Philosophy 301 Reflections on Art, Spring 2003, 2 MWF in Forestry 107; CRN 24342, 3 units

J.W. Powell, Office 110 UANX, phone 5753; jwp2@humboldt.edu

Office hours: 2-3:30 Thurs, 10-11:30 MWF, and by appt.;

Stop by at any time--your odds are good of catching me if I am not teaching.

What is art? What is it for? What's the relation of art to life, of art to reality? How can we judge between good art and bad art? (In particular, can we ever be wrong about those judgements?) What ever happened to beauty? How is art connected with human nature, with rationality, with imagination, with sex, with emotion, with madness, with our talk about art?

We will first collect raw data--specimens of art and artists to fix straightpins through their little heads--and take inventory of our own interests, backgrounds, and prejudices, and decide on an agenda of problems. We will look at paintings (mostly through reproductions) photos, listen to poetry, think about literature. The instructor's background in the traditionally central arts is strongest in poetry, drama, short stories, and essays, and in philosophy of art among those who have talked about painting, photography, and visual arts, so the instructor can be expected to bring up those kinds of examples. We will also look at some examples from other cultures not usually included in the artworld's discourse. (For example, we'll look at Navajo sandpaintings.) Other members of the class with other fields of expertise are invited to help out by providing other examples. We will then read some classic theoreticians on art, always with an eye to whether their arguments are strong and whether they are confirmed by our examples. With enough enthusiasm, we'll wade into some current controversies. Though this is not meant to be a comprehensive course in aesthetics, we will take up a good sample of the classic, central issues.

Because of the readings, the issues, and the methods of this course, it can be an important part of your HSU general educaton. The course has been set up with those general education goals (how they shape this course is attached to this syllabus) in mind. You will read influential arguments which have shaped our current intellectual situation, where "our" means belonging not just to dead white European males but to the world. You will also learn skills in reading, writing, and thinking critically about controversies which will help you in your HSU coursework and in your life after you leave HSU (supposing you leave alive). You will both know and be able to think. You and the world, which needs knowledgeable and thoughtful people, will benefit.

Grading: Students will write essays for two midterms and a final exam. I plan to have at least one of these exams written as a letter to the class, shared with all members via e-mail; each student will need to write a short response to two authors of those exams. Students will have the option of presenting to the class in lieu of one of the exams. For each exam students will write one or two essays chosen from five or more essay questions distributed a week ahead of when the exams are due. Grades will be an average of grades for the essays, with some fudging in favor of those whose grades go up instead of going down (viz., I will drop the first essay grade if that helps your grade for the course).

Course Evaluations will be web-based, during the last week of classes and finals week. I will deal with the problem of low participation rates via the institution of bribery: I will raise one exam grade by one-third of a grade for those who log in to the course evaluation website by Friday of finals week (the department secretary, who has access to this info though no one has access to the particular responses, will give me a list). One-third of a grade means a C+ goes to a B-, a B- to a B, and so on.

Approach: Here are some beginning remarks, to reduce hidden agendas and to expose my prejudices and interests: I am tempted to think that Jung's suggestion that every theory is a personal confession is especially true when philosophers talk about art. I am particularly interested in the weird behavior which sometimes shows that artists have believed philosophers, especially when artworks seem to stretch awfully hard to be evidence for some philosophical theory or other. Art becomes a way of doing philosophy, to the detriment of both. When this tendency is strong, one may in sour moments think of art history as a long line of artists at their easels stretching back through time, each with a winged cherub wearing the face of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Marx, Foucault, . . . .whispering in her/his ear.

I am also interested in how poorly most theoretical writers have captured the life of the artist, and I expect this will show as a concern in the course. The exceptions are noteworthy and make the rest of the pack seem shoddy. On the other hand, some of the most gifted writers on the arts, though they are not themselves artists, make us wince at how blind artists are to their own work, and we may look at some of those.

Other interests: There is a story that art sometimes shows the human soul working to become whole by struggling to incorporate elements from the unconscious in the face of psychological defense mechanisms and societal sanctions--art is on this view therapy both for the individual artist and for the society. Art can be the realm in which someone who might not fit in easily--indeed, who might otherwise be institutionalized--finds a role within society, at the margins or, with success, in the centers of power. That is, sometimes outsiders or crazies can find a voice through art. I am also interested in issues regarding the objectivity of descriptions of artworks, how one learns to read a work of art, and the relationships among artworks and the talk artists and critics produce about the artworks. I am also interested in ego, in the need of artists for audiences, in what happens when artists become powerful and successful, in levels of ambition, in power and corruption, and in domestic arts and temporary arts--flower arranging, quilting, crocheting, letterwriting, woodworking, especially art done with no public audience. I am curious to investigate the suggestion that women's art has been generally purer because done under the assumption that it had access only to audiences without power or was done by artists heedless of power issues. This of course overlaps with an interest in the relationship between ambition and art, across that wide spectrum from the intense and driven delusions of grandeur of Dali to content anonymity of quilters.

I choose philosophical problems I'm interested in and ones about which I have not yet settled in my mind how to think. Students will be given opportunity to influence our choices of problems.

Texts: I'm putting most (all, if I can) readings on Blackboard. Students will have to do those readings by logging in to Blackboard with a web browser. It's easy, directions will be provided, and the process modeled in class. There will be no required texts to purchase. There will be paper handouts provided at irregular intervals all semester (including student-written work), and these will be covered on exams. If you can do some of the readings without printing them (by saving them to disk and reading them on screen), I'll appreciate it.

