“Couldn’t each individual’s experience with art be complex and rich?”
By the hypothetical you’ve set up. to one’s self, but to anyone else no, not really, because it would be enclosed in your own subjectivity so know one else would have access to it.
Complete subjectivity changes the question. No longer would it be applicable to ask, “is this a good film?” Instead, the question becomes, “Would I appreciate this film?” by seeking like minded people whose opinions tend to mirror one’s own, a discussion about the film could be valuable in determining whether the opinions match and can lead to suggestions of similar films.
Needless to say, this would be a very boring conversation and, happily, we are not so limited.
@Matt
By the hypothetical you’ve set up. to one’s self, but to anyone else no, not really, because it would be enclosed in your own subjectivity so know one else would have access to it.
Well, you wouldn’t know about anyone’s experiences right? so they could be rich or one-dimensional. I mean, if one’s experience could be rich and complex, then that means others could as well, too, right? People could talk about these experiences, too, but an individual could never verify how rich or complex the experiences of others are. (I think that’s the case outside of this thought-experiment.)
@Brad
Instead, the question becomes, “Would I appreciate this film?” by seeking like minded people whose opinions tend to mirror one’s own, a discussion about the film could be valuable in determining whether the opinions match and can lead to suggestions of similar films.
I think that would be one of the values of discussing the film.
“you wouldn’t know about anyone’s experiences right? so they could be rich or one-dimensional. I mean, if one’s experience could be rich and complex, then that means others could as well, too, right? People could talk about these experiences, too, but an individual could never verify how rich or complex the experiences of others are. (I think that’s the case outside of this thought-experiment.)
Right, but see, you’d have to be clear if you meant subjectively “rich” or objectively “rich.” Likely most people would find there own experiences “rich”, but if one could not have some sense of participation in them (which one could not with some one else’s purely subjective experience), I would think there’s no way one could find someone else’s experiences as “rich” (if “richness” were an objective property, then of course this would be a different matter).
Before I respond to Matt, I want to ask a question: do other people agree that my definition of subjectivity in this thread is what people generally mean when they say, “All opinions are subjective. You can’t really say Kubrick is better than Ed Wood or Godfather is a better film than GI Joe—because it’s all subjective.” Or am I misunderstanding something?
@Matt
I think I mean “subjectively rich.” What do you mean by “could not have some sense of participation in them?” If there subjective experience is rich, why would they need “objective richness?”
_ I would think there’s no way one could find someone else’s experiences as “rich” (if “richness” were an objective property, then of course this would be a different matter)._
Right, but why is that important?
Subjective richness would not be communicable without an objective basis or at least some sort of shared field of experience . . . so it would be fine for you as your experience, but so long as it were subjective it would be trapped within your own experience and therefore couldn’t be real or meaningful to anyone else (who, presumably, would be analogously trapped within his/her own subjective experience). If you’re suggesting that we could perhaps “share” subjective states, then that’s getting close to Husserl and away from pure subjectivity per se.
To back up to this, though:
“do other people agree that my definition of subjectivity in this thread is what people generally mean when they say, “All opinions are subjective. You can’t really say Kubrick is better than Ed Wood or Godfather is a better film than GI Joe—because it’s all subjective.””
Yes, but, for one thing, “all opinions are subjective” doesn’t mean “all opinions are equal.”
@ Greg X Of course at that point one would question whether perception is “pure subjectivity” anymore as that sort of response system would be potentially measurable, were there someone around to could undertake the task, in which case it would be an objective response.
Yes^ indeed.
I was working on that idea as it relates to Nietzsche. I got further than the below excerpt but realized it was trending to far out:
The object (art) is the result of an active process and everything after its creation is reactive.
Obsolete is the notion of pure subjectivity – that is impossible and a reactive state. Objectivity could have existed in an active state and yet it would have represented a reversal of the meanings we now hold. To be objective would have meant being wholly subjective. For early humans, since there was no science, there would not have been a way to explain things (e.g. breaking down of totalities) thus objective/subjective were one in the same.
@Matt
Subjective richness would not be communicable without an objective basis or at least some sort of shared field of experience . . . so it would be fine for you as your experience, but so long as it were subjective it would be trapped within your own experience and therefore couldn’t be real or meaningful to anyone else (who, presumably, would be analogously trapped within his/her own subjective experience).
