Book Reviews
ricoeur, paul. On Translation. Trans. Eileen Bren-
nan. New York: Routledge, 2006, 72 pp., $95.00
cloth, $17.95 paper.
sallis, john. On Translation. Indiana University
Press, 2002, xii + 125 pp., 2 b&w illus., $42.95 cloth,
$19.95 paper.
Surely, if we do it, it can be done. And we do make
translations, but some philosophers have asked how
it could be possible for anyone to do so (Ricoeur,
pp. 14–15, 32–33; Sallis, pp. 1–20). Wiser heads, includ-
ing our two authors, have asked better questions—
what translations are, and how they may be evalu-
ated. John Sallis is especially good at raising the broad
question about what translation is (pp. 23 ff. and pas-
sim); Paul Ricoeur explicitly turns his back on the “is
it possible” question in favor of issues of fidelity and
betrayal (pp. 18, 32–33).
I have done translations, both poetry and prose, for
over thirty years, and I remain puzzled about what it
is I am doing when I make a home for a Greek, Latin,
or Chinese poem in the English idiom that I speak.
And although I know that hard work makes a trans-
lation better, I cannot put my finger on a criterion of
excellence for translation. Ricoeur is clear that there
can be no such criterion (p. 22); Sallis is critical of
philosophers who have insisted on a criterion he calls
the “restitution of meaning” (pp. 83–85).
It would be easy enough to explain what transla-
tion is and how to evaluate it if we could believe in
the classical model, according to which there is a ter-
tium quid between the donor and the receiver text—a
set of meanings that determined the text for its au-
thor and will determine the new text equally well for
the translator. But, as both of our authors show, this
model is dead.
The classic model is dead not merely because
twentieth-century philosophy rejected its central
idea—that there are meanings outside of language,
hovering like souls waiting to be born, available to
be meant by us when we find the right words in one
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:2 Spring 2008


c 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics
language or another. Sad to say, however, it is always
too soon to pronounce the death of a bad idea, and I
fear that this one shows signs of life.
We may pronounce the classic model dead for an-
other reason: speakers and writers choose words not
only for their meanings, but for their resonance with
other words, their history in their home language, as
well as for their sound and rhythm. Moreover, in both
speaking and writing, we arrange words in such a way
that a given word may have a unique job in a certain
sentence; and we arrange sentences so that the same
string of words in one text may work differently in
another. This is no less true in prose than in poetry.
Word order, rhythm, assonance, and the resonance
of etymology may be important in either prose or po-
etry, and none of these carry from one language to
another. For example, we have nothing in a Euro-
pean language to capture the semantic and rhythmic
effect of repeated syllables in Chinese, while classical
Chinese lacks the polysyllabic material needed for
European meters.
Doubling characters shifts meaning in classical
Chinese. Li Qingzhao (1084–1151?) constructs a
poem expressing grief almost entirely from doublets.
The characters for ‘search, search’ may be rendered
“Search as I may,” with less intensity than the Chi-
nese, but the relentlessness of the doublets cannot be
made good English. The poem ends, resolving into
one sad word: “And here is the dusk, yellowing, drop
by drop./ This, this on top of this: /how could one sin-
gle word, sorrow, be the end?” (unpublished trans-
lation by Liu Xiusheng and Paul Woodruff). Com-
pare Kenneth Rexroth’s version, which begins with
the doublets (“Search. Search. Seek. Seek.”), treat-
ing each instance of a word as semantically com-
plete (Love and the Turning Year; One Hundred
More Poems from the Chinese [New Directions, 1970],
p. 91).
Poetry is supposed to be a special case—harder
than prose to translate, perhaps even impossible.
Sallis’s discussion of the history of the idea that poetry
is untranslatable is astute and fairly comprehensive
198
(pp. 80–85). Catullus’s brilliant version of Sappho’s
most wrenching poem (my example—Catullus 51,
Sappho 31) has been good enough to light fires in
generations of Latin students, but those who were re-
ally excited by Sappho through Catullus went on to
learn Greek. The fire came through the translation,
but the excited students wanted more. Perhaps there
is a mysterious essence in a poem that always refuses
to be at home in an alien language. Actually, there is
no mystery here; languages and the cultures in which
they live diverge too widely for any translation, po-
etry or prose, to be completely satisfactory to one
who knows the original.
Still, translations can be superb, especially of po-
etry. Hegel got it partly right (Sallis, p. 80, n. 41).
Poetry does come across from one language to an-
other more powerfully than prose. This is partly be-
cause poetry goes to the human truths that we know
in our hearts: Catullus kindled Sappho’s fire in us
through his Latin version. But poetry crosses lan-
guages better than prose also because of a reason
Hegel missed. He thought poems could be readily
translated as prose, but poets have more tools than
prose writers. In translating a poem into English I can
use any device of English poetry that works, but most
poetic devices are denied to me when I am translating
prose.
Absent the classical model, we have no criterion
for success in translation, but we can judge transla-
tions nonetheless, as Sallis repeatedly illustrates. He
uses Schlegel’s German version of Shakespeare to il-
lustrate both what is gained and what is lost in trans-
lation, and he uses a recent translation of Plato to
show how much better one English version can be
than another. For example, pharmakon, in most En-
glish versions of the opening of the Phaedo, comes
into English without the connotations it has in Greek
of a drug that may heal, or charm, or kill, depending.
But a recent version (translated by Eva Brann, Peter
Kalkavage, and Eric Salem [Focus, 1998]) gets it as
right as can be done, as ‘potion’ (Sallis, p. 77).
Sallis neglects to point out that different transla-
tions may be equally good, but for different purposes.
An acting version of Antigone is one thing, a line- for-
line “trot” is another. The first brings an audience as
close as they can come to the ancient play in per-
formance; the other helps students understand the
syntax of the text. B. Jowett’s elegant Plato captures
the urbanity of the author’s style but betrays his ar-
guments, while G. M. A. Grube’s plodding versions
get the arguments straight but betray Plato’s bright
and varied stylistic palette. We do not have a single
purpose for translating, and so we cannot have one
standard for evaluating translations. A good transla-
tion does not veer from one purpose to another, but
coherently pursues a single aim or set of aims, and
does so with some measure of success.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
So far, I have been writing about translation of
texts from one language to another, but, as Sallis
shows, that is only one kind of translation (and not
even the “proper” kind, pace Jacobson [Sallis, pp. 46–
47]). Metaphor is a kind of translation, as it moves
our thought from one thing to another. This should
be no surprise: ‘metaphor’ is derived from the Greek
from which ‘translation’ comes (“a carrying across”).
There is also movement within a language, between
synonyms and puns. So in Shakespeare’s A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream we are taken from a weaver’s
frame, ‘bottom,’ to the proper name of a weaver,
and from there to the human posterior, ‘ass.’ Then
there is the parallel movement between the weaver
named Bottom and the creature with a human body
and an ass’s head into which he is translated for a
while. There are also all the movements that occur in
representational drama, as when an actor takes the
part of a lion, or a lantern is presented as the moon.
What most of us would call mimesis, Sallis shows to
be a form of translation. His discussion of A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream is elegant; Sallis’s book is worth
reading for this alone.
Almost thirty years ago I asked O. K. Bouwsma
about translation. If meaning is use (as he, a follower
of Wittgenstein, believed), and if use is indigenous
to a language, how can translation be possible? His
answer, after much discussion, was that translating a
text is like performing a song. The singer translates
from one medium to another, from a script to mu-
sic. Surely, he said, if a singer can do that, you can
translate Plato, performing a Greek text in English.
In fact, as Sallis shows in a frustratingly brief chap-
ter, translation from one artistic medium to another
is very difficult. And yet artists do this often. A poem
may translate a painting (think of W. H. Auden’s
“Musée de Beaux Arts,” which translates Brueghel’s
painting Icarus) or a painting may translate a myth.
Sallis’s main example is a painter who defies trans-
lation into words, but I wish he had dealt with the
rich tradition of attempts at translation between lit-
erature and the visual arts, especially lively in France
in the nineteenth century, or in Chinese landscape
painting-with-poetry. Music of course is often com-
posed to carry a poem, libretto, or other text into
song, and a few fine writers have translated music
into prose (think of Thomas Mann in Dr. Faustus).
Ricoeur’s book is a collection of three lectures
published in France after his death and recently
translated. They are a delight to read, fluent, witty,
and deeply thoughtful about their subject. Ricoeur’s
central idea is of “linguistic hospitality.” Out of
the mourning for the failure of “absolute transla-
tion” comes “the happiness associated with trans-
lating.” The hospitality goes both ways: “Linguistic
hospitality, then, [is] where the pleasure of dwelling
in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure
Book Reviews
of receiving the foreign words at home, in one’s own
welcoming house” (p. 10).
That is how it feels. Ricoeur understands the phe-
nomenology of translation, which begins in fear:
“Everything transpires as though in the initial fright,
in what is sometimes the anguish of beginning, the
foreign text towers up like a lifeless block of resis-
tance to translation” (p. 5). Part of the resistance, as
Ricoeur aptly points out, is due to the capacity of lan-
guage to “keep its secrets”: “language’s propensity
for enigma, for abstruseness, for the secret, in fact,
for non-communication” (p. 28). When a text keeps
its secrets, what is a poor translator to do? Ricoeur
does not say, but the scholar’s answer is the footnote
pointing out the enigma and the scope of possible
solutions.
Sallis’s book is a work of philosophy informed by
an interest in theater and art. The author’s strengths
are in German and Greek philosophy, and he uses
these strengths to good advantage. While Ricoeur
gives us at least the name for a theory of his own—
linguistic hospitality—Sallis wisely avoids a formal
theory, considering instead the wide range of forms
that translation can take and the many ways in which
translations can go well or badly. He plays much
on the importance of imagination in what I would
call mimesis—putting this in place of that, for those
who are willing to free their minds from the literal.
That freedom is the only ground on which transla-
tions can grow; there are no literal translations, and
no place in translators’ heaven for wordsmiths with-
out imagination.
PAUL WOODRUFF
Department of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin
gaut, berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2007, viii + 269 pp., 3 b&w illus., $70.00
cloth.
Berys Gaut is one of the most influential proponents
of the idea that the ethical value of artworks is a cen-
tral part of their aesthetic value. More precisely, he
is the proponent of ethicism, the view that artworks
are aesthetically flawed insofar as they possess a rel-
evant ethical flaw, and that such works have aesthetic
merit insofar as they possess a relevant ethical merit.
Art, Emotion and Ethics is his most thorough expli-
cation and defense of ethicism, indeed as thorough a
working out of this view as anyone could ask for.
The book methodically develops and defends ethi-
cism. Chapter 1 distinguishes various issues having
to do with the ethical evaluation of art. Such evalu-
ations can focus on the manner in which works are
produced, their effects on individuals or society, or
199
on features intrinsic to them. Officially, Gaut is only
interested in the latter, and in particular only in the
ethical attitudes manifested in a work. Chapter 2 at-
tempts to fix the content of concepts of the aesthetic
and the ethical. There is considerable variation on
what is understood by these notions. Gaut would go
further in claiming that there is a great deal of unclar-
ity about their content. However, if the ethicist thesis
is going to be interesting, we need a nonarbitrary,
relatively clear understanding of these concepts that
play such a crucial role in the formulation of the the-
sis. Gaut’s proposal about aesthetic value is roughly
that it is coextensive with artistic value. Aesthetic
properties are those that are constitutive of the value
of artworks qua artworks. The ethical, most broadly
conceived, concerns the domain of character excel-
lences and deficiencies.
Chapter 3 concerns another conceptual issue: a
perspicuous identification of alternative positions
about the contribution of ethical value to aes-
thetic value. Ethicism says that some moral merits
(defects)—the intrinsic, relevant ones—are aesthetic
merits (defects). These moral merits are never aes-
thetic defects, and similarly for the moral defects: they
are never aesthetic merits. Contextualists agree that
a moral merit may be irrelevant to aesthetic merit,
or it may be an aesthetic merit, but they also claim
that it may be an aesthetic defect. Similarly for moral
defects. It all depends on context. Autonomists deny
that moral merits and defects are ever aesthetic mer-
its or defects. They are always irrelevant to aesthetic
value. Ethicism, contextualism, and autonomism ex-
haust the field. Some terminology that has become
standard—‘moderate moralism’ and ‘immoralism’—
now gets eliminated. The moderate moralist says that
moral merits (defects) are sometimes aesthetic merits
(defects). Depending on how the claim is developed,
it becomes either ethicism or contextualism in Gaut’s
terminology. It becomes a version of contextualism,
for example, if it adds that ethical merits can also
sometimes be aesthetic defects. The immoralist, who
believes that moral defects are sometimes aesthetic
merits, is also a contextualist.
The rest that matters most is argument. Chapter 4
critiques autonomism. Three arguments are given for
ethicism: the moral beauty argument (Chapter 6), the
cognitive argument (Chapters 7, 8), and the merited
response argument (Chapter 10). Surprisingly there
is no sustained critique of contextualism—the most
plausible rival to Gaut’s view—though contextual-
ist analyses are parried in the chapters arguing for
ethicism.
