Philosophy

http://social-epistemology.com ISSN: 2471-9560 Critique Without Normative Foundations: Response to Vogelmann and Prusik Iaan Reynolds, Utah Valley University, firstname.lastname@example.com –––––––––––––––––– Reynolds, Iaan. 2022. "Critique Without Normative Foundations: Response to Vogelmann and Prusik." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (8): 8-17. https://wp.me/p1Bfg072m. 8 11 (8): 8-17. 2022. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-72m I was grateful to read the commentaries on my article offered in this forum by Charles Prusik (2022) and Frieder Vogelmann (2022), both of whose earlier writings were influential for my thinking about progress in critical theory. Despite our broad agreement-concerning a commitment to materialism, and the attendant need to shift away from a critical theory project concerned with the justification of normative principles-a few clarifications are in order. Accordingly, I will address the two biggest issues Vogelmann identifies in my article (Sections 1 and 2), before turning to an important question about the relationship between suffering and critique raised by both authors (Section 3). I close by reflecting on Prusik's most serious objection, which alerts me to the need to further clarify the relationship between the two kinds of progress outlined in my original article (Section 4). If critical theory involves an interdisciplinary critique of capitalist society, the way to relate the experience of learning this criticism to contemporary political-economic conditions remains an open question. Section 1: "Progress in History" and the Critique of Political Economy In The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Allen 2016), Amy Allen argues that we ought to do away with the conceptions of historical and moral progress used to ground the normative claims of critical theory since the Frankfurt School's "second generation." Arguing that these versions of normative critique often depend on a victorious narrative of historical advancement, Allen draws on the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and the genealogy of Michel Foucault to secure the normative perspective of critical theory through a forward-looking conception of progress. Since Allen's forward-looking conception of progress concerns the promise of moral improvements to come, it makes possible a thoroughgoing renunciation of narratives of past historical progress that tend to support a Eurocentric project of colonial domination. The problem I located in Allen's project did not concern its disavowal of grand narratives of moral progress, nor still its desire to decolonize critical theory. It lay rather in the fact that Allen enlists the work of the early Frankfurt School to ends that are basically opposed to those of their project. Viewing critical theory as normative critique, I argued, is specific to the turn taken by Frankfurt School critical theory after the work of Jürgen Habermas. Bringing Adorno and some projects of anticolonial thought into this kind of project poses fundamental problems, both for our interpretation of these authors, and for the broader project of critical theory itself. With regard to the former, I argued that the question of the "normative foundations" of critical theory does not occur in Adorno's work, and that the social theory offered by Adorno is at odds with a project of normative critique.1 As the combination of first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory with the post-Habermasian project of normative critique is an uneasy one, I claimed that Allen's strategy distorts the more general project of a critique of society. In fact, in our readiness to unburden our normative accounts of colonial baggage, we risk losing sight of (at least) two forms of 1 Normative critique, following this argument, is a form of traditional theory. This point has been made by Chris O'Kane: "Adorno and Horkheimer ascribed normative criticism to traditional theory and drew on the critique of political economy to critique the negative totality of capitalist society from the perspective of its abolition" (O'Kane 2021, 214). I. Reynolds 9 backward-looking progress that we can find throughout the work of the early Frankfurt School. These forms of progress are not used by these theorists to ground normative foundations, and they are not part of a positive historiography of human improvement, but they are nevertheless important for critical theory to recognize. The first is the progressive development of capitalist societal relations and forms of domination, and the second is the cultivation of criticism as a form of experience in critics. My article thus largely agrees with Vogelmann's previous work in which he argues that critical theory ought to do away with the search for normative foundations (Vogelmann 2021), as well as the work of a few others (see Reynolds 2021, 10 n. 4). Despite this agreement, Vogelmann raises questions about a few dimensions of my argument, which I will address now. The first issue raised by Vogelmann has to do with my "underdeveloped" reading of Allen (Vogelmann 2022, 27). This shortcoming is present in the way I apparently overlook Allen's distinction between "historical progress" and "progress in history" (Vogelmann 2022, Section 1; Allen 2016, 32-3). In this part of her text, Allen seeks to distinguish metaphysical narratives of historical progress from contextually-grounded and local instances of improvement that we might more readily be inclined to admit. We might say, using this distinction (and an example that is my own), that the abolition of slavery in the United States was a form of "progress in history," since it no doubt opened a new moral horizon and an improvement of the situation of millions of individuals. But Allen would argue that to inscribe this event in a broader story of historical progress involving a great march towards justice is to re-enforce the problematic narratives of enlightenment that allowed for the justification of slavery and colonialism in the first place. The progress represented by the abolition of slavery is a matter of a contextually understood, limited improvement within a certain historical moment, and not the victory of a transhistorical idea of freedom. In my defense of forms of backward-looking progress in critical theory, Vogelmann infers that I am merely describing Allen's "progress in history."2 This evaluation runs into problems, however, because the type of backward-looking progress I described-the progressive expansion of capitalist social forms and their domination over every dimension of life-3cannot be similar to Allen's "progress in history." Although it is always realized locally, capitalism's development is not merely "local" or "contextually grounded," and it does not represent a positive moral improvement in even Allen's limited sense. When Adorno, like other Marxist theorists of political economy, describes this expansion and domination, he is talking about an increasingly global and context-generating form of development with the capability of coopting even the rare moments of "progress in history" into its development. To return to our example, in describing the evolution of capitalist social forms as a progressive development, we are not talking about the temporary success of the abolition of slavery but about the ability of newly-ascendant financial capital after this historical moment to consolidate its power over the political system in the North and South 2 "As far as I can see, Reynolds's claim amounts to nothing more than that we can and maybe must be able to understand certain trajectories of our social practices as "progress in history" in Allen's sense" (Vogelmann 2022, 28). 