I agree with the above. But I’m not sure about the point you’re making. ? Are you saying we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all? So if I described a rich, complex experience of Werckmiester Harmonies, no one would know what I was talking about? (I assume you’re saying they wouldn’t be able to verify whether I had a rich experience or not. They would understand that I’m saying I had a rich experience. Is that right?)
“So if I described a rich, complex experience of Werckmiester Harmonies, no one would know what I was talking about?”
Well, the question to wrestle with here would be how exactly does meaningfulness to you become meaningfulness to me, right? If we’re positing objectivity, than the meaningfulness can simply be a property of the object. But if we’re positing pure subjectivity, how would the meaningfulness make the leap from one subject to another?
This is getting really weird.
Well, the question to wrestle with here would be how exactly does meaningfulness to you become meaningfulness to me, right?
I don’t think I thought of the question in that way. Instead, I thought more about validity/invalidty, right/wrong, better/worse…I guess meaningful/not meaningful would also be included though…but I didn’t think conveying the meaningfulness was important. For example, if I said, “GI Joe was a great film” and then went on to explain how it meaningful it was to me, in a purely subjective world, I think I could do that. People listening to me might not know precisely how I feel or what I think, and they would have no way of verifying that, but that doesn’t seem crucial.
What’s crucial (at least in the way I thought of this question) are discussions about which films and filmmakers are better or worse. In a purely subjective world, this would make no sense. I’m also not sure if we could learn much from each other—or I’m not sure what that would mean.
First off Jazz, I do not at all think your definition of “pure subjectivity”, as I understand it, is at all what people mean when they say art is subjective. Positing a definition which precludes any influence outside oneself simply doesn’t work and would be contrary to how art works for any of us since our response to art is based on a sort of assumed sharing of perceptual space which is tacitly, at least, understood to be not reality but relating to reality, which is where the sort of “feelings” or tensions in art arise as the viewer is in a position between their perception of art, self, and the “real” and that of the object which they are attending to which creates a sort of separate perception which is at once consonant with the viewers, that is to say it is recognizable and sensible to how the viewer understands things, and also dissonant in that it distinctly different than the viewers own perception. Art then “influences” the viewer to seeing the world, art, or themselves in a way which provides a “challenge” or tension within the viewer when it works on them. So the definition you are using, by default, would effectively deny the possibility of art “working” on the subject. At best, art might provide a sort of simulacrum of reality which would be taken for the “real”, but at that point it becomes like being caught in the matrix. What is believed to be real can’t be felt as art since it, in effect, is reality for those viewing it. Or, on the other side, any artwork would just be gibberish since the sort of “pure subjective” state you are positing would deny any sort of commonality of experience which would make the attempt to communicate between people devoid of value. There needs to be some shared ground for art, or any form of communication, to work, and that means there has to be some “influence” going on somewhere. Which is all too obviously really the case as we are talking here about art.
Outside of first year philosophy students perhaps there is no real belief in complete relativity either. I mean people may give it lip service and in some sense refuse to make certain sorts of judgments, but effectively everyone makes value based decisions all the time, so while writ large there might be some desire, and depending on the degree a reasonable desire, to not apply one’s own metric of values on others so people might speak of “relative” perspectives, in practice and individually people make choices based on values, criteria, or some form of judgment of worth or merit.
This is where the talk of subjectivity comes in. When people talk about art being subjective, they are generally talking about there being no objective standard for judgment overall. Individually people will believe some art is better than other art, they might even believe some art is objectively better than other art to them. That is to say that by their system of evaluation and judgment there might be a way to, for all intents and purposes, to evaluate art “correctly”, but this system only works for themselves. At the same time one has to recognize that one’s own view of art doesn’t hold for anyone beyond oneself, so there is a distinction to be made between speaking of art which has a direct effect on the viewer and that which is held to be of value by others. In that second sense we speak of art as a subject of potential or indirect value, where we might not experience the work as “art” personally, but we can accept that others do even if we disagree or don’t feel it ourselves.