Gaut’s conceptual analysis is illuminating and his
arguments, almost always clearly stated, are often
convincing. The criticism I now offer of both anal-
ysis and argument should not bring into doubt the
high quality of both.
200
First, it is unwise for a proponent of ethicism to
exclusively focus on intrinsic ethical value of works,
and within the realm of intrinsic ethical value, only on
the value of attitudes manifested in a work. There is
an intimate relationship between intrinsic ethical fea-
tures of works and certain types of effects these works
have on readers. The whole thrust of the cognitive ar-
gument for ethicism, for example, relies on such a
relationship. Its main theses are that some artworks
have a capacity to teach us and this is an aesthetic
merit in works. Such a capacity is necessarily tied to
actual effects on its audience. Notice too that if we do
agree that artworks have a capacity to teach, it is un-
likely that this is just a matter of the ethical attitudes a
work manifests. Rather it would also involve the skill,
originality, subtlety, detail, and sensitivity with which
it explores topics of ethical significance. Sometimes
artists do not manifest a clear attitude to a charac-
ter or an issue but nevertheless explore it in some
of the admirable ways just mentioned, leaving us to
make up our own minds. Gaut implicitly recognizes
the importance of exploration in his fine discussion
of some artworks such as Nabokov’s Lolita, but not
in his official position on intrinsic ethical value.
Next, his proposal about the nature of aesthetic
value is ill chosen. Recall that, for Gaut, the aesthetic
value of an artwork is simply its artistic value. This
means that several serious debates in the philosophy
of art become nonsense, such as, Are there concep-
tual artworks that are valuable as art even though
they are not aesthetically valuable? That question
becomes, Are there conceptual works that are valu-
able as art even though they are not valuable as art?
It would also make no sense to assert that cognitive
value or art historical value is a source of artistic value
distinct from aesthetic value, or that aesthetic value
is the most significant source of artistic value. Tra-
ditionally, that is, from the eighteenth century on,
aesthetic value has been tied to a type of valuable
experience but not to one particular source of expe-
rience such as art or nature. That is why the issues just
mentioned make sense. Gaut too quickly opts for the
reductive conception of the aesthetic he ultimately
proposes.
Gaut’s reconceptualization of the possible views
to be taken about the ethical evaluation of art—
ethicism, contextualism, and autonomism—has real
virtues such as simplicity and clarity. Unfortunately,
there is one issue that almost completely loses
salience with the new classification. All the views are
sorted by the stance they take about aesthetically rel-
evant intrinsic ethical features. According to Gaut, an
intrinsic ethical feature of a work is aesthetically rele-
vant if it makes a difference—positive or negative—
to its artistic value. Could there be intrinsic ethical
features such as the manifestation of ethically evalu-
able attitudes through artistic means that are relevant
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
to the artistic value of some works, but not to others?
One can answer yes or no and still be an ethicist on
Gaut’s current definition. Because of this, the ques-
tion could seem an unimportant one and indeed is
ignored by Gaut. But it was in fact the nerve of the
debate between what used to be called ethicism and
moderate moralism. I suspect Gaut would still want
to answer it no, while some who fancy themselves
moderate moralists would answer yes. So it would
be unfortunate if the new classification led us to lose
sight of the question.
Of the arguments Gaut presents for ethicism in
Art, Emotion and Ethics, the one that is new is the
moral beauty argument. For that reason, it will be
the main focus here. The argument goes as follows: If
a character trait is a virtue, it is also beautiful. If a trait
is beautiful, it has positive aesthetic value. Artworks
that have intrinsic ethical merits manifest virtuous
character traits. Hence they manifest beautiful traits.
Therefore the ethical merits of these works are also
aesthetic merits.
The premise that screams out for attention is the
first—call it the moral beauty claim. Why should we
believe this claim? Gaut’s only argument for it is that
philosophers as well as ordinary folk sometimes talk
of virtuous character traits as beautiful. That is a very
weak argument. Should we take this talk as ascrib-
ing an aesthetic property to these traits or should
we take it more loosely as a way of praising them
without a commitment to their possessing any fur-
ther qualities? Without a more substantive reason
for the moral beauty claim, it is an open question.
(Gaut interprets this question as asking whether we
should take the talk literally or metaphorically, but
that misinterprets the issue. One does not have to
claim that the talk is metaphorical to claim it is loose.)
A good reason to believe the first premise would
show that virtuous character traits have other proper-
ties that are characteristic of beautiful things. Think
of beautiful proofs. A proof already possesses intel-
lectual virtue in being valid, sound, establishing the
truth of its conclusion, and so forth. But not every
proof is beautiful. For that it needs more specific aes-
thetic qualities such as elegance, or a stark clarity. The
same goes for beautiful natural objects and beautiful
artworks. Their beauty will always be explicable to
a degree by appeal to more specific aesthetic qual-
ities that make things beautiful. Do morally virtu-
ous traits possess lower-level aesthetic qualities of a
kind that makes things beautiful? Gaut never asks,
but it is extremely implausible these traits invari-
ably do, any more than proofs invariably have such
qualities. Hence the moral beauty claim, and the ar-
gument on which it is based, is also implausible. If
there is an argument to be made here, it should fo-
cus on specific ways such traits might be realized in
people.
Book Reviews
Fortunately for ethicism, Gaut presents two other
arguments for ethicism that have been presented in
earlier publications, but which are most fully devel-
oped here. These have much greater plausibility. That
artworks enlarge our understanding of ethical issues,
and that this is an artistic merit in those works (the
cognitive argument), strikes me as very plausible.
That works do not always merit the responses they
prescribe in virtue of a moral flaw, and that this is an
artistic defect (the merited response argument), is a
trickier conclusion to justify, but I believe it can also
be made to work. Whether one agrees or not, Art,
Emotion and Ethics is essential reading for anyone
grappling with the ethical evaluation of art.
ROBERT STECKER
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Central Michigan University
dodd, julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology.
Oxford University Press, 2007, xi + 286 pp., $65.00
cloth.
With Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology, Julian
Dodd attempts to return us, or at least those of us
interested in the fundamental metaphysical nature
of musical works, to a simpler age—the time before
historical contextualism secured its grip on the ma-
jority of philosophers of art, when musical ontology
retained “its rightful place at the core of the ana-
lytic metaphysical tradition” (p. 4). Dodd defends
what he calls the “simple view” of musical ontol-
ogy, whereby musical works are norm-types of sound-
structure event. According to this view, musical works
are eternal, unstructured, unchanging, modally in-
flexible, abstract entities. In lay terms, that is, all mu-
sical works have existed forever, and thus cannot be
created, but only discovered; they have no parts; they
cannot be altered in any way, such as by revision;
nor could they have been any different than they in
fact are. Further, a work is instanced whenever there
is a sound event of the type the work specifies (or
a sound event close enough, since these are norm-
types), whether that event be an intentional perfor-
mance of a score, the result of a kitten on the keys of
a piano, or the wind whistling through a Precambrian
canyon. The simplicity of this view clearly does not
reside in its accord with our pretheoretical intuitions,
since before turning to philosophy, we tend to think
that all these claims about musical works are false.
But Dodd rightly points out that we always have to
give up some intuitions to achieve a respectable philo-
sophical theory. If that were not the case, there would
be no philosophical issue.
Dodd begins his book, however, with the one in-
tuition he does not need to give up for his theory:
201
that musical works are repeatable (Chapter 1). That
is, you can hear one and the same work, in its entirety,
in several distinct performances. All nontype ontolo-
gies of musical works (nominalist, action-theory, con-
tinuant, and so on) require us to give up, or at least
paraphrase away, that intuition. If musical works are
types, however, the relation between works and per-
formances “turns out to be just one more example
of the familiar relation that holds, for instance, be-
tween the word ‘table’ and its token inscriptions and
utterances” (p. 11), namely, the type–token relation.
In Dodd’s view, this establishes the type–token the-
ory as the default position in musical ontology, to be
given up only in the face of incoherence.
There are many versions of type–token theory on
the market, however, several of which do not have
such unintuitive consequences as works’ uncreatabil-
ity. Thus, Dodd devotes his next four chapters (2–5;
pp. 37–142) to a defense of a certain conception of
types. Most of this discussion would certainly feel at
home at the “core of the analytic metaphysical tradi-
tion”: most of the arguments concern such matters as
the nature of properties, the relations that hold be-
tween a property and a type, the nature of abstract
entities, and so on. There is also discussion of musi-
cal discourse and practice, in part because this is the
focus of much of the literature with which Dodd en-
gages, but usually his goal with respect to this dis-
course is to paraphrase away our ordinary claims
about musical works. Rather than say that musical
works are creatable, we can say that they are dis-
covered creatively. Rather than say that Beethoven
might have created his Fifth Symphony with a slightly
different development section, or that Stravinsky re-
vised his Firebird, we can say that Beethoven might
have discovered a slightly different work, and that
Stravinsky discovered two works that are quite sim-
ilar. The benefit of these paraphrases is a meta-
physically respectable musical ontology, according
to Dodd. Alternative type-ontologies, such as Jer-
rold Levinson’s theory of indicated sound structures,
avoid the necessity of some of these paraphrases,
but only at the cost of an obscure or incoherent
metaphysics. In Chapters 6 and 7, Dodd defends his
view in similar ways against the recent art-ontological
views of Guy Rohrbaugh, Gregory Currie, and David
Davies.
Dodd describes his project thus far as answering
the first of two questions any ontology of musical
works must address: the categorial question of the
kind of thing a musical work is. In the last two chapters
of the book, he addresses the other question: that of
how musical works are to be individuated. His answer
is “timbral sonicism”: the view that works are to be in-
dividuated on the basis of the sonic properties of their
instances, including timbral properties. In Chapter 8,
Dodd distinguishes this view from “pure sonicism,”
202
on the one hand, according to which works are in-
dividuated more roughly, with respect to the notes
they contain, but not the timbres of those notes (so
that a piano sonata might be successfully performed
by either a pianist or an orchestra), and “instrumen-
talism,” on the other, according to which works are
individuated more finely, with respect to not just their
timbral and other sonic properties, but also how those
sounds are produced. Thus he differs from the in-
strumentalist in holding that a piano sonata might
be equally successfully performed on a “perfect tim-
bral synthesizer” or a Steinway grand. In Chapter 9,
Dodd distinguishes timbral sonicism from “contextu-
alism,” according to which works are to be individu-
ated not only on the basis of their sonic properties,
but also by some features of their context of com-
position, so that, for instance, two composers man-
dating the same sounds in different musico-historical
settings are properly said to be composing the same
work, rather than two distinct works that share a sonic
profile.
Dodd argues against both instrumentalism and
contextualism in much the same way. In part he offers
paraphrasability arguments. For instance, he argues
that artistic attributions like “virtuosic” are prop-
erly applied to certain performances of Paganini’s
Caprices, namely, those produced by means of a vi-
olin, rather than to the work itself. This allows him
to agree with the instrumentalist that a performance
of that work on a synthesizer will not count as virtu-
osic, without having to concede that the reason for
this is that the work itself is virtuosic. Similarly, he
argues that though a compositional act can be “Liszt-
influenced,” a work cannot. Thus we can paraphrase
away our claims that certain of Brahms’s works are
Liszt influenced.
On the other hand, Dodd accepts that works lit-
erally have some aesthetic and expressive properties
that seem equally tied to particular means of pro-
duction or compositional contexts. For instance, he
agrees that Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata itself,
not just this or that performance, is sublime, craggy,
and assertive, in part because it is a piano sonata.
His justification of this claim is rather complicated.
Dodd defends “moderate aesthetic empiricism” as
the default epistemological position in musical aes-
thetics. This is the view that the aesthetically relevant
properties of musical works are there to be simply
heard—the view’s empiricism—by “an auditor whose
familiarity with the style of music has given her the
requisite ability to hear it as it should be heard” (p.
209)—the view’s moderation. Hearing a work cor-
rectly includes hearing it as falling into the right cate-
gory, including hearing it as produced in a certain way
(for example, on a piano). Thus, when you hear an in-
stance of the Hammerklavier, you ought to hear it as
played on a piano, whether it is so played, or whether
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
it is produced by pushing buttons on a synthesizer,
since this is the way musically informed listeners are
used to hearing such sounds.
Unlike the categorial part of his theory, accord-
ing to which musical works are norm-types, I am not
convinced that Dodd’s timbral sonicism is coherent.
Consider two examples Dodd uses to contrast his
view with instrumentalism. In one, Dodd claims that a
piano-timbre glissando that forms part of a work must
be heard as performed on a piano, since the result-
ing insouciance is a genuine property of the work. In
the other, two composers write “works” that are son-
ically indistinguishable—they both sound flutelike—
but one writes for the flute, the other for the violin
(mandating an unusual technique). (The scare quotes
indicate that on Dodd’s view there is really only one
work here, since the sounds these composers mandate
are indistinguishable.) Dodd uses this latter example
to argue that the originality of the “violin piece” is ac-
tually an artistic property of the compositional act (in
particular the scoring) rather than of the work itself.
But I am more concerned here with how we should
hear these two performances, on Dodd’s view.
