Art is in part an aspect of our necessity to delude ourselves. Art is not about "truth value" but it does help us to construct the delusion that we have meaning and can live in a world we understand. Sometimes art, excavates or reveals the truth of human experience. The great novels reveal more of human experience than any particular attempt at psychology. But because the great novels reveal the "interiority/exteriority" of human experience, does not make what they reveal "true", in your sense. Perhaps it gives the novel "strength" in Nietzsche's sense, but I am hesitant to call this "strength" a truth value. In fact I think it is intellectually dangerous to do so.
Art is about pleasure and pain that has meaning, seeing how pleasure and pain can make meaning for us. Perhaps this is also part of the Utopian function of art. But we know that the universe is pretty goddamn meaningless and does not have the teleology that art leads us to integrate into our experience.
All art is systematically misleading because it gives us false narratives and false meanings where there can't be any. This does not mean that narrative, for instance, can't reveal little "truths" (but not Truth) about our selves along the way. And these "truths" can be helpful and can help us to understand our world, as well as just as often mislead us. Homer's Achilles is a powerfully "true" character who can systematically mislead us into the delusion of the "hero." (At least this was true of Alexander and Caesar.)
We live in a "world" without narrative meaning. Art serves to give meaning where there is none. We have complex brains that help us to realize that just possibly, there is no reason in the world why we should struggle for existence at all, along with a deep biological fear of death. Stories, songs, the visual arts, among their many other functions, also help us to smooth over this contradiction between our desire to live and our knowledge that it is all probably meaningless -- the sneaking suspicion that it is "best not to have born at all." Art helps us to invent meaning to deceive ourselves that we don't have this suspicion about life.
On 10/3/06, Michael Catolico <mcatolico at mindspring.com> wrote:
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> Michael Catolico: it's not a matter of agreed upon criteria. it's a matter of truth. you seem to believe that the only valid form of knowledge that yields truth or certainty is positivist science.
JM: __Certainty, Knowledge, and Truth are all different... Why do you conflate them?__ I don't know what you mean by positivist science. I prefer to talk about the difference between testable theories and other types of knowledge. There is a difference but it is mostly because testable theories tell us so little about the world. We gain certainty but sacrifice the deepness and feeling of our imagined patterns of life.
I don't accept that I believe that theoretical models and scientific explanations are the only valid forms of knowledge. There are levels of certainty and we can be most certain about our conclusions within a) tautological systems, b) tested theoretical models. We can also obtain knowledge through normal use of everyday rational argument, common sense, the gathering of human experience, and this includes what we call "intuition" (though we don't know what "intuition" is) and the use of our senses.
We don't know how, but somehow, stories, novels, narrative in general, rhythm and blues, prosody, visual arts, provide deeply human experiences and we learn from these human experiences, both for good and for bad. The point is that I don't know how this is done and neither do you.
Within the Euclidean system we can be certain of the Pythagorean theorem. Whether it is "knowledge" or not I will leave to others. Redefine the geometry to look closer to Einstein's reality and the Pythagorean theorem doe not work as well. Educated people thought it matched reality for more than 2500 years. They were wrong. Tested theoretical models provide us with another level of certainty. Human experience in general provides us with "knowledge" including the experience of art. It is very uncertain knowledge. In none of this do I mention truth.
As far as the knowledge brought by experience and art, it somehow comes from patterns in the mind that we only have a hint of knowledge about. For instance the more chess positions I analyze the better my pattern recognition becomes and the better I become in recognizing "the truth" of the position, as Kasparov would say. Something similar happens when we "learn" to play or listen to music or watch movies or listen to, write or read poetry or stories.
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> Michael Catolico: the truth content of art exists (or fails to exist) in works and can be revealed. it's still up to the critic to develop and "prove" the extent of truth content of works and to demonstrate how well the work organizes and manifests that truth content. once revealed, denying it is akin to denying truth revealed through scientific method.
