But they never do, even in literal uses, do they? Not everything that is true of any pig whatsoever is true of Porky. No, one says, but enough is true of Porky to make him literally a pig. This seems an irresistible reply, but it goes wrong in two ways. The first error is the assumption that a sufficient condition of something’s being F will not be found in x when “x is F” is a meta­ phor. In Plato’s Theaetetus Socrates suggests, as a way of identify­ ing the sun, that it is “the brightest of the heavenly bodies that go round the earth” (208D).3 If we suppose this is a necessary and suffi­ cient condition of something’s being the sun, then how will it follow that in “Juliet is the sun,” “sun” has a changed meaning? Anyone prepared to apply “sun” to Juliet is more than likely willing to apply “brightest of the heavenly bodies” to her: that may well be much of his reason for calling Juliet the sun. And so the condition for same­ ness of meaning is satisfied. The second error is one of judgment. The assumption that there is some constant feature that makes things (literally) F is itself too embattled to do any work in justifying the claim that “pig” has changed its meaning when it is applied successfully to Smith. To talk of meaning in such a crude and simplistic way is especially likely to be unhelpful here, because the problem requires a delicate treatment. The view that claims to find an FM first has to justify that claim and then be able to say that FM is not altogether distinct from

note s on metaphor  31

FL. Goodman’s treatment, nominalistic and extensional, dissolves both parts of the problem: The question why predicates apply as they do metaphorically is much the same as the question why they apply as they do literally. And if we have no good answer in either case, perhaps that is because there is no real question.4

In Goodman’s view, then, what makes a statement metaphorical and not literal seems largely the fact that x is not a member of the habitual, usual extension of F. And the more standard view, which talks in terms of similarities and meanings, must ultimately base its claim that meaning has changed partly on the same fact. Thus, in “x is F,” if this is a successful metaphor, F is predicated of x and normally, customarily, historically, that is not done. But even if this were true, why should it be enough to establish that there has been a change in the meaning of F? Consider: “the earth is a mov­ ing thing”; “polio is a viral disease”; “Lindsay is a Democrat.” Each statement is true, and in each an F is predicated of something of which it formerly had been accounted false, or at least withheld from because of uncertainty. And in none do we feel like saying that the meaning of the predicate expression has changed. Something must have changed if we once counted “x is F” as false or uncer­ tain, and now we say it’s true. Perhaps x has changed, or perhaps x is the same but we now know more about it or have different beliefs about it. The successful application of F to a new x is not enough, taken alone, even to indicate which of these changes has occurred, much less establish the occurrence of a drastic, linguistic change—­ namely, a change in the meaning of F. Where are we left, then, in finding a reason for the claim that there is an FM, a new meaning for F, when “x is F” is a metaphor? The last hope, I think, rests on a claim like this: It is not merely that “x is F” considered to date is false; it is that “x is F” taken normally is obviously, transparently false; in fact “x is F” is linguistically anomalous, even absurd or contradictory. 32  chap te r 3

Then if x is truly F, there must be a substantial change in the condi­ tions of the successful application of F, substantial enough to con­ stitute a new meaning of F. This last reason for citing an FM brings us to the second claim, for if, as I believe, “x is F” can be both a metaphor and a straightfor­ ward literal truth, then “x is F” need not be a transgression, logical or linguistic.

III. Truth5 Monroe Beardsley, who is a standard author on the subject of meta­ phor, takes it as obvious, indeed as a prelude to theory, that meta­ phors involve change of meaning. He says, By common definition, and by etymology, a metaphor is a transfer of meaning, both in intension and extension. The metaphorical modi­ fier acquires a special sense in its particular context . . . and it applies to entities different from those it usually applies to, in any of its nor­ mal senses.6

If F is being applied to a different entity, one that lies outside F’s extension, then “x is F” is literally false, and Beardsley seems to regard this as a feature of metaphor as obvious as the putative change in meaning. In an earlier work Beardsley says, We may then restate the Controversion Theory [which Beardsley advances provisionally] as follows: a metaphor is a significant attri­ bution that is either indirectly self-­contradictory or obviously false in its context. . . .7

Must a metaphor taken literally be linguistically or logically anomalous, or even false? Suppose that Romeo says this: “The sun is warming today.” He says this on a windless, sultry day. But it is a metaphor, for it is about Juliet. This sentence is unexceptional syntactically and semantically, and it is literally true. If anything is note s on metaphor  33

odd or deviant, it is the use of “the sun” to refer to Juliet, and the application to her of the term “is warming.” That has nothing to do with what is usually thought of as the grammar of the sentence, and we may as well concentrate on the sentence and not on what some think of as the proposition or statement expressed by the sentence, for that statement—­the one expressed by the sentence—­is entirely normal. There are no “inherent tensions, or oppositions, within the metaphor itself,” as Beardsley says there should be,8 whether we take the metaphor itself to be the sentence or what the sentence usually means. Michael Reddy has made a similar point with regard to the inabil­ ity of more up-­to-­date grammar to account for metaphor. After a persuasive argument against regarding metaphors as semigram­ matical sentences that violate what Chomsky, Katz, and others have called “selectional restrictions,” Reddy himself hypothesizes that all metaphors display an oddity, but not an ordinary syntac­ tic one. What seems to be the defining characteristic of all instances of metaphorical language is an abnormal or unconventional situation with regard to the normal limits of referentiality on words. Meta­ phor occurs, it seems, whenever words in an utterance do not have referents within their conventionally defined, literal spheres of reference . . .9

Reddy notes that no current grammar has a semantic component capable of dealing with this kind of abnormal reference. He says, Further study of  this subject will reveal, I believe, a degree of context sensitivity as yet undreamed of in transformational models.10

Perhaps Beardsley would embrace at least part of Reddy’s view as a way of maintaining that there is a linguistic oddity in every meta­ phor, expecting this to be underwritten by a supergrammar yet to be formulated. The position will remain defective, for there are meta­ phors that display neither sentential peculiarity nor the referential 34  chap te r 3

oddity described by Reddy. I will formulate a variety of counter­ example metaphors to try to accommodate different ears finding them unequally persuasive. I will refer to metaphors that are literally true as “twice-­true,” or as sentences that are true in two ways. (For now I will speak of metaphors being true or false as if there were not a problem about that.) After the second section of this paper, I prefer not to speak of “meanings” until the next section. But it helps to allow oneself to think freely in terms of meanings in trying to construct twice-­true sentences. Problematic examples are problematic not because there is any doubt that they are true in more ways than one, but because it is not obvious that any of the ways is metaphorical. There is no test for metaphors: one must sort out the examples while one theorizes about them. Besides looking for the mark of inexhaustibility, which I discussed loosely in the last section’s speculative interlude, I find it helpful to consider how readily I feel like saying, “That sentence means two different things, both of  which are true.” Believing that in cases of rich metaphor there is not simply the appearance of another meaning, I find the ease of that remark an indication that there is no metaphor. For instance, “The sun is a gas” invites the remark, and to me it does not seem to be a literally true metaphor. If you think it is, then so much the better for my argument. A similar example can be extracted from Goodman’s discussion of expression and then perhaps be used against him since he seems to hold that metaphorical truths are literally false.11 In his view, a painting can express blueness only if “The painting is blue” is a metaphorical truth. But, as he nearly says himself, it might well be literally true. Here, again, though the sentence might be multiply true, I find no metaphor—­perhaps partly because I find none in the application of  “blue” to a person or his mood. A ready technique for producing twice-­true sentences that are metaphors is to use negation. Take any inapt metaphor (that hap­ pens to be literally false) and negate it: Juliet is not the pale moon. Juliet is not made of ice. not e s on metaphor   35

I do not share the view that the application to inanimate things of predicates of feeling must be metaphorical. But if you do, you will accept, say, “Guernica is not gay.” Not all such examples are essentially negations of poor meta­ phors. Some begin, so to speak, as successful metaphors containing negation: Cassius is no lamb. The Jordan River does not chill the soul. People are not sheep. No man is an island.

Such examples refute the second claim, the claim that a metaphor must be a literal falsehood; but there is still a chance for a more modest claim. It might be held that tension between the subject and the modifier, which is what Beardsley requires,12 needn’t result in literal falsity because the negation is not part of the modifier. That is, there will be a “tension” between x and F, so that “x is F” will be obviously false, or self-­contradictory, or whatever, but “x is not F” will be true. Later I will suggest that it can be at least as illuminating to consider the obvious truth of “x is not F” as the obvious falsity of “x is F” when “x is not F” is the metaphor. But now I would like to displace the notion of literal falsity directly. Let us avoid negation. “Hitler is an animal” looks to be a twice-­true metaphor. But perhaps “is an animal” seems to you to have an established other meaning. Then what of “Hitler is a Ger­ man” or “Hitler is a Nazi” or “Mahler is a Viennese”? It is easy to imagine contexts for figurative uses of these sentences. For certain purposes it might be best to use the term “metaphor” in a narrow sense and to classify these sentences as different figurative uses of language, and ultimately it will be good to try to distinguish kinds of metaphors; but in this paper I ignore those distinctions, for the theses I am discussing are usually meant to apply to a wide range of figurative speech—­to metaphors in a broad sense. An interesting example is “Mondrian’s Composition in a Square is flat,” where the metaphorical force of “flat” is not to say that the 36  chap te r 3

painting is lifeless or uninspiring, but to point out that it has no depth, no inward third dimension.13 For another example, imag­ ine that Charles is a compassionate man and also a skillful one in dealing with people. He has a great talent for restoring their spirits, for helping those who are emotionally upset to pull them­ selves together, for refurbishing their egos. Because of this we say, “Charles is a carpenter.” And suppose that Charles happens to be literally a carpenter. Better than my story is the New Testament, which gives us “Jesus was a carpenter.” I shall give no more examples here to show that metaphors needn’t be sententially peculiar, or literally false, since I think the ones already given are adequate clues for anyone who wants more.

IV. Meaning and Truth Reconsidered The two theses seem so innocent and attractive that it is difficult to imagine beginning a “theory of metaphor” with neither. If they cannot be set out less baldly than I have them at the start of this paper, then one is tempted to give up, drawing a lesson combined from two masters. Aristotle says that genius is required to make metaphors. Suppose it is also required, in some measure, to recog­ nize and understand metaphors. Kant says that genius is precisely the ability to make sense, original sense, when the sense that is made cannot be explicated by rules. Whether or not there can be a theory of metaphor, if there are rules to be found, I think they won’t be found by concentrating on sentences, their meanings, and their truth values. Why has anyone thought that a metaphor must be false liter­ ally? Perhaps one has not chanced on any counterexamples, but still, why generalize? Perhaps there is thought to be some connec­ tion between literal falsity and forced change of meaning, like that I suggested in section 1. But this will be the beginning of a bad argu­ ment. Even if the meaning of F changes from FL to FM when “x is F” is a metaphor, x might still be FL, might still be in the normal exten­ sion of F. note s on metaphor  37

For Goodman, who has no use for the notion of meaning, it may have been critical that metaphors be literally false. Of the authors I’ve cited, Goodman is the only one who speaks freely of the truth and falsity of metaphors. When “x is F” is true, how is Goodman to explain that it is a metaphor if it is (also) literally true? According to him a metaphor is the application somewhere else of a label with an extension established by habit, with the new application being effected under the influence of the habit.14 Although Goodman himself seems to note that x might be within the normal extension of F,15 how can he permit this? What one wants to say is something like this: when “x is F” is twice-­true, the reason why x is metaphori­ cally F is different from the reason why x is literally F. And so one is tempted to say that F has two meanings. But since he has forsaken vague appeals to meaning, what resources remain to Goodman? I think of two tentative possibilities. One is to claim that in, say, “Hit­ ler is an animal,” “is an animal” does not have its normal extension established by habit, for although Hitler belongs to both that exten­ sion and the new one, other things belong to one but not the other. For instance, sheep belong to the old extension but not the new one, and Venus flytraps belong to the new one but not the old one. I feel uneasy about this account, for it’s not clear that there is any new, determinate extension. And even if there is, one cannot count on its differing extensionally from the old one. For instance, a plant lover disgusted by the voracity and brutality he sees throughout the animal kingdom may say, “All animals are animals,” where this is no tautology. The second possibility is to claim a distinction not in terms of the extension, but in terms of the habit that establishes the extension. Then what is significant is not whether x is in the habit­ ual extension of F, but whether the habit that is responsible for plac­ ing it there is at work in this use of “x is F.” This will be a very subtle distinction, since in Goodman’s view, the original habit influences metaphorical applications (this is the difference between metaphor and ambiguity). There will have to be a distinction between apply­ ing F to x as a direct consequence of the habit that controls the nor­ mal use of F, and doing so only “under the influence” of that habit. I have doubts that his distinction can be made perspicuous. 38  chap te r 3

However Goodman may be able to handle twice-­true metaphors, I will in the end forego my objections to talk of meaning and its change, though not without learning something from them. Twice-­ true metaphors seem to demand at least casual talk of meaning: if “x is F” is twice-­true, then two things can be meant in calling x “F.” But by far the more persuasive argument for talk of two meanings comes from the cases in which metaphors are literally false. In such a case, if we are to call the metaphor true we will need something else to be false, and a convenient explanation will cite two mean­ ings, or propositions or statements, associated with the sentence, one metaphorical and true, the other literal and false. Another option is available: to give up applying “true” and false” to meta­ phors. It can seem odd, inept, or perverse to say that a metaphor is true, but there is a compelling, if somewhat rhetorical, reason to do so—­namely, to combat directly a traditional view that denies truth to metaphors on principle. When faced with the putatively tough-­ minded view that only literal statements have truth-­values because only they have truth conditions, we should stiffen and ask why it’s thought that metaphors have no truth conditions. “The chairman ploughed through the committee” is true if and only if the chair­ man ploughed through the committee. What’s wrong with that? Why is it any different with “Snow is white?” I see this reply as dialectical, or provisional, in this sense: I do not care to begin the argument by asserting that truth is truth, literal or figurative, and that metaphors are “cognitive,” “verifiable,” and true just as any statements are; but I do want to assert this as a reply to the dogma that only such statements are good or serious or sci­ entific and that metaphors are not like that. In the end we may no longer associate truth conditions and the rest with seriousness, and then we will be at the beginning, ready to try to understand meta­ phor with no preconceptions. For Beardsley, there has been another reason for insisting on the literal falsity or oddity of metaphors. In the Encyclopedia essay Beardsley gives as a central problem the need to explain how a met­ aphor is recognized to be a metaphor. And earlier, in a brief, gen­ erally laudatory estimate of Black’s essay, Beardsley says, “I judge note s on metaphor  39

his theory incomplete in not explaining what it is about the meta­ phorical attribution that informs us that the modifier is metaphori­ cal rather than literal.” 16 Beardsley wants the sentence to be some­ how anomalous as a sign that it is not to be taken literally. Beardsley had not noticed the full range of possible signs. First, even if the sign is to be in the sentence itself, there is no need for it to consist in self-­contradictoriness or obvious falsity. In some cases it is not a matter of falsity but of obvious truth. What counts is neither truth nor falsity so much as the obviousness itself. If something is obvi­ ously true or false, and is thought so by all concerned, then it is not said and meant, for there can be no point. There is likely to be no more “point” in saying that the Mondrian is flat, literally, than there is in saying that Juliet is the sun, literally. Second, besides mistaking what the sign must be, Beardsley has not seen where it can be. There is no need to have it in the sentence itself. Beardsley has referred to the metaphor in its context, but I think he under­ estimates the extent and complexity of the relevant context. For simple statements, that context must be what Austin calls the “total speech act.” To discover what the words mean, and certainly to dis­ cover that they don’t mean what they customarily mean, one looks beyond the words, taking into account the beliefs and intentions of the speaker and what speech act he is performing.17 When I say, “The painting is not flat” to a child, I may be drawing the child’s attention to the fact that the pigment is piled up. When I say it to students of twentieth-­century art, I may be drawing their atten­ tion to the uneven plasticity in the work of a Mondrian contempo­ rary. To tell the difference you must take account of what I could or would be saying to different people, given what you know that I know about those people. In all cases in which the words are not to be taken literally, there must be something that blocks their being taken literally. They may be senseless if taken literally. But they needn’t be. They may be bla­ tantly false if taken literally. But they may be true. What they must be, if taken literally, is something the speaker could not mean in these circumstances. There are things we cannot mean that are not (sententially) meaningless. 40  chap te r 3

An account of the dynamics of metaphor when it occurs in sim­ ple, spoken sentences must refer to the total speech act in which the sentence is animated. And, I think, a similar account is needed for metaphors that occur in poems, novels, and other written works. Often these works must, to be understood, be thought of as records, or partial manifestations, not only of speech but of whole speech acts: one must refer to a speaker (not necessarily the author), his beliefs and intentions, and in particular his beliefs about his read­ ers and their beliefs. This can be a complex and difficult reconstruc­ tion, but I think we undertake it, if  we read at all well, when reading almost any literary work.18 If we do this, then we have much more than an individual sentence to look to for clues to the presence of metaphor.19 For all the need to look beyond sentences to find the workings of metaphor, it is characteristic of metaphors that the figuring power is carried in the sentence (though there may be no way of telling from the sentence alone that it is figurative). On this point metaphor contrasts with irony.20 When we speak about the meaning of some­ one’s utterance “p,” sometimes we feel no need to mark a distinc­ tion between what “p” means and what the speaker means by “p.” When we do press this distinction, metaphor and irony seem typi­ cally to come down on different sides. When “p” is metaphorical, it seems right to talk of the (metaphorical) meaning of “p”; when “p” is ironic, it seems right to talk of  what is meant (ironically) by saying “p.” “Juliet is the sun” means that Juliet is the brightest thing in the universe, and so on. “You’re a swell fellow” can’t mean that you’re a bum who has let me down, but I could mean that by saying, “You’re a swell fellow” to you. This point is related to another difference between metaphor and irony. Irony differs from metaphor and most other figures of speech in its intimate attachment to the speaker: ironic meaning is speaker’s meaning; other figurative meaning is often meaning of the speaker’s words. But irony is unlike metaphor and like other figures in being something like a simple and straightforward func­ tion of literal meaning. If “p” is uttered ironically, then the speak­ er’s meaning is something like the “opposite” of what it would be note s on metaphor   41

if he meant “p” literally. Similar functions characterize many of the figures tabulated in traditional rhetoric, though in many cases they lead from the literal meaning of “p” and do not lead to a speaker’s figurative meaning. There is no function for metaphor. There is no way to get the figurative meaning of “p” from the literal meaning of  “p” plus the fact that “p” is a metaphor. One may think there is—­ namely that from “x is F” we get “x is like things that are F”; but this is a misapprehension. Max Black has made this clear. One of the many services performed by Black’s paper is the destruction of the apparently comfortable, traditional view accord­ ing to which metaphors are compressed or elliptical similes. The failure of this view can be illustrated in examples like “Juliet is the sun” when it is pointed out that the corresponding simile “Juliet is like the sun” is itself a metaphor. There is no property possessed by both Juliet and the sun in virtue of which Juliet is said to be (liter­ ally) like the sun. The property in question, if there is one, is pos­ sessed literally by the sun but metaphorically by Juliet. And so Juliet is not like the sun in the way that she could be like, say, other tragic heroines. We might say that she is metaphorically like the sun. The older view, challenged by Black and, following him, Goodman, among others, had taken similes to be literal, and in claiming that any metaphor could be expanded into a simile, it was claiming that any metaphor could be reduced to a literal statement. This is a misapprehension.

Note on metaphor and simile Black’s point displaces the view of simile as more fundamental than metaphor, as the real figure of which metaphor is only a literary pre­ sentation. It does not follow that the difference between metaphor and simile is insignificant. Stanley Cavell says, The “and so on” which ends my example of paraphrase is significant. It registers what William Empson calls the “pregnancy” of meta­ phors, the burgeoning of meaning in them. Call it what you like; in this feature metaphors differ from some, but perhaps not all, literal 42  chap te r 3

discourse. And differ from the similar device of simile: the inclu­ sion of  “like” in an expression changes the rhetoric. If you say “Juliet is like the sun,” two alterations at least seem obvious: the drive of it leads me to expect you to continue by saying in what definite respects they are like (similes are just a little bit pregnant); and, in complement, I wait for you to tell me what you mean, to deliver your meaning, so to speak. It is not up to me to find as much as I can in your words.21

If this report seems right (as it does to me) and more faithful to one’s sense of these figures than a severe reconstruction that insists that “x is y” implies “x is like y” and lets it go at that, then this is partly because of the rightness in moving from stark sentences to the saying of the sentences. Thus Cavell says nothing about “Juliet is like the sun” but talks about what’s in the works when you say it. This point, for those who accept it, underlies a parallel between metaphor and simile brought out in twice-­true cases. “Charles is a carpenter” could be true both metaphorically and literally. “Charles is like a carpenter” could be true as what we might call a figurative or metaphorical simile, where it amounts to something like “Charles is like a carpenter in being a polisher: just as a carpen­ ter sands and varnishes wood, Charles brings out the submerged glow in people.” The simile could be twice-­true, for Charles might also be like a carpenter literally, say, in belonging to a union with insufficient room for black apprentices. So: a metaphor and its cor­ responding literal simile can be true, and so can a figurative simile and the corresponding metaphor-­taken-­literally; and both meta­ phors and similes can be twice-­true; but it seems that a metaphor and its corresponding simile can’t both be said either figuratively or literally. If there is no function for getting the meaning of a metaphor, and there are no simple recognition signs for detecting metaphors, then it is a kind of marvel that we are able to identify metaphors at all in some cases, and yet more marvelous that we are able to understand them. That is why it seems too narrow, straight, and square to call them true. Stanley Cavell says, note s on metaphor   43

But to say that Juliet is the sun is not to say something false; it is, at best, wildly false, and that is not being just false. This is part of the fact that if we are to suggest that what the metaphor says is true, we shall have to say it is wildly true—­mythically or magically or primi­ tively true.22

To produce this kind of true sentence may well be to do some­ thing remarkable enough to credit the feat to genius. And in some cases it is remarkable in a different way that we are able to appre­ hend such a truth when someone has made it for us. I see no reason to be afraid of calling metaphors true (and let­ ting those who care to do so identify the meaning of a metaphor with its “truth conditions”). But I see no compelling reason to call them true, save as an offense to those who insist that it isn’t proper logic to do so; and I do, after all, have some worry that the exten­ sional conception of metaphors as true just as literal statements are true may leave us complacently forgetting the nonextensional features—­the magic of their production and comprehension.23 Why can’t we just lay aside the question of truth? To return to the ques­ tion of meaning: if we can keep it in mind that because the literal meaning is vitally present and working unpredictable results, meta­ phorical meaning is not just another meaning, then let us say that in metaphors we encounter new or altered meanings, but let us not suppose we understand very well what that means.24

Notes 1. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968), 71. 2. Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, UK: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1969), 122. See also Cavell’s “Aesthetic Prob­ lems of  Modern Philosophy” in the same volume, 79. 3. It is irrelevant that his remark about the sun is false. All that matters is that this characterization lies near the center of  what Max Black would call the commonplaces associated with the Greek word for “sun” as it was used by Plato and his contemporaries. The notion of associated 44  chap te r 3

commonplaces is introduced by Black in section 5 of his now nearly classic paper “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LV (1954–­55): 273–­94. 4. Goodman, Languages of Art, 78. 5. Some of the points made in this section are like some made by Timo­ thy Binkley in his acute and useful “On the Truth and Probity of  Meta­ phor,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 2 (Winter 1974), 171–­80, which I found too late for me to address here. Besides a num­ ber of good examples, Binkley gives references to various writers who have thought that a metaphor taken literally must be false. 6. See Monroe C. Beardsley, “Metaphor,” Encyclopedia of  Philosophy, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 285. 7. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1958), 142. 8. Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Metaphorical Twist,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22, no. 3 (March 1962): 294. 9. Michael J. Reddy, “A Semantic Approach to Metaphor,” Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. Robert I. Binnick, et al., published by the Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1969), 248. 10. Ibid., 248–­49. 11. I am not sure that Goodman holds that metaphors are invariably lit­ eral falsehoods. On this point Languages of Art is confusing. In a num­ ber of passages Goodman speaks as if he thinks that every metaphori­ cal truth is a literal falsehood. For instance, (i) “Although what is metaphorically true is not literally true, nei­ ther is it merely false [i.e. metaphorical truths are true]” (p. 51). (ii) “Metaphorical possession is indeed not literal possession” (p. 68). (iii) “That is, although a predicate that applies to an object meta­ phorically does not apply literally, it nevertheless applies” (pp. 68–­69). (iv) “But metaphorical application of a label to an object defies an explicit or tacit prior denial of that label to that object. . . . Application of a term is metaphorical only if to some extent contraindicated” (p. 69). (v) “What expresses sadness is metaphorically sad. And what is metaphorically sad is actually but not literally sad” (p. 85). When these quotations are set back in context there may be ways of reading them that do not commit Goodman to the claim that every true metaphor is literally false. In (ii) perhaps Goodman is saying that note s on metaphor   45

what it is to be metaphorically true is not what it is to be literally true, leaving open the question of whether something might be both. In (v) perhaps Goodman thinks the referent of “what” is established by the discussion that began on page 50, and he is talking here about a gray, sad painting and not about everything that happens to express sadness. I don’t know whether all five passages can be divorced from the claim that true metaphors are literally false. If they can, then this will be easier to read: (vi) “A metaphorically blue picture is more likely to be literally blue than literally red” (p. 83). If (vi) says, as it seems to, that “x is blue” can be true both meta­ phorically and literally, then whether or not it can be reconciled with (i)–­(v), it seems to me hopelessly at odds with one part of Goodman’s account of expression. In his analysis of the relation of expression, for which his remarks on metaphor are a prelude, Goodman construes expression to be a special case of  “exemplification”—­namely, the case in which the exemplified property is possessed metaphorically. Leav­ ing all the details of Goodman’s account aside, I point out that this means that if  x expresses F-­ness, then “x is F” is metaphorically true. Now consider this passage: (vii) “Architects, for instance, like to speak of some buildings as expressing their functions. But however effectively a glue factory may typify gluemaking, it exemplifies being a glue factory literally rather than metaphorically. A building may express fluidity or frivolity or fervor, but to express being a glue factory it would have to be something else, say a tooth­ pick plant” (pp. 90–­91). Assuming that his is not a point about glue factories as such, Good­ man suggests no reason for the last sentence of (vii) besides the claim that if “x is a glue factory” is metaphorically true then it is literally false. And there seems no reason for that claim unless, despite (vii), Goodman holds that every metaphorical truth is literally false. Whatever the resolution of Goodman’s position in Languages of Art, it should square with the statement that (viii) “Even though a metaphorical statement may be literally false, metaphorical truth differs from metaphorical falsity much as literal truth differs from literal falsity,”

46  chap te r 3

which occurs in footnote eight on page 805 of “The Status of Style,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 4 (June 1975). This essay is an important exten­ sion of the work of Languages of Art. Because it makes use of the account of metaphor given in the book, it is troubled by whatever diffi­ culties arise in the earlier account, and it would be good to have them cleared up. I think Goodman must give up the claim that metaphorical truths are always literal falsehoods—­if he holds it. He seems to hold it in “The Status of Style,” however (viii) is understood, for I think it underlies this remark: (ix) “Although a style is metaphorically a signature, a literal signa­ ture is no feature of style” (p. 807 of  “The Status of Style”). Although the topic here is style and not expression, the remark is very much like (vii), the point about glue factories. Even in Good­ man’s analysis, I simply do not see why a glue factory could not express its function, and I do not see why an artist’s signature could not be a feature of style. Goodman’s analysis can accommodate both possibilities—­if it is not claimed that metaphors have to be lit­ erally false. 12. See Beardsley, “Metaphorical Twist,” and also Beardsley’s “Metaphor,” 285. 13. Notice that many of the most obviously useful paraphrases are them­ selves metaphors. 14. Goodman, Languages of  Art, 71. 15. See quotation (vi) in note eleven above, and also his discussion of various modes of metaphor in Languages of Art, 81–­85. 16. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 161. 17. There is a striking parallel here with illocutionary acts. When a sen­ tence does not have its customary literal meaning, this cannot always be discovered without referring beyond the sentence. When an illo­ cutionary act is not the one apparently indicated by the customary force of the performative verb being used, this cannot always be dis­ covered without referring beyond the words. I have begun to discuss influences on illocutionary force in “Illocutions and Perlocutions,” Foundations of Language 9, no. 4 (March 1973): 492–­503, and I have begun to understand novel illocutions as analogies of metaphors in “Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts,” Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 19 (November 6, 1975): 669–­84. 18. The most rich and useful groundwork on this topic that I know is Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1961). Booth has begun to consider the topic with special

note s on metaphor   47

attention to figurative language in A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1974). If, as I believe, we must postulate a speaker in order to arrive at the meaning of a literary work, then this suggests that we are discovering not only meaning but also what Austin calls illocutionary force. To discover this we will have to suppose that we are dealing with whole speech acts, for we can’t pry illocutions away from their related locu­ tions and perlocutions. For a defense of this point see my “Illocutions and Perlocutions.” 19. It may be adequate as a signal of the presence of metaphors that the text is a poem. If you know that it is a poem, you read looking for poetic things. 20. I had my first glimmer of this point in conversation with Wayne Booth, though I do not know whether he would subscribe to this elaboration of the point. 21. Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” 79. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. There is something infuriatingly elusive in Black’s remark that “it would be more illuminating in some of these cases to say that the met­ aphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similar­ ity antecedently existing” (Black, “Metaphor,” 284–­8 5). One wants to paraphrase this remark, to make it more—­what—­literal? This becomes yet harder to do when one sees that Black has not (purposely, I think) restricted this characterization to metaphors, but has left it open whether literal statements might not in some cases create more than they record. Elusive or not, the remark records (or creates) an indis­ pensable insight. If talking about truth makes us overlook this insight, then I’m for overlooking truth. 24. In various parts and versions the material of this paper has been pre­ sented to a number of groups, including the Cornell Philosophy Dis­ cussion Club, the Northern Illinois University Colloquium on Aesthet­ ics, and the Kenyon Symposium. Those discussions were very helpful to me, and so were the generous critical remarks of Monroe Beards­ ley, Timothy Binkley, and Allan Gibbard.

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4

What’s Special about Photography? Writing about photography—­theoretical, critical, practical, and historical writing—­is hamstrung. Some of this writing is good, but virtually all of it suffers from some variety of unconfidence about the nature of the subject. Even in the writing of those who think they know very well just what photography is, there is an almost truculent insistence on the author‘s particular version of the deep truths about the nature of the medium. The essential character of photography has been alleged to debar it from any status as fine art, or from the possession of any significant style, or from the capacity for any but gross and pedestrian representational values. The arguments for such allegiances are often implicit, but even in the case of explicit versions I cannot see why anyone believes any of these arguments to be sound. Many of them incorporate premises that are ambiguous at best and probably false, and nearly all of the arguments are invalid, so that it doesn’t matter how things stand with the premises. For instance, this argument and its counter can be found throughout a wide range of the literature: Photography is fundamentally mechanical and automatic. Therefore, photography is not an art, not a serious, fine art.

And the counter:

49

Photography is a true fine art. Therefore, photography is not mechanical.

It takes little acumen to note that the argument is radically incomplete, at best. It isn’t clear what sense of either word might obtain so that anything mechanical or automatic in that sense could not be art. Put this baldly, the arguments do not appear in any literature I know, but in scores of pages of the literature this is all the argument that is even implicitly present. In the “theoretical” literature on photography, the question of whether photography is, after all, an art is customarily related to the question of whether photography is just another way of making pictures or is a special way of making pictures. Neither question seems to me very clear, and even less clear is the relation between the two questions. One idea seems to be that unless there is something special in photographic pictures, those pictures must be inferior versions of pictures whose superior versions are the products of painting and drawing. I find it difficult to follow these arguments because I am unable to get a good grip on the idea that there might be another way of making pictures that is not a special way. An auxiliary idea is that photography begins as just another way of making pictures and is therefore initially a craft, awaiting a chance to become art, as it will when the special character of photographic-­ picture making comes to the fore. These ideas have been present in writing about photography since at least as early as 1845. I will not discuss this literature at any length, although I aim to capture arguments to be found there. I would like to lay these arguments to rest, and I do not think it will help to become entangled in their various specific formulations. I believe that the questions of what photography is and of whether it is art have been unclear from the start. Photography itself has always been what it is: it has no need to evolve into something else. What needs some evolution is the way in which we think about photography, and I would like to make a modest contribution to that project. The task of appreciating the history of writing about photography is another project, and that project is already off to an 50  chap te r 4

excellent beginning in the work of Joel Snyder.1 My aim is to provide a general assessment of what seem to be the leading arguments, and beyond that I will have a look at the putative insights that underlie them. I will do this mostly by way of analogies. There is no issue that this paper is likely to settle. My ambition is the modest one of unpacking some of the insights and temptations of those who think there is something extraordinary in photography, something of philosophical or aesthetic interest.

I The single most pervasive conviction about photographs is that they stand in some peculiar relation to the world, a relation not shared by other pictures. We might try to put this by saying that a photograph must be of something. This is not clear enough, however, even for getting started, because it’s ambiguous. If “being a photograph of ” means being a picture of, and any picture of I guarantees the existence of I, then the statement that every photograph must be of something is false. On the other hand, if “being a photograph of ” means being a causal sequel to something’s reflection or emission of light, then the statement that every photograph must be of something is true—­but this is an odd sense of “photograph of ” that is not congruent with the normal sense of “picture of ” or of “photograph of.” A photograph certainly guarantees the existence of a light source, but that much follows trivially from the meaning of the word “photograph.” The conviction that photographs hold a special relation to the world seems most often to amount to the idea that a photograph is a fossil. Perhaps this idea is defensible, but fossils are not, in general, pictures. The amplified idea, perhaps, is that a photograph is a picture of whatever it is a fossil of. I would not like to defend this formulation, because of cases like this: You have a family photograph showing several people on the beach. In the upper right there is a dark speck. As a matter of fact, although no one could determine this by looking at the photograph, that speck is there because Uncle w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   51

Fritz was frolicking in the waves far offshore at the instant the shutter snapped (and, as another matter of fact, the photographer didn’t even notice him). Do you think this photograph is a picture of Uncle Fritz? I am not sure, and I’m not entirely comfortable even with the assertion that it is, or contains, a photograph of him. What makes me uncomfortable is the knowledge that this photograph might look exactly the same if Uncle Fritz had been out to lunch but a piece of dirt had been on the camera lens or if a speck of lint had been on the enlarger’s lens or if a stray shaft of light had struck the undeveloped photographic paper. And yet in the photograph as we are imagining it, there is no doubt that the speck is a fossil of Fritz; as a matter of relatively simple causation, it is there in the photograph because Uncle Fritz was there in the waves. We need a better idea then that a photograph is a picture of  whatever it is a fossil of. A promising idea is that it is a fossil of whatever it happens to be a picture of. There is no doubt that the speck is a fossil of Fritz. Whether it is a photograph of him now depends on whether it is a picture of him, and that is a question to be decided independently, and in any case this example and ones like it cease to be troublesome. It is an idea like this, I believe, that has led Kendall Walton to assert that photographs are “transparent,” by which he means that in them we see—­literally—­what they depict. In a photograph of Ken you see Ken. I see less in this idea than Walton does, but I am not sure that he is wrong. When discussing Ken Walton’s work it is good to have some symbols in hand, and I think we could use some now anyway. P is a photograph. L is the light source used to make P. O is the subject of P: it is the object depicted by P. One might now say that by definition P “gives us” L. There is no a priori assurance, definitional or otherwise, that L is identical with O. (Thus Roland Barthes is simply wrong about a photograph’s transmission of literal reality.) No doubt in many cases P is such that L=O. Note, however, that this is a contingent fact that cannot be told from examination of P alone, even if that examination somehow reveals that P is a photograph. When Ken Walton asserts that what is depicted 52  chap te r 4

in a photograph is seen by those who see the photograph (thus is the camera what he calls an “aid to vision”), this assertion must be qualified to apply only to photographs of which it’s true that L=O.2 Thus qualified, the assertion is acceptable, at least to me, and I think it says something about the metaphysics of some photographic pictures. I have yet to see the epistemological or aesthetical consequences. Let me meander in search of consequences by simply supposing that in a particular case it is known or strongly believed that L=O. How does that affect one’s sense of the photograph? How should it?

An Analogy Perhaps a photograph is like a natural child, while other pictures are like adopted children. An adopted child may resemble a parent, and to some extent this may be due to the acquisition of mannerisms, posture, et cetera that do come from the adopted parents. And a natural child may not resemble the parent, or a resemblance may exist only with regard to this set of acquired, environmental features. But if the child does resemble the parent, then we think that the resemblance is the result of genetic influence—­a kind of basic, direct causation. So with photographs. A photograph may not resemble its subject, and a nonphotographic picture may resemble its subject; but when a photograph does resemble its subject we think that the resemblance is the result of some basic, direct causation. We look for parents in their children. We look for subjects in their photographs. If we find parents in their adopted children, or subjects in nonphotographic pictures, we attribute this to artifice. If we find them in natural children or photographs, we attribute this to nature. I do not doubt that we do this. I wonder whether we are sensible to do it. Some cases, and they are not atypical, are mixed and complex. When I was a child, people remarked that I looked like my father when seen walking down the street, and the same thing has been said about my son and me. The noted similarity has many components. There are size, shape of body, and relative length of w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   53

limbs, for instance, but there are also posture and manner of walking. This manner incorporates speed, gait, placement of heel and toe, and motion of arms, while the posture includes the angle of head and torso. Some of these characteristics would be shared by my son, probably, if he were adopted and had spent as many years walking with me, but some would not. And some would be partial. For instance, if my son’s neck and torso were larger—­if, say, I had adopted the child of a football player, a defensive lineman—­then he would likely acquire a semblance of my walking posture but not a complete one. As things stand, some of my son’s walking similarity seems due to genetics and some to habits acquired in his association with me. To these two constituents—­the first apparently more directly and simply natural than the other, although the other is not “unnatural”—­might have been added characteristics developed in him by my explicit artifice. I might, for instance, have ordered him to walk in a certain way or suggested that he assume an erect posture. In the end, if you say that he looks like me, you will not have an easy time analyzing the similarity into discrete, simple parts, some natural and some not. You will not have a much easier time explaining the resemblance of a photograph to its subject. The fact that the photograph shows a man with close-­set, brooding eyes may be due to the fact that the subject has such eyes, but it may also be due to the angle from which the photographer shot the play of light around the forehead, nose, and eyes—­and this light display may have been wrought largely in the darkroom. Certainly a photographer can shoot a picture of me that resembles me so little that you won’t pick me out. Why deny, then, that when his picture does resemble me, at least some measure of the resemblance is due to how he made the picture? Then let us not deny it; let us suppose that all characteristics of the photograph, including those having to do with its status as a representation and a resemblance, are there, at least in part—­and probably in very large part—­because of the efforts of the photographer. We should, however, note another thing as well. Earlier I said that I do not doubt that when we find parents in their children or

54  chap te r 4

subjects in their photographs, we attribute this to something more or other than artifice—­call it “nature.” I also said that I do not know just why we make this attribution. My remarks about parents and children were meant to show that when we do it we do it rather clumsily and out of a kind of prejudice, and that it is unclear what we are saying when we credit nature with my daughter’s resemblance to her mother. But we do say it, we do do it. I do it. I admit it. I want to find the implicit content when I say it. I am looking at a photograph. In it I see my son and his bicycle, among other things. This fact, that I see my son and his Motobecane in there, is due to the fact that he and the bike were there when the shot was taken. This is not a priori. The fact needn’t have been a fact. There are other ways in which a photographic picture that looks much like this one might have been made. And my boy and his bike might have been there and a photograph have been made that looked so little like this one that you couldn’t see the boy and the bike in it. So the fact of their being there is not an a priori fact, not a necessary fact, and certainly not a fact you could discern with certainty merely by gazing at this photograph. But it is a fact. And the knowledge that it is a fact informs my view of this photograph every instant. It is this quality, this flavor, this phenomenology of viewing photographs that leads people to say that when we look at photographs we look—­really look—­into the world’s past. It may be one of the things that lead Ken Walton to say that we look at the things themselves. It leads us, at least some of us, sometimes, to prefer to look at a photograph than at any other kind of picture. This may sound like voodoo. (This may be voodoo.3) But try to keep the epistemology out of it. Maybe I am wrong about the photograph. Maybe it wasn’t taken in the summer of 1984. Maybe it’s not Amos; it’s his twin or a robot or a picture of him. Can I prove it’s him? No. So what? When I look at my daughter, sometimes, it makes all the difference that I know she is my daughter. I know she is my natural daughter, in fact. Can I prove it? Maybe she’s the milkman’s. Maybe, as she is wont to insist when she is disgusted, she was stolen at birth from a better family and brought to us, and

w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   55

maybe I don’t know this. So I look at her as my natural daughter, and I am wrong to do so. I can’t prove that she is my daughter. So what? One has faith in photographs, so to speak. It can be misplaced. When photographs are introduced in court, competent attorneys insist on documentation of the provenance of the pictures. They know that a photograph itself, alone, doesn’t prove anything. And sometimes, in court and elsewhere, a man might have to try to prove, as they say, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a girl is his daughter. The fact that the man and the girl look alike and have been together virtually all her life—­those things themselves, alone, don’t prove fatherhood. Fatherhood is not carried out in court, however, nor are photographs characteristically appreciated there. To see this photograph, of my son and his wheels, as if it were merely contingently, incidentally, insignificantly connected to the fact that once he and it were there, on Dorchester Avenue, is a possible achievement, I suppose. It is, however, an arch aestheticization, a diminution, I think. Another kind of diminution is achieved by those who view this as the only relevant fact, as if it were trivial that the film was Kodak’s MP 5247, ASA 200, that the f stop was 8 and the shutter speed 1/250th of a second, and the rest of those things. Drop those things out and you are practicing voodoo. If those things weren’t as they were, you wouldn’t see him in the photograph as you do. What follows from this? Nothing, I think, in this sense: nothing follows about the character of photography or its aesthetics. There is nothing in this to suggest that photographs are devoid of art; but there is nothing to suggest that their capacity to support nostalgia and their use as a tool against skepticism are illegitimate. The relation of photographs to the world is in some respects more natural than the comparable relation of other pictures. I have said what I can about those respects, and I conclude this section by observing that nothing whatsoever is implied about whether photographs are art, or have style, or can be expressive, or are in those respects different from other pictures.