3 "Critical theory is... obliged to retain a backward-looking historical progress, in order to apprehend the expansion of capitalist social forms, and their increasing domination of social, cultural, and global reality" (Reynolds 2021, 6). 10 11 (8): 8-17. 2022. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-72m alike.4 Seen from the standpoint of capital accumulation, the latter was a form of progress, even though it was hardly a moral victory for humankind. In its expansion and development, capitalism exhibits progressive development not reducible to temporary and contextual moral victories, nor still to a metaphysical story of inevitable historical improvement. This kind of development is highly ambiguous, as it is inevitably intertwined with regression, as I believe Adorno describes in his essay on "Progress" and his lectures on history. The importance of retaining this backward-looking notion of capitalist expansion-whether we describe it as the valorization of value, the domination of labor, or the expansion of colonial exploitation-5is that it allows us to develop an historical account of the social structure and the possibilities available within it. Conversely, if we eliminate capitalism's meta-contextual form of historical development from our critique of society, we might lose sight of the goal of critical theory as a critical social theory, in order to facilitate a more limited epistemic and moral project. We might be inclined, in the latter case, to view colonization and the struggle against it as a project of moral and epistemic clarification, rather than one of changing the material conditions of society. Adorno and Horkheimer's works in early critical theory, as I have argued, are more clearly aligned with the latter aim. This concern of mine is related to Robert Nichols' critique of Allen's text, in which he points out that Allen's selection of decolonial theorists is inclined towards those who see imperialism as an epistemic and moral problem, rather than as a historical and material reality to be analyzed with the tools of social theory.6 Departing from the authors discussed by Allen, who view the harms of colonialism through more of an epistemic lens, Nichols argues that there is another tradition of thinking about colonialism, found variously in Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and Gurminder Bhambra.7 The social theory offered in these works is different from a normative or epistemic critique: "Notwithstanding the important differences between them, [these thinkers] are social theorists: they are attempting to analyze a set of social processes that are not reducible to the normative or epistemic claims held by the individuals within them" (Nichols 2018, 783). The important realization here is that, for a project of anti-colonial thought that views colonialism as a development of capitalist societal relations, there is no need to reject progress as a theoretical term, because this term does not name a form of moral historical improvement but rather the expansion of capitalism's domination over the social world. Social theory in this mold is less concerned with decolonization as an epistemic aim of philosophical texts, than with describing the "inner logic of expansion and integration" 4 This history is outlined in W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (1998 [1935]), particularly in Chapter 14, titled "The Counter-Revolution of Property." 5 The way that we describe the development of capitalism is a matter of debate, but we need not agree with Adorno's interpretation to see the more general point about concepts of development in critical social theory. 6 Nichols particularly criticizes the influence of Edward Said on Allen's understanding of imperialism: "The point is that in this Saidian formulation, the central problem of imperialism is a set of explicitly or implicitly held propositions about the world, especially about the universality or superiority of one's own way of life. This framing of the problematic dovetails in unexpected ways with the later Frankfurt School thinkers with whom Allen grapples, since it is formulated from the standpoint of epistemology and/or moral philosophy: rooting out false claims that have normatively problematic consequences" (Nichols 2018, 782). 7 We might also add W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon as theorists of political economy for whom the resistance to colonialism does not involve the rejection of the concept of progress. I. Reynolds 11 of capitalist and colonial social processes (784), so that they might be understood, and eventually interrupted. At this point, we might be inclined to argue, with Allen, that this line of criticism merely faults her for not writing a different book.8 After all, Allen is careful to distinguish moral narratives of historical progress from the question of technical-scientific progress (Allen 2016, 10)-and we might (albeit with some difficulty) expand the latter category to include the progressive development of capitalist societal relations.9 It seems plausible that a normatively grounded critique and the critique of political economy each have a role to play in an overall view of society, and that it is wrong to hold a book concerned with the first to the standards expected of the second. But my argument proceeds from the-increasingly widespread-recognition that the normative and epistemic focus of later Frankfurt School critical theory has overshadowed the importance of the critique of political economy.10 Moreover, the apparent compatibility between these different projects overlooks the core of Adorno's treatment of capitalist society. As we have seen, in the subordination of life to capitalist value, we