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VOLUME
LIX, No. 18
AUGUST
30, 1962
IF
giving reasons for an assertion consists in making other assertions and also asserting that they support it, then critics evidently give reasons for their judgments of art. To doubt this is
to urge a stricter concept of reason-giving, according to which
not every proposition that is alleged to be a reason actually is one.
But then, using the narrower definition, we can still say that
critics wish to give reasons, and think they are doing so, whether
or not they succeed. Whichever way we put it, the critic implicitly makes the same essential claim: namely, that his judgments
can be supported in some way by other propositions.
This claim is challenged by the Critical Skeptic. The form
of his challenge depends on the latitude given to the term 'reason',
but its substance is the same. A few years ago, a colleague of
mine and I engaged in correspondence with an English gentleman,
author of a monograph entitled Shakespeare's Hyphens,' who
pointed out to us that Shakespeare used a great many hyphenated
words and that this practice was also followed by Walt Whitman
and Dylan Thomas. Our correspondent argued at one point:
the more hyphens, the greater the poet. Now, suppose a critic
were to propose the following: This poem is poor, because it is
deficient in hyphens. We may choose to say that this is not a
reason at all, because it is so wildly irrelevant; in this sense of
"reason," the skeptic's position is that no reasons can be given
for critical judgments. On the other hand, we may take a more
charitable view, and call this a reason simply because it is offered
as one; in this broad sense, the skeptic's position is that no good,
or cogent, reasons can be given for critical judgments.
The critical skeptic may remind us of Wordsworth's assurance,
in his 1800 Preface, that he was not "principally influenced by the
selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him [i.e., the reader] into an
approbation of these particular Poems." 2 Now this was a some* This paper was presented at the Northwest Division of the American
Society for Aesthetics, Washington State University, April 20-21, 1962.
1 L. C. Thompson, Shakespeare's Hyphens
(London: Amalgamated
Authors).
2 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), vol. X, p. 5.
477
478
The Well Wrought Um (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 229.
479
of its parts-but one that has received some attention in the past
few years.
To pass over a number of preliminary matters, let me first say
that I hold that the critic does make value judgments and does
sometimes adequately support them by good reasons. A reason is
some descriptive or interpretive proposition about the work under
consideration-" The poem is incoherent," for example. Thus a
reason always cites some property of the work, and we may say
that this property is then employed as a criterion of value by the
critic who presents that reason. Criteria cited in reasons supporting favorable judgments are merits; criteria cited on behalf
of unfavorable judgments are defects. If the critic says, "This
poem is poor because (among other things) is it incoherent," then
he is treating incoherence as a poetic defect. A critical criterion
is thus a feature that helps to make the work good or bad, better
or worse; it adds to or detracts from its aesthetic goodness.
This is the position that the skeptic rejects. He holds that, in
the sense proposed, there are no criteria of aesthetic value, that is,
of goodness or badness in poems, paintings, plays, music, etc.
Some skeptics like to invoke John Wisdom's distinction, in another
context, between what he called "dull" and "interesting" ways of
talking about art. A book about art, says Wisdom, "is dull when
it tries to set out in general terms what makes a good picture good'"
by giving "rules"' or "canons."'
This, by itself, is something of
an obiter dictum, but it can be given plausible and perhaps rather
convincing support.
If one proposition is a reason for another, in the sense of actually supporting it, then there must be a logical connection of some
sort between them. And, being a logical connection, it must relate
general concepts in an abstract way. Thus, for example, if a
certain degree of sharpness is a merit in knives (we can think of
a particular sort of knife, such as the butcher's), then to say that
a knife has that degree of sharpness must always be a reason to
support the conclusion that it is good, and it must apply to all
knives of the relevant sort. This reason may not be enough to
prove that the knife is good, since the merit may be outweighed
by serious defects, but sharpness to that degree will always make
its contribution to the goodness of the knife. It will, at least,
never be a fault in a knife: that is, we cannot say, "That knife
is poor, just because it is exactly that sharp." And, of two knives
similar in all other respects, if one is sharp and the other is not,
the former will be a better knife than the other. Thus sharpness
is a general merit in knives.
4 See his paper in the symposium on "Things and Persons,"
of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement, 22 (1948): 207.
Proceedings
480
Mind, 67 (1958):
481
482
483
484
of Brooks's criteria-'-"sensitivity"
and "tough-mindedness":
poems that excel in one of these are perhaps not likely to excel in
the other.
The third argument is also Mr. Kennick's-and this time he
belongs to a larger company.12 What if there are features that are
merits in some works, but not merits at all in other works? Take
realism, Mr. Kennick suggests: sometimes it is a merit, sometimes
not. But this does not tell against the General Criterion Theory
if we complicate the theory in an easy and convenient way.
There are features of poems, and there are pairs and clusters of
features. And some contribute value, so to speak, on their own,
while others do so only in combination. This principle has an
application in many walks of life, as G. E. Moore pointed out some
time ago. It's like saying that you don't want butter without
bread, or bread without butter, but only the two together. We can
say that bread is not desirable, and butter is not desirable, but
bread-and-butter is desirable; or we can say that butter is sometimes desirable (namely, when there's bread) and sometimes not
(namely, when there isn't).
Thus we should not be surprised to find specific features that
may be good in one poem but neutral in another: their goodness
depends upon association with other cooperative features. Mr.
Kennick's example, realism, is a broad notion, so it's not clear
exactly what sort of judgment he has in mind when he says that
"Realism is not always a virtue." In some of its senses, I'm
not sure that realism is ever a strictly literary virtue (or, as I
would prefer to say, merit-Mr. Kennick's moralistic terms 'virtue'
and 'blameworthy' do not seem to me appropriate to the eritical
context). But a critic might justifiably cite an author's discriminating ear for four-letter words as a merit in, say, Tropic of
Cancer, where certain types of situation and character are present,
though he would not, of course, wish to say that their introduction
would improve The Wings of the Dove or The Mill on the Floss.
III
The fourth argument against the General Criterion Theory
takes us a little beyond the third-though, in fact, the examples
I have just given would serve for it as well. Suppose there are
features that are merits in one work and actually defects in another. The touch of humor that is just right in one play is just
12 For example, Helen Knight, "The Use of 'Good' in Aesthetic Judgments," in William Elton, ed., op. cit., pp. 155-156; J. A. Passmore, "The
Dreariness of Aesthetics," ibid., 49, 51-52; J. Kemp, "Generalization in the
Philosophy of Art, " Philosophy, 33 (1958): 152.
485
486
Some good paintings are somewhat disorganized; they are good in spite of
the fact that they are somewhat disorganized. But no painting is good
because it is disorganized, and many are bad primarily because they are disorganized.13
13 "Reasons in Criticism," in Israel Scheffler, ed., Philosophy and Eduration (Boston: Allvn and Bacon, 1958), p. 220.
* "Could Mental States be Brain Processes I," this JOURNAL, 58 (1961),
26: 813. Unless otherwise noted, all page references will be to this article.