56  chap te r 4

II The alleged special relation of photographs to the world is, allegedly, related to the alleged mechanical or automatic character of photography. What about the machinery? The machine in question, I suppose, is the camera, although the not infrequent reference to things like “optical and chemical” properties suggests that darkroom apparatus involved in developing and printing is to be included. There are two, separate points, and I will take them quickly in turn. The first concerns the fact that there is a machine in the works, and the second has to do with the fact that this machine is somehow automatic. The first point, despite the extent to which it dominates much thinking about photography, has remarkably little substance. It often seems to amount to an obsession with the fact of the camera, with the fact that it is a machine. This fact cannot by itself be especially pertinent, because machines are parts of a number of arts. When my son is cleaning and repairing his French horn the parts of this incredible apparatus cover the dining-­room floor. He plays the horn well, and he has a commendable knowledge of how the thing works. I would guess that his knowledge is comparable in scope to a photographer’s knowledge of how his machine works. The difference, some would say, is that the camera is an automatic kind of machine and the horn is not that kind of machine. What does that mean? That cameras work all by themselves? They can be made to work by themselves, after a fashion; but if you outfitted the horn with an altered mouthpiece and set it out in a blizzard then it would work by itself. Responding to praise of his performance at the organ, Bach is reported to have said, “There is nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”4 A charming remark but not meant to be taken seriously; and the idea of setting up the French horn in a blizzard is just foolish. Still, I don’t see exactly how it is more foolish than the idea that the

w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   57

camera is automatic, when this automatism is cited as an inherently unartistic or uncreative core in photography. With a camera, I suppose one might say that all one has to do is set the aperture and shutter mechanisms, point the thing the right way, hit the shutter button at the right time, and the instrument will play itself, just like Bach’s organ. The significant difference has to do with the results: the camera delivers a picture (at least sometimes), and it might do this, as it were, almost “by chance.” Neither a pipe organ nor a French horn is likely to deliver a tune by chance. Let us try to get a grip on this idea that a camera is an automatic picture-­making machine. Then we can try to understand why this fact about the camera seems to some to diminish the artistic capacities of photography, and finally I can say why this fact does not do this but does render photographs a special kind of picture. It is undeniable that photography is automatically in possession of a capacity for a kind of gross, generic representation. By that I mean that with a camera virtually anyone can make easily detected likenesses of things and people. Not many of us can do this without a camera, especially when the task is to make a likeness of a person. In this respect one might say that photographs are infinitely “easier” to make than are other kinds of pictures. But it is only in this respect, and negative consequences for the artistic potential of photographs would follow only if they were easier in all other respects. Some people write as if they were. One way to make a picture that looks like a tall man is to turn your camera on a tall man (and pay some attention to what else shows up in your picture). One way to make a picture that looks like a tall, sad man is to turn your camera on a tall man looking sad. Some writers write as if they thought that were the only way to get sadness into a photograph, indeed as if the only way any of the oft-­ cited, little-­understood values of plastic art—­the expression of feel­ ing and emotion, the celebration of life or God or whatever—­as if the only way any of that could get into a photograph is by way of the photographer’s finding those expressions, celebrations, et cetera in the world and turning a camera on them. That idea is so misguided 58  chap te r 4

and so wrong that the only interest it yields is wonder at how it can arise. I personally believe it arises either from (1) an abysmal ignorance of the most elementary facts concerning how photographs are made, or (2) a steady diet of examples in each of which something like a family-­album snapshot is compared with something like a Velázquez or a Rembrandt. Or it arises from the ignorance plus the stacked examples, perhaps because the ignorance leads one to choose just such pairs of examples. A photograph might be profoundly sad and yet show a happy-­ looking person, or the other way round. A photograph might be “about” the isolation of a person from others, the insignificance of people, the triumph of the will, the eternal newness of America, the impossibility of the marriage contract. Of course it might, it could be about any of those things. And the photographer’s problem in making such a photograph would be exactly the same as any picture maker’s except, of course, that he has to address the problem in terms of the resources of photography, which are not the same as those of oil painting; but they do not make his task easier, nor do they make it impossible. The picture we seem to be stuck with is this: Suppose M (a maker) makes something, X. Suppose L (a looker) looks at X. The question is, how does the relation of M to X compare with the relation of L to X? There seem to be two extreme cases, one in which the relations have to be the same, and one in which they cannot be the same. We are tempted to believe that photography is an instance of the first case, and a painting an example of the second. In the second case M must have had a preconception of X in order to make X, and therefore his relation to it is different from that of L, who has no conception of X until he sees it. (This preconception is what, in the Cri­ tique of Judgement, Kant calls a Zweck.) That is to say, for instance, that the painter has to know what he’s going to do before he does it. This contrasts with the first case, where photography is supposed to belong, in which M needs no prior conceptualizing but makes do with a camera, something to point it at, and some light to reflect off whatever he’s pointing at. He need have no efficacious conception, and so his photograph can be his occasion for the conception, just w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   59

as it is L’s. (This is why it seems unremarkable when a photographer discovers what is in his own picture.) This way of thinking of things leaves very little room for artistry on the part of the photographer. There certainly are photographs like this, ones about which, had you noticed where the camera was aimed, you would have as good an idea as the photographer of how the picture would look. But if the photographer is able, and especially if he is very good, you won’t know how his picture will look, not even if  you look through the viewfinder. Or, to put it better, the things you do know are precisely not the things that will matter most. The things you do know about what the photograph is likely to look like are, on the whole, exactly those things that will appear because of photography’s automatic capacity for what I call gross depiction—­the achievement of easily recognized likenesses. My idea is that this achievement dislocates the value of representation, especially relative to its value in other kinds of pictures. It is an old idea that photography freed painting from the burden of representing. I think this old idea is backwards. It is photography that is freed of this burden, just because it is no burden in photography. Contrary to Susan Sontag, for instance, I think that one’s informed attention when looking at photographs tends to go elsewhere than to what is (grossly) depicted.

Another Analogy Representation, in this sense of gross depiction, is something like pitch in the performance of music. With photographs this kind of representation has, roughly, the importance that pitch has in piano playing. It is sensible and important to attend to pitch when hearing people sing or when listening to strings, winds, and brasses play. Mastery of pitch is very important in the successful use of these instruments. But unless you object to the way a piano was tuned before the performance, there is no comparable way to dwell on achievements of pitch control when listening to a piano sonata. Pitch is, we might say, an automatic achievement of the piano. It 60  chap te r 4

is also a kind of limitation. Those shadings of sharp and flat that mark a good string player and those adjustments that the good horn player makes to preserve the harmonics of the ensemble are beyond the power of a pianist because of the mechanical character of the instrument. It is ridiculous to suggest that piano playing could not be good music, or that it could not incorporate features of style. It is possible, however, to imagine someone so misguided in his understanding of the piano and piano music that he found it inherently inartistic. I put it to you that this is how some writers seem to have found photography because of the automatic, mechanical character of the camera. Just as some people regard photographs as debased paintings made with the aid of an automatic tool, whose one interesting feature is that they record faithfully, so someone might regard piano playing as a debased form of string-­ensemble playing done with a clumsy string-­sounder, whose one interesting feature is constancy of intonation. “Absurd” is too soft a word for such an idea. The fact that pianos produce correct pitches and do so automatically is neither a guarantee of nor a barrier to the artistic possibilities of piano music. The fact that cameras produce likenesses and do so automatically is neither a guarantee of nor a barrier to the artistic possibilities of photography.5

III Neither the intimate relation of photographs to reality (such as that relation may be) nor the mechanical character of the camera is a bar to art in photography. It follows that there is no need for those who find photography artistic to deny either of those things. And it would be a mistake to do so. In the first place, as difficult as it is to describe the intimate relation and as annoying as it is to be forced to say what’s different in photography’s automatism that would distinguish it from any other art’s machinery, these are special, unique features of photography. In the second place, these features endow photographs with special interests that may or may not have to do with Art. There is nothing that prevents a single object from being w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?  61

a work of art and also engaging you in some respect that may seem to have nothing to do with art, and I dare say there is nothing wrong with that. Let me give you one very small example, from another art—­literature. It is a small passage. To follow it you need to know only that the first-­person narrator is Anna, Janet is her daughter, and Marie is a friend of Janet’s. Janet says, tell me a story. “There was once a little girl called Janet,” I begin, and she smiles with pleasure. I tell her how this little girl went to school on a rainy day, did lessons, played with the other children, quarrelled with her friend. . . .” “No, mummy, I didn’t, that was yesterday. I love Marie for ever and ever.” So I change the story so that Janet loves Marie for ever and ever. Janet eats dreamily, conveying her spoon back and forth to her mouth, listening while I create her day, give it form.

The section goes on a bit, with the development of a wonderful negotiation between Anna and Janet over just how the story is to be told, over just what parts of the story must conform to Janet’s day and what parts of Janet’s day will be made to match the story; but we will not go into that. What is the point of Anna’s telling this story to Janet? Well, it helps the child end her day; it helps her give in to bed, sleep, and the night. That is a sublime achievement. Anna says that the story creates Janet’s day, gives it form. I do not know that it is easier to make the parts of one’s life into a day than it is to make one’s things into a world; so let us credit Anna with a real success. Her story has real value. Is the story also a work of art? I doubt that you would like to say so, and so let us turn to the larger story, of which this is a very small section. It is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. That story is a work of art. It also creates a day, many days, a big part of someone’s life, and it does it by (or in) giving that life form. Whose life? Anna’s. (But Anna is Doris Lessing, or at least she is nearly.) The value of The Golden Notebook for Anna is the same as the value of Anna’s little story for Janet. Now in the larger case, perhaps the value to Anna (and to any reader who can 62  chap te r 4

feel herself to be Anna) has become integral to the fact that the book is art, or the fact that it’s good art. I don’t know that it has. I only know that personal, intimate attachments to works are identifiable separately from the artistry of those works even if in some cases they merge. Take my photograph of my son. Like Anna’s story to Janet, this picture is no work of art, or at least it is not one of consequence. It is, however, of considerable value to me, and I dearly hope that someday it will touch him as what it is, or was meant to be: my attempts to make sense for him and me of the day of a city boy and his bike in the summer—­an attempt to create his day. Only a photograph could do this for us, because, unlike a painting, it signals that he was there and I was there and we were together making this photograph. Photographs can do such things for us. They can also be art. Perhaps in some cases their artistry incorporates this value of intimacy in the past preserved, this sense of the object and the photographer united in this picture. I think this of some things by Eugène Atget and some by Walker Evans. In those pictures I sense the choice of the photographer, the selection of something with which to unite. But this is all very flighty (as my friendly critic Joel Snyder would say, I have left the ground). Let me conclude, therefore, by concluding that there is nothing whatsoever in the nature of photography that disqualifies it as art, and by speculating that there are things in its nature that make it—­some of the time—­one of the kinds of art it can be.

Notes This paper began as a response to an excellent paper by Professor Cynthia Freeland, for a symposium at eastern-­division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful to her for having shown me that there is a good, difficult topic here. And I am grateful beyond adequate expression to Professor Joel Snyder, who, first, has taught me virtually all I know about photography and, second, has discussed and argued these questions with me w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   63

at great length, refusing my extravagances but hearing them out sympathetically. 1. The best guide I know to this literature is “Photography, Vision and Representation” by Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, in Critical In­ quiry 2, no. 1. (1975): 143–­69. Early arguments to the effect that a pho­ tograph is essentally only another kind of picture can be found in William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1845) and Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (London, 1889). (Snyder has told me that Emerson later changed his opinions and makes the argument in question only in the first edition of the book.) Arguments to the effect that photographs have a special nature are relatively more recent. They can be found, for instance, in Edward Weston, “Seeing Photographically,” The Complete Photographer 9, no. 49 (New York, 1943); Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photogra­ phy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964); and John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967). 2. Perhaps Walton would insist that the photograph is of L, even if L is not identical with O, or perhaps he would say that it is a characteristic feature of photographs that they invariably do depict L. I do not know his most recent thinking on these matters, and in any case I do not mean to be tangling with him here. Two criteria come to mind for use in determining whether P depicts something, L, for instance. One is resemblance, if it can be explained well enough to settle the question of whether P resembles L. The other is some Goodman-­like set of conditions for determining, as a matter of formal semantics, what P refers to, supposing it to be settled that P is the kind of symbol that can depict. On either ground, it seems clear to me that P does not depict Uncle Fritz. If one continues to maintain that P does depict Uncle Fritz (and any other light source whose light is realized in P), it seems to me that one must be doing so solely on the basis of this causal connection, and a consequence will be that the representational capacity of photographs will be entirely different from that of nonphotographic pictures. If in our treatment of photographs—­I mean how we look at them and try to make sense of them—­we behave as we do when treating other pictures, at least with regard to determining what they depict, then we should be unwilling to suppose that they secure their depictions in any radically different way. If one persists in thinking that they do work in this different way, operating on the basis of one necessary and sufficient condition, namely the causal efficacy of a light source, then perhaps one should just abandon the idea that photographs are representational at all. Roger Scruton has taken this position. Perhaps Walton would agree, 64  chap te r 4

although for different reasons, for if he believes that in a photograph of Ken I see Ken literally, then why bother with the idea that I see a representation of Ken? It is only in peculiar and logically obnoxious cases that X represents Y and also is identical with Y. It might be more comfortable to think that photographs are (pictorially) representational and their frequent—­even standard—­causal relation to their depictions is an additional feature. 3. I owe this term to Joel Snyder. I first heard it in this technical employment when Snyder responded to the observation that photographs must themselves be close to the things they picture, just as the Shroud of Turin is thought to be nearer to Jesus himself than is any conceivable painting or drawing. It was also Snyder who got me to take note of what the word “photograph” means. 4. Quoted by J. F. Kohler, as reported in The Bach Reader, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, rev. ed. (1945; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1966). My thanks to Professor Peter Kivy, who recalled that Bach had said something like this and put me on to it, and to Professor Ellen Harris, who lent me the book and gave me guidance, and to myself, who spent most of a summer looking in the book for this remark. 5. Of course neither the piano nor the camera does its trick all by itself. It must be prepared, by the performer or by someone else. I wish to compare the performer who sits down to a tuned piano with a photographer who picks up a ready-­to-­shoot camera. You are free to imagine the tuner to be simply a person who has tools for tightening and loosening the strings, with either a good ear, a tuning fork, or an electronic pitch-­checker, or you may think of the tuner as someone who knows in detail how the thing works and builds the whole piano from scratch as well as tunes it. You may think of the photographer’s helper as someone who focuses the lens and sets the aperture and shutter (or perhaps you prefer to think of it as a whiz-­bang, superautomated camera that does all that on its own), or you may think of the helper as someone who really knows how the thing works and even builds it from scratch. The parallel remains.

w h at ’s special ab out photogra phy?   65

5

Sports and Art Be gi nn i ng Que s t ion s This piece is a prelude, intended only to open a few questions about sports. I am interested mainly in questions of aesthetics, but I will also outline a point concerning ethics. In the first case I want to advance a comparison of the appreciation of sports with the appreciation of art, and in the other case I will compare an attitude toward sports with a central moral attitude. An overall question, for another occasion, is how far these comparisons can be kept cogent.

Aesthetics I am thinking of sports from the standpoint of the spectator, the critical appreciator. That is different from the position of a parti­ci­ pant, but there is a connection. The connection is complex and un­ clear. It appears in various contexts, including ones involving the estimation of difficulty. I am thinking primarily of large-­scale team games like baseball, basketball, and football, but it would do as well to consider individual competitions like tennis and ping-­pong, or sports in which the participants do not vie against one another simultaneously, like golf and gymnastics. To appreciate the qual­ ity of play by some performer it is necessary, at least sometimes, to apprehend the difficulty of what is being done. This can count both

66

ways: in favor of doing something difficult, and against failing to do something easy. First consider the latter case, in which something easy or routine is bungled, either through carelessness or lack of ability or what­ ever.1 You should fawn on me when I hit that backhand, but it is really a rather routine shot—­my son has been able to make it since shortly after he learned to play tennis—­and you would be wrong to shift your approbation from making the shot to the shot itself. The difficulty in question, therefore, is a kind of absolute, for it seems to be measured against a norm independent of the peculiar capaci­ ties of the artist or player, and also independent of those of the spectator. However the difficulty is measured, what kinds of difficulty mat­ ter? Not every kind. Certainly not every kind of difficult thing is a thing that is good to do, for a difficulty might be so radically out of place that its introduction is a blemish.2 The player may have done something that almost no one in the world can do, and yet it will not be laudable. It will be grotesque. The reason is that the undertaking is very poorly calculated to achieve what is analytically the aim of playing the game in question; but the point of immediate interest is that, however particular cases may be assessed, we cannot take it as a general and unqualified proposition that it is good when some­ thing difficult is done. And we cannot make use of such a proposi­ tion in assessing art. Buddy Rich could do things when playing jazz drums that are beyond the technical capacity of all but a handful of drummers, and yet some of Rich’s performances are at best stun­ ning oddities that add nothing and may well detract from the musi­ cal value of the pieces in which they occur. It is not always easy to identify a case in which the difficulty is irrelevant. Sometimes overcoming the difficulty is irrelevant to the point of the exercise, as when an athlete undertakes something that need not have been attempted at all. I will describe such examples presently, but first let me describe a kind of case we might call “mixed.” In a mixed case an athlete bumbles initially and thus winds up with a much greater difficulty than he would have faced if

sp orts and art  67

he had performed well at the start, and yet he overcomes this self-­ imposed obstacle.3 One can find and imagine comparable examples in the arts—­photography and literature, for instance—­in which the artist has created for himself an unnecessarily complex problem in composition or lighting or narration but then proceeded to solve it. I want to observe a few more things about the appreciation of dif­ ficult doings. But first let me gather together the two very general points that are emerging about some circumstances in which, in both sports and art, we seem to appreciate the accomplishment of a task.4 First, we appreciate the accomplishment of a task when it is dif­ ficult, meaning that an average sort of performer probably couldn’t do it. I do not pretend that this notion, the idea of “what someone could do,” is unproblematic. One line of complexity leads to cases in which the “thing that is done” is clearly easy, yet it is not easy—­in a particular place at a particular time—­to think of doing it. It is not difficult to drop a soft liner in the infield on purpose in order to make a double play, and it is not so difficult to serve neither wide to the forehand nor steeply to the backhand but directly into the center of the receiver’s body, but not every baseball infielder or tennis server thinks to do these things. Sometimes a maneuver of this kind is so rare that it is virtually unique, and its first occurrences constitute a permanent innovation. The “Fosbury flop” style of high-­jumping is an example. These cases have some similarity to cases in art in which it is quite clear that what has been done “could have been done by almost anyone,” and yet it is just one artist who thought to do it. Much of  Warhol, Christo, Cage, and Oldenburg is like this. I am simply ignoring this complication in this essay, and I will not go into a refined conception of “being able to do it” that separates being able to think it up from being able to execute it. Second, we appreciate the accomplishment of a task when there is some point in having the task done. The point is supplied typi­ cally by the context—­the game or the work of art—­in which the task is set. Within a game the point is typically given in terms of win­ ning; within a work of art, things are not so clear. I am assuming 68  chap te r 5

that a desire to win is an analytical component in playing a game. Of course this doesn’t deny that you can be playing baseball when you really don’t care whether you win, or even when, as with me in a weekly game I play with children, you actually want the other team to win. It does mean that spectators and players understand the efforts of the players in terms of a presumed wish all round that the players win. In the degenerate case a player deliberately loses, or tries to, and a corruption that is not merely moral is brought to the game. If you swing without trying to hit the ball or take what you know to be a third strike without swinging, it is difficult to say just what you are doing in terms of the idiom of playing baseball. Do not, however, confuse individual units of play with the whole game. Sandy Koufax reports that in some games in which the Dodg­ ers had built a substantial lead he would try a pitch he was unsure of just to determine whether the batter in question could handle it. Sometimes this resulted in a home run, but Koufax then knew bet­ ter how to deal with this batter in difficult circumstances, should they arise. A case like this is not an example of someone’s trying not to win, but to see this one must notice that the relevant con­ text is broader than that consisting of only this pitch to this batter. I am a tennis player of markedly limited abilities. Early in matches, especially during games whose outcomes seem to me nearly inde­ pendent of the point at hand, I sometimes go to the net, inviting a passing shot, and then deliberately fail to cover the ensuing ground stroke. My hope is that at some later, critical time I will come to the net, my opponent will go for the same passing shot, and I will con­ found him with greater speed and net coverage than he expected. Such cases are common, and they can be very complex when what is at stake is not one pitch or one batter or even one game but an entire series of games or perhaps a whole season. The context supplied by a game or a work of art can rationalize one of its constituents, but if this rationalization is to be profound then the game or work itself must be significant. Why is it that some sports become entrenched objects of complex appreciation and others do not? Why baseball and not tug-­of-­war? Why tennis and not human-­pyramid building? Why sprint racing and not speed sp orts and art   69

typing? In some cases it seems to be because one activity has intrin­ sic possibilities that exceed those of another. But many apparently simple activities yield virtually endless refinements, and there are certainly examples of complex athletic activities that never become canonical sports. Some cases can be explained by the fact that one sport retains a connection with some natural endeavor while the other is utterly artificial. Can all cases be explained in these ways? Are these the explanations of why some productive enterprises become art and others do not? Which athletic activities (can) become real sports? Which pro­ ductive activities (can) become artistic? Which made things (can) become works of art? In some cases—­perhaps most—­an after­-the-­ fact explanation is available in terms of the natural coherence and significance of these activities. But not in all cases, and in general there is no possible a priori determination of the possibilities. What kinds of things will be art? What will be a medium? What will be a sport? There is no way to say in advance. Sports, like the genera of art, discover and create their own possibilities. Virtuosity is obvi­ ously a significant idea in the appreciation of art, and it is almost as obvious that we do not yet have any reliable analysis of just what virtuosity is.5 It is equally important and obscure in the apprecia­ tion of sports. In neither art nor sports is virtuosity of an unquali­ fied determinate value. The phrase “mere virtuosity” makes that clear, for it acknowledges something remarkable but simultaneously depreciates it. If virtuosity is at least in part a matter of doing some­ thing difficult, then what remains to be said? First there is the question of how it is that mere virtuosity becomes serious, how the flair and facility with which something is done become themselves the logical subjects of attention. What seems to happen is that what was at best a means to an end becomes itself an end. This is one way to think of the development of certain sports, and it is surely how art forms and media evolve (although it is not the only way). Think of the skills exhibited in master paintings: the portrayal of light and shadow, the modeling of shapes, the sugges­ tion of motion, the creation and arrangement of color. It is natu­ ral to think of those abilities marshaled originally in service of the 70  chap te r 5

depiction of recognizable objects, and in that capacity they are used to achieve a kind of generic end. But painters and audiences have long since appeared who are able to regard the exhibition of those skills as an end. Similarly in sports, an instrumental skill begins to be cultivated, as we say, in a useless but irresistible phrase, “for its own sake.” Running fast, over short and long distances, jump­ ing with and without the aid of a pole,6 throwing objects, lifting weights—­all these things make perfectly good sense, first as means to obvious natural ends like killing one’s enemies, securing food, et cetera, and then as means to sporting ends—­in particular, winning athletic games. But entirely independent of those considerations we are able to appreciate skill in these activities, and we can take an interest in competitions in simply running or jumping. This is what makes possible one sense (never mind the truth) in saying that one com­ petitor is better than another but the other is better than the one. One boxer may hit harder than another and also take punches bet­ ter and even have more stamina, and yet the latter may always beat the former, say in the kind of boxing match staged in the Olympics. (If the weaker man can survive the stronger’s punches and do this for the duration of a short fight, while landing more blows than he receives, he will win.) It is a frequent observation about pairs of ten­ nis players that A is a better tennis player than B although B beats A more often than A beats B. We are able to separate the idea of good tennis play from the idea of winning at tennis, at least up to a point, and we can recognize and appreciate the former. It is obviously possible to prefer A’s play to B’s for any of a variety of reasons that are not strictly sportive. For instance, A’s play might be “aesthetically” more pleasing, or it might be more classical, or it might be in some style that the viewer just happens to prefer or to prefer looking at. The problem is to make sense of a preference for A’s play on grounds intrinsic to the sport A and B are playing. The solution, I think, is to relate A’s play to something like success at the game in general. A’s play is generally superior to B’s in being a kind of play more likely than B’s to prevail in the sport in question, although perhaps not specifically against B. It is easiest to imagine sp orts and art  71

this in a sport whose skills are complex and interrelated. Think of tennis. I, A, am able to beat some players who are better than I. It happens this way. I have rather weak ground strokes, but I have a fairly good net game and I possess a genuinely reliable overhead. And I am quick. When my opponent, B, has good ground strokes but neither particularly good passing shots nor an effective lob, he cannot keep me from the net often enough to win. Typically in such a situation, although not necessarily, it happens that there is a third player, C, who customarily beats A but loses to B. In my case such a player has the lob or the speed or the passing shots to neutralize my advantage at the net, but these skills are of little use against B, who does not rely on getting positions at the net, and then B’s superior ground game usually gets the better of C. A striking feature of virtuosity is that one of its most character­ istic expressions is a concealment of itself. The mark of this kind of virtuosity is that the virtuoso makes the difficult appear easy. This disguised effort, as we might call it, is as well marked in sports as it is in art. Julius Erving is unquestionably a virtuoso, and he has recorded the following estimate of virtuosity in the play of his fel­ low basketball players: “[Bernard King] will never get up to the level of the real all-­timers like, say, Kareem, or myself, because he looks like he’s working too hard. When you reach a level of great­ ness there’s a certain added element that goes into making it look easy.” 7 Sometimes the act in question is so obviously difficult that even a novice spectator realizes that considerable skill is being deployed by whoever does it, but sometimes it is not at all obvious. In these subtle cases, how do we come to apprehend the virtuosity? How do we realize that it is there? Neither a description of the act nor the sight of its being done is sure to reveal the difficulty. This fact seems to me connected with a point articulated by J. O. Urmson thirty years ago in his preliminary descriptions of what he called “simple cases of aesthetic evaluation”: But there are some slightly more sophisticated cases which need closer inspection. I have in mind occasions when we admire a build­ 72  chap te r 5

ing not only for its color and shape but because it looks strong or spacious, or admire a horse because it looks swift as well as for its gleaming coat. These looks are not sensible qualities in the simple way in which color and shape are. . . . We are now considering the facts which, exclusively emphasized, lead to the functional view of aesthetics. The element of truth in that view I take to be that if a thing looks to have a characteristic which is a desirable one from another point of view, its looking so is a proper ground of aesthetic appreciation. What makes the appreciation aes­ thetic is that it is concerned with a thing’s looking somehow with­ out concern for whether it really is like that; beauty, we may say, to emphasize the point, is not even skin-­deep.8

Swiftness is a desirable quality in a horse, but it is incompatible with other desirable qualities. The kind of horse called a “thorough­ bred,” which runs in races like the Kentucky Derby, is swift—­and it looks swift. Belgian draft horses and Clydesdales are not swift. And they certainly do not look swift. The very characteristics desirable in strong, hardworking horses of this kind are plainly incompat­ ible with the characteristics that are the concomitants of swiftness in a horse. So far this is no problem for Urmson. There is a “point of view” from which one prizes the speed of a horse, and there is another point of view from which one prizes the strength of a horse. The slender-­looking legs of a horse will strike one differently depending on which of the two points of view one is taking. Neither is what Urmson thinks of as “aesthetic.” Urmson thinks of aesthetic evaluation as involving a “point of view” itself, an aesthetic point of view, and I would not myself care to put things that way; but that is not the point here. The point is Urmson’s interest in the swift look of a horse. This is not such a simple look, as he notes. It is not like a color or a shape. My question is, how do we know what a swift horse looks like? Surely there is a connection between looking like a swift horse and being a swift horse, although the connection is not so inflexible as to ensure that all swift horses look swift, or that all swift-­looking horses are swift. It is possible, no doubt, to learn the use of an adjective like “swift-­looking” on the strength of exposure sp orts and art  73

to a number of cases of swift-­looking horses, but in the central case one will need to know something about swift horses—­and not just about the appearance of swift-­looking horses—­in order to have an idea of what a swift-­looking horse would look like. I wish very much not to open the general topic of “expression,” and in particular I do not want to take up the question of what ac­ quaintance, if any, we need with properties in order to be aware of their expression. I want only to note the point that not all the prop­ erties of a thing are open to casual, immediate inspection, whether these are expressive properties or any other kind. Compare the look of a horse with the look of a person. Federico Fellini has this to say about the look of Donald Sutherland, the actor he chose to play Casanova: “I like Sutherland because he has a wonderfully stupid look. He looks unborn.”9 Although I do not know just what Urmson means by “aesthetic appreciation,” I daresay that there could be as much aesthetic appre­ ciation of a stupid look wrought in a picture as of a wise or compas­ sionate look. But there may be no other “point of view” (other than the “aesthetic point of view”) from which stupidity is a desirable characteristic in a person. Thus when Urmson identifies desirability as part of “a proper ground of aesthetic appreciation,” he is led away from the remarkable (aesthetic?) phenomenon of one thing’s being made to look like another. It may not matter so much whether that thing is a desirable thing. How do we learn what a stupid person looks like? If something as evidently transparent as the look of a stupid person or of a swift horse is discernible only by those who are somehow acquainted with stupid people or swift horses, then the appearance of difficulty promises to be even less overtly detectable. Ask yourself which is harder to do, to hit a pitched baseball with a bat or to return a ping-­pong ball. Do you know? Does it help to be told that you will have approximately three-­fourths of a second to watch the baseball come toward you at the plate, and that you will have approximately one-­tenth of a second to focus on the ping-­ pong ball before it bounces in front of you? I doubt that anyone who

74  chap te r 5

has not attempted these things can begin to answer, unless he has seen the attempts of others or knows the statistics concerning those who do attempt to do these things. The proximate requirement is that one be able to imagine doing something oneself, or trying to, with enough vividness to achieve an estimate of the difficulty in doing it. It may be that this act of imag­ ination, sometimes, for some people, requires an actual attempt. There is a connection here with R. G. Collingwood’s fine idea that all genuine appreciation of art, where appreciation entails under­ standing, is built upon an auditor’s act of imagination in which he achieves the virtual creation of the work. Are there, perhaps, difficulties that can be measured only by someone who has encountered them? If so, then whatever virtuos­ ity is exhibited in overcoming them necessarily will be unappreci­ ated by all who have no firsthand experience of these tasks. If that were true, then we might have to reconsider a chronic complaint of artists and athletes. Artists replying to critics and athletes respond­ ing to sports reporters sometimes voice peculiarly accusatory com­ plaints, more or less on the order of “How dare you judge my work, you who have never painted or composed or concertized or tried to guard Julius Erving or return Ivan Lendl’s serve?” The force of this charge seems moralistic. It seems to question the legitimacy of the critic’s position, denying that he has the right to hold his opinion. It is like questioning the competence of a court on the grounds that it has no jurisdiction in the matter at hand, or, better, on the grounds that its jury is not composed of true peers of the defendant. It is as if only members of the relevant community were entitled to assess members of the community, and the relevant community consisted of actual practicing painters or tennis players. This is an interesting idea, worth more attention than it will get if we treat these performers’ complaints as (what they may well be, much of the time) the testy outbursts of people who have been pricked by negative remarks about their work. There is another reason not to dismiss this kind of rebuttal too easily. It is the idea that the difficulty itself—­or the overcoming of

sp orts and art  75

it—­is part of what is being done. The difficulty is in the very sub­ stance of the thing. This is a difficult idea. It has been expressed forcefully by Claudio Arrau: Take the beginning of the Beethoven Opus 111. People play it with two hands because they don’t want to risk dirty octaves. Well, first of all, it sounds different played with one hand, as written. And then technical difficulty has itself an expressive value.10 The way it’s [Brahms’s F-­sharp Minor Sonata] written is almost impossible—­to make the big skips fortissimo. Actually, without ex­ ception people redistribute the notes. Here, for instance, they take the bottom notes in the right hand—­F-­sharp, C-­sharp, A, F-­sharp—­ with the left hand. . . . And then, of course, it’s very easy. Again, I must say that such facilitation is wrong. Physical difficulty has itself an expressive value. When something sounds easy, its meaning changes completely.11

Arrau is saying that one can hear the difficulty, and I think that is right, although, as I have been arguing, not every difficulty is iden­ tifiable as such to every spectator. One might need at least some experience, direct or indirect, with piano playing to hear the diffi­ culty in a Brahms sonata. And this means that sometimes the chal­ lenge to the competence of critics may be not a denial of the critic’s right but a claim of his factual incompetence. You are incompetent to appraise my work when, never having tried to do what I am try­ ing to do, you cannot form any reliable opinion of how good my efforts are. With a little forcing we can say that you don’t know what I am doing, and so you don’t know what you are talking about when you talk about what I am doing. This construction seems attractive to me. Its plausibility depends on the truth of the proposition that at least some artistic and sportive tasks have a difficulty that can be measured only by those who attempt them. Whether or not participation is requisite for one who would under­ stand the efforts of those who do participate, nonparticipation is characteristic of a fan insofar as he is a fan. Whether or not he is a fan, when a spectator appreciates the difficulty of what is done, 76  chap te r 5

whether or not the difficulty is disguised, he has feelings whose dynamics are similar to those of a moral judge. We feel greater moral approbation for a person who does the right thing when it seems especially difficult for him to do that thing. And in ordinary life there are profound problems that escape the purview of many observers. For instance, there are difficulties in being a reliable spouse and parent that go unrecognized by many people, and these people are thus unable to appreciate—­morally—­the durability of married parents. When the spectator is a fan, whether or not he can appreciate the difficulty of the players’ efforts, he connects himself with the players in a very special way. Although he is not himself a player, which is to say that he does nothing in the game, his feelings are connected very directly to what is done by those who are playing. One of the best statements of this that I know of was given by the very fine baseball player Willie McCovey: “The fans sitting up there are helpless. They can’t pick up a bat and come down and do some­ thing. Their only involvement is in how well you do. If you strike out or mess up out there, they feel they’ve done something wrong.” McCovey goes on to offer this acute estimate: “You’re all they’ve got. The professional athlete knows there’s always another game or another year coming up. If he loses, he swallows the bitter pill and comes back. It’s much harder for the fans.” 12 I think this is right, that it is often much harder for the fan. It is not just because the ath­ lete knows that there will be another opportunity, as if the fan did not know that as well. It is because there is nothing the fan can do to make things better. Of course there is nothing the fan did that brought him his grief. And yet he feels it. I do not intend to attempt an explanation of this feeling, this feeling of being wrong, as Wil­ lie McCovey puts it, when in fact one has done nothing that could be right or wrong. Rather than take up questions in the psychology or sociology of sports fans, and rather than open a discussion of “identification,” 13 I will stick with this fact, the feelings engendered in fans by what the players do. It is a simple and beautiful phenome­ non. And it is deep enough. It is located in what I think of as a moral dimension of sports appreciation. sp orts and art  77

Ethics The relation of morality to sport is a marvelously rich topic, with a vast range of questions concerning the morality of cultivating an enjoyment of and a proficiency in activities that damage and destroy people, of taking pleasure in the emotional and physical pain of others, and so on; but I will be brief and develop only one extremely abstract point. I want to persuade you that our ability to become fans is an amazing fact about human beings. I am not rec­ ommending that you become a fan, nor am I lauding the condition in anyone who is a fan. I want only to note that the possibility of becoming a fan is a possibility predicated on the same fact that—­if indeed it is a fact—­makes morality possible. For now I will charac­ terize a fan (of some team or of a single competitor) as someone who cares how that team does in its competitions. It pleases a fan when his team wins, pains the fan when his team loses. A fan hopes that his team will win. The salient fact is that the team is his. How do you get into this relation with a team? There are a num­ ber of possibilities, some of which will be mentioned in order to be excluded. First, let us not confuse the simple state of being a fan with thinking or predicting that the team will win. If you predict that the team will win, then you may hope that it will win, and if it does, then you will derive the pleasure that comes from being right. If you have enough confidence in your prediction, or someone else’s, to make a bet, then certainly you will hope that the team wins, and you will be pleased and rich if it does. A bettor is a kind of fan, I suppose, but not the pure kind—­unless he is the kind of romantic who bets on his team because he is already a fan, which is to say that it is already his team, and he has no reason to think he will win. In this case it is not the betting that makes him a fan; it is being a fan that makes him a bettor. We want, then, to characterize some way in which you can become attached to a team and care about its fortune independently of any expectations that the team will do well. There are a number of routes to this condition. Your friend or relative may play on the team. An enemy or relative may play on the 78  chap te r 5

opposing team. You or someone close to you may be the coach or owner of the team. The team may have members of your race, reli­ gion, sex, or age. (Or size. One of the reasons why I have tended to root for John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors over Björn Borg and Ivan Lendl, I think, while I don’t seem to have cared how Roscoe Tanner does against them, is that they are more like me in size.) In many cases a fan is connected with his team by a complex act of imagination, and the freedom of this act is not entirely unlim­ ited. Besides the problem of estimating difficulty, which may seem like a problem in aesthetic appreciation, there may be the problem of thinking of oneself as sufficiently like the members of the team, which may be like a problem in moral appreciation. It may be easier to take pleasure in the success of someone relatively like oneself. It is thought by some that the popularity of the Boston Celtics is due in part to their having a relatively large number of capable white players in comparison with other American basketball teams. If this is true, then although this is a kind of racist phenomenon, it is not simple, generic racism, for it may be that some white fans have been unable to achieve an adequate “identification” with the Phila­ delphia 76ers or the Los Angeles Lakers, comparably successful basketball teams in which almost all of the significant players are black. One of the finest baseball teams of the 1970s was the Pitts­ burgh Pirates. Sometimes when Dock Ellis was pitching, the entire team was “non-­white,” all nine players being either black or His­ panic. Some think that this explains the failure of Pittsburgh fans to fill their stadium consistently during those years. This is connected, surely, with the affective component we see in social and moral racism when, say, a white person does not “feel” the pleasure and pain of a black person as keenly as he feels the pleasure and pain of another white person. Why else might you become a team’s fan? It might be your coun­ try’s team, or your college’s. It may be the team from your city or from the city in which you grew up or from the city in which you were living when you first became interested. Any of these con­ nections can explain—­and justify—­your interest in the team. Your interest is predicated on the interest of someone close to you, and sp orts and art  79

that person has the interest of direct involvement. Such cases are different from the predicting and betting cases: in those you stake your reputation or your self-­image or your money, and your interest in your reputation or your image or your money leads directly to an interest in the team’s winning. In the former cases your interest is not by this kind of indirection, but it is indirect nonetheless, being predicated on the direct interest of someone in whom you take an interest.14 There is a fascinating case that is none of these. It is the one in which your interest is engaged directly and is not predicated on any anterior concern. This is what it is to be purely a fan, and, just as in discussions of morality, some will say that such a thing does not happen, that it cannot happen. That is exactly like objecting to Kant that all imperatives are hypothetical. This is not the same as observ­ ing that whenever an act is obligatory there will be a hypothetical imperative in force, for this observation is no objection if there are still cases in which a categorical obligation obtains along with hypo­ thetical ones. A persistent misreading has led to the widespread attribution to Kant of the conviction that no agent has moral worth when he does something he already wants to do. It would follow that an unqualifiedly good will can be exhibited only in the commis­ sion of acts that have no other, nonmoral motive, and in fact Kant does suggest that it becomes increasingly easier to espy a good will as the noncategorical imperatives to the action become fewer. One might think, analogously, that the pure condition of a fan is to be found only in a fan who could have no rational reason for expecting his team to do well, nor any other wish to see the team do well. But this is a distortion of Kant’s idea. As I understand him, a good will can show itself in any actions (except those that contravene one’s duty), including trivial ones of no apparent moral consequence, and including those for which one has strong self-­interested motives. It is the same for fans. One’s attachment to a team, just like one’s obligation to do a deed, can be multiply grounded. You may have the stance of a pure fan of team T and also be linked to T by being a member of T yourself or by having predicted that T will win, for instance, or by any number of other contingent connections. Some 80  chap te r 5

contingent connection may have grounded your concern initially but has since lapsed—­that is, ceased to be the ground of your con­ nection. This is just how it is with Kantian categorical obligations: they may be commanded hypothetically as well, as when it is in your material interest to keep a promise, or when it is good busi­ ness to develop a reputation for giving accurate change. A pure fan of  Jimmy Connors would also once have had good, rational reasons for expecting him to beat Ivan Lendl at Wimbledon or in the US Open. When the pure condition happens—­if ever it does, in morality or in sports appreciation—­a person succeeds in attaching himself to a team in such a way that its success brings him pleasure and its fail­ ure is a source of pain, and these feelings are not mediated by any vested interest. This is a marvelous achievement. Think of what it means that a person is able to do this. It means that one of us can be moved by good or bad fortune that is not our own. (You may prefer to say that we can make some other fortune our own, but it is the same point, and I do not care which way it is formulated.) This seems to me a wonderful thing. And it is wonderful yet again because this capacity, which makes it possible to be a fan, surely has its source in the capacity that makes morality possible. This is the capacity for altruism. A straightforward form of moral skepti­ cism is the denial that altruism is actual, or even possible. I am not a moral skeptic. For those who are and for those who are undecided, I recommend some time pondering the lot of the true fan. It may not change your mind, but it will give you a chance to think freely about the phenomenon of fellow feeling, unencumbered by whatever moral theories you already subscribe to, and without the pressure that comes with the consideration of official cases of moral gravity. It is very refreshing.