The two obvious options are to “hear them as” (1)
played on a violin or (2) played on a flute. Now, as
played on the flute, some melody might sound simple
and pastoral, while as played on the violin in such a
way as to be sonically indistinguishable from a flute,
the same melody might sound ghostly and eerie. The
trouble for Dodd, of course, is that there is only one
work here, and it presumably does not have all four
aesthetic properties of being simple, pastoral, ghostly,
and eerie. The only method Dodd suggests for picking
between these two modes of hearing is by reference
to “a competent, sensitive listener . . . who has a de-
veloped musical sensibility and who shares our way
of conceptualizing what is heard” (p. 234). I would
suggest that such a listener would care whether the
work she is listening to is one for violin or flute. Dodd
might respond that this is just because I am an unre-
generate instrumentalist. But it seems to me he is also
committed to this view by his approach to the piano-
glissando case. It is appropriate to hear this as a work
for piano because it consists of piano-like sounds and
one of its correct categories is “piano piece.” But
the violin/flute performance under consideration will
sound to a competent, sensitive listener as if it could
have been produced on a violin or a flute. Dodd’s
theory is incapable of saying there are two works
here, yet any attempt to pick just one of the ways
of hearing available is bound to be ad hoc. There
are still options open to Dodd, of course—maybe
we should hear this performance in some disjunctive
way, maybe in these kinds of cases the relevant aes-
thetic properties are possessed by the performance,
not the work—but none of these options looks very
appealing.
Book Reviews
Moving back to the core of Dodd’s view—that mu-
sical works are norm-types of sound event—one can
point to many unintuitive consequences. Dodd deals
with many of these in the book, particularly those im-
mediately implied by the view, such as works’ eternal-
ity, unchangeability, and modal inflexibility. I would
like here to point out just one more. Since musical
works are simple sound-event types, there is no inten-
tional condition on producing an instance of a work.
Thus, since all possible sound-event types are eternal
existents, whenever there is a sound it is an instance
of a musical work. If you think that’s bad enough, let
me turn the screw twice more. First, since Dodd al-
lows for thicker and thinner works, whenever a kitten
walks along the keys of a piano, it does not merely
instance one work, but an infinite number of works:
the work that mandates exactly those notes in that
order; the work that mandates roughly those notes,
but allows for some variation; the work that man-
dates any notes that fit this harmonic profile; and so
on. There is an infinite number of such works, since
thickness and thinness are merely two ends on a con-
tinuum. Second, the kitten produces an instance of
more works than this. Since works are norm-types on
Dodd’s view, the kitten can “get some notes wrong.”
It instances not only the work that mandates just these
notes in this order, but also all works that differ from
this work by one note, two notes, three notes, and so
on. Thus, for each of the infinite number of works the
kitten instances, mentioned above, there is a further
infinity of works the kitten produces a passable, but
imperfect, instance of. Note also that I picked a kitten
on a piano only for convenience. Every sound event,
and every part of every sound event, is an instance of
an infinite number of works for just the same reasons.
I do not believe that these kinds of consequences
render Dodd’s view incoherent, but I submit that
they do render it rather unappealing. Dodd thinks,
by contrast, that these consequences, while unappeal-
ing from an intuitive, or musical, point of view, are a
reasonable price to pay for the metaphysical clarity
afforded by his theory. Arbitrating this dispute would
require a discussion of the proper methodology for
art ontology, and I think it is a serious shortcoming
that Dodd fails to consider methodological questions
at all, especially given some of the fine recent work
in this area by such philosophers as David Davies,
Guy Rohrbaugh, and Amie Thomasson. The general
move away from simple ontologies of music, such
as Dodd’s, has been motivated precisely by concerns
that these theories do not do justice to their domain—
musical practice. Dodd obviously thinks the ontology
of music is not so beholden to musical practice, but
he never says why.
I have focused on exegesis and criticism of Works
of Music, as a reviewer must, but let me leave no
doubt that the detailed arguments to be found on
203
every page are clear, tightly structured, and thought
provoking. While I have my doubts about the coher-
ence of parts of Dodd’s view, and the consequences of
the rest, this book will give anyone with an interest in
musical ontology, whatever his or her methodological
bent, plenty to chew on.
ANDREW KANIA
Department of Philosophy
Trinity University
goldie, peter, and elisabeth schellekens, eds. Phi-
losophy and Conceptual Art. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007, xxi + 273 pp., 11 b&w illus.,
$74.00 cloth.
Philosophy and Conceptual Art is a book about a
philosophically difficult topic. The methodology of
analytic philosophy is, ideally, descriptive. Our inter-
est lies in the structure of those categories that de-
termine membership in natural and artificial kinds,
or at least in sets of algorithms and epistemic prac-
tices that enable us to reliably discriminate X’s from
Y’s on the fly. However, the net result of this de-
scriptive project is a set of constraints that determine
category membership (this is what Y’s ought to be
like if they lay claim to being X’s). Therefore, there is
another, important sense in which our work is intrin-
sically normative. Herein lies the rub. The practice of
conceptual art is methodologically inconsistent with
the practice of analytic philosophy. Conceptual art is
putatively art that has been wrested from the nor-
mative tyranny of traditional art institutions (p. 262).
The challenge for any project like Philosophy and
Conceptual Art is to avoid formalizing conceptual art
in a way that might impose a novel form of institu-
tionality. So, Philosophy and Conceptual Art is a book
about a philosophically difficult topic: what is an ana-
lytic philosopher to do with an art form whose stated
purpose is the (un)principled denial of the existence
of fixed normative constraints on its own practice?
The fourteen essays in the volume are divided into
four sections that address difficulties in determining
the ontological status, artistic value, epistemic pur-
pose, and focus of appreciation for canonically anti-
aesthetic works. These four topics are loosely focused
on two common questions: does the shift from mod-
ernism to conceptual art in the mid-1960s represent
a paradigm shift in the practices associated with art,
and, if so, does the break between these sets of prac-
tices necessitate a change in the way philosophers
think about art? The answer: yes and no. The weak
consensus seems to be that conceptual art marked
a significant change in the practices associated with
artistic production, engagement, and appreciation.
However, there is a strong consensus that, given the
204
experiential quality of our engagement with concep-
tual artworks themselves, these novel practices can
be accommodated within a traditional analytic frame-
work for the philosophy of art (Peter Lamarque, p. 15;
Margaret A. Boden, pp. 230–232).
The status quo in art in the 1960s was represented
by Greenbergian modernism. This view was aesthetic
in the sense that it defined artistic production and
engagement as intuitive, anti-intellectual practices.
Artistic production was interpreted as a type of di-
rect gestural expression that revealed the form of
consciousness stripped of its practical and concep-
tual content. Artistic engagement was likewise inter-
preted as a form of direct sensuous cognition through
which viewers intuited the gesture of the work. Fi-
nally, the formal properties of a medium were identi-
fied as the principal constraint on what could or could
not be perceptually expressed by a work of art, and
it was thought that critics and viewers must come to
understand the way artists exploit these constraints in
order to understand their works. Therefore, medium
specificity was key to the Greenbergian view of artis-
tic production and engagement.
Conceptual art intentionally violates all of
Clement Greenberg’s definitional criteria. First, con-
ceptual artists separate out the creative activity of
artists from the execution of artworks. Artists con-
ceptualize artworks that are then, in the most radical
cases, executed by others following a series of ran-
domized procedures. Second, works are constructed
from a variety of spatio-temporally ephemeral me-
dia. They can be one-time performances like Vito
Acconci’s Following Piece or Santiago Sierra’s Space
Closed by Corrugated Metal, diffuse clouds of gas
dissipating into the atmosphere like Robert Mor-
ris’s Steam or Robert Barry’s Inert Gas: Helium,
or hidden objects like Walter De Maria’s Vertical
Earth Kilometer. Even when they are material ob-
jects, their existence is temporally limited. Sol Le-
witt’s Wall Drawings exist only as long as the show
runs and are destroyed when the gallery walls are re-
painted. Robert Smithson’s cascades of asphalt, con-
crete, and glue, Asphalt Rundown, Concrete Pour,
and Glue Pour, lasted only as long as the landscape
in which they were constructed. In fact, Spiral Jetty
was rendered invisible for many years by the rising
waterline of the Great Salt Lake. These works may
be documented. But, even if we interpret the docu-
mentation as the work itself, the relationship between
medium specificity, artistic practice, and generaliz-
able art-critical rules or principles is lost.
These changes in the manner of artistic production
complicate the viewer’s relationship to the work. On
Greenberg’s model, the practices of production and
engagement are each focused on the role medium-
specific constraints play in the production of artistic
conventions. The artist and the viewer are thereby, if
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
things work out right, in lockstep in a shared Gricean
aesthetic project (Robert Hopkins, pp. 62–63). The
loss of medium specificity as a formal ground for gen-
eralizable stylistic rules upends this neat epistemic
relationship between the material qualities of an art-
work and its content (Dominic McIver Lopes, p. 253).
The first step in the engagement with a work of con-
ceptual art is intellectual; one must try to interpret
its general goal, purpose, or conceptual content. A
spectator can only gain purchase on the semanti-
cally salient features of a work’s material embodi-
ment in the context of this prior interpretive act. Of
course one could object that contextualizing narra-
tives are always needed to bootstrap the traditional
inductive-empirical model for artistic engagement
(David Davies, p. 143). However, this observation
does not dissolve the difficulty. Medium specificity
supports stylistic generalizations that render contex-
tualizing narratives transparent in the surfaces of
traditional artworks (at least for the art historically
educated). The productive practices of conceptual art
are designed to disrupt empirical access to these types
of stylistic generalizations. These latter works, as a re-
sult, require prior identifying narratives to mark off
just what aspect of the productive practice constitutes
the artwork, for example, the artist’s idea, the perfor-
mance event that realizes the execution of that idea,
the material instantiation of that idea, or some as-
pect of the viewer’s response to the piece (Davies, p.
152). Nonetheless, most works of conceptual art need
to be experienced to be understood. The consensus
view of the essays in this volume is that this mini-
mal epistemic criterion locates conceptual art within
a Gricean aesthetic workspace that can be accommo-
dated by traditional analytic philosophy of art.
Philosophy and Conceptual Art is the product of an
Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, “Per-
ception, discourse, and conceptual art.” The discus-
sion in the book, not surprisingly, centers around
two aspects of our aesthetic engagement with works
of conceptual art: the materiality of their manifes-
tations as art objects and the experientiality of our
standard engagement with those objects (Lamarque,
p. 12). The consideration of these aspects of concep-
tual art can, in turn, be divided into three broad cate-
gories: the productive practices of conceptual artists
(idea versus execution); the nature of conceptual
works (idea versus materiality); and the epistemic
practices of viewers, for example, how we identify the
work (Davies), what we value in the work (Elisabeth
Schellekens), what we can learn from the work (Pe-
ter Goldie), and what it is that we appreciate about
the work (Matthew Kieran, Boden, and Lopes).
These discussions of the aesthetic overtones that run
through conceptual art are refreshing. However, my
praise for the volume comes with several caveats.
First, the conceptual turn was born of dissatisfaction
Book Reviews
with the status quo in both art and politics in the
1960s (Derek Matravers, pp. 25–26). The essays in
this volume have very little to say about the latter.
Whether or not one takes this to be a shortcoming is
up to the taste of the reader. There is a wide range
of issues one could address in a book on conceptual
art. This volume is narrowly focused on a question
of whether the tools of traditional analytic philoso-
phy of art can be generalized to help us understand
conceptual art.
Second, the authors fail to celebrate the mis-
chievous wit of conceptual artists. The conceptual
revolution in art included a sense of irreverence to-
ward the very intellectual practices it promoted. Con-
ceptual art was, and for the most part still is, fun.
It mixes high intellectual and political ideals with
the joy of a good prank. It is an opportunity to
get one over on the (art) establishment. This ironic
turn is not a mere addendum to the movement. It
is a key element of the central goal of conceptual
art: a critical commentary on the high aesthetics of
modernism.
Third, the reader learns more about analytic aes-
thetics from this volume than about conceptual art.
Very little time is spent discussing the history of con-
ceptual art, its place in the broader history of art,
or the views of conceptual artists themselves. Excep-
tions to this rule are the essays by Matravers, Carolyn
Wilde, and the Art and Language collective, respec-
tively. This is, of course, an artifact of the narrow fo-
cus of the book. However, the revolution in art in
the 1960s was a revolution in methods of artistic pro-
duction (Kieran, p. 205). Once the medium of art be-
comes conceptual, the object gives way. The difficult
works that make conceptual art problematic are ar-
tifacts of the expanded field of artistic production.
The book would, therefore, have been enhanced by
a more explicit dialogue between practitioners and
philosophers. On the one hand, it would have been
informative to read what conceptual artists and their
contemporary critics had to say about conceptual art.
On the other hand, conceptual art has been the status
quo in the artworld for more than a generation. De-
spite evident incommensurabilities between the lan-
guages of the two fields (see the essay by the Art and
Language collective), I think that the analytic per-
spective could only gain in richness and depth from
engaging methodological challenges brought by con-
temporary art and those who produce it.
I would like to close with an anecdote and a com-
ment on the claim that conceptual art represents a
break from the Greenbergian conception of art. Con-
stantin Brancusi’s Bird in Flight is a canonical exam-
ple of the modernist aesthetic qualities. However, it
was charged a custom’s duty as an industrial object
when it traveled to the United States with Marcel
Duchamp in 1926. Why? It was not recognizable as a
205
work of art, and so not granted the associated exemp-
tion from custom duties. It too needed an identifying
narrative.
