Abstract
This essay considers the foundations of reasonable evaluation in the arts. These we argue concern the relations that constitute (1) our experience of art, and (2) the ontology of the art work itself. The being of the artwork, the experience and the interpretation of it all involve over-lapping modes of part–whole relations. The experience of meaningfulness is not an experience of a singular object or framework of meaning as closed and complete but an experience of relational meaning whereby exposure to one set of meaningful relations transforms another in an on-going and open manner. This suggests that the experience of art itself provides the norms for reasonableness of evaluation. These norms are not rules in the sense of offering a method. They are characteristic of the features of an experience of meaningfulness itself. The essay suggests that the reasonableness of a response to a work can be considered in terms of (1) its appropriacy relative to the context of its own horizon and the horizon surrounding the production of the work; (2) its plausibility, that is, its internal coherence and consistency as a reading; (3) whether the structure of the response is consistent with, supplements, or expands the intelligible content of the work; and (4) whether it gives a sense of the latent possibilities still held within a work and intimates where the movement of a work’s subject-matter might
Highlights
Thesis Statement Is it the case within the arts and humanities that anything can be said about anything? Is this the dark secret of hermeneutics as George Steiner claims?1 Are there norms for evaluation or are nihilism and relativism the inevitable consequence of “interpretive approaches” to art? This essay proposes that (1) an ontological conception of the relational being of an artwork as a singular multiplicity defends the cognate value of art and, that (2) this ontological conception promises a response to the charge that in aesthetics no reasoning and evaluation is possible
Philosophical Orientation My argument is framed within the tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics
I want in this essay to suggest that the nature of aesthetic reasoning is best understood from what we do
Summary
The key to aesthetic reasoning is arguably not how we (as methodological subjects) apply critical or evaluative regulae to artworks but how the latter’s own singular measures relate and lock into the measures that define the receiving horizons of a spectator. Relationality is behind the claim that an artwork is never complete.[9] Art works embody part-whole structure and there is no logical stricture upon how the parts within a work’s manifold can be aligned or re-aligned to form a different whole.
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