The distinction here is a main part of the issue as the two notions of art, the personal and the cultural, set up some confusion about what art is or needs to do, and that will have an effect on how we think of any questions surrounding it. The reason people speak of art as subjective is that it is the experience of it that provides its value to the individual, that, basically, makes it art at all. In recognizing this experience and the importance of it to us we are able to presume that others share a somewhat analogous sort of understanding or feeling about art given how important it is to the culture, so we can recognize that shared value is worthy of notice and categorizing as art. Yet at the same time we also understand that the individual experience doesn’t translate the same way as the cultural one. The difference between the direct and indirect valuation of art is somewhat akin to our other relationship based values. As I was trying to suggest earlier, if we think of the relationship you presumably have with your wife, I can say that she holds no personal or direct value to me but I can still speak of the relationship as being of indirect value by extrapolation from my own experiences, larger cultural discourse and how I perceive you valuing her. This way we can speak of a shared idea of “love” even though our particular subjective interests may not match at all. Love in a direct sense must be experienced by the individual themselves, and that experience may not and need not be shared in terms of the object of that desire as it is personal. That sort of love doesn’t make sense in any other way, and so it is for art.
Art works on us individually through that sort of direct experience, without it, regardless of the perceived value of the work to the larger culture, the work is empty for us. This is the where the notion of art being subjective comes in. If my friend thinks the Lord of the Rings movies are the greatest work of art that is due to their experience of the films, one which I don’t share but I can’t deny to them regardless of how I feel about the movies. If I say Ornamental Hairpin is a far greater work of art and they don’t “get it” at all, then their experience of Hairpin will be analogous to my experience of Rings. We would each have to deny the others subjective response if we wanted to try and posit either film as being “better” in a non-subjective manner, and that in itself doesn’t work since for art to hold direct value it must be have a personal experiential component otherwise it is meaningless to speak of at all.
The value of communication about our diverse experiences of art comes from our shared understanding of art in the larger sense and the recognition of the possibility of influence. By sharing our experience,as best we can, we hope that we might provide a window into the work or our own viewpoint which might better enable the other person to see the work as we do. Most of the time this is bound to either fail or have limited immediate effect, but the accumulation of discussion on the subject can move the other towards a different understanding of the larger world, art, or the individual which will then effect the way they view art since their grounding will have shifted even if their conscious opinion of the specific work has not. The few of us who deeply value art and speak of it are in a minority as most people tend not to think of the subject so directly. This in itself has an effect on what each group will experience as art as the act of thinking about it alters our relationship to it. So it is as much to get others to think about art more deeply or even at all that these discussions matter as that may change the personal dynamic between art, the world and the viewer. Taste isn’t a fixed thing, not even in food, as the place of coffee and alcohol in our society should show as very few people like the taste of alcohol or coffee on first taste, it is acquired through experience and age. We speak of our subjective experiences in the desire to share and to move others so that they too may come to see beauty where we do and thus increase it for all.
“First off Jazz, I do not at all think your definition of “pure subjectivity”, as I understand it, is at all what people mean when they say art is subjective”
Could have fooled me. They sure as hell act like it.
But after reading that post, i still don’t understand your problem with intersubjectivity Greg. It seems like you are disagreeing with consciously, but the rest of your mind is telling you otherwise ;-)
I don’t disagree with the idea of intersubjectivity in many circumstances much of our culture works on an intersubjective basis after all, like laguage for a specific example. My disagreement with Jazz (and Bordwell) is over whether one can apply intersubjective criteria to evaluate art and what that would even mean. My claim is that there are no intersubjective criteria which would work in the way they seem to suggest both due to the exceedingly limited scope such criteria should it exist would cover in terms of who would potentially agree with it and more basically in the claims for the applicability of the criteria itself, which is pretty indistinguishable from the evaluative function of taste as practiced by everyone and as there is no reason to assume any greater agreement on any single criterion much less how many of them working together would signal greater artistic value given the subjective base necessarily underlying all the individual components. At best, it would, in effect, just further expand the argument over any art work from being about it alone to being about all the criteria and their possible application to the work and how important each and all might be. Intersubjectivity does exist, just not there.
“I thought more about validity/invalidty, right/wrong, better/worse”
In a hypothetically purely subjective opinion, your subjective opinion would be valid/right/better for you and invalid/wrong/worse for everyone else (and vice versa) because there would be nothing external for it to correspond to.
“if I said, “GI Joe was a great film” and then went on to explain how it meaningful it was to me, in a purely subjective world, "Even if it were possible to verbalize some facsimile of your subjective experience of the film, this would be (by the parameters of this hypothetical) purely in terms of your own experience, the meaningfulness of which would be lost if one attempted to transpose it to his/her own (equally unique) subjective experience. If we’re talking about shared subjectivity, then that’s something else.