Notes 1. It is important to imagine these cases as vividly as possible. It is not easy to give examples from sports that are equally familiar to all who sp orts and art  81

might see this paper, and so here and later I will give a variety of exam­ ples, keeping these intrusions in footnotes in order to avoid making the text periodically arcane for various readers. The kind of gratuitous blunder I am thinking of here seems to be one that easily could have been avoided. For instance, getting picked off base when there was no reason to take a big lead; muffing a slow grounder by overrunning it when the batter is known to run so slowly that there was no need to rush the ball; missing a low, floating overhead two feet from the net; going up for a layup and having it blocked when a teammate is wide open on the other side of the basket; or being run out after daring to cross the crease when one needn’t have risked it because the bowler has been ineffective. 2. It is not so hard to conceive examples. I will give one. Suppose a basketball game is in its last few seconds with the score very close. A forward grabs a defensive rebound and heaves an outlet pass to a guard. The play works. The breaking teammate receives the pass and dribbles toward the other basket with no one within six feet of him. Instead of going straight in for a simple layup, he pulls up at the circle, leaps high and far, and executes a 360-­degree turn in midair, culmi­ nating in a gargantuan slam dunk. Suppose that he makes the shot, or nearly makes it, and, whether he makes it or not, if you like, that the force of his shot destroys the goal and backboard. 3. In recent years the Chicago White Sox—­my baseball team—­have turned up a number of outfielders who occasionally make this kind of play: running at great speed on a difficult angle to the ball, the fielder just manages to stab the ball in a one-­hand catch over the shoulder. Good. But if the fielder had positioned himself properly and gotten even a decent jump on the ball, he could have made a standard two-­ hand catch above his head, standing still, facing the infield. What are we to make of the spectacular catch? On the one hand, many journey­ man outfielders could have made the less dramatic putout; but on the other hand, only a few of all the outfielders in the game could have made the play in just the way that these White Sox outfielders did. How do we estimate what they did? 4. Both these points are implicated in one of the earliest appreciations of difficulty I have seen, Aristotle’s. In Poetics VI, Aristotle presents a number of arguments to show that the plot is the most important of what he calls “the parts” of tragedy. It is difficult to make out just what he means by “most important.” (Given various points he makes in his logical works, we may assume that he is not presenting any argument that is a mere truism. We must not assume, then, that by “most impor­ tant part” he could mean the only necessary part, for then one of his arguments would be that the plot is the only necessary part because 82  chap te r 5

it is the only necessary part.) But it seems clear that when one part is more important than another, excellence in the more important part contributes more to the excellence of a tragedy than does excellence in the less important part. Aristotle’s final argument in favor of the preeminence of the plot is his observation that beginning tragedians achieve success in constructing plots later than they achieve success in creating other parts of a tragedy. This sounds like an observation that it is relatively more difficult to construct a plot, and this is linked to the assertion that it is a more valuable thing to do. 5. It is possible to think of a work’s taking virtuosity as its own subject. A sensitive, useful analysis of this idea is Thomas Carson Mark’s “On Works of  Virtuosity,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 28–­45. 6. It is interesting to read of the development of pole vaulting in the fen country of England, where it became the preferred method of mov­ ing about for those who did not care for the standard method, slodg­ ing. I owe my acquaintance with this fact as well as what little biol­ ogy I know of the fen country to Julie Cohen, mother of our children, and both of us owe our introduction to the lore of that country and the country itself to our good friend Jeremy Butterfield of Jesus College, Cambridge. 7. Quoted by Mark Jacobson in “Doctor One and Only,” Esquire, Febru­ ary 1985, 116. 8. J. O. Urmson, “What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 31 (1957): 88–­89. 9. This quotation is said to appear in Hollis Alpert’s recent book Fellini: A Life (New York: Atheneum, 1986). I have not located the book. The quotation is given by Cheryl Lavin in “Runners,” Chicago Tribune Mag­ azine, February 15, 1987, 3. 10. Quoted in Joseph Horowitz, Conversations with Arrau (New York: Knopf, 1982), 121. For this reference I am grateful to Larry Kart, who gave it to me during a conversation about his valuable essay “Taking a Look at the History of Jazz: The Bass Steps out of the Shadows,” Chi­ cago Tribune, March 11, 1984. 11. Horowitz, Conversations with Arrau, 152–­5 3. 12. Quoted by Roger Angell in Late Innings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 105. 13. The word “identification” seems exactly the right word—­and I will use it later—­but I distrust it. Instead of explaining the phenomenon, it may just name it. And it is tempting to use it for a number of different phenomena. With regard to books I read, plays and movies I see, and sports I watch, for instance, it would not be remarkable for me to say I “identify with” King Lear, King Saul, Roy Hobbs, Cary Grant, Dustin Hoffman, Sandy Koufax, and Willie McCovey. But my relations to sp orts and art  83

these figures are very different from one another, and it may cover more than it reveals to call them all cases of identification. 14. This kind of fellow feeling ought to be a central topic in serious discus­ sions of morality. The logic of the thing has been taken up by Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and in a number of essays by Nagel and others that have followed that book. For an excellent introduction to the phenomenol­ ogy of feelings on behalf of others, as well as to many other matters in this paper, I am indebted to Stephen Cohen and his essay “Vicarious Pride” (unpublished).

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6

Clay for Contemplation The philosophy of art is a peripheral subject in philosophy, and within the philosophy of art itself my interests have carried me to the margins of the subject (where I have written about figures of speech, sports, jokes, and, most recently, television). Thus my work counts as marginal in philosophy, at least according to the cus­ tomary canons of philosophy. And ceramic art is marginal, at least according to the customary practices of institutional art history and theory. As an aid to my preparations I was sent a copy of Professor Math­ ias Danbolt’s admirable essay “The Concept of Research in the Fine Arts,” and although I will not attempt to continue the work of that essay, I would like to register my agreement with its main lines. In particular, I think Professor Danbolt is exactly right when he states, “This discussion should indicate that no foundation exists for re­ garding artistic activity as research in the traditional sense.” For my part, I would like to suggest another way of thinking of things, not in opposition to Professor Danbolt’s but in hopes of complement­ing his way. A certain way of thinking about art begins at least as early as Plato, and I will ask you to consider another way of thinking. Ac­ cording to Plato, the question of whether art (or anything else, for that matter) is of value is the question of whether it has any clear

85

relation to knowledge. Plato concludes that art has a little to do with knowledge, but very little, and accordingly he assigns it a rather minor place in his conception of the best possible state. Aristotle is far more sanguine about the value of art, but—­and this is the criti­ cal point—­he accepts Plato’s assumption that the value in art must have to do with the acquisition of knowledge, and so he constructs an account of how it is that we learn from art. This kind of reply has been a part of the apology for art in the Western tradition ever since. In our time, science has taken on the role of paradigm in our understanding of what it means to acquire knowledge, and we are thereby led to suppose that we must explain art and artistic activity in terms of how much it resembles science. Thus Professor Danbolt takes research in science as a paradigm of research—­and he should, I think, for it is principally with regard to science that we have an at least relatively stable conception of what “research” means. This approach also mirrors the character of many contemporary univer­ sities, at least in the United States, where departments of physics, chemistry, and biology are accorded an unquestioned legitimacy, and the rest of us find ourselves cast in the role of mimics, practic­ ing social “science” or doing “research” in the humanities. Suppose, for a moment, we refuse this assumption of Plato’s: sup­ pose we say that we do not believe that the value of human activi­ ties must always be measured in terms of those activities’ relation to knowledge. Suppose we say, for instance, that Plato is just wrong in his attempt to explain goodness itself as a kind of knowledge. Let us say, for the moment, as if we were Nietzsche, that we do not believe that the mask of the knower is the only appealing guise. Eventually we might also want to say that we are not so happy with Descartes’s gift to the modern world, the obsessive concern with certainty, but for now we say only that we think there may be human enterprises of importance that have nothing to do with what Plato thinks of as knowledge. And we suppose that there might be some point in art besides the effort at knowledge and, furthermore, that this point may have legitimacy and validity all its own, not to be measured in terms of knowledge. 86  chap te r 6

Then what is the value of art? A very old and a very difficult ques­ tion, to which I certainly cannot argue an answer. But I will give an answer, entirely unargued, by way of starting a discussion. The answer is this: the value in art comes from the reason why we make works of art. And that reason is precisely that there is no reason. When slogans are sounded that suggest otherwise—­for instance, that art is done “for its own sake”—­these are misleading. Art is that human activity—­perhaps not the only one, but the cen­ tral one—­that we do just because we do not have to. It is, therefore, the activity in which we show ourselves to be free, human beings. There is no canonical purpose served by works of art, and therefore there is no canonical reason why any work of art should be com­ prehensible. The miracle is that works of art are comprehensible, that they make a kind of sense. We understand them, we feel what it is that moved the artist to do what he or she did. This is not to say that we learn anything, that we come by some piece of knowledge—­ except for the peculiar kind of self-­knowledge we achieve when we realize a common humanity with someone else. If one thinks of art in this way, then what could count as “re­ search” in art? I will say something about that presently, but let me just note now that, in one clear sense, every genuine artistic ac­ tivity is, in itself, a kind of research, although not the same as that of science. When I think about art in this way, I am led to the agreeably paradoxical-­sounding view that ceramic art is, simultaneously, the art that is least like Art, and the art that most perfectly embod­ ies what art really is. How is it that ceramic art is able to embody what art really is? It is possible to think of art as embedded in, and enriched by, a long, long cultural tradition that sustains it and gives it its status. And that is a perfectly authentic way to regard art. But we can also think of art as that single, signal human enterprise in which the freedom of our spirits finds its truest expression. Art is the one thing we do precisely because we don’t have to do it. Of course we do have to do it. Our spirit requires it, and we know, deeply, that without doing it we will be less than human, less than we can be. I mean that we don’t have to do it in the ways in which we have to eat, cl ay for c ont empl ation  87

have to engage in sexual activity, have to clothe ourselves, have to engage in political activity, et cetera. It is precisely, exactly because we could do without art that art is the one thing we really cannot do without. And it is ceramic art—­at least in my naïve eyes—­that shows this most clearly. It is the art that seems closest to us: pick up the earth (not because you need to grow things), mix it up and treat it (not in order to make building materials), shape it and color it (not in order to make signs), glaze it and bake it. Why do all of that? Because you can, and when you are done, it will seem worth having done—­it will seem that way to yourself and others. When you do all of that, you show that you are able to make an impression in and on the earth. That’s glory, isn’t it? It is not only ceramics that can fill this bill, but also weaving and tapestry in general, and a few other things can also hold this place. But, you may insist, Rembrandt and Michelangelo and possibly even Andy Warhol achieve these spiritual feats too, and they work in the way of traditional high art. Of course you are right. But these items are so much a part of a formidable, sanctioned, irresistible tradition, one that is effectively forced on us culturally, that they begin to take on the character of one of those things that must be done. And there is another reason for prizing the special character of ceramic art—­at least some kinds of ceramic art—­along with some kinds of weaving and the rest. It is because this art retains a strong connection with being useful. This may sound like a retreat from the idea that it is done because it does not have to be done. But that isn’t what I mean. You make, say, a bowl or a cup because you need one in order to be able to eat or to drink. That is, you have to make this piece. But you do not have to make it shapely, or interestingly tex­ tured, or colored in a special way. When you do that, when you do make a good bowl, then that object itself exemplifies the very dis­ tinction at hand. It announces itself and reminds us that although we may need to have bowls in order to eat, we do not need to have beautiful bowls purely in order to eat, but we do want beautiful

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bowls, and it is that extra want in which our humanity is reflected. You may then graduate to making pots that are never used or even intended to be used for eating; but the connection between your art pot and those other, eating pots is not forgotten. And this is another glory. Now I would like to urge the importance of retaining this special marginal character of ceramic art, and I will put the point in terms of the difference between insiders and outsiders. When it comes to defending the sanctity of something against outsiders, the most vigorous defense always comes from those who were not inside from the start, but were themselves outsiders who had to make their way inside. You are surely familiar with the dynamics of this kind of ardor. You see it at its most melancholy, I think, in the atti­ tudes toward the young of those who are no longer young. You will have examples of your own. The example relevant in this lecture is the one having to do with insiders and outsiders in the world of “fine art.” I am not referring to the difference between those art­ ists who have the right gallery connections and have caught the patronizing eye of the right critics and collectors, and those who have not—­although that is a good, serious topic. I am referring to the difference between those who are thought to be making art and those who are thought to be doing something else. The people most bedeviled by this presumptive distinction are people who work in the ceramic arts and a few other things. The people guarding art’s inner sanctum are accustomed to keeping the potters out, although occasionally one of their objects will sneak in once it has ceased to be a pot. I am asking those in the ceramic arts not to behave like insiders. I am asking them to adopt an aesthetical analogue of this line from the Bible: “Be kind to the stranger, for you were strangers yourself in the land of Egypt.” What I mean, generally, is that when an out­ sider gets inside, it behooves him or her to look kindly on those still outside. Try to remember what you are doing. Don’t let someone who tells you what Rembrandt was doing tell you, by implication, you must be doing that too. Tell yourself what you are doing, and

cl ay for c ontempl ation  89

then you may wonder whether those woodcarvers or coal sculptors are doing the same thing, and if they are not, whether they are any less artistic for that. Now a problem arises. I have been urging us all to be open-­ minded. But let us not forget this maxim: be open-­minded, but not so open-­minded that your brains fall out. If we are not going to per­ mit professors of art history or philosophers of art or museum cura­ tors to tell us what constitutes fine art and what does not, then what are we to do? Shall we just give up the distinction between what is serious art and what isn’t? I think we should not do that. It seems to me that there is no way to be a thoroughgoing, nonjudgmental plu­ ralist while retaining real conviction in one’s own work and one’s own taste. I am not going to try to prove that today. I will just say this much: to be a devoted and unconditional pluralist, you have to believe that these choices and the values they represent are some­ how, at bottom, arbitrary. But you cannot think about the choices you make, and the values you hold, unless you really believe that you might just as well have chosen them at random—­and I do not think you can believe that without becoming a fraud. And it will be the worst kind of fraud, for you will defraud yourself. If we are going to refuse to allow tradition, contemporary criti­ cal culture, or anything else to supply us with rules for deciding what is serious art and what isn’t, then how are we going to make those decisions? How are we going to be able to decide that this quilt maker, for instance, is really just sewing by rote, designing out of habit, and certainly not producing any object that embodies human freedom and expresses any of the glory I mentioned earlier? According to which rules or criteria will we decide this? I know only one way to decide, and it may not seem attractive to you. We will decide without conclusive reference to rules, definitions, or authoritative pronouncements. And when we decide in that way, we truly decide freely, and this gives us—­the viewers—­a chance for our own expression of the freedom of our humanity. If we made these decisions according to rules, then we would be deciding as we have to decide. It would be like rejecting a car because it doesn’t

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run fast enough, or a cup because it doesn’t keep the liquid warm. These are both sensible decisions, but they are imposed by prior commitments. The decision about art is not imposed. That is its whole point: it is as free as the art making itself. When I have tried to understand, generally, what a work of art is—­and I have persisted in trying to do this in the face of the history of philosophy’s peculiar attempts to do just this, as it has attempted to define art—­I have found it necessary to think of a work of art as an object that holds a special place for a community of people. What makes the people a community, in this case, is not a shared belief, nor a commitment to any jointly held project, but a shared feeling. They are like the community of people who find a joke funny. No one can prove that a joke is funny (or that it is not), but there is a kind of “agreement” between those who respond to the joke. The expression of this agreement is an expression of a shared feeling; its typical sign is laughter. This sharing is a marvel, I think, a stun­ ning revelation of a shared humanity. No one is right or correct; we are just all together. Works of art are not jokes, typically, although some jokes may well be works of art. But works of art, like jokes, are the focus of the same kind of effective sharing. As such, they constitute significant objects within the lives of the members of the community. (The idea that a work of art might have universal significance is precisely the idea that its community might, in principle, be all of humanity.) A work of art is like a person, and our relationship to such an object is like our relationship to people. Not just any people, but those people who are special in our lives. I regard the relationship of friendship, for instance, as one principally of feeling. There is no proving that someone is your friend, or that s/he is not. It is a rela­ tionship that must be realized, and must be developed. I make no apology for the unabashed fancifulness of this idea, although I do apologize for introducing such a peculiar idea when there is no time to develop or defend it. I think of an artist as setting out to make such a thing, to bring such a thing into the world, and I think of the audience in this

cl ay for c ontempl ation  91

attempt as undertaking to discover whether the object can indeed bear the weight of such a relationship. There is, thus, research on both sides. And is there a risk? Certainly. An artist risks himself and may come up short, perhaps even embarrassing himself when he real­ izes that instead of succeeding in pouring his soul into this object, he has just made a sentimental trifle. We in the audience risk adu­ lating something that turns out to be trite, or alternatively turning our backs on something that turns out to be honest and deep. And there should be a risk: freedom and glory should not come easily. The risk is an essential risk. Taking the risk out of research, would, I think, obliterate the kind of research that is the activity of art. You set out to make a thing that may have meaning, signifi­ cance, and depth for those who see it. You cannot predict that you will succeed, you cannot do this thing by following a recipe. You try, with conviction, and then we see how we feel about it. We see whether it becomes a part of our lives, altering our senses of our­ selves in our relations to it and to other things. No one proves any­ thing in art, and that is why the scientific conception of research has only a derivative place in art (having to do with chemical and optical properties, for instance—­which are vital, no doubt, but are not at the center of the idea of making art). In place of proofs and experiments, we have the felt effort to produce things that can hold the deep attention of human beings. And in place of verification we have the audience’s experience of being held and moved by these things. It is undoubtedly a specifically human thing to practice science. But it is another, equally unique, human thing to make things we care to have in our world, not because they do anything there, but just because we care to have them with us.

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7

There Are No Ties at First Base Even if it is now an obsession with me, it did not begin as one. That was many years ago, early in June, the beginning of the summer, during a family picnic held to mark the end of the year’s Sunday school. A softball game was underway, one with too many players, even though sixteen-­inch softball accommodates ten players on each team. We had more: there were a handful of adults and a dozen children on each team. My team was at bat; a small child was at the plate. I can’t remember who the child was, not even whether the child was a girl or a boy, but someone hit a slow roller toward the left side of the infield. The batter first hesitated, as children do at the plate, and then tackled the infinite distance to first base, running with a child’s desperate, furious slowness, while an infielder triangulated carefully and came together with the ball. It was probably the third baseman, although I am not sure of that, and he heaved the ball to first, where it was caught on the bounce. The ball and the runner arrived together, and immediately every child on my team yelled, “Safe,” while every child on the fielding team yelled, “Out.” There arose that wonderful American polyphony: “Safe,” “Out,” “Safe,” “Out,” overlaid with “He didn’t have control of the ball,” “He turned the wrong way,” “He never touched the base” (said by both teams), and the other initiatory chants of serious ball. Then an adult loped in from the outfield and, with calm, good sense and an intention to soothe, spoke softly but firmly, 93

commanding immediate quiet and attention. “It was a tie. Let’s let him be safe.” It was a perfect remark. It was generous and also fair. It was pa­ ternal but not patronizing. It satisfied the children: the batting team was given a runner at first, the fielding team was given respect. But it was wrong. I alone knew it was wrong, and had anyone else known it, I would have been alone in feeling the necessity of saying so. “If it was a tie,” I said, “then you don’t have to let him be safe; he was safe.” The other adult turned his calm on me: “I know it’s a convention in baseball that ties go to the runner.” With that remark he put me with the children, I suppose, as if I were a perverse child and perhaps a bright one, but a child still. I had a brief thought of letting it go at that, but that thought faded like a weak throw from the outfield, and I became the kind of child/adult who is too much for a sensible man to handle. “It’s not a convention,” I said. “The rule says that the runner is safe unless the ball arrives before him. If the ball arrives at the same time, then it doesn’t arrive before him, and so he is safe.” The other adult was silenced. The older children were in awe. I was trembling with a sense of moral triumph. I can remember nothing else from that game. A few weeks later some men asked if I would help to organize a weekly softball game during the summer months for children and their parents. I have superintended that game ever since. The children are mostly boys and almost all the adults are men—­fathers. I show up every Saturday morning from June through August or early September with my son. We bring a plate and bases and a one-­ hundred-­foot-­measuring tape for laying out the infield. Everyone is grateful to me for maintaining this institution, but the children regard me with a steady ambivalence. On the one hand, I see that the game is played properly and I give good instruction to very young children who have yet to learn how to bat or field or throw the ball. On the other hand, I am insufferable. I control the tempo of the game, refusing to allow the children to dally on the way to the

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plate; I insist on sensible, attentive play in the field; and I compel a dedicated attention to the rules. On one occasion, a girl hit a ground ball that got through the infield. When the ball was retrieved, she was at second base and the second baseman was her father. He was playfully tagging her with the ball and pretending to push her off the base while a runner at third sneaked home with an important run. I delivered a quick lecture on the need to bring the ball all the way into the infield, to be aware of all the base runners, and to attend to everything, and finally the second-­baseman father said to me, “You’re being obnoxious.” All the children who play regularly know this about me, and especially my son knows it. But they sense that this goes with the order I give to the game. We play in a large athletic park that holds four ball fields along with other facilities, and many people wander by on Sunday mornings. Some children who live in the neighborhood often come by, and those who have played in our game once usually come back, choosing it over the more informal pickup games elsewhere in the park. They seem to like the structure I supply, the umpiring and the authoritative commentary on the rules, and I think they are entranced by my obtuse scholasticism. After that initial overture, in which I assessed the value of a tie at first base, I was immediately aware that I must consult the rules. I had spoken with confidence but was not really sure. I thought I must be right because, like everyone, I have absorbed an encyclopedia of sandlot lore, but unlike almost everyone, I have turned it over in my mind thoroughly enough to force it to make sense. For instance, I never believed that runners were to be called out for leaving the base paths. That doesn’t make sense. They transgress only if they leave the path in order to avoid being tagged, or if they are being obstructive—­which is altogether a different matter. If a runner is casually, whimsically running outside the path, he is increasing the distance he must run. Why penalize him for that? So if a runner is to be called safe if he ties the ball, this cannot be a convention: it must be the rule. But I was not sure, and so I checked. There it was, and is: Rule 6.05(j):

t her e ar e no tie s at f ir st ba se   95

A batter is out when after a third strike or after he hits a fair ball, he or first base is tagged before he touches first base.

This rule does not say that the runner is safe unless the base is tagged first, but that is its import because the other rules do not give any other reason for calling him out. So I was right. The tie goes to the runner because he has not been put out. For months after I’d found Rule 6.05(j) I delighted in exhibiting my verbatim acquaintance with it. My delight increased as I discovered that no one but me actually knew the rule, really knew it. People bargained to solicit opinions and information from me. I would receive calls asking what happens if the pitcher falls dead during his windup of if the ball becomes stuck in the umpire’s mask. I had to make clear that I was no authority on the history of baseball and knew little of its infinite tables and figures, and that I had no particular knowledge of the rules of other games, but I cultivated my position as an authority on baseball’s rules. In fact, I continued to peruse the rule book and became a genuine authority. And then I found Rule 7.08(e): Any runner is out when he fails to reach the next base before a fielder tags him or the base, after he has been forced to advance by reason of the batter becoming a runner.

This was stupefying. The anomaly seemed marvelous. For some time my son and I pondered this odd reversal. This rule says, for instance, that when a runner is at first base and the batter hits a grounder, the runner advancing to second will be out if he doesn’t beat the ball to second base. And that means that if he ties the ball, he will be out. Why, we wondered, was this tie at second base being called against the runner, while the tie at first base was being called for him? My son produced a brilliant exegesis, speculating that the authors of the rules had attempted to compensate for the greater difficulty in calling force plays at second base. I was wondering whom to consult to learn whether my son was right, when I was struck by the hitherto seemingly trivial 6.09(a): 96  chap te r 7

The batter becomes a runner when he hits a fair ball.

My God. I saw at once that with 6.09(a) in the works, it was not merely an anomaly that had been uncovered but that 6.05(j) and 7.08(e) are inconsistent with one another. I cannot help putting it in this way; I am a philosopher. These two rules together are contradictory. You see it, don’t you? The rules in Section 6 concern the batter. Section 7 is about the runner. This had led me to believe that they could not ever be in conflict. But 6.09 tells us that under certain circumstances the batter is a runner or has become one. This will happen if a batter hits an infield grounder, and if he then arrives at first base simultaneously with the throw, 6.05(j) says he’s safe, while 7.08(e) says that he’s out. My feelings were very strong, but they were ambivalent. I was deeply troubled by this logical rot in the Official Baseball Rules. I had become extremely fond of the rules. They have charm and, so I had thought, precision. They do not have logical elegance, but that is part of their charm. They have the appearance of having been written by journeymen lawyers. This is the kind of lawyer who has enough experience to be able to imagine most of the cases that his contract or statute will have to comprehend but does not have the analytical power necessary to divine a few simple principles that will do the trick, and so he enumerates the cases, one by one, seemingly as he thinks them up. There is a charm in that. The rules have the further charm of their turn-­of-­the-­century idiom. For instance, Rule 5.03: The pitcher shall deliver the pitch to the batter who may elect to strike the ball, or who may not offer at it, as he chooses.

With all that charm, and with their natural appeal for my philosophical sensibility, the rules had won me over. Now I found them wanting at their core. On the other hand, I anticipated the statutory immortality that would be due me. I would effect a change in the rules. It was unlikely that I would be given a footnote in the rule book itself, but t her e ar e no tie s at f ir st ba se   97

I might well find myself in a Roger Angell essay, and I would certainly let my ball-­playing friends know. I imagined myself apologizing to all those I had persuaded of the correct ruling when ties occur at first base, and then going on to inform them that I had seen to it that the rules were rectified. As I planned to proceed, I became bolder in announcing my discovery and even in predicting the change it was sure to bring. I told my friends, ballplayers I knew, and even students in my classes—­ especially students, who found me wonderfully eccentric, except for the few, always a few, who found me tedious and irrelevant. I did not know what to do next until I thought to call a sportswriter at the city newspaper. It is from my wife,1 whose father was a newspaperman, that I learned this device. It is amazing what one can learn by calling people who work on newspapers. They know an immense amount, and they know how to find out an even greater immensity, and they genuinely enjoy imparting this knowledge. They are true professors, practical professors. The senior sportswriter whom I called seemed moderately interested in my claim, although I sensed that he did not find it easy to believe that the rules could be axiomatically defective, but he did tell me what I needed to know. He didn’t have the address of the rules committee, but he did have the name and address of an executive in the office of the president of the National League. This man had formerly worked for a Chicago baseball team and was known personally to the sportswriter. Now I knew whom to write, but I was not sure just how to compose my letter. I was on the verge of writing on my own stationery, when my wife made the first of two excellent suggestions. Guessing that the baseball people must receive reams of frivolous mail, she advised me to write on my university letterhead. That would add weight and, perhaps, command the brief attention necessary for my profound purpose to become evident. I worried about compromising my university and my philosophy department, but my wife saw the truth, that my case was proper and urgent, and indeed the 1. Julie Cohen, married to Ted Cohen at the time he wrote this essay.—­Ed. 98  chap te r 7

university should be proud that another of its faculty was entering history. Her second suggestion was that I write with no attempts at humor or irony, but that I just do the job. I took both suggestions, and thus began my correspondence with baseball by way of the Administrator of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. As a matter of fact, I am an American League fan primarily, and it was the accident of my sportswriter’s acquaintance that led me to the National League. No matter. Both leagues use the same rule book, and that book is seen to annually by the Official Playing Rules Committee. I was certain that I could persuade that committee of the need for revision, and I even entertained lavish hopes of being invited to attend one of its meetings. I wrote seriously and carefully, and with all the lucidity I could manage. Despite that, and despite the acuity of my point and the gravity of the letterhead, I feared that my letter would be consigned to the buckets of crank mail. But no: within a week I had a wonderful reply from the Administrator (from whose letterhead I have learned to call it the “National League of Professional Baseball Clubs”), thanking me for my letter and my interest in baseball and telling me that I was the first to find this interpretation of the rules, and also informing me that both rules were meant to say that the runner is safe unless the ball beats him, but that because of my interpretation the rules committee would look into the matter at its winter meeting. Now I was energized and, above all, truly hopeful. Before it had been a lark; now it was serious: a serious lark. In my excitement, I nearly reverted to professorial pedantry—­which may be the best part of me anyway—­and thought of writing back that it was not a matter of “interpretation,” because the only significant term was the word before and its meaning was clear and unambiguous. But I restrained myself, realizing that it had been my wife’s fine advice that had gotten me this far, and I drafted another sincere, unargumentative letter. I thanked the Administrator for taking me seriously and added only that it might be of help to the rules committee to note that the current rules had been written as if either the t her e ar e no tie s at f ir st ba se   99

runner beats the ball or the ball beats the runner. That is—­although of course I did not write this in the letter—­as though the runner beats the ball if and only if the ball does not beat the runner. (That might be put “rBb if—­bBr,” but that kind of flourish would be of scarcely more use to baseball than it is to philosophy.) All those letters went through in the autumn of 1982. The following December, the time of the winter meeting of the rules committee, came and went and I heard nothing. Six months later, in June, well into the next baseball season, I finally wrote again, asking what had happened. The reply has left me dispirited and confused—­ permanently, I fear—­for I can’t think of what to do next. The umpires present at the rules committee meeting told the committee that in their opinion there are never any ties. Therefore, said the Administrator, “to set up a special rule, which in effect would allow for ties, we felt would be extremely confusing.” What am I to say to that? I have thought of many things, but none of them will do. I have thought of asking why such a rule would be confusing. Why not humor me and put in a rule that would cover these cases that never arise? If some biologist produced a scientific classification for unicorns, would that be confusing just because no one ever found a beast to apply it to? Is it that a rule to cover ties would induce unwary umpires to look for ties when in fact there are none to find, and that would be a waste and a shame? The heart of the matter, of course, is the business about there not being any ties. Why do umpires opine that there are no ties? When they seem to see one, what makes them sure that things are not as they seem? I have heard television and radio baseball announcers also declare that in truth there are no ties, saying this as if it were an arcane scientific fact known only to those who really know baseball, and these announcers are former players. But I really know baseball, and I don’t know this fact. I have toyed with the idea that we are dealing here with difficult matters of modern physics, but I have consulted a good friend who is a philosopher of relativity physics. He has explained that once we restrict attention to the context of special relativity and take as a 100  chap te r 7

background standard the uniform motion of the playing field (and if  we don’t do that, imagine the problem of umpiring), it is perfectly possible for a foot to touch a base at the same time as a ball touches a glove. At about the same time, I learned a miracle of umpiring from another friend, a philosopher of cognitive psychology. When the umpire is making a close call, particularly at first base, he sometimes looks for the runner’s foot to touch the base while he listens for the ball to arrive in the baseman’s glove. This has always bothered some of us, because, after all, light travels much faster than sound, and this means, for instance, that in the case of a genuine tie, the umpire will see the runner arrive before he hears the ball. But my friend tells me that recent research has shown that the hu­ man brain processes its auditory stimuli much more rapidly than its visual stimuli, just enough so that the look-­and-­listen method gives very accurate results, and it does that because the distances are right. In football the distances are wrong if, for instance, you’re trying to tell whether members of the punting team cross the line of scrimmage too soon while watching from fifty yards away and listening for the punt. It is no surprise that even nature contributes to the perfection of baseball. I cannot write any of this to the Administrator or to the rules committee. They would take me for a crank. But I cannot rest. If anything in this world could be right, it is baseball; but baseball isn’t right with its current rules. I cannot stand it. I have been reminded, with pain, melancholy, and sweetness, of my personal discovery that I could never play baseball at a higher level. This news came to me, as it does to many boys and young men, when I was a high-­school player. My daughter has complained bitterly that baseball cannot have this place in the lives of girls and young women: because women do not play professional baseball, although girls can learn the game, become significant fans, and even play, they cannot connect these themes with an ambition to play forever better. This saves them some pain, but it costs them the humanity it brings. Had my daughter had the chance, perhaps the realization would have come to her as a high-­school player. It comes to some at an t her e ar e no t ie s at f ir st ba se   101

earlier age, and to others it doesn’t come until later, in college or the minor leagues; but to many it comes, as it did to me, when one must try to bat against an impossible pitcher. Mine was a fastball pitcher, faster by far than any I had seen or imagined. And he was wild. The first pitch came right across the plate and was gone before I even thought to swing. I attempted to adjust, to accelerate my mind, my eyes, my arms—­everything—­and I did swing at the second pitch, but only when it was already in the hands of the catcher. Strike two. Now I wanted desperately just to be able to touch the ball with my bat, and I stood tense and rigid in the box. The third pitch was wild, coming right at my head, at least as I saw it, and I leaped backward in terror. That terror is still with me. It is permanent. And it was with me then, when I stepped up with the count one-­and-­two. It made no difference whatsoever where the pitcher might have thrown the next ball. I was backing away from the instant his arm came forward, and although I swung, I could not have reached the ball. So I struck out, and I knew I would always strike out against that pitcher. And that was painful, but it was not the occasion of the metaphysical pain I recalled when I struck out with the rules committee. That pain came the second time I batted against the same pitcher, two or three innings later. That at-­bat began with two quick strikes, both swinging, and with me flailing as I bailed backward out of the box. The third pitch, which I foresaw as the inevitable third strike, was another wild one. This time the ball sailed at least five feet over my head, and I swung. I did it on purpose, with calculation, and I immediately dashed for first base. I was safe by a mile. The ball had gone by well above the reach of the catcher, and it nearly cleared the backstop. Had it done so and gone on into the cornfield behind the diamond, I would have been ready to go on to second base. You know that if the catcher does not catch the third strike, and there is no one on base, and so on, the batter may run to first, and he will be safe there if he beats the catcher’s throw (or, to put it properly, if the catcher’s throw does not beat him). This catcher did not even make a throw. I had never been as proud of myself athletically as I was in that moment, in which I had overcome the finest pitcher I knew. I could 102  chap te r 7

not do it by hitting, but I had done it by knowing the rules and thinking fast despite a nearly paralyzing fear. And then my soul was squeezed. By my teammates. They did not care for what I had done. I did not receive even grudging admiration. I barely got grudging acceptance. It was not that they found me unmanly, although perhaps they did do that. They regarded me as someone who did not really grasp the nature of the game. I thought that in knowing the rules I knew the game; they knew the game in some other way. It was this ache that reappeared when I heard the last word from the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. There have been two sequels, one cosmic and one personal. The cosmic one has to do with Chicago baseball. In an effort to add a slight light touch, I ended my first letter to baseball with this jest: “I am very fond of the rules of baseball (perhaps partly because we in Chicago have been driven to a somewhat academic interest in the game),” and that was during the 1982 season. In 1983 the White Sox won the western-­division championship of the American League. The Cubs won the National League’s eastern-­division championship in 1984, and did it again in 1989. The 1989 win was sweetly unexpected, humble and inspiring, truly cosmic in the way in which only gentle things can be cosmic, without the irrelevant distractions of sound, fury, and apocalypse. In the interim the Bears had one magnificent, terrorizing season, during which they won every game but one, an insignificant one, usually not only winning but winning easily, often giving up no points, and almost always hurting their opponents. Football does not engage me much, nor do its rules. It has some interest as a struggle to determine whether it will be a game of players or a game of rules, much like the epic struggles of modern states to decide whether they will be societies of men or societies of laws. And its racial features may be interesting. But I have found nothing in football approaching the metaphysics of baseball. In all, Chicago sports swung up during the 1980s. My logic was offended, but my world improved. The personal note is sad. My confidence in the order of our summer softball games has been shattered. My heart is no longer in it t her e ar e no t ie s at f ir st ba se   103

when I articulate and administer the rules, and that leaves me with nothing to dwell on but the rate at which the children in the game have overcome the strength and speed of us adults. What good are rules if no one knows them? What good is it to know the rules if no one believes you? And what if they believe you but just don’t care?