__One function of art is to delude us__ JM: So how are we going to agree? I don't believe that that the "truth value" of art is anything but harmful to artistic creation. I believe that the false belief that we are after the "truth" is just as important to art as anything that art "truthfully" reveals. I believe that art provides us with illusions, disillusions, and delusions. One of the important functions of art is not only to reveal to us how we are, or how we might be, but to deceive us into thinking that we are something that we are not. Art helps us to live because it deceives us into thinking that we matter, our story is an important story, that the world we create is of cosmic importance. Art is important because self-deception is essential to carry through in day to day life, and without stories self-deception would be a lot harder.
The very fact that a piece of writing is a cohesive narrative makes it in some sense an illusion and perhaps always also a delusion. That's why I find what you call the "truth-value" of art so delusional in itself. The truth value of art may only be that it reveals something about us and our culture but that it creates patterns where there are no patterns, because we need patterns, stories, unities, explanations just to live from day to day. It does not matter whether those patterns are "true" or "false".... all that they have to be is "adequate" for survival for a certain amount of (human) time.
Plato believed that the poet was a liar who fostered delusions, as well as disillusions, and thus the poet should be banned from his Republic. I believe that the poet is a liar and fosters delusions, as well as disillusions, and that is her value (though it would be a little bit perverse to call this a "truth-value").
My deeper guess is that the very fact that we pattern and make narratives is not a reflection of any particular "truth" that those patterns or narratives reveal, but rather a product of pre-existing patterns in the mind-brain that help us to organize experience. We know very little about this whole process and even though you may find a hint of "literary Darwinism" in the above hypothesis, as far as I am concerned the evolutionary psychologists who try to apply biological theory to narrative are simply pretending that they have knowledge when all that they have are (more, probably less) educated guesses.
> Michael Catolico: if i understand you clearly, your argument at times dogmatically insists that there cannot be any agreed upon criteria for judging the merits of artworks with any certainty.
_Verdi and Chinese Opera_ JM: Well I think that there is probably a biological basis for our feelings for beauty and for the stories we love. A hypothetical Martian could probably tell us why all our forms of narrative, music, and visual arts can be judged on the same or similar scales.
My Martian might be able to tell me that Greek traditional music really has the same underlying rhythms as John Coltrane. The fact is I can't "hear" the underlying rhythms in traditional Greek music and this music sounds like "noise" to me. But I can "hear" John Coltrane.
I live in a Greek neighborhood, and the people in this neighborhood who grew up with Greek music can obviously hear it and they must like it or why would they play it? As for me it is awful. There is a certain period in your life when you learn to hear music and it becomes harder and harder to learn new music as you go along. I believe that similar things happen with poetry, stories, and the visual arts. There may be some criteria somewhere to judge all of these things, but for me Verdi will always sound divine and Chinese opera will always sound like nails on blackboard. I have tried to listen to Chinese opera and I have been told what is great and what is mediocre. It is all awful to me, though I am willing to understand that others don't find it so.
Now you are I going to set up some set of criteria that will tell me why I should accept Chinese opera as great music when I can't even hear it? I would say that this is certainly arrogant. And you are going to tell the person who only grew up with Chinese music that Verdi is great? Why are you so certain of these things when I am not?
> Michael Catolico: you say this for several reasons 1) only scientific method permits valid assertions of truth claims or certainty,
JM: I never mentioned truth only certainty and levels of certainty. Truth is either a lot harder or a lot easier, depending where you are coming from and what kind of truth you are trying to show. I go with Bert Russell here.
> Michael Catolico: 2) art is experienced by individuals and as such can never be examined outside of personal experience of the works in question,
JM: I don't think it is a matter of (individual) personal experience -- but human experiential phenomena, which by necessity we experience for ourselves as individuals. But we all have basically the same biological apparatuses and we all have ways of communication that are shared by the whole of the human species. Thus the experiences we have individually can be "shared" in communication, and we can try to understand each other and come to agreements about our experiences with various amounts of certainty and uncertainty.
> Michael Catolico: thus 3) any measure of artistic value is doomed to be an unprovable or unverifiable claim. there are many marxist categories that address this type of reasoning. reification and alienation come to mind.