In a hypothetically purely subjective opinion, your subjective opinion would be valid/right/better for you and invalid/wrong/worse for everyone else (and vice versa) because there would be nothing external for it to correspond to.
Wouldn’t your opinion be valid/right to those who have the same opinion?
If we’re talking about shared subjectivity, then that’s something else.
I’m not sure what you mean by “shared subjectivity.”
Wouldn’t your opinion be valid/right to those who have the same opinion?
Not valid/right. Just the same.
I think it’s reasonable to make a distinction between an opinion being valid and an opinion being correct. An opinion can’t be incorrect, but it can be invalid.
I say Bicycle Thieves is the greatest movie ever, you think it’s horrible. Both of these opinions are valid.
I think Bicycle Thieves is about the experience of powerlessness, you think it’s a tribute to Angry Birds. My opinion is valid, yours is not.
^ lol…yes, that’s a fair distinction, well put. I hesitate to put myself in the place of the Angry Birds advocate, but what if someone else agreed with my take on Bicycle Thieves – would my opinion then become valid? Or to take it a step further, what if many other people shared my Angry Birds stance?
For it to be valid there would have to be some kind of logical basis.
For which, you’d first have to defeat the ‘Angry Birds came into existence sixty years after Bicycle Thieves’ argument.
Yes. Which would be rather tricky :)
@Scampi
Not valid/right. Just the same.
Well, in a purely subjective world, “validity” and “rightness” would (or could) come to mean one’s opinions and judgments. Ergo, those opinions and judgments that align with them are also “valid” and “right.”
@Jirin
I say Bicycle Thieves is the greatest movie ever, you think it’s horrible. Both of these opinions are valid.
Well, not to make things to complicated, but…
I would agree that both opinions are valid if by “greatest” and “horrible” we really mean “I loved this movie” or “I hated this movie.” When we’re talking about where someone enjoyed a movie or not, there is no right/wrong or valid/invalid, imo. It is akin, if not exactly the same, as the pure subjectivity premise of this thread. It makes no sense to argue about whether a person enjoyed a film or not; you can’t convince them that they’re “wrong.”
On the other hand, if arguing about whether a film is an excellent artwork or not does make sense. There are opinions that are more valid than others; opinions about this are not all equal. So the opinions that BC is the “greatest film” or “horrible” aren’t necessarily valid—if by “greatest” and “horrible” we’re talking about the quality of the films in an intersubjective sense. The validity depends on the argument that supports each opinion.
I want to reiterate the point about the duel meanings of words like “great,” “greatest,” “best,” “worst,” etc.—because I think this is where much of the confusion comes from:
Meaning #1: that which one enjoys or dislikes. This is very personal and subjective.
Meaning #2: that which one determines as excellent artwork. This is intersubjective.
The two aren’t synonymous, but there can be overlap. People conflate the two meanings and flip-flop between the two meanings or use the meanings simultaneously. This is what causes a lot of confusion and disagreement, imo.
“For it to be valid there would have to be some kind of logical basis.”
For an argument to be logically valid, yes, it would . . . but that’s is reasserting a kind of objectivity, so that’s not what we’re talking about.
“Wouldn’t your opinion be valid/right to those who have the same opinion?”
If everything was purely subjective, technically, no one would have the same experience, therefore, no one would have the same opinion.
“I’m not sure what you mean by “shared subjectivity.”
I’ll have to come back to that later.
If everything was purely subjective, technically, no one would have the same experience, therefore, no one would have the same opinion.
Well, we really wouldn’t know this with any certainty, would we? In any event, we would know if opinions were similar—similar enough where differences might be negligible.
I’ll have to come back to that later.
OK, cool.
“Well, we really wouldn’t know this with any certainty, would we? In any event, we would know if opinions were similar—similar enough where differences might be negligible.”
Once we started sharing opinions, the purity of the subjectivity is tainted (this, I suspect, is a big part of the reason people get miffed and resort to the ol’ “it’s all subjective” gambit.
This is going to be a little heavy, but I’ve got to lay a little Husserl on you now:
“According to Husserl, intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the rational structures underlying—and making possible—these constitutive achievements.