The discontinuity view of conceptual art depends
on a narrow aesthetic view of the history of art. How-
ever, let’s assume that contextualizing narratives are
necessary for artistic appreciation because each work
is the embodiment of both the intentions of the artist
and the idea it expresses. Let’s assume further that
two artists could produce, either accidentally or pur-
posefully, perceptually identical yet artistically dis-
tinct works, such as Cervantes and Menard’s Quixote
or Warhol and Bidlo’s Brillo Boxes. If these assump-
tions are sound (and I have every reason to believe
that they are), then what is artistically salient about
a given work of art is not its perceptual or narrative
profile per se, but rather the way its form embodies
its meaning. Another way to say this is that the mean-
ing is the medium. The conceptual medium of a work
is not, in this context, an abstract, philosophical idea.
Rather it is, as David Davies construes it, the mate-
rial embodiment of those shared understandings that
licenses taking an artistic vehicle as the articulation
of an artistic statement (Davies, p. 145). If so, one
can construe the productive practices of conceptual
art as continuous with Greenbergian modernism: the
exploration of a novel set of material constraints on
artistic expression, such as intentional, art historical,
and sociocultural conceptual constraints appropriate
to identifying narratives.
WILLIAM P. SEELEY
Department of Philosophy
Franklin & Marshall College
becker, howard s., robert r. faulkner, and barbara
kirshenblatt-gimblett, eds. Art from Start to Fin-
ish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisa-
tions. University of Chicago Press, 2006, xvii + 234
pp., 23 b&w illus., $62.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.
One guesses that it was sociologist Howard S. Becker,
known for what is called “social reaction theory,”
who had the major hand in pulling this collection
together. (Robert R. Faulkner too is a sociologist,
while Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a professor
of performance studies.) Becker is the author of Art
Worlds (University of California Press, 1982)—not a
philosophy book, but containing data very useful for
philosophical aesthetics about the actual workings of
various artistic institutions and practices.
The material in this volume orbits around two
questions: What is the work of art?, and, When is a
work of art finished?—or, alternatively, What is it for
an artwork to be finished? These questions are aired
explicitly or implicitly in a group of fifteen pieces,
206
which includes no less than four introductory texts, if
we count Becker’s own first chapter, “The Work It-
self.” Before I turn to the general perspective of this
book, let me address a few of the volume’s superior
contributions.
Musicologist Paul Berliner’s essay about Zimbab-
wean mbira music is a must-read for any music ontol-
ogist who still wears European blinders. The mbira, or
thumb piano, is played by plucking with both thumbs
metal strips of different lengths attached to a res-
onating box. Its music constitutes a repertoire, but
in a very different sense from that of European con-
cert music. A performance of a “work” can last five
minutes—or an hour—and need not observe oblig-
atory structural points for beginnings and endings.
Like Ghanaian drum music, performances are intrin-
sically social in character. Players learn how to stake
out personal styles, but always within the context of a
communal activity. Since players consider themselves
both as preserving the tradition and as contributing
to it, negotiations between members of the group are
necessary.
Striking differences from the European model
of work-performance are also profiled in Scott De-
Veaux’s essay, “This Is What I Do.” His subject—dear
to this reviewer’s heart—is the persistent attempt to
convert jazz into finished works by recording them.
DeVeaux regards this commercially motivated ex-
tra step as an inherently anti-jazz project. Taking his
theme from remarks by Sonny Rollins on the matter,
DeVeaux believes that recordings are little more than
advertisement for the living stuff. The one thing the
essay could use to complete the story of this inher-
ently paradoxical situation is emphasis of the ironic
fact that it is almost entirely by recording that we have
a jazz history.
Faulkner’s own essay on what in jazz is called
“wood-shedding,” or simply “shedding,” is also a
gem. Although the term refers, over simply, to prac-
ticing, the jargon carries extra freight for jazz mu-
sicians. “Shedding” in jazz is ceaseless, but not in
the bald sense that, like Artur Rubinstein or Jascha
Heifetz, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins never
stopped practicing. Jazz practice is not practice for a
finished work or for a finished performance thereof.
The jazz musician occupies a place in a field of in-
determinacy where only a fuzzy line connects dis-
cipline and imagination, planning and spontaneity.
Thus, Faulkner’s title, “Shedding Culture,” is a pun,
which profiles the fact that the practicing jazz musi-
cian absorbs his culture in order (partly) to shed it.
Unsurprisingly, Faulkner rejects the romantic story
of jazz playing as sheer spontaneity. But he would
presumably also reject the quieter myth that even
the most adventurous jazz solo is a mere pastiche
of learned material. The general picture is that the
life of a jazz player is an ongoing work-in-endless-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
process. One might want to qualify the claim by
citing jazz subtypes, but Faulkner’s piece has real
depth.
Artist Larry Kagan presents himself as a case of
how artistic intentions can be radically revised along
the way. Kagan began by shaping wiry bits of steel
in forms that resembled drawings, for which he then
constructed frames that would allow the wiry bits
of steel to interact with the wall behind them. Be-
cause steel elements cast unanticipated shadows on
the background, Kagan discovered that by not having
a “one-to-one mapping between shadow and object,
new object/shadow relationships become possible”
(p. 167). Kagan thus found himself working with vi-
sual forms that went well beyond those with which he
began.
In spite of several striking pieces, this volume is
overall a curious anthology. The editorial essays per-
sistently stew over the question whether, given its
methodological constraints, social science can “deal
with the work itself.” It is never quite clear whether
this question is about how sociology can address spe-
cific artworks or whether it is about whether sociol-
ogy is able to cast some light on the concept of an
individual artwork.
Concern about either of these as apt questions
for behavioral science would certainly be justified.
But the methodology that would be relevant is made
conspicuous by its total absence in this volume—
analytic aesthetics. Too bad, because the questions
that tumble down from the closet shelf throughout
the volume are mainly conceptual ones, indeed, on-
tological ones. Some examples: Is a musical work the
score—or perhaps the performance? Does a perfor-
mance work have to be performed? Which is the “real
work,” the plan for the work or the performance it-
self? The editors state that they “decided not to fa-
vor either” answer to this last question, but “rather
to study how this question is decided in various ar-
eas of artwork” (pp. 5–6). But anyone looking for
answers to any of these questions is going to be dis-
appointed. Although contemporary analytical work
on these issues abounds, virtually none of it makes an
appearance in this volume. (Pierre-Michel Menger’s
reference to Nelson Goodman is immediately over-
printed by the conceptualizations of literary theorist
Gérard Genette.)
Of course, ontological questions about art forms
cannot be undertaken a priori—as they might have
been ages ago. Contemporary philosophy is vividly
aware of the necessity of keeping conceptual analysis
in touch with artistic practice. Although this volume
contains data for philosophy, it nags at questions that,
by the nature of the approach, cannot be sufficiently
refined to become manageable, let alone answered.
One gets the impression that the editors actually wel-
come their questions’ apparent intractability, as when
Book Reviews
they state that the question of when a work of art is
finished is “wonderfully open-ended” (p. xiv).
In fairness, the volume here and there does seem
to acknowledge that none of the questions it tosses
around have across-the-board answers. However, the
overall trend of the book is to convert that point into
some hazy generalities anyway. As a result, the ner-
vous but high-spirited skepticism that runs through
the several editorial essays becomes fodder for a
“convergence” on what the editors call “a common
point of view” (p. xv). The spirit of the convergence
is revealed by the editors’ summary of the volume’s
aim—to address “art from start to a never-reached
finish” (p. 20, emphasis added).
The volume’s convergence seems to break down
into four very general claims, none of which is con-
vincingly argued for.
First, an approach to art needs to be contextual.
It is odd, then, that the contributors are unaware of
the strongly contextualist trend of recent aesthetic
theory. As it is, the volume is never quite clear about
what context means or just why it is relevant.
Second, no precise answer can be given to the ques-
tion of when an artwork is finished. Menger’s exposi-
tion of the manner in which Rodin endlessly tinkered
with his works is presumably intended to support the
case, since it shows how Rodin refused to play the
conventional game of “now it’s done.” But Menger
admits that Rodin’s approach was idiosyncratic. It
cannot be generalized without hazard.
Likewise, the important contributions of Berlin on
Shona music and DeVeaux and Faulkner on jazz are
contributions to specific artistic practices. Although
we may not be able to attach any clear meaning to the
idea of a finished jazz jam, there surely is a conven-
tional way to tell when a performance of the Ham-
merklavier Sonata is finished—namely, when the last
piano note dies away. Here and there in the volume,
one finds apparent concessions to finishedness, but
they are quickly overprinted by the main agenda.
The contribution of Bruce Jackson fits the vol-
ume’s “convergence” revealingly. Along with mul-
tiple versions of an anecdote from Jorge Luis Borges
and a shaggy dog story about an undelivered James
Joyce manuscript, Jackson stews up a hodgepodge of
examples that he thinks makes finishedness totally
problematic. (Sample: The fact that Max Brod ig-
nored Franz Kafka’s wish that his works be burned.)
The editors consider the view of Barbara
Herrnstein-Smith’s Poetic Closure that “artistic vo-
cabularies” involve conventions—such as signing a
painting—that signify “done.” But it becomes clear
that they think we can safely ignore this useful pro-
posal, except as grist for the skeptical mill and de-
prived of its ontological bite. The idea seems to be that
conventionalism implies that the moment of comple-
tion is arbitrary and hence that, once again, unfin-
207
ishedness rules. Of course, the ontological thrust of a
conventionalist analysis taken seriously is that there
is no hidden reality behind the convention.
A third central theme in the volume is process.
However, it is never clear what this entails. (Is it that
there are no works, but only processes?) If so, it is
striking that the philosopher of art as experiential
process—John Dewey—is never mentioned.
The fourth theme one finds in this volume is about
contingency—the fact that artists face the constant,
sometimes oppressive fact of choice. The matter is ad-
dressed from an economic perspective by Richard E.
Caves, who wonders to what extent concepts such as
expected utility can contribute to our understanding
of an artist’s practical reasoning as she or he works on
a project. Should an artist at any point continue on a
given project—or switch to another? How should we
measure the utility of an artist’s fanatical devotion
to a project in spite of its seeming uncompletabil-
ity? (Caves might have cited Zola’s “L’Oeuvre,”
the downbeat tale of artistic obsession carried to
extremes.) True, because of the expected utility of
the search itself , marginal costs can be turned into
marginal benefits. Caves’s (unsurprising) judgment is
that economics cannot tell an artist whether to reckon
marginal costs and benefits in market values or in sub-
jective terms. For the editors of this volume, however,
contingency seems to become an existential condition
of the artistic process.
Once pulled away from the agenda of the editors,
the contribution of Larry Gross, titled “The Frag-
ment Itself,” is not without interest. Beginning with
Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini, Gross traces a
path toward a conception of the autonomous artist
whose every gesture betokens genius. Eventually,
etudes—including sketches, preparatory studies, and
underpaintings—began to take on a value they never
previously had.
Grindingly switching gears, Gross cites de Koon-
ing’s infamous decorated toilet seat, asserting that
it was art simply because of de Kooning’s “choice.”
Choice to do what? “To play a joke,” claimed Elaine
de Kooning. And Arthur Danto has given the basic
reason why the thing is not an artwork. It has no place
in de Kooning’s oeuvre.
Michael D. Harris, an expert in African and
African American art, notes how often the European
appropriation of African cultural material has disre-
garded context. It is not clear, however, how his at-
tempt to connect Yoruba art with the work of modern
African-American artist Juan Logan entirely avoids
the problem.
Other essays in the volume deserve even less at-
tention. Becker’s contribution takes a curious turn
when he reveals that he abandoned what he in-
tended to provide, namely a “sociological” analysis
of Lester Young’s recorded solo on “Lady Be Good”
208
because he realized that this is not the kind of thing
a sociologist can do. Stunningly, he declares that the
musicologists whose work he cites are doing sociol-
ogy anyway.
The title of hypertext expert Michael Joyce’s es-
say, “How do I know I am Finnish?” is presum-
ably intended as intellectual wit—meaning that he is
never finished. The piece reads like a rambling cross-
referencing letter to friends. In an interview, New
Zealand artist Max Gimblett provides only a Dada re-
sponse to the question of when a work is finished: “To
begin,” he says, “is to complete. On the other hand,”
he adds, “the completion is the front door” (p. 177).
It is a pity that essays of the quality of Berliner, De-
Veaux, and others do not find themselves alongside
equally distinguished company in this volume.
LEE B. BROWN
Department of Philosophy
The Ohio State University
zamir, tzachi. Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and
Shakespearean Drama. Princeton University Press,
2007, xv + 234 pp., 3 b&w illus., $35.00 cloth.