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8

A Driving Examination A S t ory He was an old man all the time I knew him, from the very beginning, and so he never seemed to age, not for thirty years. The only others who have been like that for me were Picasso, Stravinsky, and Bertrand Russell. But I never knew them, and I did know Max. He was my grandfather. He was past sixty when I was born, and so he seemed an old man to me from the start. He had a memory that went back time out of mind, out of my mind anyway, and by the end of his life it was out of his mind too. When I was first old enough to really know him, in the forties, just after the war, he was as sharp as a tack. And he drove. He had a modest car, well kept, but far below his means. His entire life was well kept and well within his means. His means were considerable. When I first knew him, he was the owner of the Max Cohen General Store, several properties in town, and three farms within a few miles in three different directions from town. It was in the store that I came to know him, Cohen’s Store as everyone called it, and as my uncle, who worked with his father Max, would say in a loud voice when answering the phone. I saw Max in his store nearly every day after school. In that tiny town the commercial area, the “business district” as signs say in those towns, was only two blocks from my home. My father’s office, an insurance agency, was next to the blacksmith’s shop, directly

105

across the one main street from Cohen’s Store. I would look in on my father and then walk across the street to hang out in the general store. My earliest memories are from just after the Second World War. At that time my father was restarting his insurance business after his time in the army, and he was conducting it out of Max’s store. He soon moved to the little building across the street, leaving his father and brother in the general store, and that is how I remember things. I loved the store. It was a real general store. It sold groceries and meat—­my uncle was the butcher—­dry goods of all kinds, hardware and nails and coal oil in the back, and gasoline out of a hand pump on the street in front of the store. My grandfather was nearly always in the store, usually at the counter near the front. He did not seem to me to do much. The visible labor—­stocking shelves, labeling cans, candling eggs, cutting meat—­all this was done either by my uncle or by someone working under his direction. My grandfather took money at the cash register and wrote up charge slips, and otherwise he made conversation with the customers. He also did business, but I was unaware of that until I was a teenager half a dozen years later. The business involved buying and selling houses and other properties, lending money, buying and selling notes, and the like. I was unaware of that business, and so far as I could tell he was simply being Cohen of Cohen’s Store. During almost all of every day but Sunday he was in the store. I know of only two things that took him away, besides lunch and haircuts. They were trips down the street for short sessions in the card room, where he played an hour or so of euchre, and trips to his farms. He drove to the farms, and he often took me with him. They were casual trips of inspection. There was never any stopping, just very slow driving past the fields of corn, soybeans, and wheat, slow enough to see how the crops were doing and, occasionally, to take note of newly erected farm buildings and newly painted old ones. He never drove fast, especially not on the gravel farm roads, and he was a competent driver. I could tell, however, and from an early age, that he was not a natural driver. I might not have noticed his awkwardness so soon 106  chap te r 8

if I had not had my father to compare. My father was a splendid, natural driver, one of those men who drive as intuitively as they walk. A few years ago my father suffered a stroke, and now his walking is forced and mechanical, but his driving is still fluid. Unlike his father, my father learned to drive when he was young. A family photograph from the early thirties shows him with two friends about to go shotgun hunting. The other two are in the back seat of the open-­ top car, my father is behind the wheel. Painted on the side of the car is “Cohen’s Store. Phone 32.” If you phoned 32, my uncle would answer “Cohen’s Store.” It was Max’s delivery car, and my father was its main driver. Later, when his insurance business was doing well, my father would drive his own cars hundreds of miles each week to see his customers on farms all over the county. His early start and then all that practice had made my father a consummate driver by the time I began to ride with him. Max started much later in life and never drove very much, and I noted his lesser skill. He had mastered the operation of his car, at least for his purposes. It was a Dodge. Like all cars at the time it had a manual transmission, but it was of an advanced kind, called fluid drive, I think, and it didn’t require so much clutch work. It was in that car that Max and I would drive to see the farms, and sometimes, once every two months or so, we would go to a movie together. We had to go to a neighboring town, either six miles west or ten miles east, because there was no longer a movie house in our town. When Max and I went out to a movie he drove even more slowly than when we went to the farms, even though these movie drives were on a paved highway instead of gravel farm roads, because we went to movies at night, and Max drove even more cautiously in the dark. Max was an immigrant. He was born in the 1870s somewhere near the Germany-­Poland border. Max himself was unsure where he’d come from: he called it only the old country, and the fact that in his naturalization papers he renounces all allegiance to the czar of Russia seems to establish nothing. The officials who handled those forms were very personal and highly informal. Max entered a dr iving examination  107

the United States when he was a boy, coming all alone. He came straight to Chicago and began a career as a downstate peddler, bringing horse-­drawn wagonloads of household items on trips south from Chicago. He settled in central Illinois, operating a general store out in the country. When it burned, he built another in our town and did business there for more than fifty years. He prospered. He brought a wife the 150 miles from Chicago. She gave him two sons, my uncle first and then my father, and then she died just after my father finished high school. That was before 1930, and from then on he lived as a widower. He was living alone except for his housekeeper and her daughter, in his big house, when I first knew him. I knew he was my grandfather, but I knew it as some children do, without knowing what it means. He seemed to me detached, in contact with everything—­his presence pervaded the town, pushing outward from his store right through the short streets whose properties he sometimes owned and out into the surrounding farmland—­but in contact without being connected. He seemed absolutely independent, even outside time, for he seemed old but unaging. He spoke an independent speech. He had an immigrant’s accent that I heard nowhere else and would not hear again until years later when I’d moved away. He called his accent, and every other broken or accented En­ glish, a brogue. My father uses the word brogue in that way. It is a descriptive term, and an affectionate one. Max always seemed to prefer driving with company, and al­ though he did make solitary drives, when he had a companion he often preferred to be the passenger. In the beginning, of course, I was a little boy, and he did the driving: but once I was sixteen and a legal driver, I often drove him. My father would give me the family car so that I could drive Max where he wanted to go. Once I was taking him to get a haircut. The barber was in a town a few miles southwest and our route took us past one of Max’s farms and then on through the farmland. I was driving slowly as the road neared the end of a cornfield. Among my friends, most of them farm boys who had been driving tractors and pickup 108  chap te r 8

trucks since they were very young, it was a matter of pride to be able to drive fast over the country roads. This can be difficult. The gravel is often slippery, and it can be impossible to keep the tires in the ruts. The road is narrow, with no shoulder and sometimes steep drainage ditches on the sides. It becomes necessary to drive on the edge of the ditch if you meet another car. I was learning to drive fast, and I was especially proud of my ability to stay at seventy miles per hour when driving over one of the bridges crossing the creeks that go through that fertile land. Atop the bridge would be two planks, each about two feet wide, and I would have to keep the car straight with a wheel on each plank or the car would swerve out of control. My pride notwithstanding, I was driving slowly that day. It was prudent because fast driving on gravel roads throws up rocks that can scar the car, and it was my parents’ car. And it was decent be­ cause Max had always driven slowly so that we could both look. Now we were looking at the line where the cornfield ended and a soybean field began. A fence ran between the fields, and also a row of big elm trees. “In the old days,” said Max, “sometimes a fence would be hung on trees instead of posts.” I noticed that the trees were evenly spaced, although the fence was attached not to them but to posts. “I remember when those trees were planted,” he said. “About sixty years ago.” I was astounded. Max had come to the time when he often re­ called sixty years ago with brilliant clarity and could not remem­ ber yesterday at all. I was seventeen and too stupid to realize this meant that it was time for me to learn about sixty years ago and that Max didn’t need to remember yesterday because he could leave that to me. My father was giving me the car more and more often in order to have me drive Max, and both he and my mother frequently drove him. The only one of us not to drive Max was my brother, eight years younger. By the time he was old enough to drive I had gone away, and he then became Max’s principal driver. a dr iving examination  109

The reason we were doing so much driving with Max, although I did not know this at the time, was that my parents were increasingly concerned about Max’s own driving. He was becoming erratic and even dangerous. It was his age. This is the right description, I think, and not one in terms of his physical or mental powers—­as if we know that those things are different, or even what they are. He was now truly an old man. My parents could notice this, and especially my father, for unlike me they had known Max when he was young. In his old age Max drove even more slowly and not always in a straight line; sometimes he would stop completely because he could not remember where he meant to be going. This was particularly worrisome when he set out for one of the neighboring towns whose banks he kept money in, or for a meal or a haircut. These drives were made on US Route 36. That road runs straight through from Indianapolis to Denver, and in those days, before the interstate highway system, it was heavily used by high-­speed traffic. Max had become a peril on that road. The only problem with Max’s driving I was aware of was one that developed when he bought a new car with an automatic transmission. In choosing the car he asked advice from my father. My father and the automobile dealer anticipated Max’s difficulties in learning to operate a new car, and they thought he would do best with one that didn’t require shifting. Surely a sensible idea, but they were wrong. Over fifty years of using a clutch had left Max unable to drive without one. By the time I became aware of the real problem I was living away from home. When I came back to visit, my father often would arrange a drive for me with Max. And he told me that he hoped that Max would see this and renounce his own driving. Max would have to do it himself, however, for my father would not force him. At first I thought the solution was simple. It was obvious that Max must stop driving: he threatened not only himself but other drivers and their passengers. My father had considerable influence with his father, and it seemed to me that he must simply order Max to quit. It seemed so to me until my father told me, when he first explicitly introduced me to the problem, that he desperately wanted Max to 110  chap te r 8

quit and was suggesting it to him but could not force this on Max. I knew at once that my father was right and that he was wrong, and I knew that I was seeing the complex depths of morality for the first time. I was and am infinitely relieved that it was my father and his father, and not me and my father. When I was away from home I was kept abreast of the problem by news of Max’s adventures. It came in letters and phone calls, and it was a regular item like reports of the annual farm crop and the doings of my brother. The farm crops were cyclic and unchanging overall, a dry growing season was followed by a moist one, a poor crop by a good one. Those things balanced out. Max and my brother, however, were changing steadily in single directions. My brother was passing through his teens, growing into the prosperity of adult youth. Max was declining, and his driving grew ever worse. He had retired from the general store, turning it over to my uncle, and this left him with more time free for driving. Even if my father, mother, and brother could have been available to take him every time he wanted a drive, he still sometimes wanted to drive himself. By now he had suffered a few scrapes, and it seemed a miracle that there had still been no serious accident. My mother’s anguish was as keen as my father’s. He could not force his father to give up the car. She could not force her husband to force his father. It was a moral impossibility. For both my parents it was the kind of gripping paralysis one feels while being swept into a disaster. The disaster would be Max’s inevitable ruinous collision. I think my mother’s apprehension was more acute because it was more complex. When the accident came she would suffer Max’s hurt and whatever he brought to others, and she would also share my father’s inevitable remorse as he faced the fact that it was he alone who could have deterred Max, and then she would have her own guilt for not having tried to persuade my father to persuade his father. My father remained unpersuaded: he couldn’t stop Max, he couldn’t take the car away. An entirely unexpected remission was granted in the 1960s. The state of Illinois enacted a new code of driver regulations, one of whose provisions was that any older driver must reapply for his a dr iving examination  111

license annually and must pass a driving test to receive it. There was no chance that Max could pass this test. My whole family looked forward eagerly to the expiration of Max’s license and the relief that was bound to follow. My town is in a county that has only one driver’s license facility, located in the town that is the county seat, a little more than twenty miles away. When I was in high school, all the teenagers hungered for their driver’s licenses, especially the boys, even those who had already been driving in their work on the farms. The license was an absolute liberator. We needed cars to get anywhere, to do anything. My high school was in another town three miles away, so that, too, required driving. Everything we wanted to do had to be done after driving—­seeing movies, going to ball games, necking. And with the license one could finally do the driving oneself. In those days the minimum age for being licensed to drive in Illinois was sixteen. Everyone reached that age in high school and unless one’s birthday fell on Saturday or during the summer vacation, one took the morning off from school, went to the county courthouse to take the driving examination, and came back to school before lunchtime a legal driver. I was one of those who suffered the embarrassment of failing the test the first time. I cannot remember what was wrong with my driving. There were a number of failures around that time, and we all believed that the examiner was being harsh out of guilt because two boys he had licensed earlier in the year had subsequently driven into fatal accidents. I passed the test the second time and immediately dedicated myself to learning to drive fast on the farm-­country roads. A bit later I began to study my father’s driving in order to learn to give the elegant, swift, comfortable ride he gave. I have been an excellent driver ever since, although for many years now I have been mostly confined to big-­city driving where all one can do is play at being a taxi driver and cultivate the foolish idea that lane-­changing accelerations illustrate a worthwhile skill, and where there is no chance for the expansive, commanding, generous driving I grew up with. I had already long been a crabbed city driver when the legal change came that would put a merciful, impersonal end to Max’s 112  chap te r 8

driving. The day of his test, Max set out alone on the half-­hour drive to the county seat. I do not know my father’s feelings as he awaited Max’s return. Would Max be dejected and need consolation? How would my father give that? Since his retirement Max had walked to the post office once each day, he had walked to the card room, and infrequently he took a stroll. And he had driven himself out of town when he wanted. Now he would be restricted to those few walks—­ and even those were unavailable in bad weather—­unless someone were willing to drive him. Could he accept that? I wonder if my father thought that Max could accept it, and I wonder whether my father thought that Max should accept it. When Max had been gone for more than an hour, a phone call came through to my father’s office. It was the driver’s license examiner. Max was fine, the man told my father, and he was on his way home. Driving. “Of course he passed,” said the examiner. “Don’t worry. Max will have a license as long as I’m in charge of this office.” My family was stunned, but my father was relieved. If the law itself would not stop Max’s driving, then my father’s inability to stop it was excusable. My father lives by a very strong moral code, but it is a highly personal one, and it sometimes accepts legality as the final word. A more cosmic code applied as well, however, for it was now clear that all those years—­more than fifty—­of being an honest and successful merchant, of being the substance of the community, of being Cohen of Cohen’s Store—­all this had earned Max the absolute right to drive. This was clear to the driver’s license examiner, and then it became clear to Max’s family. Max continued his driving. My family continued to drive him as much as possible, and my father saw to the oil changes, antifreeze adjustments, lubrications, and the rest that kept Max’s car in good condition. After a very few more years Max took himself off the road, giving up his car for good. There had been a few more minor mishaps, but the feared catastrophe never came. Not long after that Max had to take himself from his house and enter a nursing home. Less than a year later he died. He was ninety-­ three or more. We have never known his exact age: he came from a dr iving examination  113

the old country with imperfect records, and eventually he himself didn’t know his age. Max died about fifteen years ago. By then only my parents remained in our town. They still live there, but they spend the cold half of each year in Arizona. The trip is about two thousand miles. They drive themselves both ways.

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9

Objects of Appreciation E ar ly Refle c tion s on Tel e vi s ion, with F u rthe r Rem ark s on Ba seba l l During the past few years I have been speaking and writing about a variety of things outside the canonical budget typically assigned to the philosophy of art. Among the things that have engaged me are figurative language, photography, the movies, jokes, and sports. Here I will persist in this eccentricity, but with a more reflective eye toward what it means to be taken with these presumably marginal topics. And I think I should begin with some turgid remarks of dialectical self-­justification. Some of my friends and colleagues, including some who have a good opinion of my philosophical sense and capacities, have wondered about my seriousness, and they have worried that I have become less philosophical. Those with a deep interest in the history of philosophy had expected more work on Kant’s aesthetics, a monograph on Hume’s marvelous essay on taste, and perhaps a new study of the argument of Aristotle’s Poetics. The less historically minded expected a theory of art or a theory of beauty, or perhaps a sketch of the logic of fictional speech acts. A dozen years ago I wrote a couple of pieces about metaphor, and they seemed peculiar at the time, although the topic has since become relatively common. And my work on photography has seemed not so odd, I suppose, as a

115

few other philosophers have been attracted to the topic. But I had moved off, meanwhile, producing remarks on Hitchcock’s movies, jokes, and baseball. All this has made me dubious in the regard of both philosophers of art and philosophers in general. Many philosophers already regard the philosophy of art as a relatively unserious kind of philosophy, and philosophers of art are apt to suppose that the serious part of their study concerns (1) the understanding of art as a general philosophical problem, and (2) the specific study of the abstract characteristics of painting, literature, and music. When I moved, seemingly, to the periphery of even the philosophy of art, I wandered to the circumference of one of philosophy’s more distant epicycles. Well, I am enjoying myself there, very much, and I would comfortably just stay there and leave it at that, but for two things I feel a need to say to those who are losing sight of me and worry over me on that account. 1. I am learning a great deal out here. The air is fresh. The view is not cluttered with moribund theories, and the terrain is not littered with monuments of Great Historical Importance. 2. I would like to ask: Who is being serious and philosophical, and who is not? My critics, friendly and otherwise, are sure that when I collaborated on a paper about Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, I was being more serious and more intellectually respectable than when I wrote a piece on baseball. Why do they think that? What makes them so sure? Is it obvious that the paintings of the Spanish Renaissance are more important, culturally and philosophically, than American baseball? I am a philosopher, after all—­at least I have the customary credentials—­and I should like to observe that declaring something obvious is one of the most antiphilosophical maneuvers I am aware of. It is a device that smells bad, like its companion declaration that something is natural. When someone tells us that something is obvious (and therefore true) or natural (and therefore good), if we have any drop of true philosophical blood in us, we will demand a general account, a theory in fact, of obviousness and naturalness. There has to be some non-­question-­begging way of telling the obvious from the unobvious, the natural from the unnatural, besides simply accepting the pronouncement of a 116  chap te r 9

self-­appointed judge. I know of no tenable theory along these lines. If the critic has no theory, and he has nothing to rest on except his conviction that this is the way things have always been done or that these are the things that have always been believed, then he has no claim worthy of a philosophical response. The claim is all the less worthy if it rests on nothing more than the fact that its proponent and his circle share certain preferences. We should remind him, gently if he is young, not so gently if he is as old as Allan Bloom, that instead of doing philosophy he is just singing an old song; and then we might note that if an American has any birthright at all, it is one that releases him from the need to dance to the tunes of others. I have not said that baseball is more noble than Spanish painting. I have not said that it is as noble. I have not said anything. I have the supremely good luck to be able to work on what interests me—­ if I did not have the luck, I hope I would have the courage to do it anyway—­and so it is not incumbent upon me, politically, to obtain a license for what I do; nor do I require, philosophically, an a priori apology for the value of the topics I address. As I see it, those who question the seriousness, the philosophical merit, or the value of these topics are the ones in need of justifications, a priori or otherwise. When they produce these arguments, I will attempt to answer them. Until then I will press on (maybe I will discover America), and it will do nicely to start with baseball. Not everyone cares for baseball (in fact, among my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago I think there is only one baseball fan). Suppose a friend says that he does not care for baseball. He finds it boring. In fact he says it is boring. Could he be wrong about this? Can I argue with him about this? There are things I can say, although they may not be an argument, but it matters considerably whether he is speaking against baseball specifically, because if he isn’t, then I will need to say other things. I will suppose for a moment that he is, and that he is not expressing a disdain for all spectator sports. Then I will ask him just what he means by saying that baseball is boring, or—­better—­just what is boring about baseball. Imagine that he tells us that baseball is not exciting, or that it is seldom exciting. Now he may mean by this that objects of appr eciation  117

he himself does not often become excited when watching baseball, but we will already have known that, for that seems to be another way of saying (almost) what he had in mind when he made his first and unforgivable remark about baseball, calling it boring. When he elaborates, he is likely to insist that the game itself is not exciting, and in particular he is likely to assert that in baseball not much happens. And now we will ask, what counts as something happening? When this friend goes for a drive in the country, a stroll in the woods, a hike in the hills, nothing much happens, nor does much happen, as a matter of fact, when he visits an art museum. Is he bored then? Oh, but those outings are different, he says. The art museum example is simply irrelevant, because that concerns the experience of art, and baseball is not art. Baseball is a sport, like football and soccer and tennis. But who says that baseball is like football and soccer and tennis? If you go to a baseball game looking for the kinds of things that happen in football, you won’t find many. But why do you go to a baseball game looking for things like that? When you read a novel you note things happening, and things happen when you listen to music; but if you look for things like that when you are looking at paintings, you won’t find any. Suppose someone tells us that Bach’s music is boring, and when we press him in the way we press the baseball ignoramus, he says that Bach’s music leaves him flat because it doesn’t lead him to clap his hands and dance. What will we say about that? And what will we say about someone who loves Bach’s music just because whenever he hears it he does set his feet a-­tapping and soon begins to dance? It is not so easy to imagine someone who says these things about Bach and is telling the truth about his reactions, although it is considerably easier to imagine the one who finds the music boring than it is to imagine the one who likes getting down with the St. Matthew Passion. But let us try to imagine, just to begin to discover what we might say. Would you agree to something like this—­that these responses to Bach’s music are possible only in a listener who does not hear the music for what it is, who does not respond in terms of the kind of thing this music is? I am willing to say that, although I 118  chap te r 9

am not near ready to say that a listener has an obligation to listen to music in terms of the kind of music it is, and so I am not in a good position to say that the listener has made an error. I say the same thing about the benighted soul who is bored by baseball. When a spectator is bored by baseball (I mean bored in general, not just bored by a specific item), then he likely does not see baseball in terms of the kind of thing it is. This skewed view, I suspect, most often results from a mistaken sense of the units of possible interest. This brings me as close as I will get to the ostensible topic of this essay (although I will come this close more than once). What thing is it that is being appreciated (or not) when one appreciates baseball? What is the object? I have nothing especially metaphysical in mind. I am not interested in distinctions between physical and mental things, nor do I have an eye out for distinctions between the general and the particular, or the abstract and the concrete. I am after something more simple, although it is complex enough. If a spectator understands himself to have seen something happen in baseball only when a batter strikes out or walks, or a ball is hit out of the park or into the glove of a fielder or on the ground past the infielder, et cetera, or a batter­-become-­runner has either beaten or been beaten by a fielder’s throw to first base, then that spectator has far too meager a purview. What do you focus on when you watch baseball? A single pitch? A time at bat? A half-­inning? The four-­and-­a-­half innings that beat the rain? A whole, complete game? A weekend series, say, between the Cardinals and the Dodgers? How about a whole season? What does it mean to watch Sandy Koufax pitch? To see him throw one fastball to Willie McCovey? To see him work on McCovey throughout one time at bat? Throughout one whole game? How about throughout a whole season? How about throughout a whole career? When you sit in the stands and watch Koufax throw a high, inside fastball to McCovey, you have seen something that is somehow a part of all the things just enumerated. What did you see happen? (By the way, what do you hear happen when you are listening to one variation on a theme, when the whole theme-­and­-variations is itself set into one of the four movements of a classical symphony?) objects of appr eciation  119

Well, I do not mean to talk about baseball here, although it is always a welcome topic. I have mentioned it as a familiar example of misapprehension, as a context of possible appreciation in which it is not obvious what the focal object is. (I have my doubts that it is ever obvious what the salient object is: in some cases it has a traditional or habitual position.) I will spend most of my time with another object, one more likely to be thought of in connection with Art, although it is almost always assessed as being either not art or very, very inferior art: television. My aim in speaking about television is certainly not to settle any significant questions: I intend to raise questions and I hope to persuade you of the urgency of some of these questions, and I will urge you that none of us is entitled to any firm convictions about the artistic, aesthetic, or cultural value of television. We have no idea how good or bad or indifferent television is because we have no reliable idea of what television is. Those who hold firm opinions about the quality of television typically are in no doubt about just what kind of thing television is, and they see no reason to wonder about what it is because they implicitly think they know what it is. They have made an error, I think—­I certainly made it—­and it is an ironic replay of an earlier error made in the apprehension of movies. Until after World War II, and well after the war for many of us, movies were seen as if they were theater. A movie was taken to be a visual recording of a play, with perhaps a few jumps in space and time thrown in. The appraisal of movies, accordingly, was carried out essentially in the idiom of dramatic criticism. (Many critics still carry on in this way; Siskel and Ebert, for example, and a number of New Yorker reviewers of recent years, but not Pauline Kael.) It is, therefore, not surprising that for a generation of movie viewers it was Ingmar Bergman who first made them believe that a movie might be Art. In The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician, for instance, one found just what one expected of good, serious drama. One found real acting, the kind associated with closely coached repertory theater; careful story composition; and even set design. Some people have stayed with movies like

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this, grouping them with what are called “art films,” and I believe that those people have continued to see movies as derived forms of theater or painting. Others, including me, have come to a point at which it seems that the best movies of Bergman are no better, and certainly no more art, than many movies by John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock. In fact I think that there are at least a half dozen movies by Hitchcock that are significantly better than any movie by Bergman. A good friend of mine, Alexander Sesonske, whose opinions about movies deserve more attention than almost anyone else’s and certainly more than almost any other philosopher’s, has argued to me that for a significant group of people the discovery of what movies are was made a generation earlier and centered around some Italian and Japanese movies that appeared in America almost immediately after World War II. The specifics of this history are not important. Nor does it matter whether you have a better opinion of Bergman or a lower opinion of Hitchcock than I do. All that matters is that you agree with this: as long as movies are seen as essentially theater, they will always seem inferior. One might prefer a movie version of King Lear to a performance in the “legitimate theater,” but only because of something inherently ir­ relevant, say the fact that it is only in the film version that some particular actor plays Lear. I would like to be untendentious in this little sketch of  what I think of as the development of a sensibility adequate to movies, but I will have to be at least a little more concrete, and these specifics may be controversial. For those of us breaking away from seeing movies as theater and developing an appreciation of movies as movies, it was necessary to learn to do new things and to undo some old ones: to see John Wayne, or perhaps, that is, to see the Ringo Kid, but not to see John Wayne enact the role of the Ringo Kid; to move with the movie instead of the story, to accept the camera’s delineations and innuendos instead of only those of dialogue and plot. It was relatively easy for literary types to feel the force of Bergman’s telling us of a man who is a magician precisely because he knows that he has no magic; it was harder—­and certainly different—­to come to feel

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the moral judgment Hitchcock passes in Rear Window, for Hitchcock uses the movie itself to do this, to trap us, to make us watch a watcher and feel for him. We are now, I think, in a position to respond to movies, at least some of us are, and we are capable of complex responses and as­ sessments. We can connect Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and wonder whether Hitchcock can really be that good. We can connect Apocalypse Now with Heart of Darkness and see that Conrad’s novel is better and that its point escapes Francis Ford Coppola. What about television? The irony at work is that we see television as if we were seeing movies. If movies once went unappreciated because they were seen as ersatz theater, now it is our consciousness of movies—­and the subtle habits that go with that sensibility—­ that stands between us and a rich appreciation of television. We see television, as an old school friend of mine once called it, as chamber cinema. Who is it who sees television as if he or she were watching a movie? I suppose that I have in mind mostly critics and academic intellectuals, although I think it is also true of many general viewers, especially those who are old enough to have had the habit of movie viewing before television appeared. Professor Dan­ iel Brudney, my much­-younger colleague, has pointed out to me that he and his coevals grew up watching television and consequently have television-­watching habits at least as well entrenched as their movie-­watching habits. Astonishingly, for all his youth, Professor Brudney is my one colleague, the one I mentioned earlier, who is a sophisticated baseball fan. He is a remarkable man. As long as television seems to you to be a movie, it is almost cer­ tainly going to seem to be a bad movie. The screen isn’t large enough for certain kinds of dynamism, the focus isn’t sharp, the colors are neither accurate nor rich. If watching television isn’t roughly the same as seeing a movie, then what is it? Is television, properly appraised, better than most cultural critics say? Is television capable of art? No one can tell these things a priori. They cannot be told in advance, and we are in advance as long as we haven’t got a proper fix on television. Then 122  chap te r 9

what is television? I don’t know. Maybe we can find an answer to­ gether. All I can do for now is clear some ground. My main goal is to begin to figure out what the object is, and it is almost time to get to that.

Polemical Interlude For those with a need, or an interest, it may be useful for me to help us get past some common denigrations of television. It is not uncommon for us to criticize ourselves, or at least to express disappointment in ourselves, for watching “too much” television, and there seems to be a general opinion to the effect that many American children watch too much television. Too much for what? A common enough sentiment seems to be that it would be better, especially for our children, to read, to read a book, than to watch television. This is surely a witless assertion. Surely it matters, for instance, what book one might be reading instead of watching television. What if one were reading TV Guide? Would it be better to read a novel by Dorothy Sayers or Sara Paretsky than to watch some Cagney and Lacey? Surely that is not obvious. Would it be better to read Anna Karenina than to watch Dallas? How about Upstairs, Downstairs? This is not obvious either, for it might be that one’s powers of concentration or, if one is a child, even one’s reading abilities are not up to Anna Karenina. Well, one might say, “all things being equal, it is better to read than to watch television.” Even if we could agree with that, we would be agreeing to very little, for all things are never equal. And really, could it always be better to read than to watch television? What if one read all the time? What if one spent so much time reading that one never listened to music? Never looked at paintings? Or what if it were not quite so extreme, and one did occasionally listen to music or look at an architectural work but never with the concentration and attention given to reading? Would that be acceptable: serious reading but no serious attention to other arts? To some, I suppose that seems better than committing everything to television, because television is already assumed not to be the objects of appr ec iation  123

equal of serious arts. But that is just an assumption. And anyway, I do not mean to be talking about someone who spends all his time watching television, for the assertion I am questioning is the one that says it is never as good to watch television as to read a book. Rubbish. Another common complaint is that watching television is just too “passive” an experience to be as valuable as the experience of genuine art. Television can be passive, certainly, and maybe it is more likely to be an unengaged activity than some others, but it is not only television that produces couch potatoes. After all, I know plenty of very passive listeners to music, lookers at paintings and movies, and readers. (Indeed I have been all those things myself.) You can just sit there from 7 till 10 p.m. (in the east it is 8 till 11 p.m.), letting the television pull you into its wash. But you can watch Hitch­ cock’s North by Northwest and never even wonder where Cary Grant is going when he travels north by northwest, much less figure out where he is going, really see where he is going. You can read Anna Karenina and never wonder why the book is named for Anna and not for Levin. You can read Lolita and never notice the fun that is being made of T. S. Eliot. You can listen to Beethoven’s Opus 131 and not hear the hocketing. When subscribers to our major symphony orchestras object to programming outside the usual reper­ toire of eighteenth-­, nineteenth-­, and early-­twentieth-­century pieces, I would make the guess that they are asking for a relatively “passive” experience when they attend concerts. If there is no way to watch television except passively, that remains to be shown. The commercialism of television distresses many critics, for they assume that the constraints of commerce are a bar to any significant artistic achievement in television. But why should this be an insuperable barrier only in television? Wonderful short stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mavis Gallant, John Updike, and countless others were first read by significant audiences in the pages of magazines like Esquire and the New Yorker. Those stories were flanked by and even interrupted by advertisements. One either overlooked that advertising or took time out to look it over, and I see no reason

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whatsoever why the same thing should not be done by a television watcher. A comparable objection has been made in terms of the presumed need for television to appeal to such a large audience that it must, to succeed, subject itself to the constraints of vulgar taste and the political requirements of the day. And, of course, television has to fit itself into thirty-­and sixty-­minute segments. Similar objections were once leveled at the movies (and still are, by some critics), and if one thing has become clear it is this: artists face a variety of constraints, ranging from the intractability of the French horn to the optical chemistry of pigments and dyes to the linguistic and mnemonic capacities of audiences. Commercial constraints are different from those, no doubt, but they are still constraints that can be overcome or even exploited. I know of no argument to show there is a kind of constraint that can be overcome only at the cost of art. It is a common idea that there are certain requirements that are a bar to the making of art. But it is difficult to credit this idea, because when it is explicated it always seems to be either senseless or false. The idea leads to pronouncements like these: you could not make a work of art if you had to make an object according to certain commercial specifications; you could not make a work of art if you had to make an object that would serve some mundane utilitarian purpose; you could not make a work of art if you had to make an object that would appeal to very many people. Why should we believe any of those things? Perhaps a proponent would say that the artist must be absolutely and entirely free if he or she is to be able to make real art. What does it mean to be absolutely and entirely free? Suppose a composer is writing a piece for the piano. If he would like to construct a harmonic sequence in which e-­sharp and f are two different pitches, he cannot do it: at least, he is not free to do this when composing for a standardly tuned piano. Of course he might choose then not to compose for such a piano. But he has to compose for something, and whatever that instrument is, it is guaranteed to re­ strict the possibilities available to the composer. No medium is indefinitely tractable. So what? Not just anything

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can be done with wood, or with ceramic materials, or with clarinets. It is surely correct to regard these mediums as coming with limitations, but it is exceedingly strange to think that these limitations are inimical to the creation of art. It ought to be similarly strange to think that the possible uses of objects are barriers to art. A potter makes a cup, a woodworker makes a chair, a designer makes wallpaper. What difference does it make that the cup is to be drunk from, the chair sat in, and the paper pasted on walls? My first acquaintance with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts was in 1988, at the annual meeting of this wonderful group of ceramic artists, teachers, and critics. I had time to stop in some of the sessions, and one was devoted to a discussion of art and craft. Early on, one of the speakers asked, “What is the difference between a pot and a vessel?” and someone in the audience immediately called out, “About $4,000.” That answer is worth more than volumes of aesthetics and philosophy. It may register all the truth we need to know. There is, perhaps, one distinction to be made and looked into. Suppose you are a talented ceramist. You decide to make a cup. Your intention is to make a work of art (whatever exactly it means to set out to do that), and your expectation is that it will become part of the permanent collection of a museum and spend its time resting untouched on a pedestal. On the other hand, suppose that you are the same talented ceramist and I come to you and commission a cup. Furthermore, as I make clear to you, I intend to use this cup daily for my morning coffee. Now what? The question is not whether you go about your cup making differently. You may, of course, depending on your desire for fame, your opinion of me and my taste, your need for money, et cetera. The question is whether you have to go about your cup making differently. The distinction I have in mind is this: you might make the cup just as you would make it if  you were going to keep it yourself or place it in a museum, but then add in whatever is necessary to render the piece durable enough for the use I will make of it; or you might make this durability requirement itself more integral to the task. Do you see the 126  chap te r 9

difference? It is rather like the difference between creating a television program in such a way that it will not be damaged by being interrupted every fifteen minutes by a commercial, and creating it in such a way that its very own, internal rhythm requires these interruptions. Either way, there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent the cup or the television program from being a successful work of art, but my guess is that it will succeed more thoroughly or deeply if this additional (seemingly extrinsic) constraint is accepted as one that comes with the medium. This distinction may also be introduced into the appreciation of objects. We can see the cup as if its utility were an incidental feature, entirely independent of the cup’s artistry, or we can see it as an essential aspect of the medium in which the potter was working. I think that the latter is likely to be the better way to see the cup, but what I wish to note here is that these two ways of looking are virtually ways of looking at two different objects. What is the object of appreciation? It is a persistent idea that television is irretrievably vulgar be­ cause it needs to appeal to such a wide audience. This idea is tied to the conviction that nothing very good can have such a wide appeal, I suppose because only a relatively few auditors can appreciate the truly good. What reason is there to believe this? I know of no good reason. You do not need me to remind you of the enormous and wide success of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Verdi. Finally, let me take up one criticism of television that is made very often, but whose point continues to escape me. Television is alleged to damage everything from wholesome family life to the social polity, and specifically it is accused of destroying the community of appreciation. Because watching television is often a solitary occupation, and because it does not bring together large audiences to share an appreciation of something, it is charged with subverting artistic appreciation. What a strange indictment. Except for theatrical performances, movies seen in theaters, musical performances, perhaps architecture of certain kinds, and a few other things, art typically is experienced by people who are either alone or in very small groups (groups of about the size, say, of a family watching objects of appr ec iation  127

television together). But the indictment is not only strange; it is completely wrongheaded. Television frequently creates an audience of a kind and on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented. For a number of years, every Monday night at 9 p.m. and every Thursday night at 9 p.m., respectively (both Central time), millions of people watched Cagney and Lacey and Hill Street Blues. They did not watch together in the same space, but they did watch together at the same time, and they knew that one another were watching. On the following Tuesdays and Fridays, thousands of  viewers engaged one another in conversation about what they saw the preceding nights. What more could be wanted of an audience? An appealing idea of Dewey’s is that the occasions for what he calls “aesthetic experience” should not be confined to special places—­concert halls and museums—­but should be more prominent and pervasive in daily life. I put it to you that television has done just that, although in a way undreamt of by Dewey, or by Walter Benjamin in his early speculations about what art would be like as it became “mechanically reproducible.”

Return to the Topic Once we have freed ourselves of preconceptions about the possibilities of television, let us try for a fresh look. An early question ought to be, what shall we look at? For an illustration of the subtlety of this question, permit me one last dip into the rejuvenating well of baseball. Baseball is not the same as baseball-­on-­television: baseball-­ on-­television is not merely baseball that happens to be televised. From the standpoint of the spectator, the rhythm of the experience is different. This is never more obvious than when the spectator must make a choice that substantially determines his experience. An example presents itself when there is a batted ball with a runner on base. Suppose that the Chicago White Sox are playing the Oakland Athletics, with the A’s at bat. José Canseco is on first base. The batter sends a line hit toward the gap in right-­center field. Now, what will you watch? Do you want to see what kind of  jump Canseco gets off first base and how well he makes the turn at second? Will you want to see the third­-base coach giving signals? Do you want to 128  chap te r 9

see how Canseco tries to keep track of the ball and the coach as he decides whether to try for third? Or will you watch Harold Baines in right field, noting how good a jump he gets on the ball, how cleanly he fields it, and how well he throws to third (or maybe, if he decides that Canseco is not going to try for third, Harold will throw to second behind the runner)? All those things are taking place so near to simultaneously that you cannot watch them all. You will likely wind up asking your companions whether Harold slipped or Canseco stumbled or the coach underestimated Harold’s arm, even if you have the wit and the knack to check on all these things sequentially as the play develops. There is no choice to be made by the television spectator. The program director will decide what you see. And then he will show you all the other things, the things he decided against showing you “live,” and you will see in some temporal sequence the things that happened simultaneously. This is quite a different viewing experience from the one to be had in the ballpark, and its principal visual constituent is a different object. Some matters of choice are approximately the same for the ballpark viewer and the television viewer. When you are watching a fielder or a runner or a batter you can concentrate your attention on his hands, his arms, his feet, his overall posture, his face, etc. That’s up to you whether you are a home viewer or in the stands at the game. And sometimes even when you are concentrating you will not see everything that happens. During a Chicago Cubs game a few years ago, Ron Santo was a runner at first, with less than two out, when the batter grounded to the left side of the infield. Santo figured to be an easy force-­out at second base, but the second baseman dropped the ball. Santo was still out, however, because he slid well past the base and was tagged by the second baseman. Cubs fans booed, thinking that they had seen a sloppy slide cost them an out and a baserunner at second. It seemed to me, however, that Santo had quite reasonably taken himself to be a dead duck at second and he was bent on preventing a double play. To do so he needed to slide right past the bag into the legs of the fielder. Alas for Santo, if he had made the kind of unimaginative slide that would have guaranteed a objects of appr ec iation  129

double play and gotten him booed for failing to break up the play, he would have been safe. The booing fans did not see, and that fail­ ure to see is as much a possibility for a television viewer as for someone at the game. The rhythm that baseball exhibits is, in the first instance, a matter of movement through space, and the estimate of visual space is different on television. When the center-­field camera with its telephoto lens shows you the pitcher throwing to the batter, it looks as if the ball has such a short distance to go that it should reach the catcher immediately after the pitcher lets it go. With a little viewing experience, however, we have all learned to “understand” this episode. Early on, at least for me, the ball seemed to be going more slowly than I had expected. Then, gradually, I began to see the television ball traversing, not the sixty feet traveled by a real baseball, but the four or five inches separating television pitching rubber from television home plate, and the whole thing began to look and feel right. Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden look faster in the park than Orel Hershiser does, and they also look faster on television. A different phenomenon arises when television renders baseball space discontinuously. When television shows all the space be­ tween a throw and a catch, viewers adapt readily, but it is different when the intervening space is not shown. Of late, television has begun to treat base-­stealing threats in this way: the television screen is split, right down the middle, I think, and on the left you see the pitcher holding the ball and peering over at the runner, and on the right you see the runner taking an ever-­longer lead off first. When the pitcher throws to first, the ball simply disappears for an instant as it departs the left side of the screen, and one has no visual clues as to when to expect it to reappear on the right side of the screen. I have never been able to get the hang of this visual array, and I wish they would cut it out; but I may have an underdeveloped sensibility. Baseball has been a brilliant subject for television, in some re­ spects. It is not necessary, for instance, to interrupt baseball—­or at least not the part of a baseball game when the ball is in play—­in order to show commercials. The half-­inning and full-­inning breaks are enough, and they last long enough, especially when a few other 130  chap te r 9

interruptions occur naturally, as when a relief pitcher comes in. This is not to say that the experience of a baseball game in a baseball park is simply the experience to be had when the ball is in play. Absolutely not. A spectator has much to look at and think about, and many choices to make, during all those breaks. But television base­ ball is grafted onto real baseball, as, for instance, television football is not quite grafted onto real football. A football game must introduce additional pauses and delays into its own rhythm to accommodate commercial interruptions. Hence the “television time-­out,” which leaves the television audience with the choice of whether to go to the bathroom, go to the kitchen, or endure the commercial, all of which are consistent with the game on television, but drops the live audience out of the rhythm of the game. That is enough of baseball, at least for this paper. What about television? What are television’s objects of possible appreciation? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I think I do know that what we should look at are not isolated thirty—­or sixty—­minute segments.1 We should not look exclusively, that is, at particular episodes of Lou Grant or Moonlighting or All in the Family or Slap Maxwell. One of those episodes will be an audiovisual array of an hour’s or a half hour’s duration with two, three, four, or five interludes filled with commercials, announcements, et cetera. None of these is the principal thing in television. What is that thing? What do you think? Is it a series? A season? As many seasons as a show lasts? Here are some significant thematic elements in Cagney and Lacey: Cagney’s alcoholism and her relationship with her alcoholic father; Lacey’s not-­so-­ambivalent relationship with her father; the coming-­of-­age of Lacey’s military-­minded older son; Cagney’s aggressive but equivocal sexuality; the racial and ethnic tensions of the detective squad; Lacey’s feminism; Cagney’s loyalty to the force. You could not see half these things appear in any whole season, much less watch them develop. Just what does it come to, then, to say that Cagney and Lacey is one of the things on television? Cagney and Lacey is not uniquely typical of what is on television, and although I will make no survey here, I will note that there are a number of different formats, and we ought to pay attention to objects of appr ec iation  131

what works on television. This does not seem to me principally a matter of judgment; it is just a question of looking. Most programs last either thirty minutes or an hour, although for a while hour-­and-­ a-­half programs were not uncommon (my memory may be faulty, but I think that Columbo, at least for a while, was part of a rotating series whose programs were each ninety minutes long). Consider only the programs that are fiction. Some of them present entirely self-­contained episodes. Many situation comedies are like this, although some display a connectedness as the characters and their situations change. All in the Family was like this, and so is The Cosby Show, although less dramatically. Archie became less or differently bigoted, Edith became a protofeminist, the Huxtable children grow up. It is not only situation comedies that are thus self-­contained, episode by episode. Harry O and The Rockford Files were like that. Occasionally one of these self-contained programs will extend itself, but always for a specified time—­usually just for two episodes, called “Part One” and “Part Two.” This kind of extension has appeared, to my knowledge, in a number of series, including, for instance, Magnum, P.I. and Cagney and Lacey. Other programs are not self-­contained but spread out indefinitely. The most obvious examples are soaps, but Hill Street Blues was like this, and so is L.A. Law. What difference does it make? One difference is an alteration in what I think of as the rhythmic expectations of viewers. When you watch a self-­contained episode, you expect a resolution by five minutes before either the half-­or the full hour. Sometimes you are surprised, and perhaps exasperated, when the resolution does not come and in its place you read “to be continued.” But your expectations are quite different when you watch a non-­self-­contained episode. Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and L.A. Law, for instance, almost always contain, in any episode, a number of subnarratives. Some of these narratives are begun in the current episode and some are continued from earlier episodes; some of them will resolve in the episode at hand and others will not. You don’t know which are which, and so you find yourself less able to anticipate developments as the episode nears its end. These programs have been able to secure an audience engagement sufficient 132  chap te r 9

to permit—­if only very infrequently—­a subnarrative to begin in one episode and then be entirely absent from the next episode but be picked up again in a later episode. (A variation on this kind of construction, with an empty middle, is currently present in a commercial. I cannot remember just what headache remedy is being advertised. Someone appears complaining of a headache and then doses himself with the favored pills. Next you see other commercials, and only after that does the headache sufferer reappear, claiming that the pills have restored him.) A certain kind of philosopher will insist, at this point if not long since, that if television is to pretend to be art or like art or significant as a medium, then it must be appropriate to say what is special about television, or at least one of its forms—­to lay out an Aristotelian definition. Just as Aristotle tells us what is special about tragedy by way of a definition and its implications, so we should have a formulaic, definitive description of television. I think this is a mistaken project that is not only inadequate to the task at hand but also faithless to Aristotle’s own project. Aristotle does not set out his definition in advance. Aristotle persistently is a methodological conservative. At the time Aristotle undertakes the philosophy of the Poetics, tragedy is securely in place in his culture, with a well-­known history, considerable agreement about which of its examples are salient, and a significant understanding of how tragedies work. Aristotle reflects on all of this and then produces his analysis. Tragedy has already worked itself out when Aristotle attempts a philosophical understanding of it. Television has not worked itself out; it is doing so right now. We are not in a position to say what television is and what the best that television can do is. Imagine trying to say these things about movies in the 1920s or about music in the seventeenth century. What we can do is begin to ask questions. It is not my task here to go into these things in detail. I would like to induce you to believe that there is some point, and some difficulty and perhaps a reward, in trying to describe what is on television. A focal point has to be what seems to work on television. Why are game shows enduringly popular? Why do Westerns sometimes work, and sometimes police, doctor, or lawyer shows? Why do soap objects of appr ec iation  133

operas work, as well as other infinitely extended dramatic series? What is it about the medium that supports these things? How are we to understand the abiding interest in reruns? When someone attached to Harry O, as I am, watches reruns, it may be in hopes of seeing an episode missed when it first showed, but not infrequently the viewer has seen every episode at least once before. I am like this. What am I doing when I watch these episodes again? Is it like rereading a book, in hopes of understanding more? Or is it like visiting an old, comfortable friend (not that this is absolutely different)? And how is it that television creates a character, and what kinds of characters can it create? This is one question I will go into briefly, although I will leave it, like the others, in considerable need of attention. Let me begin with a three-­part story. 1. The first part is autobiographical. Eight years ago my family made its first trip to Poland. While we were staying in Lublin, a provincial capital near the eastern border, we attended a party given for us by a number of marvelously generous and cordial academics. During the evening my children entertained themselves part of the time by playing with the dog who belonged to our host. It was a basset hound, and my children remember him under the name they gave him, “Long and Low,” because of their great difficulty in tumbling him off his feet. His Polish owners, however, had named him “Columbo.” 2. Recently the journal American Film published Michel Ciment’s interview with Marcel Ophuls, dealing principally with Ophuls’s recent movie Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. When Ophuls attempts to articulate the difference in conception between this movie and others, in particular his own The Sorrow and the Pity and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, he says, The series Columbo is very popular in France. I myself am a great Columbo fan, just as Truffaut was, and Columbo probably influenced me in the way that I constructed this film. The principle of Columbo is taking Hitchcock’s idea that suspense is not the same as mystery—­so