From a first-person point of view, intersubjectivity comes in when we undergo acts of empathy. Intersubjective experience is empathic experience; it occurs in the course of our conscious attribution of intentional acts to other subjects, in the course of which we put ourselves into the other one’s shoes . . . Among the fundamental beliefs thus uncovered by Husserl is the belief (or expectation) that a being that looks and behaves more or less like myself, i.e., displays traits more or less familiar from my own case, will generally perceive things from an egocentric viewpoint similar to my own (“here”, “over there”, “to my left”, “in front of me”, etc.), in the sense that I would roughly look upon things the way he does if I were in his shoes and perceived them from his perspective. This belief allows me to ascribe intentional acts to others immediately or “appresentatively”, i.e., without having to draw an inference, say, by analogy with my own case. So the belief in question must lie quite at the bedrock of my belief-system. It forms a part of the already pregiven (and generally unreflected) intentional background, or “lifeworld” (cf. Crisis), against which my practice of act-ascription and all constitutive achievements based upon that practice make sense in the first place, and in terms of which they get their ultimate justification.
Husserl’s notion of lifeworld is a difficult (and at the same time important) one. It can roughly be thought of in two different (but arguably compatible) ways: (1) in terms of belief and (2) in terms of something like socially, culturally or evolutionarily established (but nevertheless abstract) sense or meaning.
(1) If we restrict ourselves to a single subject of experience, the lifeworld can be looked upon as the rational structure underlying his (or her) “natural attitude”. That is to say: a given subject’s lifeworld consists of the beliefs against which his everyday attitude towards himself, the objective world and others receive their ultimate justification. (However, in principle not even beliefs forming part of a subject’s lifeworld are immune to revision. Hence, Husserl must not be regarded as an epistemological foundationalist; see Føllesdal 1988.)
(2a) If we consider a single community of subjects, their common lifeworld, or “homeworld”, can be looked upon, by first approximation, as the system of senses or meanings constituting their common language, or “form of life” (Wittgenstein), given that they conceive of the world and themselves in the categories provided by this language.
(2b) If we consider subjects belonging to different communities, we can look upon their common lifeworld as the general framework, or “a priori structure”, of senses or meanings that allows for the mutual translation of their respective languages (with their different associated “homeworlds”) into one another.
The term “lifeworld” thus denotes the way the members of one or more social groups (cultures, linguistic communities) use to structure the world into objects . . . The respective lifeworld is claimed to “predelineate” a “world-horizon” of potential future experiences that are to be (more or less) expected for a given group member at a given time, under various conditions, where the resulting sequences of anticipated experiences can be looked upon as corresponding to different “possible worlds and environments” . . . These expectations follow typical patterns, as the lifeworld is fixed by a system of (first and foremost implicit) intersubjective standards, or conventions, that determine what counts as “normal” or “standard” observation under “normal” conditions . . . and thus as a source of epistemic justification. Some of these standards are restricted to a particular culture or “homeworld” . . . whereas others determine a “general structure” that is “a priori” in being “unconditionally valid for all subjects”, defining “that on which normal Europeans, normal Hindus, Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity” . . . These conceptions determine the general structure of all particular thing-concepts that are such that any creature sharing the essential structures of intentional consciousness will be capable of forming and grasping them, respectively, under different lifeworldly conditions.
Husserl . . . characterizes the environment as a world of entities that are “meaningful” to us in that they exercise “motivating” force on us and present themselves to us under egocentric aspects. Any subject taking the “personalistic attitude” builds the center of an environment containing such objects. The personalistic attitude is “the attitude we are always in when we live with one another, talk to one another, shake hands with one another in greeting, or are related to one another in love and aversion, in disposition and action, in discourse and discussion” . . . The central notion of Husserl’s “Umweltanalyse” is the concept of motivation, whose application he explains as follows: “how did I hit upon that, what brought me to it? That questions like these can be raised characterizes all motivation in general” . . . The entities exercising motivating force on us owe their corresponding “meaning” or significance to certain forms of intentional consciousness and intersubjective processes. Thus, to quote one of Husserl’s examples, “I see coal as heating material; I recognize it and recognize it as useful and as used for heating, as appropriate for and as destined to produce warmth. […] I can use [a combustible object] as fuel; it has value for me as a possible source of heat. That is, it has value for me with respect to the fact that with it I can produce the heating of a room and thereby pleasant sensations of warmth for myself and others. […] Others also apprehend it in the same way, and it acquires an intersubjective use-value and in a social context is appreciated and is valuable as serving such and such a purpose, as useful to man, etc.” (Husserliana, vol. IV, pp. 186f; Husserl 1989, pp. 196f).