Tzachi Zamir’s Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and
Shakespearean Drama is a thoughtful and impres-
sive new book about literature’s connection to moral
knowledge. Of particular note is Double Vision’s dou-
ble objective: it is both a work about our ethical en-
gagement with literature and a work that engages
us ethically with literature. The first part of Dou-
ble Vision is an argument for the claim that litera-
ture is what Zamir calls “knowledge yielding.” The
rest of Double Vision is a series of exercises in art
criticism that draw out the practical implications of
Zamir’s theoretic argument by engaging thoughtfully
with several works by William Shakespeare, includ-
ing: Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony
and Cleopatra, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear. In
what follows, I will offer a sympathetic reconstruc-
tion of Zamir’s theoretic commitments followed by a
brief consideration of his treatment of Macbeth.
Zamir begins his inquiry by arguing that when we
read literature we engage our rational faculties in a
way that develops our ability to reason ethically and
contributes to our storehouse of ethical knowledge.
While this claim may have a familiar ring, what is
novel about Zamir’s proposal is that it relies on an in-
triguing account of rationality. According to Zamir,
philosophers recognize the legitimacy of deductive
and inductive modes of inference, but fail to ade-
quately recognize the legitimacy of a third mode of
inference—what Zamir, claiming to follow Aristotle,
calls rhetorical reason. Moreover, Zamir charges, it is
because philosophers operate with an impoverished
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
notion of rationality that they tend to ignore or di-
minish the ethical importance of literature. Once we
understand rhetorical modes of inference, he claims,
we will see how literature serves to engage and sup-
port rhetorical knowledge.
So, what is rhetorical reasoning, and how does it
get deployed when we read literature? According
to Zamir, rhetorical reasoning concerns two kinds
of truths: first truths and general truths. While the
notion of first truth is obvious enough to most, the
notion of general truth may not be so. For Zamir, gen-
eral truths are not categorical and so their truth can-
not be established via deductive modes of inference.
Further, they are not the product of statistical gener-
alizations, and so their truth cannot be established via
inductive modes of inference. However, Zamir points
out, many important claims that we make seem to fall
into this third category of being rhetorical. Rhetor-
ical reasoning, Zamir claims, concerns the kind of
learning “from the local incidents that make up our
lives and from which we reasonably establish many
of our attitudes” (p. 8). He further claims that “for
Aristotle, the need for rhetoric arises when discussing
assumptions and beliefs that can be other than they
are—claims that can be derived from premises that
are for the most part only generally true [Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, I.ii.14]” and that it involves the “reapplying
of a principle that was successfully applied in another
case” (p. 8). Though Zamir does not provide an ex-
tended analysis of the norms of rhetorical inference,
nor of the notion of general truth, he does point out
that the reasons that we cite in support of general and
first truths have their origin in our experience. For ex-
ample, from experience I can learn that in general I
should not loan money to a friend. I do not believe
this because there is some categorical principle that
states that I should not do so, nor do I believe it on
the basis of a statistical generalization. I do, however,
believe it on the basis of experience—both my own
and that of others—which leads me to see a ratio-
nal connection between friendship and the loaning
of money, a connection that speaks against the loan-
ing of money to friends. However, this connection
does not seem to be articulable in terms of principles
that can be used in a straightforward deductive argu-
ment. Doubtless many readers of Double Vision will
find themselves wanting a substantive theory of gen-
eral truth, of rhetorical reason, and an account of how
they relate to one another. In response to a demand
for such theory, Zamir points to belief coherence, and
coherence with other literary sources, as a possible
starting place. However, he cautions, “[w]e cannot
always specify the conditions under which we would
withdraw our assent to some beliefs” (p. 38). Zamir
may very well be right to claim that the norms of
rhetorical rationality cannot be fully specified. Still, if
we are to accept his intriguing and plausible-sounding
Book Reviews
suggestions, then doubtless we will want a more nu-
anced account of rhetorical inference than we find in
Double Vision. Minimally, for example, we want to
know why such an account can never be fully spec-
ified. Here one might look to the work on practical
rationality and general truths recently undertaken by
particularists such as Margaret Little. While particu-
larists tend to reduce all moral principles to general
claims, a position from which Zamir clearly distances
himself, one need only agree with Zamir that there
are at least some general truths that we have reason
to accept in order to see the particularist’s work on
practical rationality as a useful resource.
Assuming that there are resources to develop an
adequate account of rhetorical rationality, how would
such an account illuminate our literary practices?
Once we grant that there is a mode of reasoning
that involves inferences from our experiences and not
from moral principles, Zamir argues, we can begin to
see how three aesthetic features of literature operate
to engage and support rhetorical rationality. First, lit-
erature often takes first truths and general claims as
its subject. Second, literature requires that we sus-
pend disbelief, and this allows us a kind of rational
distance from the arguments made therein. This dis-
tance, Zamir claims, puts readers in a mind-set that
encourages them to test the claims made by individual
works of literature against their own past experiences,
both actual experiences and literary experiences. In
so doing, we might ask ourselves the following kinds
of questions: Do the proposals suggested by the lit-
erary work resonate with our past experiences, or do
they undermine them? Do they help illuminate our
past experiences in a way that helps make sense of
them, or do they fail to do so? Is the situation pre-
sented in the literary work relevantly similar to our
past experiences, or is it in some significant way dis-
similar? Do they take proper account of the details
of the case, or do they suffer from blind spots? Third,
literature’s arguments are embedded in experiences.
Experiences in general help to orient our rational
architecture, which can have a dramatic impact on
what kinds of actions we undertake, even when such
experiences leave our antecedently held beliefs in-
tact. By way of illustration, Zamir asks us to con-
sider an entrepreneur who, on the basis of testimony,
comes to believe that a certain landscape is majes-
tic and beautiful, but still takes steps to destroy it.
According to Zamir, the entrepreneur’s problematic
behavior might be due to a lack of experience. Had
he experienced the landscape’s majesty and beauty
for himself, he might behave differently. It is reason-
able to conclude that experiencing the landscape for
himself would have led him to properly appreciate
the force of the truth about its majesty and beauty,
and so to adjust the rest of his epistemic repertoire.
If Zamir is right, then experience makes a difference
209
in how truths resonate with us, and how we conceive
of the world thereafter.
According to Zamir, the upshot of all of this is that
acknowledging the role of rhetorical reasoning in our
literary experiences helps to make sense of the fol-
lowing rational virtues of literature: literature has a
better chance of “reaching the springs of moral activ-
ity”; it allows us the opportunity to “discover for our-
selves” certain truths; and it “exemplifies rational, yet
non-deductive [and presumably non-inductive] rea-
soning patterns” (p. 23).
At this point, one might worry that a proposal
like Zamir’s instrumentalizes the value of literature
by undermining literature whose moral vision is less
than savory. Zamir, however, cautions against draw-
ing such conclusions. He counsels us to distinguish
between the “voices that are valuable to have, and
those that encapsulate values that one takes to be
correct” (p. 41). Among the voices that are valuable
to have, he claims, will be some whose messages are
flawed, since engaging with flawed messages can en-
rich our thinking on a subject just as much as those
that are morally sound. In Zamir’s words, his “ap-
proach moralizes literature, but does not reduce it
into didactic statements” (p. 43).
What makes Zamir’s theoretic position particu-
larly compelling is that he demonstrates its truth by
showing us what thoughtful, rhetorical engagement
with particular works of art looks like. In “Upon One
Bank and Shoal of Time,” for example, Zamir in-
terprets Macbeth as making a substantive, rhetori-
cal argument against value nihilism. Zamir begins by
pointing to a central difficulty that faces readers of
Macbeth: how do we construct a coherent picture
of Macbeth’s moral psychology? Many interpreters
have argued that Macbeth is motivated primarily by
his “vaulting ambition” (p. 92). However, Zamir ar-
gues, this solution fails to take seriously other aspects
of Macbeth’s moral psychology. Zamir asks us to con-
sider that Macbeth is successful in the achievement of
his ends, and yet his responses to these achievements
are markedly hollow. If Macbeth were primarily mo-
tivated by a desire for promotion or power, we would
expect him to be at least minimally satisfied by his
achievements. According to Zamir, it is this feature of
Macbeth’s psychology that marks him out as distinct,
disturbing, and alien. Moreover, Zamir maintains,
one way out of this interpretative puzzle is to see Mac-
beth as a protagonist who is guided by a nonfatalistic,
nihilistic worldview: Macbeth is driven to act by a fear
of losing control, a fear that is a natural consequence
of one who sees everything as ultimately valueless.
As Zamir puts the point, in Macbeth, “[n]ihilism is
less of a brilliant cynicism and more of a disability
connected with anxieties of losing control that jointly
underlie patterns of circumvention” (p. 98). This is
evidenced, Zamir claims, by the fact that Macbeth
210
immediately recognizes any end that he achieves as
valueless: a recognition that purges the end of any
real content, and transforms it to nothing more than
another means to some other end—an end that is
born out of fear.
Further, Zamir argues, Macbeth is more than a por-
trait of a nihilist; it is a rhetorical argument against
value skepticism. Through the character of Macbeth
readers come to see what a psychological, if not a
philosophical, commitment to a version of nihilism
that does not collapse into fatalism looks like. More-
over, Zamir argues, Macbeth’s nihilism is punctuated
by the contrasting commitment to value embodied in
the character of Macduff. In what Zamir points out as
a pivotal scene—one that is longer than any other in
the play—Macduff reacts to the news of the murder
of his family. In this scene, Zamir argues, Macduff re-
veals himself to have a deep emotional commitment
to the value of his family, which requires that he ex-
perience a grief that is so deep that it threatens the
very stability of his identity categories; for example,
he claims that he will feel his grief as a man (pp. 105–
106).
According to Zamir, that Shakespeare allows the
reader to experience Macbeth’s psychology as punc-
tuated by Macduff’s psychology shows us that ni-
hilism is more than practical skepticism. It results in
a psychology that conceives of the world as simulta-
neously valueless and fearful. In contrast, MacDuff’s
psychology allows him to occupy a world that is not
only value laden, but includes relationships of true
worth. It is through this contrast, Zamir argues, that
Macbeth operates as a rhetorical argument against
philosophical nihilism.
Of course, there are those who will dispute Zamir’s
interpretation of Macbeth. However, Zamir does a
careful job of accounting for many of Macbeth’s
details—details that I cannot account for here—so
that only a monist about interpretation would deny
the legitimacy of his interpretation. Moreover, what
is particularly helpful about Zamir’s interpretative
work here is that it allows us to see for ourselves
why didacticism of a pernicious kind does not fol-
low from his theoretic commitments. Consider again
Zamir’s challenge that having the voice of a charac-
ter like Zamir’s Macbeth at one’s disposal is of cen-
tral moral importance. Certainly, having the voice of
Macbeth punctuated as it is by the voice of Macduff
as part of one’s rational repertoire is useful, beyond
the immediate rational gain that one gets from read-
ing Macbeth. So, Zamir maintains, we should not see
the rational value of a piece of literature as directly
connected to its moral soundness: we can learn just
as much, and this is a familiar point, from voices that
are less than morally sound.
Moreover, one need not read the possibility of dis-
sent here as a flaw. If part of the function of rhetorical
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
reason is to allow us to generate reasons from our
experience, an exercise in interpretive disagreement
should also be an opportunity for rhetorical reflec-
tion. Such an exercise represents a difference of opin-
ion about how to read one’s experience and demands
that one provide reasons in support of one’s interpre-
tation. If this is right, then debates over what a work
means are just as intellectually and morally fruitful
as working through any single interpretation. So, not
only do we have a moral reason to engage with liter-
ature, but we also have a moral reason to engage in
thoughtful literary interpretation, interpretation that
may require that we come to terms with the way that
others have conceived of the work, including work
like we find in Double Vision.
STEPHANIE PATRIDGE
Department of Religion and Philosophy
Otterbein College
stewart, garrett. Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic
Cinema. University of Chicago Press, 2007, x + 299
pp., 140 color illus., $90.00 cloth, $40.00 paper.
As the twenty-first century begins to stretch its legs,
the world of film studies has begun to confront a cru-
cial question, one that lies at the heart of Garrett
Stewart’s impressively poignant and, at times, con-
fusingly expansive new book, Framed Time: Toward
a Postfilmic Cinema. This question is as follows: how
can we discuss cinema when it is no longer film? That
is to say, how have recent developments in digital
technology, and the industrial economy of this shift,
altered problems both of formalism and also of repre-
sentation in the seventh art? In Framed Time, Stewart
attempts to approach this issue in light of the contem-
porary European and Hollywood fascinations with
the uncanny and the fantastic, arguing that this re-
cent audiovisual fetish is a symptomatic link between
the postmodern vacuum of political engagement and
the evolution of a medium that no longer has to bank
on a starting place in physical reality.
Along the trajectory of this study lies Stewart’s
methodological goal, which is the sharpening of his
notion of narratography, “a medial specification of
poetics for a given story text” (p. 22). This notion
of narratography is much like what some readers of
contemporary French film theory might recognize as
Jacques Rancière’s cinematographic fable, an attempt
to structure film criticism based on a merger of form
and content as a function of how narration triggers
particular modes of representation. Stewart attempts
to separate his approach from the narratological pro-
cedures of such theorists as David Bordwell, though
he ultimately produces a study that could be con-
sidered an analysis of film rhetoric. It is upon this
Book Reviews
premise that Stewart is his most innovative but, also,
perhaps where he loses his otherwise rigorous gift for
insight.