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much that in the first five minutes you know who the guilty person is. The rest is watching Peter Falk investigate the crime and seeing how people lie and how the crime was committed.2

3. In Wim Wenders’s movie Wings of Desire all the actors are European—­mostly German, I think—­with the exception of Peter Falk, who plays himself (whatever this means) as the-­actor-­Peter-­ Falk who has come to Berlin to be in a movie being made there. When he is not busy on the set he strolls around Berlin, frequently being recognized and always being called “Columbo.” What are we to make of this? Well, first there is the wide appeal of the character Columbo. He is known to French filmmakers, a Polish philosopher of science and his friends and colleagues, and German construction workers. By itself that may be no more striking than the availability of Big Macs in Paris, Belgrade, and Tokyo. But more is going on. Note the way in which Columbo is spoken of. During his description of the typical Columbo episode, Ophuls says that Peter Falk investigates the crime. But in Columbo it is Columbo who is the detective. This easy movement between the actor and the role is typical of discussions of movies, and it is at its most significant when the actor is one of those actors especially suited to the movies. (When I have written and lectured about North by Northwest, for instance, I have more often called the main character “Cary Grant” than “Roger Thornhill,” and I am not at all unusual in this.) Television has made a character, Columbo, and it is misleading to think of Peter Falk as playing the role if that suggests a relationship like one in which Laurence Olivier plays Hamlet. In Wings of Desire, one of the angels decides to give up his angelic nature and become a human. After he does this, Peter Falk reveals to him that he himself once did the same thing, cashing in his armor in a pawnshop on Lenox Avenue. At this point the audience is invited to understand the personality of this man in terms of his angelic, prehuman background and the choice he once made to be human. But what man is being understood in this way? Columbo? Peter Falk? This man has a deep, unhurried appreciation of details—­the taste of coffee and

objects of appr ec iation  135

cigarettes, the looks of streets and alleys and hats. And he has an abiding awareness that along with the concrete sensuality of life’s objects there are things unseen, waiting to be revealed, perhaps by being induced to reveal themselves. The man with those characteristics is Columbo. Much of what is in Wings of Desire eludes me, but I will venture the guess that Wenders wants this character to epitomize America and something that America stands for. When he chooses a character to do this, he chooses Columbo. It is a good choice. And this character exists because television created him. How significant a creation is this? How profound and memorable is Columbo?3 This remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that Columbo is specifically a television creation. He is something like a character created in fiction, like someone wrought in a long novel. One might think of Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield, and certainly one thinks of Sherlock Holmes as he is developed in the fifty-­six short stories and four novels. But Columbo has a specific appearance, a visible concrete physicality, and in this respect he is like a character presented in a movie. But a movie does not have the expansive and discontinuous dimensions that permit the development of a character by accretion. As long as we see television in terms of single continuous units we will think of it as more confined and restricted than movies, but once we see television in terms of extended series we see it as more ample than movies. It is not so clear what it means for a character to develop or be developed in a novel, in a play, in a poem, in a movie, or on television. Sometimes the character has a personality essentially intact when the character is first presented, and he remains unchanged throughout the text. Aspects of this personality may be revealed cumulatively throughout the text, thereby enriching the character and showing how a character with this personality acts and feels as new situations appear, but in such a case we have character development only in the sense of developing the character for the audience. Columbo is like this. During the entire sequence we learn considerably many facts about the man, many of which reveal aspects

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of his personality. Some of them are facts about his current life—­for instance, the car he drives, the dog he owns, how he cares for his car and for his dog, the relatives he has and how he is involved with them, particularly the relatives who have come to him through his wife. Some of the facts, although not nearly so many, concern his history. In one episode Columbo needs access to a suspect’s car, and so he contrives to disable the car, thereby inducing the suspect to leave it in a mechanic’s garage overnight. Columbo stymies the automobile engine by jamming a potato into its exhaust pipe. Near the end of the episode Columbo confides to the man whose wife was murdered by the suspect that he, Columbo, learned this trick with potatoes and exhaust systems when he was a boy hanging out with other boys who went in for such tricks. Facts like these make good sense in the life of a man who is also the kind of man who would get a good price for armor when selling it in a pawn shop on Lenox Avenue. When one of these facts is presented, the audience is delighted, perhaps, but not surprised, as one would be surprised to learn that a person had done something entirely unexpected and unpredictable, because these facts are congruent with the Columbo character who has been in place since the first episode in the series. It is as if an outline were continually being filled in. This kind of character development, which is character revelation, so to speak, is not a peculiarly television kind of device. It is to be seen in Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, I think, and in Regan and Goneril in King Lear. It is different with the character of Levin in Anna Karenina and the character of Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies. In both those cases it is arguable that the character himself is developing, perhaps changing, and certainly growing. The story does not merely reveal more and more of the character; it is also the context in which the character alters as he reveals himself. I see no reason why television should not be capable of both kinds of character development, and in fact I think it has succeeded with both kinds. Alexander Nehamas has not been sanguine about the achievement of character development in television. In his

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recent, stimulating piece “Plato and the Mass Media,” he first says, “The characters’ personalities are usually the same,”4 and then he adds this reservation: This statement needs to be qualified in light of shows like Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, or L.A. Law, which allow for some character development. Such development, however, is both slow and conservative.5

In this assessment I think that Professor Nehamas goes too quickly and may have stumbled. It is not at all clear how to measure the speed with which a character develops in traditional mediums. Who develops faster, the king in Oedipus Rex or the king in King Lear? In these cases I suppose we might actually time performances of the plays and note the time elapsed when Oedipus first seems to begin self-­realization or when Lear first moves from being a parent to being a child, and we might time the development of the count in a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, too, but I doubt that this is what Professor Nehamas has in mind. In plays and operas we don’t have to take an actual performance as the time frame, do we? And in novels, stories, and poems we have no such possibility. Does it matter how long it takes us to read? How quickly does Marlow develop in Heart of Darkness? As rapidly as he does in Apocalypse Now? These are not the pressing questions about speed of character development, however, although they are intriguing. The pressing question is, what counts as speed of character development in television? What counts as speed of anything in television? Speed has to do with getting from one place to another. What are the places in television? The beginning and end of a thirty-­minute episode? The ends of coherent segments within a whole series, which may or may not be congruent with the beginnings and ends of particular episodes? The point of this paper is that we do not know just what the object is when we discuss television, and so we certainly do not know how to measure speed and location in terms of that object. It

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is not a point of this paper, alas, to answer these questions. I hope it is an achievement to ask them. If television has a special capacity for the development and de­ lineation of characters (as I am suggesting in the case of Columbo), then does it not also have related capacities for the exploitation of temporal sequences, in particular interrupted ones, ones whose continuities span the gaps of two-­minute commercial interruptions and the gaps of weeks between installments? This year a television station in Chicago has been showing Hill Street Blues, rerunning the episodes in their proper order but showing one every night. I had previously watched reruns of Hill Street Blues but always with the usual weeklong interlude between episodes. The show is changed by being shown every night, and I think it is damaged. Weekly showings induce the audience to think and feel that time has gone by since the characters were last seen, and that the characters have existed during that time and been going about their business. There has been adequate time for LaRue’s drinking problem to have gotten better or worse, for Belker’s aging father to deteriorate, for Renko’s feelings about Bobby Hill to change, for tension to build on the Hill. Nightly showings defeat this sense in the audience. M *A*S *H survives nightly showings much better because its rhythms seldom stretch beyond individual episodes. If M*A*S*H is like the items in a song recital, then Hill Street Blues is more like a song cycle or an opera. Or perhaps M*A*S* H is like a collection of short stories and Hill Street Blues is like a novel. But these analogies are dangerous. We need to describe television if we are go­ing to be able to talk about it with any depth, and we must des­cribe it without assimilating it to something else. However helpful, and maybe necessary, it is to begin by thinking of things television resembles, television is different and so are its capacities. Once these capacities are worked out—­by television itself—­and then seen by us, it will still remain for us to realize whether they underwrite anything worthwhile. Until then, we are in the dark, and I put it to you that those who announce that there is no artistic merit in television almost certainly do not know what they are talking about.

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Notes After delivering a version of this paper in the Catholic University of America’s 1988–­1989 Matchette series, I was able to try the topic again when I was invited to the Center for Philosophic Exchange at the State University of New York College at Brockport. I received considerable help in both places, and I would like to thank especially Daniel Dahlstrom in Washington and Jack Glickman in Brockport. It is not easy to find a philosopher who is willing to sponsor a lecture on television, and it is even harder to find one who is also a generous host and a stimulating philosophical conversationalist. I found two. 1. The only sustained, philosophical treatment of television’s “formats” I know is Stanley Cavell’s exceptionally useful “The Fact of Television,” which first appeared in Daedalus, Fall 1982, and is reprinted in Cavell’s Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984). 2. Michel Ciment, “Joy to the world!: An interview with Marcel Ophuls,” American Film, September 1988, 41. 3. If you are embarrassed to be caught doing critical analyses of television characters, let me reassure you by noting that a friend of mine, Richard Strier, a distinguished professor of English literature and an expert on George Herbert, has suggested that the model for Columbo is Porfiry, the police inspector who persists to the end in Crime and Punishment, and that the structure of the program’s episodes itself is taken from the dramatic psychological structure of the book. As fascinating as this suggestion is, I have been willing to credit the suggestion to Professor Strier and leave its defense to him. This is partly because I have been able to recall only one episode of this type, one in which Johnny Cash is the murderer, but a murderer whose religious nature is about to force him to confess when Columbo traps him. Recently, however, Professor Strier has fortified his case by noting a piece on the revival of Columbo in which the author of the piece says, “According to a press handout, the actor says he modeled the role on Porfiry Petrovich, the excessively polite, psychologically probing investigator, who works so insidiously on Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment” (New York Times, March 2, 1989). According to Professor Strier, this not only makes his case but it also demonstrates that a literary thesis can be 140  chap te r 9

proved. The most useful writing on Columbo I have seen is in David Thorburn’s “Television Melodrama.” I am not sure of the publication history of this piece. I think it first appeared in Television as a Cultural Force, ed. Douglass Cater and Richard Adler (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), but I have used it in Television: The Critical View, 4th edi­ tion, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). It is especially good on the American character of Columbo, virtually anticipating the sense of the character that Wenders exploits. 4. See Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media,” Monist 71 (April 1988): 229. 5. Ibid., 234n54.

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10

And What If  They Don’t Laugh? I know more about jokes than about any other vehicle of humor—­at least I have thought more about them, and so they are mainly what I will speak about. And I will, mainly, speak about only one aspect of joking—­namely, what to make of it when a joke doesn’t work. There are, no doubt, many reasons why one might tell a joke, but a basic, central reason must be in order to induce laughter in the joke’s audience. In my small book, in one small section, I attempted to establish that all jokes are conditional in the sense that they can succeed only if the audience meets certain requirements—­that is, satisfies certain conditions.1 I won’t rehearse any of that here; I will only repeat that the conditions can range from being very slight to being extremely rich and complex. In all kinds of joke failure, I think, it is reasonable to suppose that in some way or another the target audience has failed to meet the requisite conditions. This may sound as if it is always the audience that is to be blamed, but in fact it is characteristically the fault of the teller, who has somehow mistaken his audience and presumed in them something that is not there. Or, in what may be the most interesting case, he has not been aware of something that is there. I do not think you want me to take your time telling jokes (although I may be wrong: the organizers of this conference did not tell me just what they expect of me). And, after all, this is a serious,

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academic occasion. We do need an example, however, and so I offer this: Late one night Abe and Sarah are sleeping. Sarah wakes up needing to use the bathroom. When she has not returned to bed for quite a while, Abe hears her calling softly, and he goes to the bathroom to discover that Sarah, who has been growing increasingly plump, has in fact gotten herself stuck in the toilet. She is wedged in and simply can’t get herself out. Abe does his best, tugging and prying, but he can’t extricate his wife. At his wits’ end, finally it occurs to Abe that this is, after all, a problem in the bathroom, and so he calls Ole, the Norwegian plumber. Because it is an emergency, Ole agrees to come over, even though it is nearly 3 a.m. When he arrives, and Abe has let him into the house, Abe suddenly realizes that Sarah is sitting naked in the bathroom and Ole is about to see her. Thinking as quickly as he can, Abe runs ahead, removes the yarmulke from his head, and places it over Sarah’s most private parts just before Ole gets to the bathroom. Ole surveys the situation carefully, walking round and round the toilet, saying nothing, until Abe asks, “Well, can you do something?” “Yes,” says Ole, “with the equipment I’ve brought, I can get her out all right. But the rabbi? He’s a goner.”2

I will not rehearse the list of conditions required of those who get this joke, beyond mentioning that, of course, they must recognize “Abe” and “Sarah” as Jewish names. The joke never says that they are Jewish, and unless they are, Abe’s wearing a skullcap makes little sense. And unless Ole takes Abe and Sarah to be Jewish and has some idea that a rabbi might wear such a cap, his final remark is unintelligible. So—­an audience that doesn’t recognize the Jewish practice of covering one’s head, and therefore has no sense that someone with a rather flimsy sense of this practice might associate it with Jewish rabbis, will not, as we say, “get” this joke, will not understand it. If they understand it but still don’t find it funny, I’m not sure what to

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say (assuming, of course, that this is an audience that finds at least some jokes funny, that it isn’t a joke-­audience equivalent of the tone-­deaf listening to music). But what if it is another kind of failure? The audience does get it, does find the wit in it, does appreciate how totally unexpected the wonderful punchline is, but doesn’t laugh. Perhaps this is an audience that, although not unduly solemn or reverential, still finds it somehow offensive to be offered, even if only by implication, an image of a rabbi somehow lodged beneath a woman’s bare bottom, presumably being crushed and/or drowned as he succumbs to a flush. Or it might be an audience that never likes Norwegian jokes and is particularly distressed at having a Norwegian portrayed as someone making an utterly fantastic inference in order to explain what he sees, a woman on a toilet seat with a yarmulke between her legs. Now in all these cases in which a joke has not worked, something has gone wrong, and as a devoted student of J. L. Austin, I incline toward thinking that it may be more profitable to ask what has gone wrong when something has, than to try to say what has gone right when something works. So, what has happened with this joke telling? Has there been a misfire, a hitch, a flaw? Has there been a failure to “secure uptake?” Wittgenstein says somewhere (I think) that a joke gone wrong is like a ball thrown to someone who will not throw it back. This is far too crude. Perhaps the fellow caught it and won’t throw it back, but why? Does he think you don’t want it back or, perhaps, that you can’t catch it? And did he catch it, to begin with? It may be that the ball was not caught, and it may not have been caught for various, quite different reasons, and it is worth inquiring into as many of these as we can. If the ball was not caught, did he not see it coming? Was he not looking? Did he see it well enough but have insufficient hand-­eye coordination to catch it? Was it thrown so badly that it was virtually impossible to catch? We might look into as many of these possibilities as we can think of. It is possible, you know. Austin once wrote this, speaking not about ball catching or joke telling, but about the uses of language: 144  chap te r 10

I think we should not despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of  language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list.3

Now I am not going to get anywhere near even seventeen items, but I am going to begin trying to list some ways in which jokes can fail. I have already described a couple very crudely, but let me start again. A joke gone wrong (or perhaps we should say, a joke gone nowhere) has fallen stillborn for at least one of these three general reasons: 1. The audience didn’t understand the joke. 2. The audience did understand the joke but found no fun in it. 3. The audience did understand the joke, and found the fun in it, but was somehow constrained not to laugh; that is, something overwhelmed what might otherwise have been a laughing response.

The first kind of failure, a failure by the audience even to understand the joke, is not particularly complex, although if we had time, we might go into just what features of a joke might go not understood—­ that is, just what the audience has failed to do (not understanding words in another language, for instance, or not securing geographical and historical references, or not recognizing the invocation of stereotypes, or failing to recognize a particular accent—­thus not realizing, for instance, that one of the characters in the joke must be Irish—­or a number of other possible breakdowns). I will not go into these, however, for, as interesting as they are, they are not as hard to describe and understand as other kinds of failure. I think of the second kind of disaster as one in which the audience does indeed understand the joke but doesn’t find any fun in it. a nd w hat if  t hey d on ’t l augh?  145

This is not so hard to describe, but I fear that I have not found what to say about it beyond the obvious, and I’m eager to have help from you. I think we need a clear, brief example. Here is one taken from my book. It is one of those rare jokes that tend to succeed with both children and adults. What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? They have the same middle name.

This joke usually does succeed, and it is a surprise to me how many of those who have written about my book have cited this as a favorite joke, but it does not always work. It is virtually always understood. The joke is not without its craft. For instance, it is better to pair Alexander the Great with Winnie the Pooh than to pair Alexander with, say, Peter the Great, or Attila the Hun, and it is not so difficult to say why it is better. Tell me, if you like. But I would also like you to tell me what to say, when the joke is in its best form, if someone who understands it doesn’t find it funny? He does understand everything that seems relevant: he knows who Winnie and Alexander are, he is familiar with historical nomenclature, he realizes that Winnie and Alexander have nothing whatsoever in common, and so on. But he doesn’t find the joke funny. All I have thought to say is that this is just a rock-­bottom fact about the world and us humans, that two of us might understand something perfectly and yet only one of us would be moved to laugh. Please tell me what else there is to say. There is something else that I would like even more to know what to say about, and that is a failure of the third kind, when the audience gets the joke, sees exactly what is funny in it, but does not, as it were, feel the fun, does not laugh, does not even give a grudging smile. What has happened then? Perhaps it is something like this. I am reminded of a kind of ex­­ perience that was part of my childhood. I don’t mean to burden you with my autobiography: I hope to be reminding you of an experience you’ve had. 146  chap te r 10

On some occasions I would be moved to inappropriate laughter. Either it seemed to me inappropriate to be laughing at the thing at all, or, although the thing was a fit object of laughter, it seemed inappropriate to be laughing in the circumstances. So I didn’t want to be laughing then and there. I found it almost impossible to stifle the laughter directly, and so I would try to overcome it, as it were, by turning my thoughts to something as sober as I could imagine. I would recall the death of a grandparent, or I would imagine something infinitely sad. Often this would not work, and I would laugh on, but sometimes it did work, at least after a fashion, and my laugh­ ter was subdued. I had no “theory” of why this laughter killing might work, and I don’t have one now. But something happened, and it may be reasonable to think of it like this: It is as if something X might produce laughter in me, and something else Y might produce great sobriety or even tears. Given that X was already at work, if I could introduce Y into my mental life I might create a vector, as it were, the resultant of X and Y, and so my ultimate reaction might not be utter sobriety or weeping, but it would be something less than laughter. Does that seem reasonable to you, if not as a “Newtonian” theory of inertia, momentum, and motion, at least as a useful description of moments in the mind of a laughing animal? It is one thing to be struck by the vulgarity, obscenity, unspeakability of some joke, and thus think that one should not laugh even though without these strictures one would laugh freely, because, after all, the damned thing is funny; and it is yet another thing, and a different kind of thing, to have a negative reaction to the joke so strong and pointed that this reaction undercuts any response of amusement. I’m not sure of the plausibility of this description, but it does seem to me a description that matches the description of how it is, for instance, that my appreciation of the music of Wagner and of some of the poetry of T. S. Eliot is often strangled by the anti-­ Semitism I find in those works. Should one’s appreciation of this music and this poetry be subdued by their offensive politics? I have argued (elsewhere) that a nd w hat if  they d on ’t l augh?  147

there is no final answer to this question, that those whose appreciation is not affected are entirely legitimate in their responses, but so are those, like me, who find their appreciation undercut. I wonder if that is how it is with humor? I have no doubt that that is exactly how it is in some cases, cases in which one should admit the existence of the fun but also insist that one wants nothing to do with it. As I recall my childhood efforts to stifle my own laughter, it seems to me that these efforts, whether or not they worked, occurred in two markedly different kinds of situations. One was a case in which I found something genuinely funny but thought it utterly inappropriate that I should be exhibiting mirth under the circumstances. I might be at a funeral, for instance, when something funny either occurred to me or presented itself, and I felt a strong inhibition against laughing or even smiling during that sad occasion. This is not so complicated, I suppose, because the question of whether something is genuinely funny, or even funny only to me, didn’t arise. It was indeed funny, but it was inappropriate to respond to the fun. In other cases, however, it seemed to me that perhaps there was something wrong in me to find something funny—­even though I did—­and I was, as it were, trying to kill that response in myself once and for all. It wasn’t that I thought it inappropriate to laugh then and there, but that I thought it inappropriate to laugh at this thing ever. And then there is a kind of mixed case that still leaves me unsure what to say. My mother once took a friend and me to a ballet performance when my friend and I were ten to twelve years old. I had never before attended one, nor had my friend, and I was largely unable to make any sense of it whatsoever. When some of the female dancers did a routine during which they stood erect on one leg, toe curved and pointed downward, with the other leg bent so that its toe touched the extended leg, I was suddenly struck by the image and whispered to my friend that the dancers looked as if they had fleas. Of course this convulsed the two of us, and I bent every effort to suppress my giggling. As little as I understood ballet, I understood absolutely that I was not supposed to be laughing at this

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display while seated amid an attentive and appreciative audience. No question about that. But there is a question of whether it would be right or apt or decent to find this exhibition funny under any circumstances whatsoever. It is, one might say, a wrong response to the dance. What do you think? I would like to distinguish this case, and cases like it, from a case like this: In a movie I last saw dozens of years ago, an inconsequential movie called Cat Ballou, Lee Marvin plays a hired gunfighter who has been engaged to protect a man named Frankie Ballou. He does not succeed, and although Lee Marvin is unaware of it, Frankie Ballou is shot to death. His daughter, Cat Ballou, played by Jane Fonda, has her father laid out in a casket with memorial candles burning nearby. Lee Marvin stumbles drunkenly into this scene, assesses it, and then blows out the candles while singing “Happy Birthday” to Frankie. Here there is simply a mistake. Lee Marvin has mistaken a bier for the trappings of a birthday party and has failed to realize that the birthday boy is dead. I did understand, if very dimly, what ballet is, and, unlike Lee Marvin, I understood perfectly well that laughter was an inappropriate response to the occasion. So if I made a mistake, it was not Lee Marvin’s kind of mistake, and it was a deeper and more significant error. Exactly what kind of error is this? During this conference we are concerned with humor, and this error is one of laughing at the wrong thing or at the wrong time, but the question of  when it is right to laugh is an instance of the larger question of the appropriateness of feelings and reactions. When is it right, or wrong, to feel sadness, to feel fright, to feel disgust, or to feel amused? Hume says there is a sense in which a feeling is never right or wrong, it just is; but Hume goes on to say that feelings can be appropriate or not, or, as he says, they can be the “natural” responses to things.4 Some things are, in Hume’s words, “fitted by nature” to produce certain human responses. Should we agree with Hume in this? There is a temptation to do so. Ask yourself what you would like to say of someone who has

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strong erotic feelings in the presence of young children or who is amused by the pain experienced when animals are tortured. Such people seem pathological, somehow not right, and it is tempting to say that their responses are “unnatural.” But the history of denominating things natural and unnatural is not, in general, a history of very sound philosophy, and it is not always an entirely savory history. Homosexual attraction has been called unnatural. Slavery has been called natural. It has been called natural to believe in the Christian God. Hume thought it somehow natural to prefer the poetry of Milton to that of Ogilby, natural to feel more pleasure from Milton’s verse than from Ogilby’s. He also thought the same about Bunyan and Addison. If you have read Ogilby, then perhaps you share Hume’s comparative re­ sponses to him and to Milton. Where do you stand on Bunyan and Addison? It seems clear to me that this natural/unnatural business is very slippery and maybe not a little dangerous. I think it won’t do to take as natural what is typically or usually thought or felt. In the first place, it has not been uncommon in history for a majority to have a sensibility later thought misguided, and in the second place, Hume would like to say that the proper response to a work of art is somehow the natural one, but Hume also notes that often only a few people are capable of this proper response. But then what are we to say of those who laugh at the wrong things, or—­my official topic—­those who don’t laugh at genuine fun? I know one thing we can say, and it may be both distressing and very interesting if this is all we can say: we can say that these eccentrics are not like us. I laughed at this joke. You didn’t. You are not like me. Are you, in addition, somehow unnatural? Defective? Inadequate? On what possible grounds could I say that? I could take myself as a measure, an index, and judge everyone else in terms of my personal responses, but, of course, you might do that just as well. So what is left to say? For the past few years, when thinking and writing about figurative language, art in general, and jokes in particular, I have been forced to the conclusion that in the end there just is nothing to say except that we sometimes are the same in our responses, but 150  chap te r 10

sometimes we are different, and when these differences arise, sometimes we can explain the differences and sometimes we can’t, but we are often unable to make sense of the idea that someone is right and someone wrong. If that conclusion disappoints you, and you would like something more definitive, more classically “philosophical,” then I invite you to find it and share it with me. In closing, I would like to point out that a great deal of humor, especially of joking humor, in fact portrays people responding eccentrically, having inappropriate or somehow skewed responses. Here is an example: There is one background item needed for this story that you may not have, and so I will give it to you. Among some Jews there is a particular practice employed when a death occurs. It is called “sitting Shiva.” For seven days after the burial, the bereaved family opens its house to sympathizers, with the house itself prepared for the occasion in various ways dictated by various versions of this practice, but always, and typically, with food and other refreshments for those who visit. The family is said to be sitting Shiva. Greenberg, an elderly New Yorker with few financial resources, hits on an ingenious way to supplement his food supply. He reads newspapers regularly, attending to the obituaries, and when he finds a Jewish name, he checks the address of the deceased and then goes to that place, where he is always welcomed as a fellow mourner and invited to eat and drink. One day he finds the address of someone recently passed, and he sets out in the early evening for East 57th Street. He has mistaken the address, however, and he should have gone to West 57th Street. When he arrives, unknown to him, he has come to a house of ill repute. When the Madam answers the door, Greenberg says, “I’ve come for the Shiva.” “Shiva?” asks the woman. “I don’t know about Shiva, but Brandy knows a lot of tricks. Go up to the second floor and ask for Brandy at the first door to the left.” Greenberg goes to the door, and when Brandy opens it, he says, “I was told to come up here for the Shiva.” and w hat if  t hey d on ’t l augh?  151

“Shiva?” asks Brandy. “I don’t think I know that one, but I know a lot and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Come in.” Greenberg enters the room, and half an hour later he emerges, Brandy behind him, and he hears her say, “That was swell, mister, you just come back any time you like.” “Yes,” says Greenberg solemnly, “I will. But on a happier occasion.”

So what do you make of Greenberg? I guess he has been lucky. He has made some kind of mistake, I suppose, and in some respects he and Brandy have not had exactly the same response. Maybe we should say that sometimes things just don’t work out. But sometimes they do.

Notes 1. Ted Cohen, Jokes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; paperback edition, 2001). 2. I owe this story to my friend, Professor Henry West of Macalester College. I have been told that Professor West told the story to open an academic conference a few years ago. I do not know the topic of the conference. I wish I had been there. 3. J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 4. David Hume, “Of the Standard of  Taste,” Four Dissertations (1757).

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Liking What’s Good: Why Should We? Introduction If we are to compare popular art with high, fine art, then we will need something they have in common in order to locate a scale along which their relative standing might be plotted. Almost all of this essay is an attempt to do that by way of a description of art, along with other things, as consisting of objects around each of which is gathered what I call “a community of appreciation.” With that in hand, it is possible for me to offer a very brief, highly tentative guess about what difference it might make whether such an object were an instance of popular art or of something more “refined.”

The Main Part When you like something, does it matter how good that thing is? Augustine thought so, at least with regard to political communities. He thought that the ancient Romans were a people, as he thought of a people, because they loved something in common, but that they were less than a very good people because the things they loved in common were not such good things (they did not love God).1 Let us think not of political communities, but of what might be 153

called “aesthetic communities,” and ask about how they are constituted. For some years, in a few papers and one small book, I have argued that when a group of people care for the same thing they therein constitute a community exhibiting at least some mutuality. Here, too, it has been thought that it is better to like better things. As an example of this sentiment, you might consider an admonitory remark printed in 1897 in one of Chicago’s cultural magazines, the Dial. That magazine was admonishing audiences of the Chicago Orchestra not to resist difficult works of European “classical” music, and it said this: “This masterpiece deserves your attention . . . for it has the power to raise you to a higher spiritual level. If you do not like it now, pray that you may learn to like it, for the defect is yours.”2 These aesthetic communities, as I have conceived them, are constituted in innumerable ways, grouped around an enormous variety of objects, and sometimes characterized by their comparative preferences. For instance, there are those who laugh at the same joke, those who prefer Glenn Gould’s early performance of The Goldberg Variations to other performances, those who like their meat cooked rare, those who would rather see the performance of a play than watch a movie, and so on. Here are three extreme examples: those readers who are devoted to Don Quixote, those viewers who regularly watch The Simpsons, and those jokers who like ethnic jokes. I have no idea whatever how to compare this novel, this television series, and those jokes with one another, but I will just assume that intellectuals in general, and academic intellectuals in particular, will think that Cervantes’s book is, in some sense, better than the television cartoon, and certainly better than any Polish joke. And I will overlook—­but only temporarily—­the fact that a single person might belong to all these groups, as, in fact, I do, being a fan of the adventures of the man of La Mancha, Homer Simpson’s foibles, and the joke about this year’s Polish science prizes. Now there are, plainly, two immediate problems besetting the assertion that it is better to like better things. The first is, simply, that it is utterly unclear what argument would lead from “X is better 154  chap te r 11

than Y” to “it is better to like X than it is to like Y.” I think it seems to many thinkers that it is obvious that it is better to like the better thing; but not only is it not obvious, as a few minutes’ reflection shows it is not at all clear that it is even true. Let us have a mundane example and not yet become entangled in the question of what makes one thing better than another. That tangle awaits us, but for a moment let us just suppose it a given that, say, a meal prepared with care by a four-­star chef is better than a burger and fries at McDonald’s. (Make it a complete meal, say that American curiosity, the Big Mac with extra fries along with a diet Coke—­the choice of a diet Coke being for health reasons.) Is it better, all things being equal, as the saying goes, to prefer the chef ’s offering to the grease combo? Well, we might say, at least the preference shows better taste on the part of the diner. Let’s say that. We aren’t giving much away, as I see it, for now we run up against this question, which, as I have argued elsewhere, I consider highly unlikely to be answerable: “Why is it better to have better taste?”3 An instinctive reply is, well, then you will like better things, but that runs right into another question that is not really another question, for it is the same old question: “Why is it better to like better things?” Perhaps I don’t convince you about this, and maybe I shouldn’t. If you can provide answers to these questions, I will be delighted to hear them. Until then, we have this problem: we have no reason to think it is better to like better things. That is the first immediate problem. The second problem, of course, is just this (and in fact it was probably the first problem): What could possibly establish that X is better than Y, whether X and Y are meals, wine vintages, or works of art? If X and Y are meant to serve some purpose or are intended to answer to some special consideration, then there may be answers. For instance, if X and Y are automobiles, and I need my car to carry my wife’s unbelievably difficult-­to-­carry gardening paraphernalia, then if X is a five-­door hatchback Saab while Y is a Miata two-­seater, then X is better than Y. And if  X is an all-­organic, low-­calorie, no-­fat meal, while Y is that McDonald’s grease mélange, and I am trying to lose weight, then X is a better choice. liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  155

But, and pace Aristotle and his fans, I see no way to construe works of art in this way as long as they are considered as works of art. Considered otherwise, there may be a way to make comparisons. If you’re trying to learn German, it may be better to attend a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute than to listen to his Marriage of Figaro, and if you’d like to gain a sense of Victorian England you might do better to read Dickens than Mark Twain. We are not considering them otherwise, however, and the question is, What could establish that The Marriage of Figaro is better than The Magic Flute, or that Huckleberry Finn is better than anything by Dickens, even David Copperfield? It is not that no one has tried to show such things. Indeed the history of the philosophy of art—­as well as all of art criticism, music criticism, and the rest—­is full of these attempts, and they are often worth reading. It is just that they do not succeed. Adorno might have produced ten times as much blather as he managed, and he would still not have moved one step closer to showing that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is less good than other works by Beethoven, much less that American jazz is inferior to Adorno’s prized European art music. And why don’t these attempts succeed? Well, now I come clean, and if you wind up thinking I’m a so-­called “Positivist” and you want to ride me out of Buffalo on a rail, then I will live with that. (Did you know that Abraham Lincoln once compared a disagreeable occurrence with being ridden out of town on a rail and noted that if it weren’t for the glory of it, he would just as soon skip it?) Thus I come clean and say: any reason that could be given for claiming X is better than Y will be unacceptable.4 And it will be unacceptable even to the critic who thinks to give it as a reason, just as soon as he realizes the implications of taking it as a genuine reason. It will force him to denigrate things he thinks good, and even more unacceptably, it will force him to praise things he thinks poor. Here is one example, to stand for the general point: A common reason cited for preferring one thing to another is the greater “complexity” of the one. You can see as well as I that it is going to be impossible to unpack the idea of complexity success156  chap te r 11

fully, especially given the results one needs to arrive at. But even without that worry, how about this?—­“I prefer much of the music of the standard Western art tradition to, say, rock and roll, because the music I prefer is more complex. Bach, for instance, or Beethoven, especially in the late string quartets, is far more complex harmonically and even melodically than any music by Elvis Presley.” Fine, and so far, so good. But only so far. Among composers of the mid-­ and late twentieth century we find music of complexity equal to or greater than that of things by Bach or Beethoven. Some of that music, say some things by Milton Babbitt or various late twelve-­tone composers, is so complex that virtually no one can hear the music’s internal relations. I have, finally, learned to do that, at least a little. Recall that I am one who prefers Bach to Elvis on account of Bach’s greater complexity. Now this is a subtle point, one whose subtlety escaped me for quite some time. It may well be true that my preference for Bach over Elvis is in fact due to the greater complexity of, say, The Goldberg Variations when compared with, say, Heartbreak Hotel. But it cannot be true in general that I prefer the more complex to the less complex, because, among other things, I do not prefer anything by Milton Babbitt to The Goldberg Variations. And this means that it cannot be true, even for me, that in general X is better than Y whenever X is more complex than Y. I am not advancing a confusion between liking something and thinking that the thing is good, at least not as yet, because I not only like Bach more than I like Babbitt, but I think Bach is better than Babbitt. So what are we to say about the kinds of art one likes and about one’s preferences for one work over another? Before I try saying something, I will back away from these questions about art for a moment and go back to what seem to be questions of morality and politics, just as a way of helping us to loosen up a bit when thinking about these things. Let us ask: When one person is morally superior to another, is it better of us to like that better man more than we like the other? To help in thinking about that, I give you two examples from my own liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  157

affective life. The first concerns a man who was once in charge of the editorial page of an important newspaper but was forced to leave his position when he committed journalistic plagiarism. The other concerns a man who was once a leading figure in city government but was sent to jail after being charged with using his office to solicit bribes. Both these men were my friends. The day I read the news of the journalist’s disgrace I spent a very long time wondering not only what to do, but how to feel. Finally I had an epiphany of a kind, and I took out my stationery and wrote him a note saying I’d read of his trouble and was sorry. When the former alderman had done his jail time, I came across him walking down the street. My earlier experience with the journalist made it easier for me this time, and I simply shook the man’s hand, expressed sympathy, and welcomed him home. In a phrase, these men not only were my friends, but they still are my friends. Do you think I have made a mistake? A moral error? Should I shun these people or at least moderate my affection for them? If you think so, then you may be right, but I consider you a kind of fanatic, someone whose view of life and whose sensibility are far too simple for the subtleties and difficulties of human existence. Now that I’ve confessed to my own opinion as to whether it is better to like morally better things, I will get back to the similar question, namely whether it is better to like aesthetically better things. I begin by noting that among the bromides, chestnuts, and many offhand remarks made about works of art are two that seem to be at odds with one another. One is the one that lurks in the background throughout this conference, namely that the most elevated, rarefied, and refined works of art are appreciated by only a few, the true connoisseurs. But the other is the idea that art is “universal,” that it is the peculiar and redeeming fact about art that it reaches right through people’s differences—­which is to say, in a word, that it has the capacity to be “popular.” A few years ago I made the probably unwise decision to teach a little Shakespeare. Feeling inadequate, I decided to dip into the 158  chap te r 11

Shakespeare literature. I came away from that excursion stupefied by the incredible volume of material published about Shakespeare, and so I asked for some guidance from my Shakespeare-­expert friends. But before I did that I ran across an interesting assertion. I have no idea how well this assertion is supported, but genuine Shakespeare scholars have made it more than once, and I give it to you: measured in terms of the frequency of their performance, Shakespeare’s two most popular plays are Hamlet and The Merchant of  Venice. I found that surprising. I still do. On the one hand, Hamlet seems to me a stupendously great work of art, a creation of unfathomable depth, something to be engaged with for all one’s life. On the other hand, The Merchant of   Venice surely is not even one of   Shakespeare’s better plays. I think there may be more in this play than many have found, but it is, simply, on an entirely different level from Hamlet. How can this be? How can The Merchant of   Venice have snuck into one of the two top places, outdistancing, say, King Lear and Othello? Those two tragedies have their own great depths, their mysteries, their perpetual attraction, and for some very keen Shakespeare lovers King Lear outranks Hamlet. The reason seems to be that Hamlet has succeeded for hundreds of years in lands all over the world just because it is what great art is said to be—­universal, with themes and attractions that can reach us all. The Merchant of   Venice, on the other hand, seems to owe its popularity to something else. I say “seems.” I am not sure. But what would that something else be? Perhaps it is this: the mark of popular art is supposed to be that it is somehow “easy” and therefore widely accessible. The Merchant of  Venice, despite its unignorable anti-­Semitism, is fun, in its way. A Jewish man bests the best that Christian manhood can offer, and Christian manhood is so benighted about its own powers that it is only by pretending to be a man that the one person who can stand up to Shylock is given a chance. Portia overcomes them all, prevailing even over Bassanio by forcing him to break his word and then forgiving him. Then it would seem that Hamlet reaches all of us in our depth, while The Merchant of  Venice does what—­reaches us on our surface? liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  159