Schedule (This is just one way the course could go, using "What is Art, Really?" as the organizing principle. It is very tentative, almost certain to change.)

Week Topic; Readings; Exams, etc.

1. What is art? Collecting Specimens, sketches of topics, looking at works and artifacts.

2. Art is imitation, or otherwise is not reality; Art is inspired and mad. Plato, from The Republic and from Ion.

3. Plato continued: From Symposium, from Phaedrus. Iris Murdoch, Acastos: Art and Eros.

4. Aristotle on imitation (Tragedy) and on art among productive activities. More collecting artworks.

5. First Midterm, fourth or fifth week; Hegel's vocabulary lessons, Tolstoy: art is expression of certain emotions.

6. Bouwsma dynamites expression theories. Nietzsche on human needs and truth in art.

7. The Institutional view: Art is what the artworld takes as art, and welcome, stranger, to the artworld.

Dickie, Danto, Weitz. Defining art as a problem.

8. Methods for continuing, inventory of results so far. 3rd set of artworks.

9. Second Midterm, ninth or tenth week;Definition continued, and its role in philosophy; Powell handout. Navajo sandpaintings as counterexamples for definitional accounts.

10. Foucault; paradox and irony as artistic values, argument as servant of ideology and power.

11. Art and socio-economic class; Benjamin; Linda Nochlin handout.

12. Non-DWEM aesthetics; Irigaray; Mudimbe; Clifford (no, not that Clifford); Fry and Willis.

13. Alienation, Madness, Insight: Outsider artists. Powell handout.

14. Art as sex or as sex substitute; Freud; N.O. Brown handout. Student papers.

15. Final exams. Loose ends. Student Papers continued.

On goals: The University and the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences recently asked faculty to review courses in the light of General Education Goals. Some of the adopted goals turn out to be shaping ideas for this course. Indeed, I often have moments where I think the philosophy department is the only place competent to address them; here they are.

--We will develop an understanding of how humanistic approaches are important to an overall understanding of human experience. For instance, a scientist may work away at discovery of the causes of AIDS or amotivational syndrome or schizophrenia, but it is a philosopher, working within the humanities, who works to make us aware of what counts as a cause and why we ask about causes. A fisheries biologist may work to rehabilitate spawning grounds but it is in philosophical moments that we place that effort within larger questions of significance or articulate the values and assumptions that she takes for granted in her work. A psychologist may trace interesting relations between mental illness and artistic genius, but we are doing philosophy when we ask about whether those relations should change our concept of art. We will see many instances of these distinctions in this course.

--We will understand how scholarly questions and writing in the humanities are different from scholarship in other fields, and how those other fields may connect with philosophical or other humanistic scholarship. For instance, we are going to read work by some long-dead philosophers and then point out how our interest in their arguments and issues is different from the interest of a historian.

--We will become able to question the relationships between generalizations and examples, especially in connection with our work on general philosophical questions. This is a recurrent theme in philosophy courses. For example, in our work on the question of the meaning of life, our own lives and the lives of Socrates, Sartre, William James, Zen masters, and others help us think through our answers and provide evidence. In this course, the question how we recognize whether a definition of art is better or worse than others requires us to attend to a sliding scale of abstractions, from examples of artworks to issues about artworks to generalizations about artworks. We will first concentrate on putting together possible answers, but then will shift to the question of how general we are requiring each answer to be, and what assumptions we have to make to ask the question.

--We will be working consistently through the semester to identify our own resources for providing good answers to the philosophical problems. That is, we are not going to limit our possible answers to those provided by dead white European males, but instead will stretch to imagine other alternatives. We will regard ourselves and our own imaginations as important resources in our work. In the philosophy of art, common sense is an important preventative measure against mistakes.

--We will increase our awareness of the environment of ideas around us which shapes possibilities we might otherwise take for granted. That is, we have been raised to think in particular ruts and need to lift up our heads to look around us. We will also look in the mirror--note our own reactions to this environment of ideas. It's a recurrent theme in philosophy that we need to think of things we had not considered. For instance, in work on the question of the meaning of life we will read works by people who disagree with each other profoundly, and our reactions of agreement and disagreement, or of scorn or admiration, may help or hinder our ability to think independently about the question. What can we do so those reactions we have don't paralyze us or make us miss important insights? Trying to understand ideas from traditions which are quite different from our own can help us see new possibilities.

There are some by-the-way parts of meeting those goals. Accordingly, we are going to also work on the following:

--We will learn the lingo. We will learn the vocabulary of argument, and clarify those terms we use everyday which are philosophically loaded. Philosophy is one place where clarity of language is absolutely necessary, and our work to show what words do and how they mark distinctions from each other helps to clarify how crucial clear thinking, writing, and speaking are to the humanities.

--We will be active. This does not mean students have to talk out every class, but it means passivity and memorization which might work in other disciplines don't here. Worse, passivity shows you don't get it. We will worry and take the stakes seriously and find cause for enthusiasm and feel attacked and feel as though what we have to say on these matters, matters.

--We will raise our standards of discussion. We will pay attention to how arguments fail and how they could be made better. We will watch ourselves fail and do better. We will become enlightened about the possibilities of doing better and failing. We will become more demanding--this comes with being educated.

--We will pay attention to how people have been unfairly robbed of their voices by others with more power. We do this in order to take arguments seriously no matter who gives them voice. We will insist that arguments work not because the arguer has the right number of limbs, the right skin color or sexual plumbing or money or powerful friends, but because they are good arguments. We will note arguments which have been discounted unfairly because they came from women or minorities or otherwise marginalized people.

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