An excerpt from Joseph Margolis – Three Paradoxes of Personhood. The Venetian Lectures
“Yes, I think that my work has really come out from my notion of aesthetics. First of all, you can’t do any pertinent work in the philosophy of art, history, or culture without admitting relativism. You cannot have a theory of interpretation regarding art or the rest of the cultural world of humans that does not accommodate the relativistic option.”
Joseph Margolis
On the definition of art and why it matters even outside aesthetics
In Italy Joseph Margolis is known above all for his work in the aesthetic field: his name usually appears together with those of the analytic philosophers who took part in the debate on the definition of art and his essays are mentioned in the various collected volumes that have introduced analytic aesthetics into our country over the last fifteen years.
However, his work on aesthetics is far from being a kind of over- specialized inquiry, basically separated and independent from other crucial philosophical issues. Even if he has always been sensitive to the technical details of the subject, Margolis has claimed that a definition of what a work of art is cannot be pursued without being aware of its basic connections with the rest of our cultural world and with a conception of what it is to be a human self. In other words, even the first superficial impression of over-technicality that is sometimes made by earlier formulations of his theory cannot be understood without referring to the wider backdrop of a philosophy of culture and of an anthropology of the peculiar cultural entities we humans are.
Nonetheless, Margolis does not refuse to face the typical analytic challenge of defining art. His point is rather a double one — which actually raises many difficulties for the traditional analytic approach to the definition of art. On the one hand, he problematizes the almost obvious assumption that we cannot have a definition of art if we cannot have a generalized concept of art. This idea derives from the assumption that a definition cannot but be “exhaustive of all art and exclusive of all that is not art”— that is, it is connected to a metaphysics of permanence and of an underlying unchanging order of being. If we reject this kind of metaphysical framework we can discover and accept many different historical conceptions of what a work of art is, definitions which are more or less informal, more or less extensive and always connected to the relatively precarious rules of a historical form of life.
On the other hand Margolis definitely provides a definition of art that does not exclusively apply to artistic products: on the contrary, it can be extended to most of our cultural world, including us humans. From this point of view, his definition of works of art as “physically embodied and culturally emergent entities”7 can be considered analogous to Dewey’s claim that in order to understand what art is we have to return to the basic features characterizing human beings’ experience of their own environment. In other words, Margolis’ definition of works of art cannot be used to strictly distinguish them in comparison to other kinds of cultural or artifactual things. I have no space here to develop this point, but it is enough to say that Margolis’ goal in defining art and the fruitfulness of his strategy amount to a broader move in a new and different direction: they constitute an attempt to understand the peculiarly human condition and the distinctively human word.
In any case, Margolis’ famous idea of “works of art as physically embodied and culturally emergent entities” is essentially based on embodiment and emergence. The first category helped Margolis answer analytic requests for a relatively precise extensional identification of the work of art. Works of art are real things, things no less real than physical entities: they help construct our world and they can cause deep changes in it, even if causal efficiency is not the most suitable means by which to interpret cultural dynamics. The second category meets the need to account for the peculiarities of the cultural world, which Margolis characterizes in terms of “Intentionality”. By Intentional properties Margolis means the expressive, symbolic, meaningful, semiotic, and linguistic features characterizing our cultural world. He overtly rejects Brentano’s and Husserl’s basically solipsistic, non-cultural and a-historical perspectives on intentionality — this is the reason why he adopts a capital ‘I’. Moreover, his remark about the Intentional characteristics of the human world has nothing to do with a mere subjective or private characterization of the world itself, nor with a primarily mental treatment of our experience. On the contrary, for Margolis Intentionality is strictly connected to the social character of human conditions: by Intentional properties he means those attributes we can ascribe to something or someone because they are already embedded within a shared world of practices; those practices are essentially connected to the fact that from birth we have to learn a natural language from a social group and to acquire the informal rules governing a certain common form of life. Such properties emerge from mere physical properties and cannot be reduced to them, even though they cannot exist apart from the real world we live in. This is the reason why Margolis speaks of “artifactual transformation” — of producing works of art — as a kind of ontological transformation or metaphysical construction, which nonetheless maintains a deeply realistic claim.
Emergence, however, has been shown to have broader implications over the last few years, when the analogy between the emergence of works of art from physical media and the emergence of self-conscious creatures from human animals has been overtly developed. Whereas in the 1970s Margolis’ aim was to ensure a materialistic or realistic treatment of art while avoiding any form of reduction of cultural entities to mere physical things, in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century his basic insight is that we cannot properly deal with cultural artifacts if we do not address the problem of the cultural peculiarities of the human world against the background of a basic animal continuity. In other words, “you cannot formulate a reasonable theory of the arts — the fine arts — without providing a pertinent sketch of the relationship between nature and culture”. There is nothing extravagant or vainly rhetorical in comparing persons and works of art: on the contrary, Margolis is focusing on what he characterizes as the “artifactuality of persons”, that is the constructive dimension of being humans in relation to their physiological or biological nature. From his perspective, to be a person is to be a second-natured entity: the human organism transforms itself into a person or into a self by acquiring a natural language and the connected socially shared practices — both verbal competencies and lingual or significant ones. The point of arrival will be a deep reinforcement of Margolis’ thesis that we are beings characterized by an enlanguaged form of life. Becoming humans is conceived as a historical process, open to the actions of the cultural and social world we share with others, and it is conceived as a process where we are constantly constructing and reconstructing our own self-identities in relation to others.
Sketches by kind concession of Jale N. Erzen