Oddly enough, despite the fact that, virtually by definition, popular art is more popular than “high” art, popular art may be likelier to offer you the opportunity for discovery. When you are first taken with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, you are not in the least surprised to find others who feel as you do, including listeners completely devoted to Mozart operas who can tell you many things about them and their performances. But when you stumble upon a pedestrian work, especially if the work is not yet known to you nor even heard of by you, and you are taken with it, it will be a special, extra treat to find others who care for it. This is not a paradox, nor even more than mildly ironic, but it is interesting that in some cases it is the “popular” that is rare, or novel. It is, one might say, “standard” that one like Mozart, and in that sense it is “popular” to like Mozart. Now with regard to the popular arts, some things are standard and some are not. Elaine May’s failure Ishtar is, to the degree that movies are a popular art, popular, but in another sense of “popular” the movie was not at all popular, and I am nearly alone in my good opinion of it. And then there are subtleties and refinements within the popular arts. Here is an example. In one episode of the television series The West Wing, which is a popular program, this happens: At the beginning of the episode we see a very peculiar event, shown, as I remember it, in black and white. Three orthodox Jews are sitting in a car, two in the front seat, one in the back. There is some conversation (not remembered well by me), during which the man in the back, the youngest of the three, tells the others about Cole Porter, mentioning that he was at Yale, where they have a curious singing group called “The Whiffenpoofs.” Then their conversation shifts and one of the men in the front seat tells the other that the back-­ seat man has just become a father. The baby is named “Tobias.” Next, the two front-­seat men leave the car, go down the street, and after the sound of a gunshot, one of them returns. At this point the episode shifts and becomes the familiar scene, in color, in Washington. As the episode progresses Toby is visited by his father, and, oddly, Toby is not at all happy to see him and virtually ignores him. When someone inquires of Toby, he tells the questioner that 160  chap te r 11

his father is recently retired from the garment business, and that before that he was in prison because he’d been a member of Murder Incorporated. Toby plainly disapproves of his father and resists the old man’s attempts at friendship. Eventually, another regular character speaks to Toby about his father and tells Toby that his father was an immigrant, trying to support a family, with no other work to do, and, besides, the people assassinated by Murder Incorporated were pretty bad guys. Toby is unrelenting. But by the end of the episode Toby makes an overture to his father, who has been waiting, alone, in Toby’s office, and invites the old man to stay in Toby’s apartment. As they are leaving the building they stop to listen to a visiting chorus that has come to sing during the Christmas season. The old man asks who they are, and he is told that they are the Whiffenpoofs from Yale. I do not always watch The West Wing, but surely this is one of the most thoroughly crafted episodes in the series, especially because this development in the relationship between Toby and his formerly-­murderous father plays out against the background of what’s been happening in the White House, where, as it happens, the president has authorized the assassination of a foreign bad guy. The complexity of my liking for this particular episode of The West Wing, which, clearly, is a function of the complexity of the episode itself, might easily be compared with the complexity of my liking for Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But in developing my affection for that television episode I was much more on my own than in coming to love Don Giovanni, and this is not only because Don Giovanni has been around so much longer. It is partly because television episodes do not come to me already surrounded by a canonical appreciation. By now, whether or not you agree with me, you can see, surely, (1) that I don’t believe in any compelling argument to the effect that one thing is (aesthetically) better than another, and (2) that I don’t believe it possible to show that it is better to like better things. Where does that leave me? You might say, Nowhere, but I prefer to think that I’ve been freed to start again, to try to understand what to make of the communities of people who care for the things they liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  161

care for. I start, characteristically for me, I suppose, with a little autobiography. Not long ago my wife and I were in Memphis, and after completing family obligations we spent an evening on Beale Street. While having dinner at B. B. King’s, listening to an amplified blues band, I was almost mesmerized by twelve other members of the audience. They were in two groups of six. The first were a half dozen young Japanese women who had preceded my wife and me waiting to pay the club’s cover charge. I’m not good at estimating ages, but I judged these young women to be in their twenties. They were dressed casually but neatly, and they sat at a round table between us and the stage, eating their dinner of ribs, rice, beans, and so on. The other group I did not notice until after the music had begun. They must have been seated before we came in. They were six elderly black women, whom I estimated to be, on average, about forty years older than the Japanese. They were very well dressed, almost as if they’d come from church, and they all wore hats as they sat slowly drinking their beers straight from the bottle. A great feeling of well-­being came over me, augmented, perhaps, by the two large glasses of beer I was drinking and the presence of my beautiful, great-­spirited wife, herself captivated by the music. Everyone was swaying to the blues, and a couple was dancing in the small area in front of the stage. When the band temporarily abandoned the blues and dug into a rendition of “Mustang Sally,” they encouraged sections of the audience to sing the refrain “Ride, Sally, ride.” Having just seen Bill Murray in Lost in Translation mistake a Japanese lady’s request to rip her stockings for a plea to “lip my stockings,” I was desperate to get close enough to the Japanese to hear whether they were singing “Lide, Sally, lide,” but I behaved myself, and I can tell you only that the young Japanese women sang with gusto. That evening, in Memphis at B. B. King’s, I may have been mellowing out to the point of being sappy, but I thought, by God this is it, this is the so-­called universality of art. This is how art joins people one to another, this is how it unites, if only in certain aspects, people who may otherwise have nothing to do with one another 162  chap te r 11

and, apparently, very little in common. They have this in common, this music, right now. But of course this is not real “universality,” not in Kant’s sense. The music doesn’t get to everyone, and, at least so I think, Kant was wrong to think that such universality had to be the property of genuine judgments of beauty and art. But, whatever Kant may have thought, this doesn’t diminish the importance of those less-­than-­ universal groups that are gathered around specific works. It seems to me important to ask about those groups, about how they are constituted and how they are related to one another. In fact we have two different points from which to begin. We might take a specific work, say Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest or Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, and then look to the audience the work has earned. Or we might take a specific person, say you or me, and look into the various works that person cares for. What we have, I think, is a wonderfully intricate array of circles, all of them organized around two different foci. Despite my contempt for PowerPoint and my aversion to slide shows, I would have drawn this configuration for you, but I am not up to that, and you’ll have to imagine it, either visually or otherwise. First we have works of art and other objects of appreciation, and around each of them is the intimate circle of those who care for these things. But the auditors themselves are foci, each of them in turn, and each of them belongs to the circles of many objects. So we would have to make both the works and the appreciators centers of circles, and these circles would be overlapping, sometimes entirely within one another, sometimes completely separate from one another, and there would be lenses and lunes galore. This may look to you like the result of a sociological survey, but I don’t mind: I’m not one of those riding a keen distinction between philosophy and other things, and there is at least a little of what seems to be philosophy on the way. Let us have a slight, very brief, and partial illustration. Take as the work Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. In its circle you will find me, my wife, many of my friends, certainly the musicologist Joseph liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  163

Kerman, and many, many others, but you will not find the late Alan Tormey, for instance, nor many people with no taste for Mozart, nor many of those who do not care for opera at all. Now take me. I’m already in the Marriage of Figaro circle, but I am myself the center of a circle, and within that circle, the one defined by me, are at least five Mozart operas, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, piano trios by Schubert, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Leon Redbone’s “Walking Stick,” many poems by Robert Pinsky, two books by Imre Kertész, and many, many other things. One wants to know—­at least I want to know—­what characterizes the things inside these circles, or, to put it in a good, old-­fashioned way, (1) what do all those who love the Marriage of Figaro have in common?, and (2) what do all the works I love have in common? I think I know the answers to these questions, and I think I know an absolutely essential corollary to the answers. The first answer is—­and I’m sure Nelson Goodman would be glad to hear this—­nothing. The only thing you’re going to find that we Mozart lovers have in common is that we love Mozart. And the only thing you will find in common when you look over all that I love is that I love it all. Nominalism, I guess. I am not going to argue for these answers here. I have previously given a sketch of an argument for the proposition that each of us has what I call “an aesthetic personality” that exhibits no essential characteristic.5 My idea was, and is, that whatever reason you or I may have for our attraction to some work, some other work with exactly the same characteristic may well fail to attract us. My idea about the other circles is similar. If you take all those who care for some work, you will not find that they care for it in just the same way, for just the same reasons. Thus your attraction to the Marriage of Figaro or Don Quixote may be anchored differently from mine. A likely example is Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Perhaps you like that movie as much as I, but chances are you do not find in that movie an extended meditation on what it means to be an American, the very thing that most attracts me to the movie. So then we are both in the movie’s circle but we are held there quite differently. 164  chap te r 11

If I am right about this, or even most of it, we find ourselves and our art—­the popular art, the high art, and all the rest—­linked to one another, and separated from one another, and there seem to be no underlying “principles” to explain these groupings. These circles of appreciation are defined by an enormous number of objects and activities. Some of us like stock-­car racing, some like to play pool, some love baseball, some are bored by baseball (they are mistaken), some like to watch bullfighting, some can’t stand even the thought of bullfighting, and so on and on. We can draw my circles with regard to any and all of these things. My personal circle includes watching baseball, listening to Schubert, playing pool, telling jokes, listening to jokes, listening to jazz, playing drums, and on and on, and it excludes bullfighting, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, playing football (but not watching football), and on and on. Some of the items inside my circle, and some outside it, and, surely, things inside and outside your circles are art, or things like art, and some are not. Please don’t think for a moment that I’m going to offer any “definition” of “art,” or accept anyone else’s, but I am going to suppose we know what we’re talking about when we talk about art and things that seem pretty much like art but about which we’re not so sure. In these circles—­and, more to the point, in the relations between us and our favorites—­what does it matter that some of them are art? If I am known for much of anything in contemporary aesthetics I think it is that I am customarily, inveterately, obstinately, even nastily opposed to theories, but I do indeed think that those bromides, chestnuts, and the rest that I spoke of much earlier contain some pretty good thoughts. One long-­ standing thought about art is that it is a medium through which human beings reach one another, and there is an ancillary thought, a favorite of mine, that our relations to the works of art themselves are strikingly like our relationships to people. The dimensions of your humanity are exhibited in the tangents, radii, and intersections appearing in your circle-­array, but I think that there is a special significance, a depth, in those dimensions along which you are connected to other people. liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  165

The works of art are not different from any of the other things we like, or don’t, with regard to whether there are principles to be found that would explain how these things and their audiences are constituted. There are no such principles. But then my corollary to this is unexpected. I suppose it is not a genuine “corollary,” but rather an injunction, a kind of desperate imperative. I think we must look for the samenesses, the similarities, the essential links in full knowledge that we will not find them. And why is that? It is time for the unabashed, romantic declaration: each work, each object of appreciation and affection is unique, and equally unique are those of us who are the appreciators, and, in addition, those bonds that link us to our loves may also be unique, or nearly. It is critical to appreciate this uniqueness, and the way to do this is to do away, one by one, with all the temptations to think we are not unique, that we are just like one another. In doing this we have a chance to discover two things we absolutely need to know, namely just how much we are indeed like one another, and how much we are not. I doubt that we will ever know those things, but we must try.

Highly Tentative Conclusion The community of appreciation grouped around something can be thought of no matter what kind of thing it is that is appreciated. It might be a game, say, or the playing of a game, or a mountain view; but, presumably, things are at least somewhat different if the object of appreciation is a work of art, and I think that this is so because in the appreciation of a work of art one is also somehow in touch with the maker—­the artist. The community created by Melville’s Billy Budd, for instance, in addition to those readers who care for the novel, also includes Melville, whose palpable sensibility lies behind—­and, one might say, is in—­the book. This seems to me a difference between the appreciation of made objects and of objects that do not embody the sense of any creator, but that is not a difference marked between works of fine art and 166  chap te r 11

works of any other kind of art. If there is a difference here, it will be a reflection of some difference between the creator of a work of fine art and the creator of something else, say the kind of work of “entertainment” commonly regarded (at least by academic and other intellectuals) as trivial. The community of appreciation of a “serious” work will include the robust presence of a serious artist, and the community that appreciates an object of popular, mass art presumably will not. One has a relationship with a work of art, and thereby a relationship with the work’s creator, and perhaps this relationship has more depth and texture when the work is wonderful and wonderfully serious. Perhaps. If so, then this difference remains to be explained, and I am unable to do that; at least, I am unable to do it yet. And then, even if that difference can be formulated persuasively, there will remain the question of whether it is in any way better to join company with a fine, serious artist than with an entertainer; and, to paraphrase Hume, with a difference, this question is embarrassing and throws us back into the uncertainty with which we be­ gan. My apologies: I have nowhere else to go.

Notes 1. See Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Book XIX, chap. 24. 2. “The Chicago Orchestra,” Dial 22 (May 1, 1897): 269–­7 1, quoted by Lawrence W. Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 3. “The Philosophy of Taste: Thoughts on the Idea,” in Peter Kivy, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 4. I have tried to give a generalized argument for this in “On Consistency in One’s Personal Aesthetics,” Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. Ibid.

liking w hat ’s g o od : w hy shou ld w e ?  167

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Language Games A P oe m The fingers appeared And wrote on the wall MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. The king said to the exile, “What does it mean?” The exile said, “The handwriting is on the wall.” The king was not satisfied. The exile said, “I will tell you a story. Once, The fingers appeared And wrote on the wall MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. The king said to the exile, ‘What does it mean?’ The exile said, ‘The handwriting is on the wall.’ The king was satisfied, But sad.” “Ah,” said the king. “Then I am satisfied, But sad.”

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Ethics Class Max Stine waited in his office. These were not scheduled office hours, but he’d told the student to come at this time so they’d not be disturbed. He’d picked this time to conflict with the department meeting, excusing himself from the meeting because he had this appointment. The only part of his work he still enjoyed was the teaching. He recalled John Updike’s remark about “the agony of the working teacher.” Updike was speaking of his father, a high school teacher. There was no agony in Max’s teaching. His students were college kids, and none of them were forced into his classes. They chose to be there, usually because of the recommendations of older students. There was no agony in teaching them: it was closer to ecstasy. Max gave them everything he had—­what he knew about the texts, what he knew about the problems of philosophy, what he knew about life in general and his own life in particular. Yes, Max loved the teaching. The rest he’d like to be rid of, especially department meetings. He’d attended about a thousand, even chaired many. Departmental colleagues were decent and intelligent, but they talked and talked, and so did he. He was as guilty of this as anyone. His wife had pointed out that he was long-­winded and she guessed that professors grow used to talking and talking to people who have to listen without interruption. During meetings sometimes a colleague would complain about a university procedure, saying that things had been done better at 169

his former university. When that happened, Max felt like saying, “If things were so good there, why did you leave to come here,” but he never did. It wouldn’t have been a fair remark; besides, although he accepted being the department’s old man, he didn’t want to be the crotchety old fart. He thought of his father, who wouldn’t have said “crotchety” but would have said “grouchy.” Max knew more words than his father had known, but he thought his father was the better man. His father had suffered slights, indignities, and hurts, but he didn’t dwell on them. His late father had been able to do what Max’s wife’s late mother had called “rising above it.” Max didn’t rise. There was one member of the department who didn’t talk so much at meetings. He sometimes didn’t talk at all, and when he did, it was late in the conversation and he spoke briefly, almost always saying something genuinely useful. This young fellow was also an amateur magician. Max wondered whether the calm concentration required to do magic helped his colleague keep himself quiet when there was no reason to speak, and he wondered whether a philosophy professor’s resisting the temptation to oration was itself an exhibition of magic. If lately Max talked less during department meetings, it was because he felt marginalized by the newcomers and because he was, finally, conscious of how much he might say that was un­­ needed. It’s especially important not to waste time talking or doing anything else when you’re growing old. Max would have liked to have been smoking, but it was no longer permitted. First they stopped him from smoking in class, then he couldn’t smoke in any of the public spaces in the buildings, and now he couldn’t smoke even in his own office. One more unpleasant change. Much had changed, he thought, as he contemplated Philip Waters’s behavior in class. Wherever he’d gone to high school, he was al­ most certainly one of  those kids who was thought to be special, as Wa­ ters certainly thought of himself. His view, repeated over and over in class, was that the only reason why anyone ever did anything was because that pleased him and that was all the justification that could

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or needed to be given. He presented this view relentlessly, often beating down other students and remaining immune to anything they or Max might say in opposition. Waters had been like this since the first day of class. They’d begun with some discussion of David Hume’s moral theory, and this kid had immediately announced his view of the final truth in such matters, namely that there is no objective difference between right and wrong, and, further, that people, whatever they may say, always simply act in ways that will please them. A mixture of psychological and ethical egoism, Max thought, although he’d never encountered such a view in anyone as young as this student, this eighteen-­year-­old Philip Waters. He’d known plenty of single-­minded, self-­confident types. How could he not, having spent so long with academics? When you argued against them, it was hopeless. If they were Marxists, they wrote you off as having an insufficiently raised class consciousness. If they were Freudians, they said you were repressing or in denial or something. And, of course, if they were ardent Christians—­not common in academia but not unheard of—­they could tell that you’d somehow not been touched by grace. And it was not that different when you dealt with someone who treated texts as scriptures—­an ardent Kantian, say, who simply could not fathom your opinion that Kant is largely full of shit. But he’d never known anyone so single-­ minded and sure of himself at this age as Philip Waters. The kid was a psychological egoist, Max thought, or an ethical egoist. He strained to remember the difference. Probably it was both psychological and ethical egoism. Max couldn’t remember just how those categories went. There were so many, dating back to graduate school. Universal egoism, teleology, deontology, externalism, internalism, realism, nominalism, logicism, intuitionism, and on and on. To what purpose? Lately Max had run through a mental inventory of those who had taught him philosophy, realizing with shock that nearly all of them had died. One who hadn’t died had once written, “Such ‘explanations’ are no doubt essential, and they may account for everything we need to know except why any man of intelligence has ever been attracted to the subject of philosophy.”

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Yes, Max thought, and yet people continued to make these categories and stuff them. Max supposed it helped people see where they stood, although it had never helped him in the least. And the books, the books treated like scripture. Years spent trying to figure out what the Kraut (as Max thought of him) meant by “Dasein.” Or the earlier Prussian with his transcendental rigmarole. When he’d been a student, the Germans were neglected or at best marginalized, but now they were roaring back. Even in his own field: Adorno, God help us, and Heidegger who said we need a god and then became one for his epigones. Max supposed that it might have been wrong to ignore those German texts, but now they were back. The baby had returned, but so had the bathwater. Yeats’s lines came to mind—­ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—­and Max thought the beast in question could be German philosophy. Sinking deeper into his rambling thought, he recalled lines from the Auden poem: Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god.

As Max began to emerge from his reflections, he thought of himself and how he’d avoided the isms and no longer slaved over the great books. He just wanted to be a philosopher, and maybe he was, although he wasn’t sure just who thought so. Max pulled himself completely out of the reveries about his career, his father, department meetings, and the Germans, wondering whether he had an irrational fixation on the Germans. Fixation, 172  chap te r 13

maybe. But why irrational? At that he fell into another reflection as he remembered that much later in the day he would be visited by the graduate students who were assisting him in his class. Earlier in his career he’d had many graduate students working with him, but no more. Now his clientele were mainly college kids, especially freshmen in the class in which Waters now annoyed him. Where had the graduate students gone? Maybe they were uninterested in his field, in his work. Maybe they were uninterested in him. He didn’t much care, although he enjoyed their company at department events. He did wonder what those graduate students thought when they were appointed his course assistants and saw his popular classes. Did they dislike his style and write his popularity off to something unphilosophical? Well, he didn’t much care what they thought, although he enjoyed their help and good humor. But what did Max care about? And earlier in his career he had often been invited to lecture elsewhere. For a time, he had given more outside lectures than anyone else in the department, but those invitations had dwindled to a trickle. He was nearing the end of his career, and it seemed his sun was setting. He published less frequently, although regularly. Recently an essay of his had been translated into Slovak, joining earlier pieces of his that had been translated into Russian, Serbo-­ Croatian, and Polish, and now he was invited to give a keynote address in Bratislava. Well, he thought, maybe he was rising in the East. The knock at the door was not tentative, although it wasn’t aggressive. As he rose to go to the door, he thought of the door-­ knocking in the Saul Bellow novel. This knocking was also “not so innocent,” although Max knew this kid was no Augie March. Max opened the door and silently waved the student to a chair, then took his own seat behind the desk. “I’m in your class, Professor Stine. My name is Philip Waters.” “I know,” said Max, and fell silent. “I’ve come to ask about my paper grade.” “Yes.” “You gave my paper an F.” et hic s cl as s  173

“Yes, I did that.” Waters looked angry but also flustered, and he said, as calmly as he could, “But the paper deserves much better than that.” “Yes,” said Max, his face a blank. “Then you’ll change the grade?” “Of course not,” said Max, still speaking slowly. “But why not,” asked Waters, “if you admit that it should have a better grade?” Finally Max spoke at length. “I don’t see that there’s any ‘should’ to it, Mr. Waters. You’ve finally persuaded me that the only reason why anyone does anything is in order to further his own pleasure. It pleased me enormously to give you an F.” “I don’t believe you, Professor Stine. I haven’t persuaded you of anything.” “How do you know? In any case you can barely imagine how much I liked assigning that F.” Waters’s anger now showed clearly, and he raised his voice. “I’ll go to the college ombudsman and the dean, and then you’ll be in real trouble.” “What will you tell them, Mr. Waters?” “I’ll show them the paper with your F on it, and they’ll read the paper and see that it’s worth much more than an F.” Now Max smiled for the first time. “What if I tell them that I’ve never seen the paper before, that it’s not the paper you turned in?” “You’d be lying.” “Yes. In class you gave a forceful and sarcastic rebuttal of Kant’s argument against lying.” Waters trembled and he stood up. As he walked out of the office, he said, “We’ll see.” “Yes,” said Max, as he contemplated the magical logic he was practicing on Waters, and he thought, There is always something to see, even as you get older. Especially as you get older.

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14

Kings and Salesmen For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. — ­Sh a ke s pea r e 1 The assumption—­or presumption—­behind these plays is that life has meaning. —­Arth u r M i l l er 2

There seem to be two compelling reasons why one needs to connect with characters in fiction. The first is that unless one does that, one will be unable to “understand” that character—­why he does what he does, how he feels, what pleases him, and so on. The second reason is that if, as is so often assumed, one somehow brings something from the fiction back into one’s own life, one will have had to enter the fiction, so to speak, in order to find whatever that is. For convenience, let us speak of the world of whatever fiction we have in mind as a so-­called fictional world. I prefer to treat this only as a manner of speaking and remain uncommitted to any more specific, technical idea. Perhaps a fictional world can be thought of as a Kripkean possible world, in the manner described by David Lewis, but I am not altogether sanguine about that, and in any case, I would not like to be bogged down in worrying about it. So when speaking of a fictional world, I should be taken to be speaking very 175

informally, leaving it to you to parse that expression in any way that seems good to you. In a recent small book I claimed that an adequate appreciation of fiction sometimes requires the reader to achieve a figurative identification with fictional characters, and I argued, further, that this achievement is an exercise of the ability to create and understand metaphor.3 Whether or not that book is persuasive, almost everyone will agree that the appreciation of fiction typically involves feeling for fictional characters. Here I raise a question without supplying any very definitive answer. The question is, What difference does it make how much the fictional character is like the reader, or like the audience if the fiction is a play? I raise the question, at least initially, about tragedy because with tragedy there is at least one well-­known opinion, namely Aristotle’s. According to him, the hero of a tragedy should be someone higher or better than average, and this presumably means that the tragic hero will be higher or better than the typical member of the play’s audience. This is what Aristotle says: Again, since tragedy is an imitation of persons above the common level, the example of good portrait painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive features of the original, make a likeness true to life and yet more beautiful. So too the poet, in representing men hot tempered or indolent or with other defects of char­ acter, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it.4

It is neither obvious nor even clear to me why Aristotle thinks the hero should be superior, unless it is for the rather prosaic reason that the higher the hero, the farther he will fall when things go badly for him. Of course it is possible that Aristotle is simply accepting as paradigms or illustrative examples those successful tragedies known to him, but then we would want to know why those tragedians and their predecessors opted for superior heroes. For help in understanding Aristotle’s preference for a superior hero, I have turned to my colleague Gabriel Lear, a distinguished student of Aristotle and a far better scholar than I. Here is her opinion: 176  chap te r 1 4

My suspicion is that the elevation of the hero is necessary (according to Aristotle) in order for tragedy to be mimesis of action that bears in the right way on eudaimonia. Unlike our happiness, which everyone seems to think they have a claim to, Aristotelian eudaimonia is a way of being outstanding, of rising above the ordinary. So in the Nicoma­ chean Ethics, he says on a couple of occasions that human beings are the only animals who can be happy because we are the only ones who participate in the divine. So the problem with a tragedy about an ordinary person is that, in Aristotle’s view, such a person isn’t really in the running for being eudaimon, though they may of course be perfectly decent. That’s why this passage from the Poetics puts so much emphasis on what’s kalon—­beautiful. The kalon is *impressive*. . . . So this is close to, but not quite the same as the “the higher they rise, the further they fall” theory. The point, I think, is not so much about intensifying the fall as it is about the reasonable aspiration and hope for happiness in the first place.

My friend Nickolas Pappas, another very accomplished scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, reported that he agrees with much of Professor Lear’s analysis, and he added this: Anyone can make a hamartia. This is another way to say why it can’t be a sin or tragic flaw, because then it would only be available to morally problematic characters. But hamartia as Sherman describes it is available to kings and salesmen alike. Salesmen’s mistakes don’t carry the same consequences though. Only under freakish conditions (which are then usually not tragic) do a salesman’s actions bring chaos to a city, or strike down a population with a plague. So this might be why Aristotle considers it so important to put kings on the tragic stage instead of salesmen.5

What, then, has happened since Aristotle’s time? Have we come to believe that we are all capable of this high Aristotelian eudaimo­ nia? Or have we found that people capable of only lower-­class happiness are equally capable of inspiring tragic feelings in audiences? king s and sale sme n  177

And is it possible that people whose demises are inconsequential are of great consequence to an audience? The conviction that a tragic hero should be an elevated type has a long history. Shakespeare’s heroes, for instance, include many kings, a thane, a general, and a prince. Do you suppose Shakespeare’s reason for choosing elevated types is the same as Aristotle’s? By the mid-­twentieth century, however, whatever that former preference for the elevated may have been, it was giving way to frequent choices in tragic heroes for the unelevated, the more pedestrian and quotidian. Thus in the sad plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and David Mamet, among others, the fated hero is usually an ordinary man. I now beg indulgence as I make undefended use of an idea from that short book mentioned earlier.6 Suppose that an audience member has to do something like imagining or feeling himself to be the tragic hero. Then what difference does it make whether he is thinking of himself as Oedipus or Lear, his superiors, or thinking of himself as Willy Loman, his equal or perhaps even his inferior? The most conspicuous difference is the difference in “distance.” King Lear is less like me than Willy Loman is like me. King Lear is “farther away.” It is a question of the distance between my world—­ the real world—­and the fictional world. Suppose one’s involvement in a play follows this path, described roughly and crudely: first one attends to the hero, taking more and more interest in what happens to him, and then one increasingly feels oneself to be that hero. I suppose this is what commonly is called “identifying with” the hero. Thus I think of the audience member as first going outside himself and then returning to himself. This return is a kind of shock of recognition. Is this shock greater or different when one has first gone farther away? Am I more surprised to think of myself as King Lear than to think of myself as Willy Loman? In both kinds of case my initial feelings are not about myself. They are about King Lear or Willy Loman, neither of whom is me. Perhaps I do come to know something about myself, or feel something

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about myself, but this is by indirection. It is as if I were ambushed. I may think “there but for the grace of God go I,” but then through the artifice of imaginative identification—­that is, through the working of art—­I realize that it is me. As Lear I feel the hopelessness that comes with age. As Willy I feel the loss of my territory. Of course I am—­really—­neither an aged king nor a superannuated salesman. And yet I am. As long as I am taking up your time asking questions and giving few answers, let me ask another. In Hamlet (the play), you recall, Hamlet (the character) wishes to reach Claudius emotionally. He wants, as he puts it, to “catch the conscience of the King.” He undertakes to do this by staging a play for Claudius to watch, and in that play the main character is a would-­be king who poisons the real king in order to take his place. So this is to be a play about a king staged for an audience who is also a king. It is hard to imagine anyone who better understood how plays work and how they reach their audiences than Shakespeare. What has he done here? He has given us a play within a play, and that interior play is about a king and is witnessed by a king. What of the containing play, the play we know as Hamlet? It is also a play about a grand figure, not a king, but a prince, and a prince who should one day have become a king, but its audience is not so grand. Its audience is us, or it is our equivalents among the theatergoers of Shakespeare’s time. Has Shakespeare himself given us a kind of illustration of symmetries and asymmetries between tragic figures and their audiences? What do you think? How has Shakespeare done what he did? I mean, not only in Hamlet, but in general. Writing about metaphor I have claimed that whatever is required of a metaphor maker—­genius, according to Aristotle, and something like that according to Kant—­must also, in some measure, be required of those who grasp the metaphors presented to them. Here the situation is reversed, at least as I have so far presented it. If you are required to achieve something like an identification with Shakespeare’s characters in order to appreciate his plays, then what was required of Shakespeare when he created those characters? How did he know what it would be like to be an

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aging man of power as he felt his power slip away, leaving him with the problem of establishing a fit legacy? He did know that, and he gave us such a character, namely King Lear. If this is the sort of thing an author must do when creating literary, fictional characters, then here too we can ask what difference it makes how much or how little the fictional character is like the author. These questions arise not only with theatrical and literary works but elsewhere as well, for instance in music. In Handel’s Solomon we hear the music for the arrival of the queen of Sheba. This is music somehow befitting the entrance of a regal woman bearing gifts of untold splendor meant for the wisest man of his time. How do you hear that music? On the other hand, how do you hear the music in Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man?” It befits ordinary American soldiers on their way to fight in World War II. Is feeling the import of these two pieces different? How? And here again we have the same questions about the composers. How do they find the music appropriate to their characters and the moods of those characters? Think of Mozart and The Marriage of Figaro. How does Mozart know how it feels to be a woman no longer in the prime of youth feeling the double pain that comes with knowledge of her husband’s philandering accompanied by the memory of earlier times when he was faithful? However Mozart did it, he did do it, with some significant help, no doubt, from his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. And here, too, one wonders what difference it makes how much or how little the character resembles the character’s creators. My guess—­not a very big stretch—­is that Aaron Copland was much more like the common man whose fanfare he wrote than Mozart is like the countess in The Marriage of  Figaro. These are perhaps not the most useful examples. Shakespeare and Mozart can seem unlike almost everyone else, almost as if they were born knowing everything and knowing how to do every­ th­ing. But I will overlook that, hoping that these examples are useful here. There are cases in which the distance between a creator and his creation is not so great. An interesting example is a book I’m glad to 180  chap te r 1 4

recommend to you. It is David Grossman’s novel To the End of  the Land. Grossman was working on this novel when his son was killed as a soldier in the Israeli army. Grossman reports that he said to his friend, the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, that he did not think he could save his book, and Yehoshua said to him, “The book will save you.” And so Grossman did finish the book, which is the story of a mother whose son has reentered the army in order to be with his comrades when his unit undertakes military action. The mother of course is worried that her son will not survive the experience. Here we have a case in which the author is nearly identical with the main fictional character, even though he is a man and his character is a woman. If we think of the author, his fictional character, and the audience, we find something of a reversal. The author, so to speak, be­ gins in his world, the real world, and moves to a fictional world in which he situates his fictional character. We in the audience enter this fictional world in order to connect with the fictional character, after which we may return to our own, real world. This is rather like the situation with metaphor, where, first, the maker of the metaphor thinks it up and then we, his audience, have to take what he’s given us and, in that strikingly apt phrase, “figure it out.” So what about the imaginative distance you have to travel to connect with a fictional character? The distance may well depend largely on how much like you the fictional character is to begin with, and here our individual experiences may vary. I have argued elsewhere that whatever special talent is required of the maker of a metaphor must also be possessed, to some degree, by anyone who understands the metaphor.7 Here, too, the audience must bring to the work some measure of the imaginative capacity utilized by the artist. If Mozart can imagine the feelings of a be­ trayed woman, then we, hearing the countess sing, must be able to recognize the authenticity of her song. This variability, this difference in audiences’ capacities to identify with fictional characters, is a marked and interesting fact about human beings. How does it happen? Here again, I have questions but no answers. I do have examples. king s and sale sme n  181

My wife Andy has found, beginning when she was a little girl and continuing as she has become a big girl, that fiction and poetry with principal male characters mean as much to her as if she were a man. If it speaks of courage and daring, even of a kind stereotypically associated with men, she connects herself with those things. For instance, Kipling’s well-­known poem “If—­,” which begins, “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” speaks to her, even if it is a little jarring to come to the final lines, “And—­which is more—­you’ll be a Man, my son.” Even at that, I doubt that she can find her way into just every fictional world, but I’m not sure. You might ask her. For my part, I am puzzled by my own empathic abilities. I don’t care for the novels of Henry James. I simply don’t relate myself to his characters. Perhaps there is no fault here, but if there is, I suppose it’s mine and not James’s. On the other hand I do find myself reaching Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, and this really does puzzle me. Surely I have more in common with those hapless, helpless, neurotics to be found in places like James’s The Beast in the Jungle than I do with the self-­confessed and essentially unrepentant pedophile in Nabokov’s wonderful book. How can it be, then, that I travel the seemingly greater distance in the case of Nabokov while I can’t cross over into the works of Henry James? I would be delighted to know how to explain this. What, then, of the idea that a man like Willy Loman is not a fit subject for serious tragedy? If one finds Willy’s demise to be too inconsequential to be significant, not something that would doom a kingdom or bring on a plague, one might attend to the closing remark offered by Willy’s friend Charley after Willy has died: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—­that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and

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you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.8

And if one finds Willy too unexceptional—­too ordinary—­to hold one’s attention, this declaration of Linda, Willy’s wife, containing one of the best remembered lines from Death of a Salesman, seems appropriate: I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

Within the play Linda is admonishing her two sons to treat their father better, to regard him differently. I also hear the author, Arthur Miller, speaking to his audience, telling them that Willy is a fit subject for their empathic identification, that it may be well to shed angry tears for Oedipus and Lear, but some must be reserved for people like Willy, for they too share your humanity. Here at the end let me go back once more to Shakespeare. He wrote, as you know and I’ve already quoted, “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” Only a fool would compete with Shakespeare, but I might be permitted to add one slight thing, and end on it: “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the fate of salesmen.” A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. — ­G eorge E l io t 9

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Notes 1. Richard II, act 3, sc. 2. 2. Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 8. 3. Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 4. On Tragedy. 5. Professor Pappas is referring to a paper he admires by Professor Nancy Sherman. See Nancy Sherman, “Virtue and Hamartia,” in Es­ says on Aristotle’s “Poetics,” ed. A. O. Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 177–96. 6. Cohen, Thinking of  Others. 7. “The Inexplicable: Some Thoughts after Kant,” Chapter 5 in The Cre­ ation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Paisley Living­ ston and Berys Gaut (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138–­47. 8. I am tempted to associate the capacity to find interest in an ordinary life like Willy’s with the capacity of at least some philosophers—­like me—­to take an interest in “ordinary language”; but that is perhaps far-­ fetched, and it is certainly a distant topic. 9. Middlemarch. Complete Works of George Eliot, Delphi Classics Volume 1 (2014).

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One Way to Think about Popular Art It is an honor to have been asked to speak here. It is also a pleasure, not least because it has given my wife Andy and me an opportunity to visit this wonderful city. I may disappoint you by not offering any theories concerning the matter at hand. But then I tend to be an opponent of what are called “theories” in philosophy and elsewhere, and I will, instead, first explain why this topic is messy, and then suggest a way of beginning to think about questions concerning high, fine art and popular art. There seems to be a distinction between popular art and some­ thing else; that something else perhaps is high, fine art. It may seem to be an obvious distinction, but I think it is virtually impossible to formulate. There are two likely formulations one might try, and then a more subtle formulation. I will take your time to show that none of these formulations is finally acceptable. I hope that will not be boring for you, but I think it is important to avoid taking for granted things that cannot be sustained. Both of the likely formulations require a characterization of two different kinds of audience. The first is a sophisticated audience with a taste for refinement and enough knowledge of art to recog­ nize and appreciate references within an artwork. The other is per­ haps less sophisticated, and in any case is less likely to identify ref­ erences to instances of high art.

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Then we might say that popular art is art that appeals to a popular audience; high art appeals to that sophisticated, high audience. The immediate problem with this formulation is that there are works that seem incontrovertibly to be works of popular art but have no success with a popular audience. Consider Elaine May’s movie Ishtar. This seems to have been intended for a general moviegoing audience, but in fact it failed with that audience, and it also failed with the artistically refined audience. Well then perhaps we should move to a formulation that avoids speaking of a work’s actual audi­ ence and instead speaks of what a work is intended to do. Thus Ishtar is popular art because it was meant for a popular audience, although in fact it did not find one. With this somewhat more refined formulation we now encoun­ ter the problem of works like, say, those of Dickens. Most readers consider them some of the finest works of English literature, and yet they have succeeded widely with a mainly popular audience. So is David Copperfield a work of popular art or of high art? I would like to persuade you that this distinction, the one be­­ tween popular and high art, is not merely difficult to formulate but is, in the end, impossible. It will take me a little while to do this. I hope you don’t mind. A not uncommon feature of many works—­both popular and high works—­is their reference to other works. Of course this is not the only feature of works of both high art and popular art, and not by any means the most important one, but I will use it to illustrate the general point—­the point, namely, that the distinction between pop­ ular art and high, fine art is in the end probably not sustainable. In two novels by Michael Chabon, the earlier The Amazing Ad­­ ventures of Kavalier and Clay (interestingly, perhaps, set partly in the old Czechoslovakia) and the very recently published Telegraph Ave­ nue, the main characters are themselves concerned with popular art. In Kavalier and Clay the main characters are writers and illustrators of comic books, and the novel contains copious references to comic books. In Telegraph Avenue two of the main characters own a store that sells old, vinyl recordings of classic jazz and other jazz, and they

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are themselves jazz musicians, and the novel makes countless refer­ ences to jazz performances and recordings. But notice that a reader need not himself know very much about those things, or, for that matter, even be interested in them. In that respect they are, perhaps, like Melville’s great novel Moby Dick. It is indeed in certain respects about whaling, but the reader needn’t know much about that activity or even care about it. This is different, for instance, from the movies of Quentin Tarantino. They are full of references to other movies and television items, and unless a viewer knows about them and derives some pleasure from them, the Tarantino movies will lose a great deal of their interest. I leave these examples aside, although I would be glad for a dis­ cussion of them, noting only that in the Chabon novels, no doubt works of high literary art, the references are to popular art, while in the Tarantino movies, a work of popular art makes reference to other popular works. I leave them in order to illustrate just how complicated this matter can be. Here are two works, one of high art, one of popular art, both of which make reference to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita seems to me unquestionably a work of high literary art. Let me remind you that the book’s narrator, Hum­ bert Humbert, sets out to revenge himself on Quilty, the man who took Lolita. When Humbert has cornered Quilty and is threatening him with a gun, he notes that Quilty is a recognized literary critic and asks Quilty’s opinion of a poem Humbert has written. This is the poem: Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage . . . Lolita, chapter 35

Does the shape of this wretched poem remind you of anything? Here is the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:

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Because I do not hope to turn again because I do not hope because I do not hope to turn desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things.

Surely Nabokov wants his readers to identify this reference to Eliot and, perhaps, to agree with Nabokov’s poor estimate of Eliot’s poetry, noting that the poem in Lolita is said to have been written by a man who claims to have a fancy prose style. What kind of audi­ ence can Nabokov expect that of? Another reference to T. S. Eliot is found in a movie, namely Cop­ pola’s Apocalypse Now. Just before the climactic scene in which Willard (played by Martin Sheen) kills Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), the goofy photojournalist (played by Dennis Hopper) says this to Willard: “This is the way the fucking world ends. Look at this fucking shit we’re in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I’m fucking splitting, Jack.” Of course this is a vulgar version of  T. S. Eliot’s line in “The Hollow Men,” “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” It may well be a familiar line to many in the popular audience, although that audience may not know that it comes from Eliot. How important is this reference to Eliot within the movie? I do not think it is merely a throwaway line. When did you first encoun­ ter the line “Mistah Kurtz, he dead”? I first read it, long before I’d read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—­which is, of course, the source for the line—­as an epigraph to that very poem “The Hollow Men.” Now consider that when Marlon Brando, the Kurtz character in the movie, is seen in one of his first appearances, he is reading and speaking aloud exactly that poem. This is a wonderfully intricate matter, that Eliot found that line in Conrad and used it as an epi­ graph for his poem, and later Francis Ford Coppola makes a movie based on the Conrad novel and puts T. S. Eliot’s work in it. I hope it is clear that these ways of distinguishing popular art, ways that make essential reference to audiences, will not work well. Before turning to one other attempt at a formulation, let me 188  chap te r 15

add here that even with regard to audiences, the distinction will be unstable. Opera, for instance, is certainly not a popular art in the United States, but it is in Italy, and perhaps also in Vienna and Bratislava. Here is a third way of thinking of a difference between popular art and that other, allegedly higher art, a way that seems to avoid the problem of specifying two discrete kinds of audience. Consider the artist, and how he thinks of what he is doing. In a romantic notion, the serious artist is simply bent on making a work as good as can be, or as good as he can make it, while the popular artist thinks mainly of how his work will strike his audience, presumably a popular audi­ ence, and thus this artist is commonly said to be an “entertainer,” presumably as opposed to being a more serious artist. As attractive as this formulation may seem, it seems to me to flounder imme­ diately in the face of two facts. One is that popular artists, say like the composer Irving Berlin, no doubt think of their audience, but also think of making their works as good as can be, even if they are imagining the works’ effects on an audience. The second fact is that a very high-­minded artist, say James Joyce, certainly often thinks of how his work will be received—­whether his intended references will be recognized, whether his constructions are simply too com­ plex to be grasped. Indeed, as I regularly tell my students, success­ ful writing depends, typically, on the author’s being able to imag­ ine someone reading the writing, someone who is not the author. This advice is not so easily taken, for all the ease with which it can be given, but it is critical. When an author revises his text, he is no doubt trying to make it better, perhaps more concise or clearer, but he is also tailoring it to fit the appreciative capacities of readers. So I think that even this formulation cannot be sustained as a depend­ able characterization of popular and not-­so-­popular art. It was my wife Andy who first pointed out and made me think about the fact that the very idea of a popular audience is unstable. It is not merely that there are variations from place to place, so that opera is popular in Italy but not in America, but that even within a single place there are significant variations over time. Melville’s novel Moby Dick contains references to the Bible, one way to t hink ab out p op ul a r a rt   189

be­ginning with the narrator’s declaration that he should be called Ishmael and ending with an account of a rescue ship named The Rachel. Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn contains references to Shakespeare, some funny and virtually nonsensical, but some more serious and thematically deep, like those to the two families enacting a permanent deadly feud, essentially acting as the Mon­ tagues and Capulets. At the time those books were published, both authors could quite reasonably have expected a popular audience to identify those references and assess their significance. But not now, I think, at least not in America. It is a curious state of affairs in my country. One might very well think of many Fundamentalist Christians as likely to be relatively less well-­educated and probably somewhat less acquainted with world literature, and yet it is exactly that group that is most likely to understand Melville’s biblical refer­ ences. On the other hand, my own college students, a very bright, well-­educated, well-­read, highly literate group, are far less likely to understand the references to Ishmael and Rachel. And Mark Twain’s contemporary readership was, I think, more likely to be acquainted with at least some significant work of Shake­ speare than is today’s American audience. Are we, then, to think of these novels as popular at one time but not at another? Popular in some circles but not in others? I am no historian, and I certainly cannot tell you what things were like in earlier times—­indeed, you may well know more about that than I—­but I have no doubt that we live in a time of fluidity, a time when popular art and high art bleed into one another, a time when, as in those novels of Michael Chabon, the high and the popular are mixed together in single works. If that is so, what are we to do? Here, finally, I offer a suggestion. It is not altogether new. I have put it forward before, but in places you are unlikely to have visited, and in any case, it is something I still believe fruitful. I begin by asking you to think of some work you like, something you care for, something, perhaps, that means something to you. Now think of all those people who also care for this work. And then try thinking of all the works you care for.