JM: The fact that we don't know what human experience is in the sense of scientific knowledge doesn't mean that we don't know what it is "intrinsically" as our own experience. The fact that we don't know how our experiential "world" works with any certainty doesn't mean that it is not "our" experience. The fact that we have little knowledge of the workings of experience doesn't mean that it doesn't give us knowledge. Only recently have we had much knowledge of our visual system. But we gain knowledge with our eyes without knowing how our eyes work. How certain we can be of the knowledge we gain from our eyes is another matter. Sometimes our eyes provide us with systematically wrong information or information that is just enough to keep us going.
Art is simply one aspect of human experience. The fact that we don't know how or why art works doesn't mean that it doesn't provide us with knowledge and experience, no matter how uncertain we can be about the knowledge provided by art.
As I said above, it would not be surprising if what art provides in part is a "necessary delusion." But even our delusions may help us toward other kinds of knowledge. But how are we to be certain?
> > Michael Catolico: the truth value in this case [the Parthenon] would likely have something to do with how greek forms express the impulse to freedom and democracy (regardless of the reality of the greek polis) and the overcoming of savage nature through human ingenuity.
JM: Ye, gods!
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> > JM: [...] Your use the word "objective" to mean something like
> "reality" or material reality and you also use it to mean "certainty." And
> you continually go back and forth between those uses.
> Michael Catolico: is there some kind of problem with this?
JM: Yes. Because we can be clear (if our choice is for consistent materialism) that what we call "subjectivity" or human experience or "consciousness" is one aspect of material reality. Something can be objective and yet we can be uncertain about it and we will have to admit our certain lack of knowledge. Examples: Dark matter is part of material reality but we have no idea what it is that we are observing.
We can be pretty sure that what we call "pain" refers to something in material reality, and that it that to a certain extent we can show how some "pain" comes about in the nervous-system brain. Yet we also know that we have very little certainty about the experiential qualities of "pain." What some people experience as "pleasure" others seem to experience as "pain" and we don't know why. This is "subjective" but it is also "objective". We can only explain this with relative certainty/uncertainty.
So when you say that are is "objective", I agree with you to a limited extent. When you say that you can set up a criteria by which we can judge art in some way that most of us can be certain of such judgments, I am quite certain that you are wrong.
> Michael Catolico: the dialectical and historical aspect of language.
JM: I am pretty sure that what you call the dialectical aspects of language is something that is empirically wrong. There are historical aspects of language but I am pretty sure that they are in that amorphous area of "meaning" that we are unable to say much about. I guess I am too much of a Chomskyian.
> Michael Catolico: why do you continue to valorize science as a special and presumably superior form of knowledge?
JM: See above. I don't think that scientific knowledge is superior. In fact it is limited and narrow. It is just more certain.
> Michael Catolico: it is you who are insisting on limiting art to individual judgment. someone can say the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion is beautiful to him. but what is the value of that judgment for exposing either the political truth behind the detonation or for that matter the science that makes the bomb possible.
JM: Again, I just don't think that beauty and pleasure has a "truth value" and much of art is about beauty. This is the old Platonic fallacy about beauty. A mushroom cloud is not art. If you wish to talk about the terrifying beauty of some landscapes, say the Grand Canyon, I am willing to entertain speculations on the relation of such "natural" beauty to art. A mushroom cloud has terrifying beauty. There is some terrifying beauty in the Marquis de Sade and Dostoevsky also. Homer's _Iliad_ is a terrifying, bloody, selfish, even alienating beauty to me. It is still great are as far as I am concerned. I think there is as much lies as truth here.
> Michael Catolico: ... truth benefits an ascending ruling class and undermines an established/declining one. art, as a conveyor of truth functions in this way just as science can be used or abused at various historical junctures. i never meant to suggest otherwise or simplify the matter. it's part of the by-product of an off-the-cuff, non-rigorous internet discussion that might lead you to believe i wouldn't be aware of this.>
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> then why would you bristle at the possibility that art can reveal truth. would not this be a valuable knowledge to be spread as well?
JM: Because art can reveal "truth" but it always does so with all of the delusions it builds. Any way what art is mainly about is pleasure, terror, beauty, ugliness, the variousness of experience. You don't need good art to tell the truth. Bad art can also help an oppressed class or people to understand the world.