Working from such disparate influences as Gilles
Deleuze and Mary Ann Doane, Stewart constantly
reinforces narratography as a method of analysis
that transcends mere stylistics and “finds something
else as well” (p. 112). Moreover, in the Deleuzean
tradition—a tradition he seemingly embraces or ig-
nores higgledy-piggledy depending on the given point
of entry—Stewart attempts to locate this “dyad of
representation versus narration” (p. 30) according to
a sociohistoric division between the thematic com-
monalities of contemporary Hollywood or European
cinema. Stewart thus grounds his study in the “co-
incidence of the postfilmic image and the postreal-
ist narrative,” hoping to tie together certain formal
procedures with the tales they are used to render
(p. 3). Unfortunately, this goal is often shrouded in
a somewhat vague definition of the digital, caught
somewhere between a conceptual expansion of the
virtual and a more literal conceptualization of a
particular mode of mechanical (re)production and
manipulation.
As my introductory paragraphs foreshadow, Stew-
art’s book is largely neologistic, a progressive and
original work with A-list back-cover praise from
Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, and D. N. Rodow-
ick. In other words, this is a heavy hitter, a big dog
in a largely transitional period of visual studies. As
such, Stewart must confront what has arguably been
the most influential study of cinema over the last
two decades, and what tends to be the most popu-
lar point of reference for contemporary excursions in
unconventional critical method. I speak here of Gilles
Deleuze’s Cinéma I: l’image-mouvement (Paris: Les
Éditions de Minuit, 1983) and Cinéma II: L’image-
temps (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985), which
have had an incalculable impact on the evolution of
cinema studies over the past twenty years. Deleuze’s
innovative style—written outside of an official aca-
demic capacity, and therefore with its own particular
internal logic—has produced many disciples who of-
ten seem to ignore certain systematic inconsistencies
in Deleuze’s work; like many such attempts to incor-
porate Deleuze into a preset methodological project,
Framed Time cozies up to the theoretical abstraction
of Deleuze’s work, somehow using it as a springboard
that justifies a rather nebulous style of theoretical
writing about cinema and time.
This very mode of critical writing serves a specific
purpose in many books of late: to permit the ap-
plication, to contemporary narrative ruses (such as
Fight Club [David Fincher, 1999], Momento [Manoel
de Oliveira, 2002], Eternal Sunshine of the Spot-
less Mind [Michel Gondry, 2004]), of an intellec-
211
tual rigor once applied to the masters of high mod-
ernism (Eisenstein, Antonioni, Godard). Citing Mary
Ann Doane, Stewart writes: “‘new cinema’—as in-
novative as it is involuntarily caught up in histori-
cal change—has arrived at a point of temporal crisis
where ‘chronos is sickness itself’” (pp. 166–167; see
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinema Time:
Modernity, Contingency, the Archive [Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2002]). This type of theoretical melo-
drama is important for Stewart’s attempt to define
Deleuze as a bridge from modernism to postmod-
ernism, as if Deleuze’s insights into the cinema of
Resnais, Welles, and Rossellini paved the way for un-
derstanding the pop-virtuosity of Michel Gondry and
Spike Jonez. Stewart writes, in characteristic fashion:
“Everything we’re dealing with as postmodern . . . cir-
cles within the orbit of, and tests to their limit, the
temporal axioms of high modernism as Deleuze con-
ceives them” (pp. 169–170).
But are these really the axioms “as Deleuze con-
ceives them,” or merely the axiomatic notions offered
by Deleuze and contorted to fit a body of films that,
while being rather clever and innovative, does not
provoke the same meaningful meditation as the films
that inspire Deleuze’s reflections? Indeed, Stewart’s
entire book revolves around the attempt to find a
generative purpose in a contemporary cinema that,
as it strays further from traditional analog processes
of production, also veers more toward a “political
disengagement from reality” (p. 213). And as for the
stylistic tricks of Michel Gondry, the narrative play
of light and shadow in the films of Almodovar, or the
virtual cinemas of such new graphic novel–inspired
films as Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez,
2005): how are they meaningful? How can we speak
of them meaningfully? More precisely: how do these
films interweave the form and the content of their
representations or simulations in order to provide
what could be understood as a new cinema?
Answering this question proves to be Stewart’s
greatest strength. He provides an intriguing taxon-
omy of contemporary cinema, breaking American
and European cinemas into two major schools: the
Hollywood ontological gothic and the Eurofantastic
of metapsychic trespass (p. 56). Stewart makes a con-
vincing argument for this division, and yet he often
resorts to somewhat specious reductions of narrative
and formal aspects into one line of argument, and
the reader is often left asking: how is this or that
film noncinematic? While Fight Club could be seen
as offering “clues to the misplaced id” (p. 91), how
is this an effect—or affect—of the formal constitu-
tion of the image? Or: in trying to apply Deleuzean
notions of virtual time, Stewart discusses scenes in
Caché (Michael Hanake, 2005) and Bad Education
(Pedro Almodóvar, 2004) in which the characters go
212
to movies in order to kill time—as if this metaphorical
way of explaining their narrative actions (“killing
time”) in fact justifies a deeper argument about digi-
tal cinema and the viral corruption of time itself.
Similar methodological problems are found in
Stewart’s division, albeit fascinating, between the two
geographical cinemas. When discussing the “ontolog-
ical ironies” of recent Hollywood thrillers, for exam-
ple, Stewart references The Manchurian Candidate
(Jonathan Demme, 2004) and Vanilla Sky (Cameron
Crowe, 2001), the former being a remake of a film
from 1962 and the other being a remake of a Eu-
ropean film (thus challenging the premises both of
temporal and national specificity) (p. xx). A simi-
lar problem can be found in the category of Euro-
pean cinema, which lumps together Michael Haneke,
François Ozon, and Pedro Almodóvar. Is this a state-
ment on European cross-fertilization in the age of the
European Union or simply an unprejudiced confla-
tion of other (non-Hollywood) cinemas?
While this reviewer finds certain methodological
problems with the implementation of Stewart’s over-
all argument, there is something fundamentally use-
ful and important in his endeavor here. Reviving
Christian Metz’s notion of trucage, or manipulation
(we might say formal effect), as “symbolic grammar”
(p. 178), Stewart pinpoints the common practices of
popular cinema at a watershed moment in techno-
cultural history, attempting to clarify the logical nar-
rative affinities of a media that, in its evolution, is
losing any direct connection to the real (that is, dig-
ital images need not be based on a source object).
Digital film, Stewart argues, is innately curious about
producing audiovisual unrealities, pushing the bor-
ders of imagination with the tools of technology. At
one moment, Stewart discusses the public desire to
be duped as being intricately related to the MTV for-
mat to which our audiovisual culture has acclimated
itself, a sociohistoric principle he seems to imply in his
analyses of contemporary Hollywood and European
cinemas.
The more we become used to effects and digital
trickery, this book seems to imply, the further our cul-
tural symbolic will wander from the responsibilities
and representations of any sociocultural, political,
or economic reality. This Baudrillardian conclusion
rings true with the political disengagement experi-
enced by popular cinema over the past twenty years,
though the volatile events of recent years seem al-
ready to have encouraged a return, albeit completely
narrative, to cinema with a conscience. Whether this
conscience is real or virtual remains to be told, but
with Garrett Stewart’s Framed Time we have begun
the critical marathon that will be necessary to em-
brace, to track, and to contribute to the rapid progress
being made in audiovisual media.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
M. HUNTER VAUGHAN
Department of Modern Languages
University of Oxford
baggett, david, and william a. drumin, eds. Hitch-
cock and Philosophy: Dial M for Metaphysics.
Vol. 27, Popular Culture and Philosophy Series.
Chicago: Open Court, 2007, xii + 273 pp., 5 b&w
illus., $17.95 paper.
In Hitchcock and Philosophy: Dial M for Meta-
physics, David Baggett and William A. Drumin bring
together a valuable and largely successful collection
of essays by leading philosophers that investigate
the relationship between various philosophical is-
sues and the film practice of Alfred Hitchcock. As
Baggett and Drumin note in the volume’s “Previews
and Opening Credits” section, and as the individual
analyses make clear, Hitchcock’s auteurist vision is
defined by the narrative and thematic exploration of
the actual and possible relationships that human be-
ings bear to themselves, to each other, to the world,
and to the cinema. Hitchcock’s thoughtful, specula-
tive approach to these issues coupled with his char-
acteristic formal and stylistic rigor makes his films
particularly amenable to philosophical analysis and
interpretation.
While the individual articles in this collection situ-
ate Hitchcock’s cinema with respect to a wide range
of philosophical topics, the majority utilize one of two
related (and frequently overlapping) methodological
approaches. Essays utilizing the first approach treat
the film under discussion as a genuine, allegorical
instance of philosophical speculation or argumenta-
tion, which must be interpreted in order to make its
implications explicit. To this end, Noël Carroll’s arti-
cle, “Vertigo and the Pathologies of Romantic Love,”
is notable both for its attention to cinematic style
and structure and for its careful discussion of how a
narrative film like Vertigo (1958) might contribute to
philosophical exploration. In elucidating the way in
which the film’s “parallel-romance structure” (p. 105)
prompts the viewer to contemplate the positive and
negative impacts of fantasy on romantic love, Carroll
scrupulously documents every step in his interpretive
process, thus providing an excellent model for philo-
sophical film analysis.
Sander Lee’s article, “Hitchcock’s Existentialism:
Anguish, Despair, and Redemption in Breakdown,”
provides an illuminating example of the “film as phi-
losophy approach.” In it Lee analyzes an episode
of Hitchcock’s television series Alfred Hitchcock
Presents, highlighting the way in which it extends the
focus on existential issues that characterized his 1950s
film practice, especially Vertigo and Rear Window
(1955). While Lee does not assert that Hitchcock was
Book Reviews
influenced by or even familiar with Martin Buber’s
“I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships or Heidegger’s no-
tions of “Angst” and “Authenticity,” his strong and
convincing reading of Breakdown leaves little doubt
that Hitchcock was motivated by many of the same
questions and concerns that prompted their formula-
tion. In this way, Lee identifies in one of Hitchcock’s
least discussed works one of his most explicit and fully
developed explorations of existentialism.
Raja Halwani and Steven Jones’s article, “The
Birds: Plato and Romantic Love,” which interprets
The Birds (1963) as Hitchcock’s philosophical trea-
tise on the dangers of romantic frivolity, is somewhat
less successful. Halwani and Jones base this interpre-
tation on the idea that the bird attacks tend to follow
actions or remarks by characters that indicate a casual
or dismissive attitude toward love. However, there
are attacks that fail to follow this pattern and others
that can only be reconciled with it after a consider-
able amount of conceptual stretching. And, insofar as
the horrific quality of the attacks derives, and seems
intended to derive, in large part from their lack of
identifiable cause or meaning, it seems impossible to
force them into such a simple pattern without doing
violence to the film’s admirable complexity. Further,
the competent if overlong summary of Plato’s Sym-
posium that opens the article adds little to the inter-
pretation of the film that follows and seems intended
only to ensure fulfillment of the collection’s “philos-
ophy requirement.” For a more nuanced reading of
The Birds and an insightful theory of Hitchcockian
suspense, see Catherine Jack Deavel and David Paul
Deavel’s excellent “Knowing When to Be Afraid: Ra-
tionality and Suspense.”
The final and shortest essay in the collection,
Robert Yanal’s “Shadow of a Doubt and Marnie: En-
tries into a Mind,” suffers from oversimplification in
its attempt to treat two major films and two major
philosophers in under eight pages. Yanal proposes
that Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Marnie (1964)
can each be instructively viewed as presenting an im-
plicit critique of Descartes’ theory of mind and an
implicit endorsement of Wittgenstein’s. Yet it is un-
clear whether Marnie presents the kind of challenge
to Descartes that Yanal describes, in that the possi-
bility of repressed childhood memories doesn’t seem
to present a contradiction to the Cartesian notion
that we can be sure of the contents of our conscious
thoughts at any given moment. Further, it is doubtful
that a narrative as heavily indebted to psychoanalysis
as Marnie’s could ever be meaningfully classified as
Wittgensteinian.
In this way, it seems that the most successful in-
stances of the film-as-philosophy approach genuinely
illuminate the hidden depths of Hitchcock’s cinema,
revealing the rigorous auteurist investigation at work
beneath the generic surface, while the less successful
213
applications tend to distort the meaning and signifi-
cance of the films or the philosophical theories dis-
cussed by forcing one or the other to conform to an
interpretation that just isn’t a good fit. Many of the
remaining articles exhibit a second approach. Rather
than treating Hitchcock’s films as philosophical texts
in their own right, these essays employ them as il-
lustrations or thought experiments, which can pro-
vide support and motivation for further philosophical
analysis.