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This gives us two groups: one is the community of those who care for the work in question, and the other is the set of works you care for. What is to be done now is to investigate those two groups, to learn what their members have in common with one another, if anything. I don’t know your preferences, your likes and loves and dislikes, and so, as an illustration, I will take myself. One of the things I care for is the music of Mahler. So now I ask two questions: (1) who else likes Mahler?, and (2) what do I like besides Mahler? The answers to these questions display an absolutely astonishing variety of human concerns and sensibilities. When I look through the group that likes Mahler, of which I am a member, I find many striking differences. For instance, many of those who like Mahler also like the music of Bruckner. But I do not much care for Bruck­ ner’s music. How can that be? Those who like both Mahler and Bruckner say they are finding many of the same things they care for in both composers, while what I seem to find in Mahler that attracts me I don’t find in Bruckner. How is this to be explained? As it happens, in addition to the music of Mahler, I also like many of Leonard Cohen’s songs, especially as they are sung by Leonard Cohen himself, while many lovers of Mahler’s music have no inter­ est whatsoever in the songs of Leonard Cohen. And if I now turn my attention not to those who are grouped around the music of Mahler but to the huge group of things I care for, I find myself puzzled yet again as I wonder what it is about me that responds both to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Leonard Cohen’s song “Closing Time.” Finally, near the end of what little I’ve had to offer you, I offer one more favorite idea of mine—­namely, that works of art enter our lives in ways resembling the ways in which our friends enter our lives. And here, too, there is an amazement of differences and vari­ ations. Just as with a work of art that appeals to both you and me but for quite different reasons, so, too, there may be someone who is a friend to both of us but for very different reasons. The bonds of friendship are extremely variable and show no stan­ dard logical connections. For instance, friendship is not transitive.

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A friend of mine thinks that friendship is transitive and so he often arranges evenings that include a number of his friends, assuming, for instance, that if I like him, and he likes someone, I will like that someone. This often turns out not to be true. Think of how your own friendships are constituted. In my case, for instance, two of my friends are Joel and Howard. They have very, very little in common, and the features that draw me to them are quite different. With Joel I have written academic papers, and he and I often read one another’s work, and we talk with one another a great deal about university matters. With Howard I tend to talk about sports, with us complaining about our teams’ misfortunes and sharing enjoyment when the teams do well. Could Joel and Howard establish a friendship as deep and enduring as I have with each of them? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Not long before my wife and I left Chicago, I spent two evenings with someone with whom I am beginning a friendship. This person and I have very different politics, and in fact we voted differently in the recent American presidential election. So we didn’t talk much about politics, and when we did, we were careful not to say any­ thing that could be felt as insulting. Why this interest in the variability and surprises of human friend­ ship? It is because, first, it is a way of coming to appreciate the vari­ ety of humanity, and, second, it is an excellent way of beginning to understand the dimensions of one’s own personality. An excellent way of investigating just what kind of person one is, is to take note of the circles of friendship to which one belongs, realizing that there is in oneself whatever is required to make those links. I am not a social philosopher, however, and I suppose much of what I think about those matters is untutored and perhaps naïve, and in any case it is high time to get back to my proper topic. So the question is, why the interest in the variability and surprises found in the circles of appreciators of works of art, both popular works and very sophisticated works? Because it is a way, first, to come to appreciate and acknowledge the huge range of aesthetic sensibili­ ties, and, second, to find—­sometimes with surprise—­just how one’s

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own aesthetic sensibility is made up. How is it that I can care for both Mahler and Leonard Cohen, but not Bruckner, while many of those who share my affection for Mahler care nothing for Leonard Cohen but are deeply attracted to Bruckner? The way to answer these questions is to look as deeply as one can into the reasons why people like what they like, trying to discern what connections and similarities may be there, as well as acknowledging that sometimes these things are just at the core of the mysteries of human variabil­ ity. Once again I take myself as an example. As it happens, I have a very high opinion of the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, and in particu­ lar I think that his North by Northwest is a masterpiece and a medi­ tation on what it means or could mean to be an American. Many people who like this movie, however, enjoy it as an exceptionally entertaining thriller, full of comedy and style, and they find none of my speculations in the movie. How, then, are those people and I related, beyond the fact that we all care for this movie? Is there nothing else? What do you think? Finally, back to what, ostensibly, has been my topic. Isn’t there, after all, some distinction between popular art and some other, higher art? Doesn’t there have to be? Maybe, although I’ve tried to show that there is no good way to formulate this distinction. But let us go on assuming such a distinction and see what that might imply. It is very tempting to suppose that some art is superior to popu­ lar art, and that the audience for such art is superior to the popular audience. I advise trying to resist that temptation. There may have been a time when there was a clear difference between popular art and something else, say fine art, or at least there may have been a widely imagined difference; but I think that time is past, or it should pass. Think once more of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its enig­ matic character Kurtz. Kurtz was the very emblem of cultivated European civilization, undoubtedly a man of taste, and a man with the capacity to appreciate the finest art. Then Kurtz and his equals would have been the appropriate audience for fine art, and other art would have been for other, lesser appreciators. But no more, for, after all, Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

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16

Caring The Le s s on of t h e Fa n Although I have been a fan, especially of baseball, for a very long time, and I have thought about what that means for a pretty long time, and I have even written about it a little,1 it was only when I reread a passage of Roger Angell’s that I thought to write about this phenomenon a little more comprehensively. Writing about the sixth game of the 1975 World Series, a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, as part of his coverage for the New Yorker, Angell ended his report with this: I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox fan is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-­fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—­I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—­caring deeply and passionately, really caring—­which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of

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our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté—­the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—­seems a small price to pay for such a gift.2

This is a wonderful piece of writing, expressing a very deep and important idea, and it means all the more to me specifically be­ cause thirty years after it was written I did myself receive late-­night phone calls from a grown man and a grown woman, my son and my daughter, first on the night the White Sox won the American League pennant, and then, later, when they won the 2005 World Series. Thus Angell seems to me almost entirely right about the matter of fans and how they care. Almost. Angell misses very, very little when he watches baseball and when he writes about it, but here I think he has missed the significance of the very fact he does note, namely that the object of this caring is, as he puts it, so “insignificant.” Angell writes that we might be better if we truly cared about more important and profound things than a baseball game, and that it is at least a consolation that some of us at least care about something “frail or foolish.” Perhaps he is right that we should care more about many things, but he misses the enormous importance of our ability exactly to care about the frail, foolish, and insignificant.

O.E.D. What is it to care? Here is part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s answer, along with part of its entry for the obviously related notion caring  for. 1) The provision of what is necessary for health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.

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2) Serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk. 3) Displaying kindness and concern for others.

It seems that caring about something is a (logical) precondition of caring  for that thing. If you didn’t care about the flowers or the puppies, then you wouldn’t—­all things being equal—­care for them.

Betting Shall I bet on baseball? If so, whom should I back? Right now, in late August 2008, I think the team most likely to win this autumn’s World Series is the California Angels. A slightly less likely winner is the Chicago Cubs. I am a longtime White Sox fan. It is the Sox I want to win. Some fans, and even some nonfans who take an interest in these things, believe it is wrong to bet against one’s team. My bet on the Angels would seem to these purists a traitorous act. It seems so to me. Right now the Angels are running away in the American League’s western division, and the Cubs are doing very well in the National League’s central division, while the White Sox barely hold on to first place in the central division of the American League. It is not inconceivable that in postseason play the White Sox will meet the Angels or the Cubs, the Angels in the American League Championship Series, the Cubs in the World Series. Should either of those matchups occur, what if I bet on the Sox’s opponent? This would be a kind of hedging, guaranteeing me some satisfaction as well as some grief. Either my Sox win and I lose the bet, or the Sox lose but I win the bet. So this kind of bet seems a middling good way to assure myself some baseball success. But it feels wrong. Why? Perhaps a bet against the Sox is a betrayal not only of the Sox but also of my fellow Sox fans. The bet might well be prudent, even dictated by considerations of probability and rationality, but this assessment reeks of the recommendations of game theorists, rational-­choice experts, and unrestricted advocates of unrestricted 196  chap te r 16

free markets, all deep thinkers who understand absolutely everything except what gives texture and meaning to human life. An American critic of American foreign policy may also be a hedger. If the policy succeeds, he will benefit because he is, after all, an American. If the policy fails, he still benefits because he has predicted the failure and been shown to be right.

Howard One of the most passionate fans I know is my friend Howard. Like me, Howard is a fan of the White Sox. But Howard is the kind of fan whose passion has a couple of dimensions my passion doesn’t exist in. More than anything else, like me, Howard wants the White Sox to win; but, unlike me, more than anything but a White Sox win, Howard wants the Chicago Cubs to lose. I am myself sometimes a negative fan. For instance, I like the New York Yankees to lose, and I like the Notre Dame football team to lose. But my pleasure at such losses derives from the great successes enjoyed by those teams and the overbearing, tiresome behavior of their fans. The Cubs, on the other hand, have won almost nothing of significance for a century. And yet Howard delights in their failure and passionately wants it to continue. Why? I’m not sure. The Cubs are Chicago’s other baseball team. They play on the north side, the White Sox on the south side of the city. Howard is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s south side, and I think since childhood he has a compelling need to be for one team and against the other. But why? Such negative passions may sometimes be as inexplicable as some positive passions. You might know the history of the development of a fan’s passion, negative or positive, but that is only a genealogy. The passion of the true, pure fan has no logical foundation. That is why it seems so slight but is so powerful. The other special feature of  Howard’s passion as fan is his tendency to blame, to find significant fault with someone when the Sox fail. Most fans, including me, do some blaming, but Howard is extreme. car ing  197

You cannot blame someone for something he could not have done otherwise. You can’t blame a batter for not being fast enough to beat out an infield grounder. But there is an abundance of targets to blame. A player: with the score tied late in the game and a runner on third with one out, he swung from the heels, trying for a home run. The manager: needing one run to win, he left on second base one of the team’s slowest runners instead of sending in a speed merchant as a pinch runner. The general manager: he traded away a good pitcher for an over-­the-­hill slugger. The owner: he has stuck with the general manager despite the general manager’s inability to judge young talent. Why all this need to blame? I think it comes from a conviction that one is somehow right to be a fan of this team. The rightness would show in the team’s winning. If the team doesn’t win, that would mean one was wrong to be a fan—­unless someone else is to blame. But I think there is nothing right or wrong in being a fan of the team, not if one is a pure fan.

Conditional Caring There are two ways in which you might come to care about something, and then perhaps care for it, both ways coming from outside, so to speak. The first way is to have made a choice or a decision, or to have acted in some way. If you have bought some company’s stock, you will care that the stock price goes up. If you have opened a shop, you will care whether shoppers patronize your store. If you hire an employee, you will care whether he is a good worker. Sometimes it is an act of others that leads you to care. If a new dean is appointed, I care whether the new dean will appreciate my value. In such cases, I have an interest in the thing I care about, with “interest” understood in a fairly crude, even material sense. A re­ lated kind of case is one in which my interest is not so tangible. For instance, if I believe the country will be a better place with X as

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pres­ident than with Y—­even if it makes no particular difference to my personal welfare—­then I will care who wins the election. In the other way of coming to care, my caring is not the result of any choice or action of mine, but it is still enjoined from outside. The book of  Isaiah says to defend the widow and protect the orphan. Now I care for the widow and the orphan because Isaiah has told me to; or because God has told me to, perhaps through Isaiah, perhaps otherwise; or because of my own conscience. I believe this is the kind of caring Roger Angell has in mind when he says we do too little of it.3

Philosophical Interlude: Obligatory for Me, Optional for You I am no fan of Kant’s moral philosophy, but I note a similarity be­­ tween the “logic” of simple caring and the logic of what Kant thinks of as moral obligation. As Kant sees it, when one is under an obligation of any kind, one is aware of being constrained by an imperative, a kind of command that one formulates as “I ought to do X.” When that constraint is imposed because of some other commitment, say because doing X is necessary in the achievement of some private end or in order to make one happy, then the obligation is conditional and its imperative only “hypothetical,” though no less real. It is only when the obligation is not predicated on other constraints that its imperative is “categorical,” and it is only then that the obligation is pure. So it is with simple caring, with this critical difference: with simple caring, nothing is enjoined. There is no constraint. There may well be an explanation of how one comes to be such a fan. For instance, it is because one’s father was a fan of the Chicago White Sox, or because one lives on the south side of Chicago (living anywhere in New England may lead to one’s being a Boston Red Sox fan). But these explanations are not reasons: they do not compel one to be a fan, to care. Parents who are fans raise children who are not. Someone living on Chicago’s south side may be utterly indifferent to the White Sox and to anything having to

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do with baseball. However one came to be a fan, the question is, what grounds one’s caring? And in the case of simple caring there is nothing, no grounds. One simply does care. And that is why such caring—­the commitment of the true, pure fan—­as slight and unteth­ ered as it is, it is for just that reason truly marvelous, a virtual revelation.

Notes 1. “Sports and Art: Beginning Questions,” originally published in Human Agency: Language, Duty, and Value, ed. Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Mora­ vcsik, and C. C. W. Taylor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 258–­76, and Chapter 6 in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 57–­64. 2. Roger Angell’s essay “Agincourt and After” originally appeared in the November 17, 1975, issue of the New Yorker, pp. 146–­6 8, reprinted in Five Seasons (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977). 3. When the “religious right” thunders about what it claims to have learned from the Bible about homosexuality, abortion, and stem-­cell research, one wishes those biblical thinkers gave at least a little more thought to the widow and the orphan.

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17

The Idea  of  Absolute Gin How might you drink your gin?1 Mixed with dry vermouth and, perhaps, some bitters, maybe along with an olive or a little onion (a martini)? Mixed with lime juice and a little water, either carbonated or still water (a gimlet)? Mixed with quinine and maybe along with a slice of lime or some mint (a gin and tonic)?2 Mixed with sweet vermouth and Campari, with perhaps a little cassis (a negroni)? Not mixed with anything but poured over ice (on the rocks)? Just by itself (neat)? Suppose you take your gin straight. You have it all alone in its glass. Maybe chilled, maybe at room temperature, but not mixed with anything, not “adulterated” by anything. What if you thought not only that this is the way you most like to take your gin, but that this is the best way to drink gin, the preferred way, the right way? If you thought that, how might you prove it? Here are some possibilities adapted from profundities in the history of philosophy:3 Thinking of Aristotle, you declare that there must be something that makes gin what it is, that makes it gin and not something else. Of course this is its essence. Call it gin’s gin-­ness, or its ginicity.

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Now you conclude that its gin-­ness comes through most clearly, most strongly, most purely when the gin is alone, not diminished or altered in any way. Gin mixed with anything else is not the true gin. Or, still thinking of the philosopher’s philosopher, you observe that gin has a special effect, an effect unique or nearly unique to gin. Call it the juniper effect. Then you note that whenever and however gin is drunk, whether alone or in mixtures, the juniper effect is mainly the result of the gin. Thus, you conclude, gin is the most important part of any gin drink, just as the Stagirite concludes that, because it is mainly responsible for the tragic effect, plot is the most important part of tragedy, and, further, that a plot alone can produce the tragic effect. So gin alone is best. Thinking of Hume, you engage in a meticulous determination of who the most refined and discriminating gin drinkers are. You mobilize a battery of tests, all of them empirical and objective, to select those drinkers who have practiced on gin drinks, have compared those drinks with one another, have strong palates and delicate taste in gin, and are utterly without prejudice. You then persuade the connoisseurs, the “true boozers,” to sample gin in all its embodiments. When they’re finished they tell you—­unanimously or nearly—­that what they prefer, what most pleases them, is straight gin. So you declare that the true standard of taste and beauty in gin declares in favor of gin alone—­gin unmixed and undiluted. Thinking of Kant you exert your best effort to denude your sensibility. You disregard every conception you may have of how a drink ought to taste. You ignore considerations of any effects drink makers may have intended to achieve. You set aside any interests and wishes you have for how a drink might taste. Thus purified, you taste all the versions of gin, discovering either that only straight gin pleases you, or that it pleases you the most. So you declare in favor of straight gin and demand that everyone agree with you.4 The Aristotelian argument concludes that straight gin is the proper or correct way to drink gin. Arguments adapted from Hume and Kant do not do exactly that. They purport to show that straight gin is better than gin drunk in any other way.

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What do you think of these arguments? Unless you are in thrall to some “philosophical” preconceptions, surely you find the arguments hopelessly unpersuasive. It may be useful to say a little about how and why they fail. First, the arguments adapted from Hume and Kant. These considerations, unlike the main one adapted from Aristotle, do not directly address gin but proceed by way of considerations of the ef­ fects of gin on gin drinkers. They refer to the affective states ei­ ther of especially qualified drinkers or of a single drinker who has rendered himself a fit representative of all humanity. The Humean argument tells us that connoisseurs of gin prefer their gin straight. Let us agree with the assertion that gin mavens go for absolute gin. But exactly what shows that they are right? The purport is that those of us who prefer our gin otherwise are defective. What is our defect? No doubt we differ from the master tasters, but why is this a deficiency? The more one considers this line of argument the more it looks as if we nonabsolutists are being declared deficient relative to the masters, and our deficiency is that we are not like them. A (nearly) palpable circle.5 Does the Kantian argument fare better? Now we have a judge who has partaken of all the versions of gin as an entirely disinterested drinker with no preconceptions, and he has gotten pleasure or the most pleasure from absolute gin. Thus he demands that we agree with him, and if we don’t, he thinks we have made a mistake. There seem to be two parts to this argument. First is the assertion that if we drank as he drinks, without personal interests or preconceptions, we would be pleased just as he is pleased. Second is the insistence that we should drink in that way. The first part is difficult to agree with unless it is a truism. Kant claims that we must be susceptible to the same simple pleasures because we humans have “states of mind” that are “communicable.” I confess to finding his argument alternately incomprehensible and ineffectively trivial. If it comes to saying that if I were exactly like the paradigm judge, I would be like him in being pleased—­then of course. This turns trivially on what it means for me to be exactly

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like that judge. The interesting assertion is that I am exactly like that judge when both of us succeed in ignoring our parochial interests and preconceptions. I know of no reason to accept this assertion, but let it stand.6 It is the second part of the Kantian argument that seems especially hollow. Why should I judge as the paradigm judge judges? Why denude myself in order to match his sensibility? Why is it right to do that? Perhaps it is replied that only in this way can I join another person in an affective community, and there is merit in that. But it is not true that this is the only way of joining a com­ munity linked to one another in taking pleasure. I might join myself to others with the same interests and preconceptions as mine. That too will provide me a community. Is it that only by making a “pure judgment of taste” can I join a potentially universal community? Why should I care to do that? Finally, what of the Aristotelian argument, the only one that di­­ rectly addresses gin itself? We might object that there is no such thing as the essence of gin, or of anything else for that matter; but let us suppose that gin does have an essence. If essences are to be countenanced, then let us declare that every one of those gin drinks—­the martini, the negroni, the gimlet, and so on—­has its own essence, each different from the essence of gin alone, the essence of absolute gin. Of course the essence of pure gin does not come through clearly in a mixture of gin and dry vermouth. Why should it? What comes through is the essence of a martini. It is similar with respect to the alleged special and proper achievement of gin, the juniper effect. You don’t get that so purely from any of the various gin mixtures, but from each of them you get its special effect. It is not that when drinking a martini you get only a severely diminished version of the juniper effect, but that you get the full martini effect. The Aristotelian argument may show that if you want the juniper effect you should drink absolute gin, but it shows nothing whatso­ ever about why you should want that effect. If the juniper effect is bet­ ter than or preferable to other effects, those achieved by nonabsolute gin, the Aristotelian argument is of no avail in establishing this. 204  chap te r 17

That is precisely what the Humean and Kantian arguments are meant to do, and I have done all I can to show that they fail. It is time—­perhaps past time—­to step back and ask whether the whole project of showing that one kind of gin drink is proper or correct or better than or preferable to the others is a supremely silly un­ dertaking. I think so. I think it is laughable, even as an exercise set in a philosophy seminar. Well, so what? Well, I would like to persuade you that arguments about the merit of absolute gin are pretty much the same—­ and equally as inane—­as arguments about the merit of “absolute music.” * * * It is easier to say what absolute music is not, than to say exactly what it is, although not much easier.7 Nonabsolute music is music with a “text.” This text might be the words to a song, or the action occurring on stage in an opera or perhaps in a movie, or it might be a “program,” say for the kind of music called a “tone poem.” Absolute music has no such text. Thus it is typically sheerly instrumental, but this needn’t be so. I see no reason why the human voice cannot be heard in absolute music provided that the voice supplies no text. In American jazz scat singing and in the kind of Eastern European (typically Hasidic) song called a nigun, a voice is heard but it does not vocalize words and it acts solely as an instrument. What matters is that the voice adds no recognizable text. It may seem clear and unproblematic with regard to any piece of music whether or not it is absolute music, but there are two nagging problems, and they are related. The first is the question of determining whether a text is in fact attached to the piece. I would guess that most writers who speak confidently of absolute music—­ either for it or against it—­think that Beethoven’s string quartets are absolute music, especially the late quartets. But what of the third movement of the fifteenth quartet (in A minor, opus 132)? In his manuscript score, at the head of this movement, Beethoven wrote, “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der t he idea  of  ab solu te gi n  205

lydischen Tonart.”8 Is that a text just as much as the name of a tone poem by Strauss or Liszt? Or what of Schoenberg’s Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene (opus 34)?9 Schoenberg named (or described) the three movements of this work “Drohende Gefahr, Angst, Katastrophe.” 10 He evidently conceived the music as the accompaniment to a film and so the film would be the music’s text, but there is no movie. Unlike Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky music, which is explicitly attached to the Eisenstein movie, Schoenberg’s music has no anchoring movie.11 Is there a text nevertheless, as it were a generic text? The problem generated by examples like these is related to the second problem, namely the determination of how and for whom music is attached to a text. In deciding whether a piece of music is absolute, are we to consider the composer, the performer, or the listener? Differing assessments of the absoluteness of a piece may come forth as the putative textual attachment is differently assigned. Suppose that many listeners who hear Beethoven’s fifteenth string quartet are entirely unaware of Beethoven’s marking. Is the music then absolute for them but programmatic for Beethoven and for those who know his inscription? And then what of the performers? Suppose that a quartet is playing this Beethoven piece, and it is only the cellist who knows the inscription (imagine that they are playing from scores that do not carry this marking). Is the music then programmatic for the cellist but absolute for his three colleagues? If you think it advisable to give up the idea that the conception of absolute music is absolute and prefer to think it a relative conception—­absolute for whom?—­then you will find a rich field in which to deploy your subtle, relativistic conception. Here is one ex­ ample, fit to stand for many, many more: Suppose I am utterly unfamiliar with Dvořák’s Rusalka and I don’t even know that it is an opera. I attend what is called a concert performance. There is no staged action. There is only a battery of singers standing in front of an orchestra. I cannot understand a

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word of Czech. For me it is as if they were singing scat. Is this music absolute for me? I have no answers to these questions, and I will leave them dangling. I do not (here) propose to press them against those who speak confidently and unproblematically of absolute music. My interest is in those who think absolute music is better, purer, and nicer than any other kind of music they claim to identify, and in those who think absolute music is inferior to “texted” music. I hope to show that these assertions—­both for and against absolute music—­have no defensible foundation. Do I think that those who prefer absolute music and those who prefer other music should abandon their preferences? Of course not. What they should abandon is any conviction that their preferences are musically or aesthetically superior. They are entirely secure in their preferences. I wish them all the enjoyment they can get from music. And from gin. Speculations about the origins of music are as idle as guesses about the beginnings of language, but let us indulge. Classes in music appreciation often note that three signal features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. Which came first? I say, rhythm. Furthermore, I note there can be rhythm alone, without melody or harmony, and it is very difficult if not impossible to have either melody or harmony without rhythm.12 Then perhaps rhythm is the one and only necessary characteristic of music, and any musical work possessing other features—­say melody or harmony—­is not purely music. But perhaps the early history of music was different. Maybe the earliest music was singing. Suppose the first music was simple song. This may have occurred among people who already had a tonal spoken language (Mandarin, for instance). If that were so, then from the very start music was textual, and it might even have made no sense to refer to anything as music that had no words. When someone thought to remove the words, leaving a bare melody, the result would have seemed attenuated. It would have been as if someone had removed from a tragedy everything but its plot. If that were the history of music, then—­at least historically—­pure, authentic music

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would have been sung music, and what is now called absolute music would have been derivative. Well, you say, the history and prehistory of music—­and especially these wildly speculative histories—­are irrelevant. In fact they are silly. What matters, you say, is what music is now. I could not agree more.

Notes 1. My highly intelligent and clever wife Andy Austin was the first to suggest that I write about vodka instead of gin, exploiting the similarity of the word “absolute” to a well-­known vodka brand name. I am sticking with gin, first because I am on better terms with gin that I am with vodka, and second because the amusing play of “absolute” and “Absolut” might deflect readers from the great seriousness of this essay. 2. It was from the estimable Professor Michael Putnam that I learned the delight of mint in a gin and tonic. 3. In what follows, the texts I have mind are Aristotle’s Poetics, Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” and Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Because I will be dealing with them cursorily—­no doubt in ways that will annoy their advocates—­it seems unnecessary to make reference to specific passages in these texts. 4. Yes, yes, I know that Kant would not regard the pleasure taken in gin drinking as a “pure judgment of taste” (he presumably would regard it as a judgment of sense). I mention him anyway because I will presently be speaking of music, and given Kant’s stupefyingly insensate remarks about music, I think he may have as much to teach us about gin as he does about music. Those who think Kant has much to teach us about taste, beauty, and art are of course free to ignore this essay. Or to despise it. 5. Hume himself supposes that hasty readers will find his theory circular when in fact there is no circle. So he declares in his “On the Standard of Taste.” I think Hume is right, but that apparent circle is not the one I am charging him with here. I have done my best to expound and amplify Hume’s theory in “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote Story in Hume’s Essay on Taste,” Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy, ed. Robert J. Yanal (University Park: Penn­ sylvania State University Press, 1994), 145–­56. The most careful and

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sympathetic historically informed discussion of Hume’s theory is Dabney Townsend’s Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sen­timent (London: Routledge, 2001). The question I am raising may be thought of as, “Why should anyone want to be like a connoisseur in his pleasures and preferences?” The best at­tempt known to me at giving a Hum­ ean answer to this question is Jerrold Levinson’s “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 227–­38. I am not persuaded: I think there is no good answer, but you should consult Levinson and decide for yourself. 6. Of course I am simply saying that Kant has not given a good reason, and although I believe that he hasn’t, I’m not going into that. And I know that Kant would not offer his reason in the case of gin drinking, presumably because the object giving pleasure has no “form”—­ whatever it is that Kant means by “form.” (It is abidingly curious that Kant seems to think that music is without form when it is obvious that music is—­almost—­nothing but form.) The best sympathetic but critical appraisals of Kant’s argument are in Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of  Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) and Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). They—­and especially Allison—­have found more merit in Kant’s argument than I can find. Make up your own mind, but please don’t begin with the assumption that Kant could not be numbingly wrong. 7. The literature of the debate about absolute music, both historical and contemporary, is extensive. I will not discuss any of it explicitly because the point I hope to make does not depend on specific disputants’ formulations. Among contemporary philosophers and others writing about absolute music, my favorite author is Peter Kivy. He gives accurate and sympathetic accounts of other views while forcefully advancing his own. An excellent introduction to his work is The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). A magisterial canvass of both early and later discussions of the topic—­especially by musicians, musicologists, and social “theorists”—­was the longtime work of Carl Dahlhaus. It is usefully summarized and synthesized in his book The Idea of Absolute Music, translated by Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), originally published in German in 1978. 8. A rough translation: “Holy Song of  Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode.” 9. “Accompaniment music for a film.” 10. “Impending danger, fear, catastrophe.”

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11. Prokofiev’s movie music seems to carry no opus number and is known simply as the score for the movie. He subsequently arranged the mu­ sic in a cantata, and that is his opus 78. 12. Perhaps you think of the earliest rhythm-­alone music as tapping or beating on something, say a hollow log. Rhythm alone can be much more complex. If you doubt this, listen to Max Roach’s wonderful M’Boom or Michael Colgrass’s Three Brothers, or the earlier and probably better known Ionisation by Edgard Varèse. There is a very little melody in the Roach production, but it is mostly just rhythm. In all of these compositions different instruments sound different pitches, but there is no melody, and the pitch differences work to individuate their instruments, thus allowing, say, bongos and timpani to be heard answering one another.

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18

Playing by the Rules It is my task today, and my personal pleasure, to introduce you to the study of rules. All kinds of rules are worth study, but I will confine myself to the rules of a few games. That will do for these purposes, for it is enough to suggest that in the study of these rules one approaches the study of the meaning of  life.1 I will say very little about the point in this study. It seems to me a fascinating subject, and one with strange and unexpected implications, but it is up to you to find what you can, and I may just be eccentric in my taste. I begin with a seemingly simple rule concerning pool playing. This rule comes from the Billiard Congress of America and is called the “Balls Moving Spontaneously” rule. Here is a portion of the rule: A hanging ball that falls into a pocket “by itself ” after being motionless for 3 seconds or longer shall be replaced as closely as possible to its position prior to falling, and play shall continue.

Let us inquire into the application of this rule. It says that if you and I are playing, say, straight pool or, if you prefer, some less classical and more romantic game like eight ball or nine ball, and you have completed your turn and the balls have come to a stop, and you retire from the table, giving way to me, if, before I can do anything, some

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ball that has been at rest on the lip of a pocket falls into the pocket—­ if all of that—­then we are to do this: replace the ball exactly where it was. There is a problem, isn’t there? The rule does not say the ball is to go exactly where it was, but only that it should be as close to that as pos­sible. How are we to know whether we have it as close as possible? When we place the pocketed ball back on the table, if it doesn’t fall into the pocket again, we must not have put it back exactly where it was, and so we have not obeyed the rule, at least not on the reasonable assumption that there is some location closer to the pocket than the one we have chosen. If the ball does fall in again, we may well have followed the rule, but we will have to reapply the rule, and, indeed, we will be reiterating the rule forever. What have we here? An example, perhaps, and probably the first and only example, of what deconstruction teaches us to look for: a text deconstructing itself. Is this the mise en abyme? Do we have a proof, now, that it is impossible to play pool by the rules? Does this mean that the rules are a Western, imperialistic, logocentric, phallocentric tool? Or is this an internal contradiction of capitalism? Or what? Take your choice: try not to be a fool. Surely the rules of pool are discriminatory. Consider the one-­ foot-­on-­the-­floor rule. Most pool-­hall players think that a shooter is required to keep a foot on the floor, but virtually none of them has actually checked the rule book. I have, of course, and there is such a rule. It says, It is a foul if a player shoots when one foot is not in contact with the floor.

With a wanton disregard for logic—­that is, with something of a French touch—­the authors of this rule have executed a syntactic am­ biguity. Surely they meant to say that the shooter must keep at least one foot on the floor, although the rule can be read, fairly naturally, to mean that the shooter must have exactly one foot on the floor, re­ quiring a kind of flamingo stance on every shot. And the rule can be read to mean that same foot must always be on the floor. But you are

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meant to be at liberty to lift your left foot on some shots, your right foot on other shots, and neither foot on still other shots. But notice the disadvantage inflicted on shorter players. The rule prohibits climbing completely on to the table in order to shoot, but this means that a perfectly normal, manly, athletically sound player like myself, who happens to be not quite five feet seven inches tall, will find some shots unavailable, when those same shots are within the range of some six-­feet-­two-­inch boor. As if in anticipation of any attempt to compensate for this, the rule carries this corollary: Foot attire must be normal in regard to size, shape and the manner in which it is worn.

This is to say that one is forbidden to wear, say, shoes with built­up soles and heels, say a foot or two high. But perhaps that would be the “normal” footgear for a player who has to compete with someone a foot taller. Do we have here yet another example of presumptions in favor of average-­size Western white males passing as innocuous regulations? I have my suspicions, but I don’t know, and in any case I should not like you to fail to notice the sublime character of these rules. Notice, for instance, the smooth and subtle concern for even the most cosmic possibilities: Non-­Player Interference. If the balls are moved (or a player bumped such that play is directly affected) by a non-­player during a match, the balls shall be replaced as near as possible to their original positions immediately prior to the incident and play shall resume with no penalty on the player affected. If the match is officiated, the referee shall replace the balls. This rule shall also apply to “act of God” interference, such as earthquake, hurricane, light fixture falling, power failure, etc.

Think of that. The rules governing a game as apparently simple and innocent as eight ball provide for hurricanes and earthquakes. Let us turn away from the rules of  billiards, for a time, and have a

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look at a rule from that game whose rules are more comprehensive than any other I know. Of course this is baseball. Here is an example, from the section of the rule book concerning the pitcher: The pitcher shall not . . . (2) apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball; (3) expectorate on the ball, either hand or his glove; (4) rub the ball on his glove, person or clothing; (5) deface the ball in any manner; (6) deliver what is called the “shine” ball, “spit” ball, “mud” ball or “emery” ball.

When we first read this rule we may imagine it to be needlessly verbose, redundant in fact. It says, first, that the pitcher may not expectorate on the ball, but then, later, it says that the pitcher may not deliver a spit ball. If the pitcher may not spit on the ball, then why bother to prohibit his throwing a spit ball, you may ask. But then we realize the need to prevent the pitcher’s securing expectoratory assistance from a teammate or anyone else. Suppose the ball comes into the possession of the shortstop. If he spits on the ball before returning it to the pitcher, then we will indeed require part (6) of the rule in order to prevent the pitcher’s delivering the ball even though the pitcher himself has not spat on it. This seems the proper exegesis, and yet there is this scenario: Suppose the batter hits a slow grounder foul up the first-­base line. The ball is picked up by the first-­base coach. This person, a teammate of the batter, not of the pitcher, slyly spits on the ball before tossing it back to the pitcher. When the unwitting pitcher delivers his next pitch to the batter, the batting team protests that the pitcher has thrown a spit ball. What now? I will not go into this: I leave it as an exercise. Nor will I take up the question of whether the rule is intended to prohibit the pitcher’s spitting on the ball in all possible circumstances. Suppose that the umpire has decided that the ball should be removed from the game, but before the umpire could confiscate the ball, the catcher had returned it to the pitcher. The umpire tells the pitcher that the ball 214  chap te r 1 8

is to be removed. Before returning the ball to the umpire for removal (returning it to the umpire, probably, by way of the catcher), the pitcher spits on the ball. What’s wrong with that? Nearly any rule would do as an illustration of this first and most basic point: if you look closely enough at the rule, the cosmos will appear in all its physical, metaphysical, moral, and spiritual aspects, presenting you a life’s work. I would not like you to think these characteristics are found only in American games. Consider the least American game we know (except, perhaps, for tossing the caber)—­cricket. Cricket’s rules are written in a somewhat unfamiliar idiom, and it will be good to ac­ quaint ourselves with that before getting to the items of today’s in­ terest. So, here is part of Law 36, the law concerning “Leg before Wicket.” I have been told that not all of you are well-­acquainted with cricket, and so I will first tell you a very little about wickets and the general conduct of the game. A wicket is a wooden gizmo, constructed approximately in this way: There are five pieces of wood in all. Three of them, called “stumps,” are rodlike sticks, a little over two feet long. They stick up out of the ground in a straight line, separated from one another by a little less than the diameter of a cricket ball (the ball cannot pass between two stumps). Atop the stumps are two smaller pieces of wood, called “bails.” These bails are laid atop the stumps, one running from the first stump to the second, and the other from the second stump to the third. (Thus a wicket looks a little—­very little—­ like two overgrown croquet wickets side by side.) When you bat in cricket, you stand in front of a wicket and attempt to keep the bowler (the person throwing the ball) from knocking the bails off the wicket. Clear? There are two wickets in cricket. They are set up about twenty yards apart, at either end of what is called the “pitch.” Batting is done from both wickets during the course of a match, but we need not go into that, or even into what you do after you have struck the ball, because we are concerned only with the Leg-­before-­Wicket rule. You are permitted to deflect the thrown ball only with your bat. pl aying by t he ru le s  215

You may not interpose your body. If you do, you are declared out leg before wicket (“L.B.W.,” that is). Now here is the law: The Striker shall be out L.B.W. in the circumstances set out below: (a) Striker Attempting to Play the Ball The Striker shall be out L.B.W. if he first intercepts with any part of his person, dress or equipment a fair ball which would have hit the wicket and which has not previously touched his bat or a hand holding the bat, provided that: (i) The ball pitched, in a straight line between wicket and wicket or on the off side of the Striker’s wicket, or in the case of ball intercepted full pitch, would have pitched in a straight line between wicket and wicket. and (ii) The point of impact is in a straight line between wicket and wicket, even if above the level of the bails.2

The crystal, British clarity of that law serves, I think, to establish the tenor of both the game and its rules. Let us now consider a sublime regulation, part 6 of Law 42. Law 42 is called “Unfair Play.” Here is part 6: 6  INC OMMODING T HE S T RIK ER An umpire is justified in intervening under this Law and shall call and signal “dead ball” if, in his opinion, any Player of the fielding side incommodes the Striker by any noise or action while he is re­ ceiving a ball.

A seemingly simple rule, and yet, once again, we find all of  human glory and misery therein. Consider—­what if this particular striker is incommoded by dead silence, or by the absence of any motion on

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the part of the players of the fielding side? Are they then obligated to shout and run about on pain of otherwise being convicted, God help us, of incommoding the striker? And then, what about this umpiring discretion? The rule says, “An Umpire is justified in intervening . . . ,” but it does not say that he should intervene. Suppose you are at bat. The other team is yelling and screaming and running amok, making it impossible for you to concentrate on your striking. You appeal to the umpire, and he says, “Yes, indeed, I am fully justified in inter­ vening, as stipulated in Law 42; but frankly I don’t give a shit.” Then what will you do? Perhaps we have here a hint of one inspiration be­ hind the American Revolution. For a final example, I turn again to cricket, introducing you to part 10 of this same Law 42, which, you recall, is the law concerning unfair play. Here is part 10: 10  TIME WA S T ING Any form of time wasting is unfair.

On the not unreasonable assumption that playing cricket is itself a form of time wasting, what are we to make of this law? Is it that there is a proper way to waste time, in contrast to wasting time in a time-­wasting way? It would not be such a remote observation that this lecture is a waste of time, but now we are wasting time while we waste time. These are very, very deep questions. I leave them with you, with these final observations: The common understanding of all these activities is that they are, as the saying goes, “rule-­governed.” And surely it must be correct to suppose that there are rules involved. How else could we explain our expectations of one another when we engage in these games? And yet—­you may take my word for it—­ two puzzling facts threaten this idea: (1) very few of the participants in these games really know much at all about the rules,3 and (2) the rules themselves seldom withstand much serious scrutiny. You will long since have grasped the main theme of this short disquisition: the fact that usually we don’t know what the rules are and the fact

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that when we do know a rule we discover that the rule makes little sense are two of the main facts about life. And what are we to make of that? Thank you. Go, and study.

