Alan Paskow, The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation

Abstract

Though the title suggests a phenomenological account of art and, in fact, has some important and insightful things to say about art, this work focuses primarily on the ontological status of ‘‘fictional beings’’ and the question of ‘‘representation’’ in art and in experience more generally. Paskow makes a case for a ‘‘realist’’ aesthetic. The first part of the book, which provides examples from literature and painting, culminates in a discussion of why fictional beings can be important to us. The second part of the book is almost exclusively devoted to a consideration of painting. It illustrates how a realist aesthetic can be brought to bear on painting and develops this aesthetic in relation to this particular art form. Throughout Paskow is concerned not only with what we should take art to be, but why it should matter to us. This work is genuinely ‘‘phenomenological’’ in the sense that it attends directly to our experience of the work of art, especially the painting. Unlike much American current literature in continental philosophy, it is not primarily a commentary on the texts of continental philosophers who have addressed the topic at hand. In fact, for good or ill, Paskow ignores the twentieth century phenomenological literature on art and painting—Geiger, Heidegger, Ingarden, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, among others. The body of literature that he does explicitly take up (Chapter I) is contemporary analytic aesthetics: especially Walton and Yanal, but also Carroll, Boruah, and Rosebury, among others. However varied, complex, and insightful the work of these philosophers is, Paskow takes them all to be committed to some sort of representationalism. On his account, they are all committed to an orientation characterized by a subject-object split and thus end up quarreling over subjectivistic and objectivistic accounts of art. Paskow’s realism is not an objectivism. He finds his orientation in the Heidegger of Being and Time, the Heidegger of phenomenological ontology. Chapters II and III draw on Being and Time for an account of how we might have a non-instrumental relation to things and ‘‘why and