Angela Curran’s article, “Shadow of a Doubt: Se-
crets, Lies, and the Search for Truth,” is one of the
most rigorous and insightful examples of this method-
ology that appears in the collection. Taking young
Charlie’s (Teresa Wright) claim that she “knows” her
uncle as a starting point, Curran undertakes a skilled
and detailed analysis of the notion of knowledge as
justified true belief, utilizing narrative elements from
Shadow of a Doubt as examples and counterexam-
ples. For instance, Curran helpfully presents the FBI’s
failure to follow up on evidence of Charles Oak-
ley’s (Joseph Cotten) guilt after the death of another
suspect in the Merry Widow Murders as an exam-
ple of problems presented by the pragmatist theory
of truth. In this way, Curran’s article highlights the
philosophical value of Shadow of a Doubt, revealing
it as an ideal illustration of the process of acquir-
ing knowledge and the difficulty of “facing facts,”
while also discussing and evaluating a number of
difficult ethical and epistemological theories. Kevin
Kinghorn’s “Plot Twist and Surprises: Why Are Some
Things Improbable?” is another fascinating article
in this vein. Kinghorn distinguishes different notions
of philosophical improbability—physical, statistical,
and evidential—and illustrates the way they oper-
ate in several of Hitchcock’s films. For instance, the
shocking or unbelievable quality of The Wrong Man’s
(1956) narrative is a result of statistical improbability
of many of its events. Kinghorn’s essay succeeds both
in establishing the importance of probability to philo-
sophical inquiry and in revealing Hitchcock’s deep
interest in exploring the effect of statistically and evi-
dentially improbable events on everyday individuals.
As Curran’s and Kinghorn’s articles indicate, the
strength of the film-as-illustration approach is the
opportunity it provides for a more detailed explica-
tion and evaluation of complex philosophical theories
than is usually appropriate to the film-as-philosophy
approach. However, many essays in this style tend
to take a rather instrumental attitude toward the
films they discuss. For instance, in “On Being Mr.
Kaplan: Personal Identity in North by Northwest,”
Steven W. Patterson uses the film as a teaching tool
for the examination of different philosophical no-
tions of personal identity. While Patterson’s article
is rigorous, informative, and often quite entertaining,
it seems somewhat unwilling to engage with North
214
by Northwest (1959) as a complete and meaningful
work. For instance, rather than drawing examples
and counterexamples directly from the film, Patter-
son merely uses its characters to recast stock philo-
sophical thought experiments: “Imagine that unbe-
knownst to Thornhill, every night for the past year
the CIA has crept into his bedroom when he’s asleep
and painlessly replaced a few thousand of the cells in
his body” (p. 131). It seems that any spy film would
serve Patterson’s pedagogical purpose equally well.
Steven M. Sanders’s “Why Be Moral? Amorality
and Psychopathy in Strangers on a Train” and Phillip
Tallon’s “Psycho: Horror, Hitchcock, and the Prob-
lem of Evil” utilize Hitchcock’s exemplary evildoers
Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) and Norman Bates
(Anthony Perkins) to examine central ethical and
theological questions. Sanders’s clear and instructive
essay largely avoids the pitfalls of a more instrumen-
tal approach by introducing numerous textual ex-
amples that reveal Bruno as a uniquely developed
instance of the amoral psychopathic character and an
ideal challenge to traditional justifications for moral
behavior—the discussion of Bruno as a moral “free
rider” is particularly interesting. However, Tallon’s
somewhat muddled essay fails to create a convincing
connection between Psycho (1960) and the problem
of evil. Tallon identifies “horrendous evil” (p. 50) as a
particularly strong challenge to the existence of God
and notes that horror films like Psycho contain mon-
strous characters that commit horrendous acts, but
his discussion of the problem of evil sheds little light
on his interpretation of Psycho and vice versa. Fur-
ther, the article is interrupted by a rather superflu-
ous critique of Noël Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror
(Routledge, 1990) that fails to link up meaningfully
with either the film or the philosophy.
The overall tone of Hitchcock and Philosophy
is fun and engaging, as evidenced by the amusing
Hitchcock-inspired writer bios that appear in the con-
cluding “Cast and Crew” section. The volume’s orga-
nization is a bit of a mixed bag: it seems that, not
knowing whether to arrange the book by film (or
number of films) discussed, by philosophical issue,
or by genre, the editors decided to pursue all of these
options simultaneously. Thus there is a section con-
taining analyses of Hitchock’s horror films, sections
dealing with ethics and epistemology, a preliminary
catchall section containing essays that don’t fit any of
the above categories, and a concluding section with
essays on multiple films. It also seems that where
possible, essays on the same film were grouped to-
gether, which leads to several interesting juxtaposi-
tions. It is instructive, for example, to compare the
different attitudes toward voyeurism on display in
Skoble’s and Silverstein’s essays on Rear Window. It
goes without saying that the multiple competing sys-
tems serve to generate a few rather unintuitive results
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
as well. For example, Thomas Wartenberg’s original
and compelling essay “Ethics or Film Theory? The
Real McGuffin in North by Northwest,” which argues
that North by Northwest sets up an apparent ethical
opposition that is resolved by the film’s final match
cut into an aesthetic treatise on the power of the cin-
ematic medium, is filed under the “Reeling Mind”
section. The inclusion of a selected bibliography or
suggestions for further reading might have helped to
make Hitchcock and Philosophy an even more valu-
able resource, but overall the majority of the essays
provide excellent models for students of both film
and philosophy who are interested in philosophically
inflected film analysis and offer a valuable opportu-
nity for Hitchcock aficionados to increase their un-
derstanding of a variety of philosophical issues.
LISA K. BROAD
Cinema Studies
New York University
erjavec, aleš, ed. Filozofski vestnik: The Revival of
Aesthetics. Vol. XXVIII, No. 2. Ljubljana, Slove-
nia: Zalozba ZRC Publishing, 2007, 286 pp., 3 b&w
illus., € 10 paper.
A colleague who retired from university teaching
after forty-five years of stellar service recently said to
me: “What is missing in faculty scholarship is imag-
ination.” Filozofski vestnik: The Revival of Aesthet-
ics overflows with imagination, and reminds scholars
and teachers in the field that aesthetics is like an over-
ripe raspberry with swollen seed nodules ready to be
planted and to sprout into strong new shrubs. Imag-
ine some of these aesthetics “seeds”: a Chomsky-like
universal human structure that enables human be-
ings to respond to the beauty of objects outside their
culture; an emphasis not on disinterest but on over-
interest, on the intense feeling and splendor of objects
presented to the imagination; a Mode-2 aesthetics
that pushes aesthetics to the borders of the discipline
where, for example, beauty meets neuroscience and
immunology; an aesthetic impact study that utilizes
the pain, dismay, and revulsion of negative aesthet-
ics to guide decision makers in their social planning;
images that produce human history, and so on. Page
after page, the book spills over with seeds begging to
be planted in the imagination of scholars.
Filozofski vestnik is a philosophy journal edited
and published by the Institute of Philosophy at
the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts. The journal publishes
three issues annually, two in Slovenian and the other
a special international issue in English, French, or
German on a topic chosen by an editorial board with
luminaries such as Alain Badiou (France), Martin
Book Reviews
Jay (USA), and Wolfgang Welsch (Germany). In-
ternational issues have appeared on the philosophi-
cal implications of the Copernican revolution (2004),
the concept of nothing (2005), and the relationship
between philosophy and psychoanalysis (2006). The
reason for choosing aesthetics as the theme of the
2007 international issue was the forthcoming (July
2007) triennial meeting of the International Congress
of Philosophy in Ankara, Turkey. The work would
ride, in a sense, a wave of interest in international
aesthetics already created by the Congress.
The editor and prime mover behind The Revival
of Aesthetics is Aleš Erjavec, Director of Research
at the Institute of Philosophy and a former presi-
dent of the International Association for Aesthet-
ics. Erjavec himself has published almost a dozen
books related to aesthetics; two of his edited works
were reviewed in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism: Post-modernism and the Post-socialist Con-
dition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism (Univer-
sity of California Press, 2003) (reviewed by Curtis L.
Carter in vol. 63, 2005) and Aesthetics and/as Global-
ization (Zalozba ZRC Publishing, 2004) (reviewed by
Dan Vaillancourt in vol. 65, 2007). Erjavec’s reputa-
tion and leadership position in the international aes-
thetics community enabled him to bring together in
one publication scholars of exceptional talent, at vari-
ous points in their careers, from all over the world. An
interesting aside is that almost a third of the contribu-
tors to the volume are not professional philosophers;
instead, they work in literature and the arts. This un-
usual combination of scholars has contributed to the
creation of a varied, interesting, and unpredictable
book. As with his other edited works, Erjavec has
held the contributors to a high standard of redaction.
In a brief interrogatory and introductory essay, Er-
javec introduces the importance of the topic and the
organization of the book into four parts (The Philos-
ophy of Beauty, Art, Culture, and Nature; Aesthet-
ics: Its Past and Present; The Revival of Aesthetics;
Cultural and Philosophical Interactions Today). In
truth, the sixteen articles defy categorization by con-
tent and can be read in any order, no article building
on knowledge explicated in previous articles. How-
ever, numerous contributions share methodological
similarities. In one group, the authors played a role in
the histories they describe, and, in another, they set
out research agendas they hope to share with other
scholars. The final group includes two idiosyncratic
contributions. For the purpose of this review, then,
the three groupings of articles are History, Research,
and Idiosyncrasy.
i. History. Four articles describe, within aesthet-
ics, historical movements that the authors observed
or in which they participated, some authors even
shaping the movement itself. Richard Shusterman
(philosopher and endowed chair holder at Florida
215
Atlantic University) gives an account of somaesthet-
ics, a movement he helped create with the 1997 pub-
lication of Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and
the Philosophical Life (Routledge). Somaesthetics
represents a “focus on the body as a locus of sensory-
aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-
fashioning” (p. 36). He describes the growth of the
movement in three areas: analytic, pragmatic, and
practical somaesthetics. Curtis L. Carter (philoso-
pher at Marquette University and founding director
of the Haggerty Museum of Art) served ten years
as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for
Aesthetics. In one of the most wide-ranging articles
in the collection, Carter surveys the aesthetics land-
scape, beginning with the establishment of the Amer-
ican Society for Aesthetics and its acquisition of The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and then mov-
ing to social and political aesthetics as well as aesthet-
ics of popular culture. Aesthetics thrives the more it
remains open and inclusive, according to these two
authors.
Yrjö Sepänmaa and Gao Jianping complete the
history group. Sepänmaa (philosopher at the Univer-
sity of Joensuu, Finland) has spent several decades
in environmental aesthetics, especially on the appli-
cation of theory to real-world situations. He is also
the organizer since 1994 of a series of international
conferences on environmental aesthetics. Sepänmaa
reviews the history of applied aesthetics and then
gives a primer to the field, covering practice and its
implications, emergent and vanishing aesthetics, hid-
den and normative aesthetics, and even suggesting
that the field ought to designate an expert in the
mold of Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” at The New
York Times, to dispense advice on how aesthetics
affects the health and happiness of human beings.
Gao Jianping (philosopher at the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences) discusses the aesthetics craze in
China between 1978 and 1985 by deconstructing four
words, wenxue (literature), xingxiang siwei (thinking
in images or imaged thought), zhuti or zhuguan (sub-
ject or subjective), and bentilun (ontology). The story
of wenxue begins the article. During Mao’s Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976), the Communist Party prin-
ciple emphasizing struggle and revolution served as
a guideline for literature and art, thus intermingling
politics and aesthetics. Indeed, literature was trans-
lated as “the Party wenxue.” After the Revolution,
the Party principle disappeared, allowing scholars to
imbue new meaning to wenxue, that is, literature in
the broad sense of the term including the belles-lettres
and other kinds of writing. This new understanding
of wenxue inspired Chinese aestheticians to examine
literature and art as entities in their own right and
no longer as revolutionary tools. The excitement of
the discovery propelled aesthetics books to the top
of bestseller lists and thousands of students to pursue
216
advanced degrees in aesthetics. Words not only open
gates in one mind but also gates in a society.
ii. Research. Ten writers lay out their research and
then leap to interesting and fruitful ideas, proposing
them in some instances as the future of aesthetics.
Wolfgang Welsch (philosopher at Friedrich-Schiller
University of Jena in Germany) writes on beauty, his
essay typifying the methodology of the articles in this
group. He challenges some beauty truisms of the past
several decades, for example, the oft-repeated state-
ment that beauty during the twentieth century had
disappeared in the shadows and the current postmod-
ern view that beauty is a cultural construct. Beauty
never disappeared from the lives of people, Welsch
argues; rather the talk of beauty has waxed and
waned, increasing in popularity in recent years. Cul-
tural factors shape the perception of much beauty,
but not all. Welsch isolates breathtaking beauty as the
kind of beauty that presupposes in all human beings
“a dimension immanent within our cultural forma-
tions that transcends the cultural framework” (p. 25).
This extra-cultural framework—this Chomsky-like
universal structure—represents the seed with which
Welsch concludes his essay, challenging the reader
with this final line: “It is still the case that nobody
really knows how to explain it” (p. 25).
