Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002
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Snaevarr,
Stefan. Minerva and the Muses:
The Place of Reason in Aesthetic Judgment.
Kristiansand (N), Høyskoleforlaget AS – Nordic Academic Press, 1999.
271 pp. ISBN: 82-7634-176-4. Kr
260,00 (about $32), paperback only.
Reviewed by
This book claims to aim at a vindication of ‘aesthetic
rationalism,’ and it does a good job of fulfilling this aim.
Aesthetic relativists like Margolis receive careful attention, as do
emotivist theories of aesthetic judgments.
So if you think aesthetic relativism or emotivism need refutation, this
is the book for you.
Unfortunately, the author has some further, rather
misguided aims. Snaevarr is not
merely out to show the value of ‘aesthetic rationalism,’ a position which is
presented as embracing the aesthetics of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant,
and Beardsley. Snaevarr in fact
spends most of his time attempting to show the flaws of the aesthetics of these
three figures, and argue for a new, competing notion of aesthetic rationality.
The problem is that Snaevarr gets Hume and Kant badly wrong, and does so
in rather tiresome ways.
Readings
like those of Kivy or Savile on Hume are dismissed in the course of two or three
pages. Savile, for instance, is
rejected because he argues that Humean aesthetics relies on the concept of ‘embeddness’:
‘But Savile’s notion of embeddness does not do the job because it is
pretty hazy and empty’ (88). We don’t learn anything more about how Savile goes wrong
here. Numerous further Hume
commentators are compared with each other, found wanting here, doing a fine job
there, as if the author were writing employee evaluations.
This all occurs in the course of about five pages of deeply breezy
writing that alternates between extreme close-up focus on out-of-context detail
on the hand, and sweeping encomiums on the other.
Neither the expert on Hume nor the novice can rely upon the discussion,
except to get some idea of what Snaevarr does not like in aesthetic theories.
The reading of Kant is more informative, but also more
warped. The errors here are legion,
but the main one is that Snaevarr never shows the slightest awareness that Kant
might have distinguished between judging what counts as beautiful and what
counts as great art. Artistic
and aesthetic value are conflated on Snaevarr’s approach.
This allows counter-intuitive examples about the universality of
judgments of artistic value (i.e., Snaevarr convincingly suggests that
not all artistic appraisals have to make universal claims) to wrongly be arrayed
against Kant’s analysis of the universality of pure judgments of taste.
For Kant makes clear, as Allison has pointed out in his recent Kant’s
Theory of Taste, that judgments on art that take into account artistic
beauty do indeed contain such ‘purity,’ but that there is also an
interaction with a judgment concerning the perfection of the artwork.
And judgments about perfection are judgments for which universally-valid
reasons can be offered; unlike
judgments of taste, where the offering of reasons can only act to get others to
‘see the light,’ not to demand consent. (Only the pure judgment of taste
itself makes this demand, not judgments offered in ‘support’ of it.)
As such, Kant actually fits the model of rational aesthetics for which
Snaevarr argues, despite Snaevarr’s attempt to castigate Kant as a ‘mental
philosopher’ and wrong-headed
universalist about judgments of artistic value.
Snaevarr’s attempt to reject Kant and Beardsley as
‘mental philosophers’ is one of the weakest part of the books:
the dread ‘mental philosopher’ is one who values the certainty of
individual experience over the intersubjective (the latter being the hero of
Snaevarr’s book). ‘Mental
philosophy’ leads to all sort of (totally non-existent) errors. For example, Kant is claimed to have reduced laws of logic to
psychological laws, as if the B-deduction did not quite make Snaevarr’s
reading list. The focus on
intersubjective validity is particularly strange given that it is in the Critique
of Judgment where we find Kant’s most compelling accounts of the need
for such validity: i.e., Kant’s
account of the sensus communis, and of the maxims of enlightened thinking
that call on one to consider the viewpoint of others when reasoning.
As someone who has spent a lot of time working in a
small language community (the Dutch ‘taalgebied’), and who therefore has
seen both the benefits and dangers of such an environment, I feel, in Humean
fashion one might say, the right sort of critic to appraise the evident effect
of Snaevarr’s Norwegian environment on his work.
What I noted in Holland was a great deal of work that combined the
provincial with the daring. Smallness leads to creative perspectives that challenge the
orthodoxy of philosophy coming from English, French, or German speaking nations.
For instance, there is Snaevarr’s attempt to formulate a striking and
very original defense of rationality in judgments on art.
But smallness can also lead to some very wrong-headed ideas that can only
be termed ‘provincial’: for
instance, attempting to paint Kant as a ‘mental philosopher,’ and thus
someone offering theories that are incompatible with Snaevarr’s more
‘up-to-date’ defense of aesthetic rationality.
In short, Snaevarr’s account has little teeth
when it comes to criticizing the likes of Hume, Kant, or their latter day
admirers. Thankfully, however, this
does not keep Snaevarr’s reductio ad absurdum critique of aesthetic skepticism
from being interesting in its own right. Snaevarr
has shown that valid judgments about artistic value are based at least partially
in reason. This is no mean
accomplishment.