Notes 1. This essay is a reconstruction of a lecture given in the spring of 1992 as part of the University of Chicago’s celebration of its centennial. Those present at the lecture have gone on to fine things. Cohen is still here. 2. One might compare this rule with the rule in baseball concerning batters hit by pitched balls. In both cases the rule is trying to deal with batters who cause themselves to be hit, and it is penalizing them for that. In the case of the cricket rule, however, the rule robs the umpire of his judgment as to whether the ball might have gotten to the wicket and instead insists that the location and probable route of the ball be judged as such, without regard to where it might have gone (if, for in­ stance, it were thrown by a spin bowler). In baseball, all that matters is the actual location of the ball. Here is the baseball rule: 6.00—­The Batter. 6.08. The batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out (provided he advances to and touches first base) when—­(b) He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (1) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (2) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball. If the ball is in the strike zone when it couches the batter, it shall be called a strike, whether or not the batter tries to avoid the ball. If the ball is outside the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a ball if he makes no attempt to avoid being touched. 3. For some time I have offered a bet, perhaps rashly. I will bet that if we observe as many as a half-­dozen baseball games—­major-­league games—­we will see at least one indisputable indication that the participants do not know the rules. I have never had to make good on the bet, but during a recent World Series, between the Yankees and the Mets, I had an encouraging moment during the second game. The Mets were batting, with fewer than two out and a runner on first. The batter struck out, but the ball went by the catcher. The batter ran toward first, the (Yankee) catcher retrieved the ball, and as the runner 218  chap te r 1 8

already on first base ran to second, the catcher made a poor throw to first base, but a throw good enough to beat the runner. So the batter was out, and the runner had advanced to second base. I believe that most observers, and many players, thought that this had happened: having struck out, the batter was entitled to try to get to first base but was out because the throw beat him. The runner on first had been forced to try advancing to second base because the batter was coming to first, and he did indeed wind up safe at second. But that is not at all what happened. In fact the batter was out, even though the catcher could not catch the third strike, and his running to first base was pointless. The runner at first in fact succeeded in stealing second base: he did not have to run. And, in fact, if the catcher had been able to get the ball to second base in time for the advancing runner to be tagged, both the runner and the batter would have been out. This was later explained by one of the television announcers, Tim McCarver, and he certainly knew the appropriate rules. But there can be no explanation of the behavior of the batter or of the catcher other than that they did not know the relevant rule, and surely the runner on first base did not know. It is marginally possible, I suppose, that the batter knew the rule but was trying to confuse the fielding team. If so, it was an ill-­advised ruse because it could well have resulted in a double play (because of the mistake of the runner on first), and there can be no explanation of what the catcher did besides his ignorance of the rule.

pl aying by the ru le s  219

19

Freedom from Rules My topic today, I hope, is at least marginally related to the theme of this summer’s Camden Conference. That theme is “the good.” I pro­ pose to speak about freedom. No doubt freedom is a good if not an unqualified good. If you agree with that, you may well be thinking of political freedom, and that, for better or worse, is not my topic. I am thinking of freedom as freedom from rules, and freedom in a more quotidian, pedestrian, homely context—­the context of ordinary life. Years ago I became interested in jokes, and then a few years later I developed an interest in metaphor and figurative language in general, and I began teaching, lecturing, and writing about those things. Increasingly, it came to seem to me that jokes and meta­ phors have something in common, something beyond the paro­ chial fact that I happen to like them both, but I had no idea what the similarity might be. Then, about a year ago, when we were at our summer place in Rockport, I think I found something jokes and metaphors have in common. They are both, at least sometimes, and characteristically, exercises in freedom. They require and result from the breaking of rules. The rules are not themselves obnoxious. Indeed, they are indispensable. They make language and social life in general possible. And yet it can be good to break those rules, to flout them, and it can be in these transgressions that aspects of human freedom emerge.

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Preliminaries When in the course of human events one feels constrained by the bonds controlling what can be said and done, it may be good to make a metaphor or tell a joke. The rules—­the rules of language and the rules of society—­are essential. They make language and society possible. But if we al­ ways comport ourselves within their strictures, we will be less than fully human. We will not be merely robotic, for there is room for im­ provisation within the rules, but we won’t burst forth in the full free­ dom that seems to me the mark of full humanity. We must insist that we were not made for language and society, but that they were made for us. And thus I declare my independence. I will describe these two forms of outlaw behavior briefly, and then invite your discussion of the phenomenon. First, metaphor, perhaps the more sublime topic. A metaphor delivers something besides what it would mean if taken literally. Think of Romeo’s declaration, “Juliet is the sun.” Taken literally, this statement is obviously false, even preposterous. What Romeo has in mind is not that his girlfriend is that thing that shows up in the morning and leaves in the evening, that which illuminates and warms the world—­although what Romeo has in mind is somehow related to those facts about the sun (and perhaps you will want to discuss this). What Romeo has in mind is not some already fixed meaning of “Juliet is the sun.” It is something new. Thus metaphor is not a species of ambiguity, although until a few years ago it often was mistakenly described as such. In a case of ambiguity, there are two (or more) already fixed ways of under­ standing some expression’s syntax or semantics or phonetics, and sometimes one can’t tell which meaning is the relevant one. For instance, I spent last night on a cape. I put my money in a bank.

fr eed om from ru le s  221

I saw her duck. I like civil engineers.

These are cute examples, I suppose, although somewhat con­ trived. Ambiguity can also figure in very serious literary contexts. As always, it is good to turn to Shakespeare: “Get thee to a nun­ nery.” 1 Or: “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”2 In all these cases, the serious ones and the playful ones, all cases of ambiguity, both possible meanings are already there, fixed in the expressions that carry them, and, furthermore, the expressions break no rules. It is quite otherwise with metaphor. Here again is Shakespeare: “Macbeth doth murder sleep.”3 I should say a little about what I have in mind when I say that the (literal) use of language proceeds according to “rules.” Here are two examples of things I might say: Andy and I spend time in Maine every summer. Native Mainers are kind to Andy and me.

In the first sentence I use the pronoun “I” to refer to myself, and in the second sentence I use “me.” That is because I follow syntac­ tic rules that take the pronoun to be part of the subject in the first sentence but treat it as the object of a preposition in the second sen­ tence, and because I take the subjective case of the pronoun to be “I,” while the objective case is “me.” I am following these rules of language. On the other hand, in both cases I put the name “Andy” before the pronoun that refers to me. Thus “Andy and I,” “Andy and me.” This is not because of any purely linguistic rule, but is, rather, a kind of courtesy rule requiring that I name myself last, rather like the form I would follow if I were introducing you and Andy to one another. (If someone spoke like a valley girl and said, “Me and Andy go to Maine,” he would violate one rule of language and one matter of courtesy.) I should note and acknowledge that most of us native speakers

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of English can formulate very, very few of these rules of language despite the fact that we follow them. Formulating the rules is a sig­ nal task of linguists. Nonetheless, I will speak of such rules and say that we speakers are following them. Then what is going on when we understand “Macbeth doth mur­ der sleep?” We cannot be understanding it entirely in terms of the rules of English, even of Elizabethan English, because it has broken those rules. Something is irregular in this sentence. The grammar of English can be formulated in various ways, but however it is formulated and whatever semantics it advances, it will incorporate a requirement to the effect that the use of the word “murder” as a transitive verb requires a direct object that is (or was) a living thing, perhaps also requiring that the living thing be a person. The noun “sleep,” which occupies the syntactic position of the direct object of “murder,” does not refer to such a thing. When you encounter this sentence, you cannot take its measure by understanding it in terms of the rules of  English: you will have to do something else, something more; and you will do it in freedom, at least freedom from the rules governing literal language. It seems to me especially important that although there may well be constraints at work when one appreciates a meta­ phor, these are not decisive. Here is an example I hope will explain what I have in mind. It is two verses from that book of the Bible often called the Song of Songs, but sometimes the Song of Solomon or Canticles. You no doubt know that in this very short biblical book, there are four distinct speakers: a young woman, a young man, the young woman’s brothers, and girlfriends of the young woman’s, called the daughters of Jerusalem. In this two-­part section, the first part is spoken by the young woman, the second part by the young man. Awake, north wind! O south wind, come, breathe upon my garden, let its spices stream out. Let my lover come into his garden and taste its delicious fruit.

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I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I have gathered my myrrh and my spices, I have eaten from the honeycomb, I have drunk the milk and the wine.

What is the literal sense of these lines? The woman asks the winds to blow so that her garden, wherein are herbs, spices, and fruits, will be fragrant; and she asks that her lover enter that garden, which she says is now his garden, and taste his fruit. The man then says that he has indeed entered the garden and enjoyed its con­ tents. And that is all the man and woman literally say. If the lines are “about” a young woman offering her body to her lover and his appreciative possession of it, then this is a figurative upshot of the lines and is not their literal sense. You probably know that both rabbis and church fathers have insisted that these verses are not about young sex but are, rather, about either God’s love for Israel or Jesus’s love for the church. My point is that no one can prove just what these figurative lines are about, although it is easy enough to show what they mean literally. Here is the point that draws a philosopher of art, like me, to an interest in metaphor: the inability to prove how things are. I think that Shakespeare’s King Lear is, in part, about the hopelessness of growing old. I think that Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness is about our need to tell stories in order to make sense of our lives. I think Mozart’s Don Giovanni is about the enigmatic power of music. I think that Roman Polanski’s movie Chinatown is about the pres­ ence in the world of things and people we simply cannot under­ stand. I think all those things, but I can prove none of them. Art criticism is not about proofs. It is about something else. If you like, we might discuss this later. Enough about metaphors, at least for now. What about jokes? Here the topic is both easier and harder. Easier because it is obvious that some jokes sometimes are transgressive. Harder because it is not obvious what they contravene. If a joke is politically or socially unacceptable—­even if this is only a breach of decorum—­then I 224  chap te r 1 9

suppose some rule has been broken. But what rule? What kind of rule? Let us have examples. Here is one. It is sometimes thought that Jews are sharp bargainers, even to the point of being unscrupu­ lous, and it is also thought that they treat one another better than they treat non-­Jews. It would be difficult to say that, especially in the presence of Jews. To do so might well be to violate some rules of decorum. But even in the presence of  Jews, you might tell this joke: A poor Jew goes to the home of a rich Jew and asks for help. The rich Jew says, “I do not give away money. But there is a Gentile who mows my lawn and I pay him $25. You mow my lawn and I’ll pay you $30.” The poor Jew considers the offer and then says, “Let the Gentile keep the job; just give me the $5.”

Or this one: One day in an English elementary school the teacher says to the class, “Can any of you tell me who is the greatest moral leader in the history of the world?” None of the children answers, and so she repeats, “Surely after all our study you know: Who is the world’s great­est moral leader?” At this a boy raises his hand and when called on says, “Jesus.” “That’s right,” says the teacher, “but how is it that you, the only Jewish child in the class, alone knows the answer?” The boy replies, “Teacher, you know and I know that the right an­ swer is ‘Moses,’ but business is business.”

This last joke was given to me years ago by an Englishman who pref­ aced his telling by asking if I would mind hearing an anti-­Semitic joke. In fact I don’t find the joke anti-­Semitic, but in telling it I sup­ pose he thought he was circumventing some piece of decorum in polite English society. Jokes involving religions are not at all uncommon, and virtually no religion is exempt. Here is one concerning Episcopalians, one that takes them perhaps to be overly concerned with niceties. fr eed om from ru le s  225

Three men have been friends since boyhood, and now they are three adult clergymen, one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Episco­ palian. One day, in a pensive mood, the Jewish rabbi says, “I have something on my mind that bothers me, and I need to tell you about it. I have found it too difficult to keep all the laws of the Torah, espe­ cially the dietary laws, and from time to time I have eaten pork.” “I, too,” says the Catholic priest, “have found it too hard to bear the burdens of my oath, and even since the seminary from time to time I have given in to the temptations of the flesh and have known women.” “Well,” says the Episcopalian, “would that I had so little to confess. Only last week I caught myself eating the main course with a salad fork.”

Here is another, also about Episcopalians, perhaps a little kinder, that one might tell to convey or exploit the idea that America’s high Episcopalian community has moved from a traditional, somewhat earthy religiosity to something that substitutes a very refined social decency. Do you know why Episcopalians so seldom indulge in orgies? There are just way too many thank-­you notes.

It is interesting—­at least to me—­that these jokes that suggest some religions are more truly spiritual than others are not always about different religions but are sometimes about different versions within the same religion. For instance, Three Jewish rabbis are accustomed to playing golf together on Sun­ days. They don’t play on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, but Sunday is someone else’s day of rest. As it happens, the three rabbis are one orthodox, one conservative, and one reform. On the day in question their play is going very, very slowly, and this is because the four­ some ahead of them is playing at an agonizingly slow pace. Finally the rabbis send one of their caddies ahead to ask that foursome to let them play through, or else to speed up. A few minutes later the

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caddie has returned, crestfallen with his head down. He reports: “They play slowly because they are blind. It takes blind golfers lon­ ger. Their caddies have to position them and tell them the direction and distance, and that takes time.” “Oy,” says the orthodox rabbi, “I have disgraced myself in unkindness.” “Yes,” says the conservative rabbi, “I shall have to atone for this, for as the Torah says, ‘You shall not place obstacles in the path of the blind.’ ” The reform rabbi then says, “They’re blind? Why the hell don’t they play at night?”

If you find any of these jokes offensive, when we get to a discus­ sion, you are more than welcome to say why. Now a digression, something of a detour, but one that leads to the point I mean to make—­at least I hope it leads there. As my bril­ liant wife Andy sometimes remarks, when I talk it is not always clear just what point I am trying to make. Let us hope for the best. When you indulge in literal language or offer arguments and proofs, if your audience doesn’t get your point, you will suppose the fault is theirs. And usually you will be right. Suppose we say to someone, “Camden is on the sea.” If he does not then believe that this town is on the water, or at least that we believe it to be, we will assume that he did not understand us. Maybe he doesn’t know that the name of this town is “Camden.” Maybe he doesn’t grasp the syntax and semantics of our sentence. In any case, our sentence does indeed mean that Camden is on the sea, and if he doesn’t grasp that, then the fault or deficiency is his, and we may blame him. Or again, I say to someone, “Last month Andy and I traveled from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a taxi driven by a Palestinian named ‘Abu Nidal.’ ” My hearer understands most of this but is later sur­ prised to learn that our driver has a son. Then he didn’t understand me completely: he didn’t know that the Arabic name “Abu Nidal” means “father of Nidal.” And, again, my hearer’s failure to join me in this belief is due to a deficiency of his. Or—­one last example, somewhat more recondite, but useful: We present someone with Cantor’s great proof that there are as many

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natural, counting numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, . . .) as there are fractions (1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, . . .), despite there being an infinity of fractions between zero and one. Our student continues to believe that there are more fractions. What has happened? Perhaps he has not under­ stood what a natural number is, or what a rational number is. Or he hasn’t grasped the technical idea of two sets being of the same size. Or he has simply failed to follow the proof, perhaps because of inadequate concentration. In any case he has not come to share our belief, and the fault is his. We are right: he is wrong. Notice the difference when you offer a metaphor or tell a joke. Here are some metaphors: T. S. Eliot says the Western world is a wasteland. John Donne tells us all mankind is a continent. The Psalmist declares, “The Lord is my Shepherd.”

Each of these assertions taken literally is a falsehood, and a pal­ pable falsehood at that. And yet each is trying to get something across. What if it doesn’t come across? I can’t see Western civiliza­ tion as barren and unfertile. I can’t gain any sense of how I might be linked to other human beings. I can’t feel myself to be cared for by a spiritual being. What then can T. S. Eliot or John Donne or King David say about me? Am I to be blamed? Have I failed? What have I failed at? I have grasped the grammar of these sentences, and there are no words in them whose meanings are unknown to me. When I understand these sentences in terms of the rules of literal language they become at best false and, more likely, inexplicable. I cannot be blamed for any sheerly linguistic shortcoming. The point is that these sentences have violated the rules of  literal language. What, then, am I required to do? This is hard to say, but it is clear that what I must do has nothing to do with following algo­ rithmic rules. Aristotle says that it takes genius to make metaphors. I do not know that he is right, at least partly because I don’t know what he meant by “genius,” but I do know that it takes something

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special to make metaphors, something more than the ability to fol­ low the rules of language. And here is an interesting point, perhaps missed by Aristotle. If it takes something—­let us call it “genius”—­ for you to make a metaphor, then at least a little genius is required of me if I am to understand you. You have done something novel, something not prescribed by the rules of language, and I will have to try a little novelty of my own if I am to follow you. In our discussion perhaps we can try to figure out just what that something extra, that novelty, is, but for now let me turn to jokes, where the situation is different but also instructively similar. With a joke you are not trying to get someone to share a belief of yours. You are not trying to impart information. With a statement, literal or metaphorical, you may be trying to incite a feeling, but you are doing so by way of some belief you hope to induce. For instance, you hope to bring me to admire someone by telling me of wonder­ ful things he has done. With a joke you hope to give me laughter. You think you are pre­ senting me with something funny. Now let us ask, as with a failed metaphor, what if your joke doesn’t work? Sometimes a joke fails with a particular audience because of something the audience doesn’t understand. Perhaps the joke incorporates words in an unfamiliar language. Or the joke plays on a stereotype unfamiliar to the audience. But what if the audience does know all those things and still doesn’t laugh: what if it finds nothing funny? Can you blame your unlaughing companion? When you tell me a joke, you hope I will join you in laughter and be your companion in finding the fun. I believe there is sometimes great virtue in shared laughter. You have sought that, but I have failed to share your laughter. We must bite the bullet and admit that no one can prove that something is funny. You have no right to think I am wrong not to laugh. You may say that I have no sense of humor, but all you are entitled to say is that I don’t have your sense of  humor. Your joke telling is a hope, a hope that my sensibility will echo yours, just as your metaphor making is your hope that I will share

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your sense of whatever your metaphor describes. In neither case is there a guarantee or the consolation of proving me deficient. When your metaphor or joke does work with me, then we are joined in our humanity, and, I say, if  I may be permitted a pompous-­ sounding description, we share the world. When this fails, we are estranged. When you undertake these extravagances—­making metaphors, telling jokes—­you take a chance. You are Moses leading people to freedom with no way of compelling them to follow, and it will be a sore disappointment if you arrive in the Promised Land all alone.

Notes 1. Hamlet, act 3, sc. 1. 2. “Sonnet 73.” 3. Macbeth, act 2, sc. 2.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge that the following chapters have been reprinted with permission: Chapter 2, “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,” originally ap­ peared in Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 1–­13. Chapter 3, “Notes on Metaphor,” originally appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 249–­59. Chapter 4, “What’s Special about Photography?” originally appeared in the Monist 71, no. 2 (April 1988): 292–­305. Chapter 5, “Sports and Art,” originally appeared in Human Agency, edited by Jonathan Dancy, M. E. Moravcsik, and C. C. W. Taylor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Chapter 6, “Clay for Contemplation,” originally appeared in Crafts 107 (November/December 1990): 17–­19. Chapter 7, “There Are No Ties at First Base,” originally appeared in the Yale Review 79, no. 2 (October 1990): 314–­22. Chapter 8, “A Driving Examination,” originally appeared in Raritan 10, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 45–­55.

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Chapter 9, “Objects of Appreciation,” originally appeared in Philosophy and Art, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni­ versity of America Press, 1991). Chapter 10, “And What If  They Don’t Laugh?” originally appeared in The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran, and Jane Taylor (London: Legenda, 2005). Chapter 11, “Liking What’s Good: Why Should We?” originally appeared in Philosophy and the Interpretation of Popular Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 117–­30. Chapter 12, “Language Games,” originally appeared in the ASA newslet­ ter 34, no. 1 (April 2014): 1.

232  acknow le d gments 

Index

Abdul-­Jabbar, Kareem, 72 absolute music, 205–­8, 209n7 Adam’s Rib (Cukor), xxii Adorno, Theodor, 156, 172 aesthetic communities, 154. See also communities of appreciation aesthetic personality, 164, 192–­93 aesthetic point of view, Urmson on, 72–­74 aesthetics. See appreciation of art; appreciation of sports; appreciation of television Albee, Edward, 178 Alexander Nevsky (Prokofiev), 206 All in the Family (TV show), 131, 132 altruism, xiv, 81 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The (Chabon), 186 ambiguity, 28–­29, 38, 221–­22 American culture, taken over by the market, xi–­xii American exceptionalism, x an American: American philosopher as, x, xi, xvi, 1, 117; Columbo as, 136, 140n3; Hitchcock as, viii, 1, 12; Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and, x–­xi, 1, 6, 7, 9–­10, 11, 13n6, 193 Angell, Roger, 194–­95, 199 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 123, 124, 137 anti-­Semitism: jokes and, 225; of Merchant of  Venice, 159; in works of  T. S. Eliot and Wagner, 147

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola), 122, 138, 188 appreciation of art: artist’s offensive politics and, 147–­48; sports appreciation compared to, 66, 67, 68, 69–­71, 75–­76; utility and, 88–­89, 127. See also communities of appreciation appreciation of sports, 66–­70, 71–­72, 74–­75, 77; of baseball, 68, 69, 77, 119, 120; difficulty and, 66–­6 8, 72, 76–­77, 81n1, 82nn2–­3. See also communities of appreciation appreciation of television, 127–­28, 131–­39. See also communities of appreciation Aristotle: essence of gin and, 201–­2, 204–­5, 208n3; liking better works of art and, 156; on metaphor, 37, 179, 228–­29; Pla­ to’s denigration of art and, 18, 19, 86; Poetics, 82n4, 133, 177, 208n3; on tragedy, 82n4, 133, 176–­78, 202 Arrau, Claudio, 76 art: ceramic, 87–­90, 126–­27; constraints on, 125–­27; freedom of, 87, 90–­91, 92, 125; judging which is better, 156–­57; knowledge as traditional apology for, 86; means becoming ends in, 70–­71; as medium of human connection, 165; metaphor as work of, ix, 19; movies as, 12, 120–­21; photography as, 49–­50, 56, 58, 60, 61–­63; Plato’s devaluation of, 18,

233

art (cont.) 19, 85–­86; research and, 85, 86, 87, 92; supposed universality of, 158, 159, 162–­ 63; utility of objects and, 88–­89, 126–­27; value of, 87. See also appreciation of art; fine/high/serious art; philosophy of art; photography; popular art artist: included in community of appreciation, 166–­67; popular vs. serious, 167, 189; risk taken by, 91–­92 Ash Wednesday (T. S. Eliot), 187–­88 Atget, Eugène, 63 Auden, W. H., 172 Augustine, xviii, 153 Austin, J. L., xii–­xiii, xv, 40, 47n18, 144–­45; How to Do Things with Words, xii, xiii Babbitt, Milton, 157 Bach, J. S., 57, 118–­19, 154, 157; The Goldberg Variations, 154, 157 Barthes, Roland, 52 baseball: appreciation of, 68, 69, 77, 119, 120; betting against one’s team, 196–­97; blaming by fan of, 197–­98; called boring, 117–­20; communities of taste including, xviii; as different experience on television, 128–­31; importance of, xvi–­xvii, 116; no ties at first base, xix, 93–­104; rules of, xix, 93–­104, 214–­15, 218nn2–­3 Beardsley, Monroe, 33–­34, 36, 39–­40 Beast in the Jungle, The (Henry James), 182 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 76, 124, 156, 157, 205–­6 Bellow, Saul, xix, 173 Benjamin, Walter, 128 Bergman, Ingmar, 120, 121 Berlin, Irving, 189 Billy Budd (Melville), 166 Black, Max, 16–­17, 39–­40, 42, 44n3, 48n23 Booth, Wayne, 16, 19, 47n18, 48n20 Brahms, Johannes, 76 Bruckner, Anton, 191, 193 Brudney, Daniel, 122

caring, 78–­79, 194–­96, 198–­200. See also communities of appreciation Cat Ballou (Silverstein), 149 Cavell, Stanley: Austin’s influence on, xii; Emerson and, ix; on metaphor, 30, 42–­44; on Shakespearean influences on American film, 2, 13n6; on television, 140n1 ceramic art, 87–­90, 126–­27 Cervantes, Miguel de. See Don Quixote (Cervantes) Chabon, Michael, 186–­87, 190; The Amaz­ ing Adventures of  Kavalier and Clay, 186; Telegraph Avenue, 186–­87 character development, 136–­39 Chinatown (Polanski), 224 Christo, 68 Ciment, Michel, 134 Cohen, Leonard, 191, 193 Colgrass, Michael, 210n12 Collingwood, R. G., 75 Columbo (TV show), 132, 134–­3 7, 140n3 communities of appreciation, xvii, xviii–­ xix, 153–­54, 161–­67; artist included in, 166–­67; of fine art vs. popular art, 153, 167; indictment of television based on, 127–­28; shared feeling in, 91. See also caring; liking what’s better; taste complexity, as reason for preference, 156–­ 57, 161 Conrad, Joseph. See Heart of Darkness (Conrad) Coovadia, Imraan, xix Copland, Aaron, 180; “Fanfare for the Common Man,” 180 Coppola, Francis Ford. See Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola) Coppola, Sofia. See Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola) Cosby Show, The (TV show), 132 cricket, rules of, 215–­17, 218n2 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 140n3 crowdsourcing, xviii, xix Cukor, George. See Adam’s Rib (Cukor)

Cage, John, xxi, 68 Cagney and Lacey (TV show), 128, 131, 132 Candide (Voltaire), xiv, xviii

Danbolt, Mathias, 85, 86 David Copperfield (Dickens), 136, 137, 156, 186 Davidson, Donald, 18

234  inde x

“Dead, The” (Joyce), 20 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 183; Aristotle on tragedy, and, 177; Willy Loman in, 178–­79, 182–­83 deconstruction, and rules of pool, 212 de Man, Paul, 16, 19 Derrida, Jacques, xiv–­xv Descartes, René, 86 Dewey, John, x, xviii–­xix, 128 Dickens, Charles, xx. See also David Cop­ perfield (Dickens) difficulty: Aristotle on plot of tragedy and, 82n4; Arrau on expressive value of, 76; identifying the degree of, 74–­76; spectator’s appreciation of sports and, 66–­6 8, 72, 76–­77, 81n1, 82nn2–­3; virtuosity and, 70, 72, 75 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 161, 224 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 154, 164 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. See Crime and Pun­ ishment (Dostoyevsky) driving examination, xx, 105–­14 Dvořák, Antonín: Rusalka, 206–­7 early thought, xvi, xx Eastwood, Clint: Unforgiven, 164 Eliot, George, 183 Eliot, T. S.: anti-­Semitism in works of, 147; Ash Wednesday, 187–­88; “The Hollow Men,” 188; works making reference to, 124, 187–­88 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ix–­x, xvi Empson, William, 42 Erving, Julius, 72, 75 ethics. See morality “Ethics Class” (short story), 169–­74 eudaimonia, 177 Evans, Walker, 63 Falk, Peter, 135. See also Columbo (TV show) fan, sports, 76–­81, 194–­95, 196–­98, 199–­200; morality and, 77, 78–­81, 196–­98; negative aspect of, 197; racial identification of, 79 “Fanfare for the Common Man” (Copland), 180 Fellini, Federico, 74 fictional world, 175–­76, 178, 181, 182

film. See movies fine/high/serious art: American movies as, 12; ceramic and other marginal arts as, 89–­90; Conrad’s Kurtz as appreciator of, 193; Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as, 11, 122; popular art and, xiv–­xv, 153, 166–­67, 185–­90, 193; rules and, 90–­91; supposedly appreciated by few, 158. See also art Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 124 Ford, John, 121 Foucault, Michel, xv freedom: of artistic activity, 87, 90–­91, 92, 125; in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, xi; metaphor and, 220, 221–­24, 230; from rules, 220–­30 friendship: judging the morality of friends, 158; variability of, 191–­92 Gallant, Mavis, 124 gin, absolute, 201–­5; Aristotle and, 201–­2, 204–­5; Hume and, 202, 203, 205, 208n5; Kant and, 202, 203–­4, 205, 208n4, 209n6 Godfather movies, 137 Goldberg Variations, The (Bach), 154, 157 Golden Notebook, The (Lessing), 62–­63 Goodman, Nelson: communities of appreciation and, 164; Languages of Art, 17, 45n11; on metaphor, 17, 25n3, 29, 32, 35, 38–­39, 42, 45n11; photographic depiction and, 64n2; on simile, 42 Gould, Glenn, 154 Grant, Cary (as Roger Thornhill): becoming an American man, xi, 1–­2, 6, 7, 9–­10, 11, 13n6, 193; clothing of, 3–­4 , 5, 8, 11, 13n3; face of, viii, xi, 2, 4–­5; flight from United Nations building, 2–­3, 11–­1 2; movement between actor and role in discussion of, 135; undertaking action of his own, xxi, 5–­6, 8. See also North by Northwest (Hitchcock) Grossman, David, 181; To the End of the Land, 181 hamartia, 177 Hamlet (Shakespeare): clothing of Hamlet in, 3; North by Northwest and, 2, 5, 10, 11,

index  235

Hamlet (Shakespeare) (cont.) 122; play within a play in, 179; popularity of, 159 Handel, George Frideric: Solomon, 180 Hanson, Norwood Russell, xiii Harries, Karsten, 14, 19 Harry O (TV show), 132, 134 Hawks, Howard, 121 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 122, 138, 188, 193, 224 Heidegger, Martin, 172 Hemingway, Ernest, 124 high art. See fine/high/serious art Hill Street Blues (TV show), 128, 132, 138, 139 Hitchcock, Alfred: artistic value of movies of, 11, 121, 122; becoming an American, viii, x–­xi, 1, 12; difference between sus­ pense and mystery for, 134–­35; Rear Win­ dow directed by, 122. See also North by Northwest (Hitchcock) Hobbes, Thomas: on metaphor, 14–­15, 16, 18, 19 “Hollow Men, The” (T. S. Eliot), 188 Hotel Terminus (Ophuls), 134 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), xii, xiii Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 190 Hume, David: connoisseurs of gin and, 202, 203, 205; on natural responses, 149–­50; standard of taste and, xvii–­xviii, 208n3, 208n5 identification: with fictional characters, 83n13, 176, 178–­80, 181–­83; with players by sports fans, 77, 79, 83n13 illocutionary acts: literary works and, 47n18; metaphors and, 47n17 I Love Lucy (TV show), xx–­xxi intimacy: linguistic style and, 25n9; metaphor and, 20, 21–­22, 24–­25 Ishtar (May), 160, 186 James, Henry, xx, 182; The Beast in the Jun­gle, 182 James, William, x jokes, 142–­5 2; aesthetic communities and, 154; constraints on laughter and,

146–­50; cruel, 24; ethnic, 154; failure of, 142–­48, 150–­5 1, 229–­30; freedom and, 220, 230; inappropriate or skewed responses in, 151–­5 2; metaphors and, 22–­24; religion in, 151–­5 2, 225–­27; rules broken by, 220–­21, 224–­27, 229–­30 Joyce, James, 189; “The Dead,” 20 Kael, Pauline, 120 Kant, Immanuel: argument against lying, 174; on communities of taste, xviii; Cri­ t­ique of  Judgment and, 59, 208n3; and judgment of gin, 202, 203–­4, 205, 208n4, 209n6; metaphor and, 37, 179; on obligations categorical or hypothetical, 80–­81, 199; and preconception by artist, 59; on universality of judgments of art, 163 Keane, Marian, 11 Kerman, Joseph, 163–­64 Kertész, Imre, 164 King, Bernard, 72 King Lear (Shakespeare): audience’s identification with Lear, 178–­79; character development in, 137, 138; hopelessness of growing old in, 224; in movies vs. theater, 121; Shakespeare’s identification with Lear, 180 knowledge: Austin on, xii; metaphor and, 16, 17, 18, 19; value in art and, 18, 19, 86, 87 Koufax, Sandy, 69, 119 L.A. Law (TV show), 132, 138 language: Austin on, xii–­xiii, 40, 47n18, 144–­45; metaphor in theories of, 14; rules of, 220–­21, 222–­23, 228–­29; terms of inequality in, xiv language games, xiv “Language Games” (poem), 168 Languages of Art (Goodman), 17, 45n11 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 134 Las Meninas (Velázquez), xv–­xvi, xvii, 116 Lear, Gabriel, 176–­77 Lehman, Ernest, xi Lendl, Ivan, 75, 79, 81 Lessing, Doris, 62; The Golden Notebook, 62–­63

236  inde x

Lewis, David, 175 liking what’s better, xvii, 154–­55, 156–­57, 161. See also communities of appreciation Lincoln, Abraham, 156 Locke, John: on metaphor, 15–­16, 18, 19 logical empiricism, xii–­xiii Lolita (Nabokov), 124, 182, 187 Loman, Willy, 178–­79, 182–­83. See also Death of a Salesman (Miller) Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola), 162 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 222, 223 Mack, Maynard, 3 Magnum, P.I. (TV show), 132 Mahler, Gustav, xviii, 191, 193 Mamet, David, 178 market, taking over American culture, xi–­xii Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), 138, 156, 160, 163–­64, 180 Marx, Karl, xv M*A*S*H (TV show), 139 Max’s driving examination, xx, 105–­14 May, Elaine: Ishtar, 160, 186 McCarver, Tim, 219 McCovey, Willie, 77, 119 meaning: Austin on, xii, 40, 47n18; Wittgenstein on, xiii–­xiv. See also metaphor and meaning Melville, Herman, 166, 187, 189–­90; Billy Budd, 166; Moby Dick, 187, 189–­90 Merchant of  Venice, The (Shakespeare), 159 metaphor: ambiguity and, 28–­29, 38, 221–­22; Aristotle on, 37, 179, 228–­29; Beardsley on, 33–­34, 36, 39–­40; Black on, 16–­17, 39–­40, 42, 44n3, 48n23; Cavell on, 30, 42–­44; cognitive status of, 17, 19, 39; detecting and unpacking, 20–­21, 24, 25n8, 43; freedom and, 220, 221–­24, 230; Goodman on, 17, 25n3, 29, 32, 35, 38–­39, 42, 45n11; with hostile intent, 24; identification with fictional characters and, 176, 179, 181; inability to prove analysis of, 224; inexhaustibility of, 30–­3 1, 35; intimacy achieved through, 20, 21–­22, 24–­25; irony contrasted with, 41–­42; Kant and, 37, 179; as literally false, 27, 28, 33, 35–­36, 37–­38, 45n11, 228; literally

true (twice-­true), 35–­3 7, 38–­39, 43–­44; in literary works, 41, 47n18; meaning and (see metaphor and meaning); newfound respectability of, 14, 16–­17; philosophical seriousness denied to, 14–­ 16; poetic, 14, 48n19; Reddy on, 34–­3 5; requirement to grasp, 179, 181; rules of language and, 37, 220–­24, 228–­29; simile and, 42–­43; speech acts involving, 40–­ 41, 47nn17–­18; transformational grammar and, 34; truth and, 17, 19, 28, 35–­40, 43–­44, 48n23; two common theses about, 27, 37; as work of art, ix, 19 metaphor and meaning: change of meaning and, 27, 28–­30, 32–­33, 37, 39, 44; positivist denial of, 16; recent analytical philosophers and, 17; speech acts and, 40; theories of meaning and, 14, 18, 25n4 Miller, Arthur, 175. See also Death of a Salesman (Miller) Moby Dick (Melville), 187, 189–­90 Montaigne, Michel de, xviii morality: altruism and, xiv, 81; “Ethics Class” (short story), 169–­74; Hitchcock’s Rear Window and, 122; liking the better man and, 157–­58; sports fans and, 77, 78–­81, 196–­98; of telling father to stop driving, 111, 113 Mount Rushmore, viii, xi, 4–­5, 11 movies: as American art, xi, 12; appraisal of, 120–­22; character development on television and in, 136; movement be­ tween actor and role in discussions of, 135. See also Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola); Hitchcock, Alfred; North by Northwest (Hitchcock); Wings of Desire (Wenders) Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Don Giovanni, 161, 224; Marriage of Figaro, 138, 156, 160, 163–­64, 180 Murray, Bill, 162 music: absolute, 205–­8, 209n7; rhythm in, 207, 210n12 Nabokov, Vladimir, 124, 182, 187–­88; Lolita, 124, 182, 187 Nagel, Thomas, 84n14

index   237

natural or unnatural things, 116–­17, 149–­50 negative passions, 197 Nehamas, Alexander, 137–­38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, x, xv, xvi, xx; knowledge and, 86 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), viii, x–­xi, xii, xxi, 1–­13; Hamlet and, 2, 5, 10, 11, 122; liked by different people for different reasons, 163, 164, 193; Mount Rushmore in, viii, xi, 4–­5, 11; overhead shot at United Nations, 2–­3, 11–­1 2; passive viewer of, 124. See also Grant, Cary (as Roger Thornhill) Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 138 Oldenburg, Claes, 68 O’Neill, Eugene, 178 Ophuls, Marcel, 134, 135; Hotel Terminus, 134; The Sorrow and the Pity, 134 Pappas, Nickolas, 177 Peirce, Charles Sanders, x, xvi philosophy of art: attempts to compare works in, 156–­57; inability to prove some things in, 224; seriousness and, 115–­17 photography, 49–­65; as art, 49–­50, 56, 58, 60, 61–­63; invalid arguments in literature on, 49–­5 1; as mechanical or automatic, 49–­50, 57–­61, 65n5; personal meaning of, 63; relation to the world, 51–­56, 57, 58–­59, 60 Pinsky, Robert, 164 Plato: devaluation of art by, 18, 19, 85–­86; on meaning of “the sun,” 31, 44n3 poetic metaphors, 14, 48n19 Polanski, Roman: Chinatown, 224 Polish jokes, 154 pool, rules of, 211–­13 popular art: community of appreciation of, 153, 167; fine art and, xiv–­xv, 153, 166–­67, 185–­90, 193; as opportunity for discovery, 160–­61. See also television positivism, twentieth-­century: claims of relative value and, 156; metaphors disparaged in, 14, 16; philosophy of language and, xiii, 17

Presley, Elvis, 157 Prokofiev, Sergei: Alexander Nevsky, 206, 210n11 Quine, W. V. O., xiii racial identification of sports fan, 79 Rear Window (Hitchcock), 122 Redbone, Leon, 164 Reddy, Michael, 34–­3 5 rhythm, 207, 210n12 Rich, Buddy, 67 Ricoeur, Paul, 14, 18, 19 Roach, Max, 210n12 Rockford Files, The (TV show), 132 Roth, Philip, xix Rothman, William, 1, 6 rules: of baseball, xix, 93–­104, 214–­15, 218nn2–­3; of cricket, 215–­17, 218n2; deep facts of life related to, 217–­18; essential character of, 220–­21; free­dom from, 220–­30; grandfather’s driving examination and, xix–­xx, 112–­13; jokes and, 220–­21, 224–­27, 229–­30; Kant on genius and, 37; of language, 220–­21, 222–­23, 228–­29; metaphor and, 37, 220–­ 24, 228–­29; of pool, 211–­13; serious art and, 90–­91 Rusalka (Dvořák), 206–­7 Santo, Ron, 129–­30 Schoenberg, Arnold, 206 Schubert piano trios, 164 science, in relation to art, 86, 87, 92 Scruton, Roger, 64n2 serious art. See fine/high/serious art serious lark, 99 seriousness: philosophy of art and, xv–­xvi, 115–­17; of television, xx Sesonske, Alexander, 121 Shakespeare, William: Mark Twain’s references to, 190; tragic heroes of, 175, 178–­ 80, 183. See also Hamlet (Shakespeare); King Lear (Shakespeare); Macbeth (Shakespeare); Merchant of  Venice, The (Shakespeare) Shoah (Lanzmann), 134

238  inde x

Silverstein, Elliot. See Cat Ballou (Silverstein) simile, 42–­43 Simpsons, The (TV show), 154 Siskel and Ebert, 120 Snyder, Joel, xvii, 51, 63, 65n3 soap operas, 132, 133–­34 Solomon (Handel), 180 Song of Songs (Song of Solomon), 223–­24 Sontag, Susan, 60 Sophocles. See Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) Sorrow and the Pity, The (Ophuls), 134 speech acts involving metaphors, 40–­41, 47nn17–­18 sports: difficulty in, 66–­6 8, 72, 76–­77, 81n1, 82nn2–­3; morality and, 77, 78–­81, 196–­ 98; rules of, xix, 93–­104, 211–­19. See also appreciation of sports; baseball; fan, sports St. Elsewhere (TV show), 132, 138 Strier, Richard, 140n3 Sutherland, Donald, 74 Tarantino, Quentin, 187 taste: Hume and evaluation of gin, 202, 203, 208n3; Hume on, xvii–­xviii; liking better things and, 155; study of people and, xviii. See also appreciation of art; appreciation of sports; appreciation of television; communities of appreciation Telegraph Avenue (Chabon), 186–­87 television: Columbo as program in, 132; Columbo as character in, 134–­3 7, 140n3; comfort in predictability of stories in, xx–­xxi; common denigrations of, 123–­25, 127–­28; exploitation of temporal sequences in, 139; formats in, 131–­33, 140n1; movies and, xx, 122, 136; not knowing what it is, 120, 122–­23, 138–­39; seriousness of, xx Tocqueville, Alexis de, 7 Tolstoy, Leo. See Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

Tormey, Alan, 164 To the End of the Land (Grossman), 181 tragedy: Aristotle on, 82n4, 133, 176–­78, 202; identifying with hero of, 178–­79; ordinary man as hero of, 178 (see also Death of a Salesman [Miller]); Shakespeare’s heroes and, 175, 178–­80, 183 (see also Hamlet [Shakespeare]; King Lear [Shakespeare]; Macbeth [Shakespeare]) Truffaut, François, 134 truth: Austin on language and, xii; meta­ phor and, 17, 19, 28, 35–­40, 43–­44, 48n23; Thornhill’s discovery about, xi Twain, Mark, ix, 190; Huckleberry Finn, 190 Unforgiven (Eastwood), 164 Updike, John, 124, 169 Urmson, J. O., 72–­74 useful art, 88–­89, 126–­27 value: of art, 87; Dewey on, xviii–­xix. See also taste Varèse, Edgard, 210n12 Velázquez, Diego. See Las Meninas (Velázquez) virtuosity, xiv, 70, 72, 75 Voltaire: Candide, xiv, xviii Wagner, Richard: anti-­Semitism of, 147 Walton, Kendall, 52–­5 3, 55, 64n2 Warhol, Andy, 68, 88 Wayne, John, 121 Wenders, Wim, 135, 136, 140n3; Wings of Desire, 135–­36 West Wing, The (TV show), 160–­61 Wings of Desire (Wenders), 135–­36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiii–­xiv, xvi; joke gone wrong and, 144 Yeats, W. B., 172 Yehoshua, A. B., 181

index   239