The other nine articles in the research group share
the same care for research details and the same zest
for provocative ideas. The reader can select any ar-
ticle from the following list without fear of disap-
pointment: Thierry de Duve (art historian at the Uni-
versity of Lille 3 in France), “The Post-Duchamp
Deal: Remarks on a Few Specifications of the Word
‘Art’”; Mario Perniola (philosopher at the University
of Rome “Tor Vergata” in Italy), “Cultural Turns in
Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics”; Lev Kreft (philoso-
pher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and di-
rector of its Peace Institute), “The Second Modernity
of Naturalist Aesthetics”; Ernest Ženko (philoso-
pher at the University of Primorska in Slovenia),
“Mode-2 Aesthetics”; Anthony J. Cascardi (compar-
ative literature scholar at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley), “The Implication of Images in the
Revival of Aesthetics”; Devin Zane Shaw (philos-
ophy graduate student at the University of Ottawa
in Canada), “Inaesthetics and Truth: The Debate be-
tween Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière”; Ken’ichi
Iwaki (director of the National Museum of Modern
Art in Kyoto, Japan), “A Viewpoint on Painting on a
Problematic Theory of Computational Psychology”;
Patrick D. Flores (art historian at the University of
the Philippines and a curator of the National Museum
of the Philippines), “‘Nature Intervenes in Strokes’:
Sensing the End of the Colony and the Origin of
the Aesthetic”; Tyrus Miller (literary scholar at the
University of California, Santa Cruz), “Retro-Avant-
Garde: Aesthetic Revival and the Con/Figurations of
Twentieth-Century Time.”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
iii. Idiosyncrasy. The final two articles utilize
methodologies unlike the others in the collection.
Eva Kit Wah Man (philosopher at the Hong Kong
Baptist University) explores comparative aesthetics,
whereas Arnold Berleant (emeritus professor of phi-
losophy at Long Island University) maps out aes-
thetic topography.
Man compares John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthet-
ics to Confucian and Taoist theories of human primal
experience to learn of ways in which aesthetic experi-
ences might open to the realm of value. From Dewey
she learns that the aesthetic experience represents an
immediate and holistic interaction of human beings
with their living environment. This important value
for human beings she calls the “Principle of Cogni-
tive Presentation,” because the human being views
the environment as an object. The Confucian and
Taoist traditions emphasize intellectual intuition, “in
which the human mind transcends the subject and ob-
ject relation before engaging with Nature” (p. 126).
Man calls this experience the “Principle of Ontolog-
ical Actualization,” since the mind sees not objects
but things-in-themselves. Both descriptions of human
experiences, though different in their reach, point to
“just so” experiences, and, hence, open to the realm
of value.
Perhaps befitting his position as a senior member
of the sixteen writers, Berleant shares his wisdom ac-
cumulated over decades of researching and teaching
aesthetics. His essay ought to be required reading for
every aesthetics student. He describes the place of
aesthetics as a discipline (it is unique and founda-
tional), the experience of aesthetics (it is synaesthetic
in involving all the senses), and negative aesthetics
(it is the pain one feels when entering a favela, for
example). The topography of aesthetics has its own
latitudinal and longitudinal lines: the aesthetics of
ethical criticism, comparative aesthetics, critical aes-
thetics, substantive aesthetics, aesthetic value of all
the arts (fine arts, popular arts, and folk arts), social
aesthetics, applied aesthetics, and analytical aesthet-
ics, especially involving powerful concepts that need
clarification like the role of the preconceptual in the
aesthetic experience and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
concepts of reversibility and chiasm or intertwining.
Berleant also names a few obstacles that may hinder
the growth of aesthetics, one of them being the ex-
aggerated importance attached to the definition of
art. Is it not more fruitful, he asks, to understand how
an “object works in appreciative experience” (p. 157)
than to haggle over whether the object ought to be
called art? He concludes the essay with an uplifting
metaphor: “While we may have to forsake the rose,
we may discover its hidden fragrance everywhere”
(p. 165).
The book is recommended for libraries and for
readers who want to experience the “busting-out” of
aesthetics. The unsystematic sequence of the articles
Book Reviews
makes the book undesirable for beginning students.
However, the fruitfulness of the articles pushes the
book to the top of the required reading list for aes-
thetics professors and advanced aesthetics students
in search of ideas for research papers, including M.A.
and Ph.D. theses. There was talk at the Congress in
Turkey of finding a major publishing house to give
the book greater publicity and more circulation, at a
higher price of course. Readers may want to purchase
the book now at a modest cost, because oftentimes
seeds do better when planted right away.
DAN VAILLANCOURT
Department of Philosophy
Loyola University Chicago
gumbrecht, hans ulrich. In Praise of Athletic
Beauty. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2006, 263 pp., $22.95 cloth.
Do sports provide their spectators with aesthetic ex-
perience? Are perfectly executed football plays beau-
tiful? Is the pleasure derived from watching sport
an aesthetic pleasure? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht re-
sponds to these questions in In Praise of Athletic
Beauty. Despite arguable comparisons of sport with
dance and theater, the potential of sport as an arena
for aesthetic experience has been underexamined,
and, as Gumbrecht argues, underestimated. While
there are some articles and book chapters devoted
to the aesthetic and sport, Gumbrecht’s book is im-
portant because it is among a scant few full-length
works devoted to the subject. In Praise of Athletic
Beauty provides a stimulating starting point for those
interested in sport as a realm for aesthetic experi-
ence. The writing is accessible, and Gumbrecht reg-
ularly oscillates from introducing concepts useful for
analyzing sport and its relationship to aesthetic expe-
rience to providing fodder for analysis through clear
explanation of examples from sport history. My sum-
mary starts at the beginning of the book, and I will
raise criticisms as I proceed.
The book is divided into four chapters; it opens
with a preface that traces how fans come to take such
tremendous pleasure in the “grotesque” movements
of human bodies engaged in sport. Chapter One is
concerned with providing definitions and delineating
concepts, particularly with regard to praise, beauty,
and athletics. To open Chapter One, Gumbrecht be-
gins his scathing critique of previous scholarly treat-
ments of sport. This is a critique that Gumbrecht
returns to in the chapters that follow. He criticizes
academia’s marginalization of sport and those schol-
ars who denounce this massive social phenomenon as
“a symptom of highly undesirable tendencies” (p. 25).
According to Gumbrecht, when scholars do take on
sport as a topic for analysis, they interpret sport as a
217
marker of some other, more important phenomenon
and fail to address sport qua sport. He includes Nor-
bert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and
Roger Caillois among the guilty scholars. He also crit-
icizes the academic investment in the belief that “aes-
thetic experience can be triggered only by a limited
set of canonized objects and situation” and asserts
that sport can also produce distinctly aesthetic expe-
riences in its observers (p. 38).
After clarifying what his project is not, Gumbrecht
asserts that this book is “unilaterally, a book about
the pleasures of sports spectatorship” and argues that
praise is an expression of gratitude for the aesthetic
pleasures offered to the spectator by the athletes.
With regard to beauty, Gumbrecht uses Kant to help
him argue that watching sport is on par with those aes-
thetic experiences associated with canonical works of
art. While he does not go so far as to argue that sports
and athletic contests are works of art, he does assert
that watching sport is, nevertheless, a candidate for
aesthetic experience. In characterizing the aesthetic
experiences elicited by watching sport, one of Gum-
brecht’s key concepts is what he calls “focused inten-
sity,” which is not merely the ability to “exclude a
multiplicity of potential distractions but also a con-
centrated openness for something unexpected to hap-
pen” (p. 52).
In characterizing athletics, Gumbrecht introduces
several important concepts, including presence, per-
formance, tragedy, and transfiguration. Gumbrecht
also makes a distinction between two key features in
athletics that I will discuss here: agon, which denotes
competition, and arête, which denotes striving for ex-
cellence with the “consequence of taking some type
of performance to its individual or collective limits”
(p. 70). Gumbrecht, who takes arête to be the defining
feature of sports and athletics, elaborates upon this
concept.
Those of us who are sports fans are unfortunately
accustomed to the blindness to women’s sports and
their achievements. Gumbrecht’s use of examples
from women’s sports is sparse throughout the book,
and those few female athletes who are mentioned
are usually only mentioned in passing. In addition,
Gumbrecht’s abstract and hypothetical athletes are
all men, as he does not employ gender-neutral lan-
guage. Some might contend that this is a picky, an-
cillary criticism. However, in Gumbrecht’s case, his
affinity for men’s sports negatively affects his ar-
gument, specifically, in his evaluation of arête as a
sporting ideal. Gumbrecht claims that arête involves
pushing the limits of human performance, and that
its presence in sport is the primary reason for our
attraction to sport. In a subsequent discussion on
women’s sports, he points out that were the best men’s
teams to compete against the best women’s teams, the
men’s teams would certainly prevail. From this asser-
tion, Gumbrecht concludes that this fact illustrates
218
the limits of arête as the defining force of our attrac-
tion to sport. It is unclear how gender asymmetry in
sport illustrates the limits of arête. Gumbrecht’s ap-
peal to gender asymmetry betrays an implicit view
of the human, and thus the limits of human perfor-
mance, as essentially male. If the best forty-year-old
male runners were to compete against the best eighty-
year-old male runners, the forty-year-olds would cer-
tainly win. If this fact also illustrates the limits of arête,
then the gender of the athletes is irrelevant. It is thus
unclear why we ought to set arête aside as a defining
concept in relation to the aesthetic in sport.
In Chapter Two, Gumbrecht traces sport history
in an attempt to reveal the “discontinuities” in sport
history. Gumbrecht’s focus is on illustrating how the
concepts delineated in the previous chapter have
been manifested in past sporting phenomena. Chap-
ter Three opens with the following question: “What
is it that fascinates sport spectators, beyond victories,
defeats, and broken records?” (p. 150). Gumbrecht’s
project in this chapter is to answer this question.
Gumbrecht explains the “objects of aesthetic expe-
rience” via fascination and elaborates on the phe-
nomenology of fascination as it applies to seven
different objects (or events) of aesthetic experience:
sculpted bodies; suffering in the face of death; grace;
tools that enhance the body’s potential; embodied
forms; plays as epiphanies; and good timing. In this
chapter, Gumbrecht further defines beauty and ug-
liness in conjunction with fascination. He asks, “But
what would an ugly play in sports look like? What
would we say that a play is not beautiful?” (p. 194).
Quite simply, ugliness in sports is a lack of fascina-
tion, which is indicated in part by a lack of excite-
ment. Chapter Four explains the varieties of spectator
engagement with sport, employing Nietzsche’s dis-
tinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
Drawing from several philosophical traditions, Gum-
brecht’s analysis is eclectic, which is favorable for ex-
amining multidimensional areas such as sport.
The most frustrating aspect of this book is that it
lacks both footnotes and a bibliography. Gumbrecht
writes that it is his hope that the reasons for why his
book is written without references are self-evident,
but they are not. Though Gumbrecht does an excel-
lent job of raising philosophically stimulating ques-
tions, the book provides no resources or directions
for readers interested in pursuing these questions.
Such resources and directions are usually provided
by a clear bibliography, or at least clear indications in
the text of what sources the author is engaging. Gum-
brecht’s failure in this regard is disappointing, and it
is a disservice to his scholarly readers. Still, the essay
form of the book does have its merits. Gumbrecht’s
conversational philosophical musings and critical re-
flections upon his experiences as a sport spectator
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
prompt readers to respond in kind and invite active
critical reflection on the part of the reader. Had Gum-
brecht employed heavily researched and intensely ar-
gued analytic philosophical writing, I doubt the effect
would be the same.
This criticism dovetails into another, more impor-
tant criticism. Though the body of scholarly litera-
ture on aesthetics and sport is small, some fascinating
philosophical work on the relationship between the
aesthetic and sport has been performed since the mid-
1970s, and this scholarship has motivated some lively
debates. This scholarship includes, but is not limited
to, the work of David Best, Peter J. Arnold, Terence
J. Roberts, Spencer K. Wertz, and Betsy Postow. The
mid-1980s saw the debate over the relationship be-
tween the aesthetic and sport become particularly in-
tense between David Best, Spencer Wertz, and Ter-
ence Roberts, in the Journal of the Philosophy of
Sport. Gumbrecht’s failure to engage this scholar-
ship is curious, as these authors have carefully treated
the same themes he treats in his book. Considered in
light of his broad-stroked critique of scholarly treat-
ments of sport beyond the scope of aesthetic issues,
this puzzling omission becomes even more provoca-
tive. I readily agree with the charges that sport has
been undertheorized and that humanistic scholar-
ship on sport suffers from complex problems that are
due in part to sport’s precarious position as a sub-
ject worthy of academic attention. However, Gum-
brecht’s dismissive critique of scholarly work on sport
not only goes unjustified in the book, but it is also
unclear what arguments and authors he is dismiss-
ing. At one point, Gumbrecht claims in passing that
many academic “readings” of sport are “highly in-
competent” (p. 68). While I find this to be a rather
harsh appraisal in any case, this would not be so trou-
bling had Gumbrecht taken the care to carefully ex-
plain this criticism and the particular arguments to
which this criticism is aimed and attempted to provide
evidence for why I, as a reader, ought to agree with
him. I find Gumbrecht’s general critique to be naı̈ve
given the volume of previous scholarship on aes-
thetics and sport, coupled with the growing body
of methodologically savvy and theoretically incisive
sport scholarship.
Despite these criticisms, this is an accessible and
thought-provoking book. It introduces readers to
some important aesthetic questions with regard to
sport. In addition, Gumbrecht’s passion for sport
shows in the vivid examples he offers, and readers
will not be able to avoid learning something about
the major events and figures in sport.
JOAN GRASSBAUGH FORRY
Department of Philosophy
Temple University