On Husserl’s view, it is precisely this “subjective-relative lifeworld”, or environment, that provides the “grounding soil” of the more objective world of science . . .in the twofold sense that (i) scientific conceptions owe their (sub-)propositional content and thus their reference to reality to the prescientific notions they are supposed to “naturalize” and that, consequently, (ii) when things get into flux in science, when a crisis occurs, all that is left to appeal to in order to defend new scientific approaches against their rivals is the prescientific lifeworld, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptances . . .
One of the constitutive achievements based upon my lifeworldly determined practice of act-ascription is my self-image as a full-fledged person existing as a psycho-physical element of the objective, spatio-temporal order. This self-image can be justified by what Edith Stein, in a PhD thesis on empathy supervised by Husserl (Stein 1917), has labelled as iterated empathy, where I put myself into the other subject’s shoes, i.e., (consciously) simulate him, under the aspect that he (or she) in turn puts himself into my shoes. In this way, I can figure out that in order for the other subject to be able to ascribe intentional acts to me, he has to identify me bodily, as a flesh-and-blood human being, with its egocentric viewpoint necessarily differing from his own. This brings home to me that my egocentric perspective is just one among many, and that from all foreign perspectives I appear as a physical object among others in a spatio-temporal world. So the following criterion of subject-identity at a given time applies both to myself and to others: one human living body, one experiencing subject. However, Husserl does not at all want to deny that we also ascribe experiences, even intentional ones, to non-human animals. This becomes the more difficult and problematic, though, the less bodily and behavioural similarity obtains between them and ourselves. . .
Before finally turning to the question of what “objectivity” amounts to in this connection, let us notice that in Husserl’s eyes something like empathy also forms the basis of both our practical, aesthetical and moral evaluations and of what might be called intercultural understanding, i.e., the constitution of a “foreign world” against the background of one’s own “homeworld”, i.e., one’s own familiar (but, again, generally unreflected) cultural heritage . . .
Even the objective spatio-temporal world, which represents a significant part of our everyday lifeworld, is constituted intersubjectively, says Husserl . . . How so? Husserl starts (again, from a first-person viewpoint) from a “solipsistic” abstraction of the notion of a spatio-temporal object which differs from that notion in that it does not presuppose that any other subject can observe such an object from his (or her) own perspective. His question is what justifies us (i.e., each of us for him- or herself) in the assumption of an objective reality consisting of such objects, given only this “solipsistic” conception of a spatio-temporal thing (or event) as our starting point. On Husserl’s view, “the crucial further step” in order to answer this question consists in disclosing the dimension that opens up when the epistemic justification, or “motivation”, of intersubjective experience, or empathy, is additionally taken into account and made explicit . . . Roughly, his argument goes as follows. In order for me to be able to put myself into someone else’s shoes and simulate his (or her) perspective upon his surrounding spatio-temporal world, I cannot but assume that this world coincides with my own, at least to a large extent; although the aspects under which the other subject represents the world must be different, as they depend on his own egocentric viewpoint. Hence, I must presuppose that the spatio-temporal objects forming my own world exist independently of my subjective perspective and the particular experiences I perform; they must, in other words, be conceived of as part of an objective reality. This result fits in well with—in fact, it serves to explain—Husserl’s view, already stressed in Ideas, that perceptual objects are “transcendent” in that at any given moment they display an inexhaustive number of unperceived (and largely even unexpected) features, only some of which will become manifest—will be intuitively presented—in the further course of observation.
However, according to Husserl this does not mean that the objective world thus constituted in intersubjective experience is to be regarded as completely independent of the aspects under which we represent the world. For on his view another condition for the possibility of intersubjective experience is precisely the assumption that by and large the other subject structures the world into objects in the same style I myself do. It is for this reason that Husserl can be said to adhere to a version of both “realism” and “idealism” at the same time."
. . .
Related to “perceptual objects are “transcendent” in that at any given moment they display an inexhaustive number of unperceived (and largely even unexpected) features, only some of which will become manifest—will be intuitively presented—in the further course of observation”, here’s Harold Bloom :
“A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are themselves already necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, we can and must accept its canonical status.
Yet by “strong misreading” I mean “strong troping,” and the strength of trope can be recognized by skilled readers in a way that anticipates the temporal progression of generations. A strong trope renders all merely trivial readings of it irrelevant. . .
There is a true law of canonization, and it works contrary to Gresham’s law of currency. We may phrase it: in a strong reader’s struggle to master a poet’s trope, strong poetry will impose itself, because that imposition, that usurpation of mental space, is the proof of trope, the testing of power by power. . . ."
This is going to be a little heavy, but I’ve got to lay a little Husserl…
Understatement of the year. (I’m kidding, Parks. :) I promise to read the post and respond later. (I read one of Husserl’s books in college, but I don’t ever remember him talking about intersubjectivity…then again, I don’t remember anything about the book, so…duh.)
Once we started sharing opinions, the purity of the subjectivity is tainted (this, I suspect, is a big part of the reason people get miffed and resort to the ol’ “it’s all subjective” gambit.
it’s ALL subjective is nihilist in that nothing then has meaning, which I think is the answer to Jazz’s question:
pure subjectivity is meaningless – discussions on that basis are pointless. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as pure subjectivity. On the forum we have buddy-ing up to achieve inter-subjective validation, because of the belief that the greater the inter-subjectivity, the greater the validity; hence, the pulling into the discourse of outside sources from experts. Expert opinions are vetted by others dedicated to close observation – thus they are more valid.
….perceptual objects are “transcendent” in that at any given moment they display an inexhaustive number of unperceived (and largely even unexpected) features, only some of which will become manifest—will be intuitively presented—in the further course of observation.
Those objects^ find meaning in the uncovering and discovering of the ‘features’ which makes one interpretation more valid than another. What is missing is the idea of features relating to a totality.
For example, describing the whale in Wrekmeister Harmonies as the Christ Figure doesn’t open the text up to an inexhaustive number of unperceived (and largely even unexpected) features, it closes the text down to a exclusive single meaning – which makes the interpretation, for many of us, invalid. Further, that closing down reduces the text to a weak misreading vs a potentially strong misreading sometime in the future.
I can imagine some valid arguments that Bicycle Thieves is poor artwork. I feel that way about Le Mepris, and I don’t think my arguments are invalid. Who am I to invalidate other peoples’ legitimate arguments about Bicycle Thieves?
When you said ‘pure subjectivity’ at first I took it to mean ‘The idea that there is no such thing as objective criteria for art’. Are you talking about that or the hypothetical extreme where all experience is completely unrelateable to any other human being? Are we having a concrete discussion or a wild abstract one? The former is more interesting.
Because you can judge objectively whether a film met agreed upon criteria. You just can’t objectively define those criteria without relying on consensus, and if you do that, your objective conclusion will vary by crowd. (Which, by the way, is how it turns out in real life. The qualities that determine good art are dependent on the common ground of the people making the determination).
When you said ‘pure subjectivity’ at first I took it to mean ‘The idea that there is no such thing as objective criteria for art’. Are you talking about that or the hypothetical extreme where all experience is completely unrelateable to any other human being? Are we having a concrete discussion or a wild abstract one? The former is more interesting.
^ That’s the same thing I did.
Because you can judge objectively whether a film met agreed upon criteria. You just can’t objectively define those criteria without relying on consensus, and if you do that, your objective conclusion will vary by crowd. (Which, by the way, is how it turns out in real life. The qualities that determine good art are dependent on the common ground of the people making the determination).
^ I agree with this wholeheartedly. Well put sir!
Jazzaloha
@Greg
My definition may be problematic, but my sense is that it’s what people mean when they say, “All opinions are subjective”—especially when arguing about art—e.g., “You can’t say Welles is better than Bay—it’s all subjective.” In other words, there’s no such thing as a superior artist or artwork—it all depends on the individual. But in this thread, I’m not trying to argue for or against this claim; rather, the premise is to assume this claim is true—would discussing films have any worth or meaning in such a scenario?
I’m also not sure that my definition would signify that people are “simple animals and protozoa.” Couldn’t each individual’s experience with art be complex and rich? The main point is that each experience and the opinions about art would be completely subjective. Other people might have similar experiences and opinions, but that would be a conicidence or at least not signifying a objective reality. Or am I think of this in a wrong way?
Now, I’d be interested in hearing you flesh out your reasons why you think this type of subjectivity renders art impossible. I can see how this would apply to language, but this isn’t clear to me when it comes to art. Indeed, I suspect people who ascribe to this relativistic notion apply this to art, but not everything.