find an increasingly global process which creates our theoretical contexts themselves. It is precisely Adorno's point that the development of economic rationality and its material relations has conceptual and normative implications, but not that these conditions directly or immediately facilitate a rational account of justice.11 Although the progressive development of the capitalist social totality is not a process of moral improvement, it is only by grasping the nonidentity of the concepts and norms produced by this social whole with their social content that we might commence a fundamental critique of capitalist society. While the progressive domination characterizing capitalist society as a totality is not utterly separated from the normative wrongness of life under capitalism, then, discovering the moment of normativity within this totality is a matter of dialectical reflection, and not one of justification and application. The retrieval and distillation of norms from within society and its institutions presumes the basic self-identity of society, in the sense that it assumes that society's moments of negativity and its normative principles are capable of rational reconciliation. But it is precisely this identity of society with itself-and the possibility of this reconciliation-that Adorno 8 See Allen 2018a, 795. 9 This kind of argument has been made by Feenberg, using his concept of the "technosystem" (Feenberg 2018). In her reply to Feenberg, Allen defends her Weberian-Habermasian separation of technical and scientific progress from normative progress, by noting that her text aims only to criticize the prominent ways of grounding critical theory's normative foundations (Allen 2018b, 539). Rejecting the latter project might allow us to develop a different conception of modernity, in which techno-scientific and normative development are understood as aspects of a capitalist social totality whose wrongness is not a question for a specialized branch of philosophy but can only be understood through a reflection on the whole. 10 As well as Chris O'Kane, cited above, Christian Lotz points this out, describing the later Frankfurt School's abandonment of questions of capitalism and ecological devastation: "I (especially) think that the turn of critical theory to the issue of normativity was a bad turn, and, as such, it is time to engage in fresh reflections on some insights that got lost in the aftermath of Habermas, Honneth, and their Anglo-American followers. From my point of view, this reflection necessarily contains a return to Marx, even if some will interpret this as return to battles that have already been fought" (Lotz 2014, xiv). For more work attempting to reverse this change of focus, see Bonefeld (2014) and Prusik (2020). 11 Prusik puts this well in his commentary: "[Adorno's] negative dialectics should be grasped as a process of immanent critique that expresses-and requires-moral, normative, and experiential concepts that belong to the capitalist social object" (Prusik 2022, 12). 12 11 (8): 8-17. 2022. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-72m consistently opposes.12 From this perspective, we can see that a normatively oriented critical theory risks producing an ideological account of life under capitalism based on the standards of this society, without attention to the way in which every appearance of this society is related to the development and expansion of capital. Through the project of critique as the rational securing of normative foundations, we not only enlist Adorno's help for a project with which it is very hard to square with his social theory, but we further the broader deemphasis on political economy in critical theory. The latter is a project dependent on forms of backward-looking development bearing no immediate relation to a normative theory of justice, but nevertheless of more urgent theoretical importance. Section 2: The Cultivation of Criticism In the third section of my paper, I reviewed a few of Adorno's occasional references to the cultivation of critique, offering an argument that this process makes critical theory possible. In the development of critical sensibility and an openness to philosophical experience, critical theory also depends on a backward-looking notion of progress. In his criticism of this element of my paper, Vogelmann argues that my approach to critical theory attempts to replace Allen's "normative foundations" of critical theory with a "parallel" grounding via self-reflexivity (Vogelmann 2022, 30). Vogelmann worries that grounding critique on selfreflection overburdens the latter, since it is "too idealistic and individualistic" to serve this role (30). My understanding of critical theory, if we follow this argument, attempts to ground it through vague imperatives on individuals to change their minds, rather than on something like a systematic understanding of ideology in capitalist society, and the attendant impossibility of such an individualistic ideal transforming the whole. To respond to this objection, we must first recognize that I have not argued anywhere that the cultivation of self-reflexivity grounds critique. On the contrary, I meant to show that there is a form of progress in in Adorno's work that doesn't have to do, immediately, with the project of critical theory as a search for normative foundations. In the development of critics and their theories, we can speak of progressive processes of development, even if these processes (like the conceptual and material development of capitalism) are also shot through with the possibility of regression. Theoretical development itself, if we take this more "subjective" dimension of critique seriously, is a progressive historical process, even if we would struggle to cast it in a metaphysical and historicist narrative. There is a real sense in which we discuss theoretical insight as a matter of "progress"-and this sense underwrites our claims about the ability or inability of certain theoretical perspectives to give us an adequate perspective.13 By outlining this second kind of backward-looking progress, I merely meant to say that the development of theoretical consciousness is also a dimension of the progress discussion, and if we want to understand how it works, it would be helpful to go back and see how Adorno and his colleagues talk about this cultivation process. This brings 12 Society for Adorno is self-contradictory (Adorno 1976b [1961], 109), or an "antagonistic totality" (Adorno 1995 1966], 10). See also Adorno's essay "Sociology and Empirical Research" ([1957] 1976c). 13 See, for example, Titus Stahl's (indirectly related) recognition: "It is clear that progress in these debates can only be made if we succeed in showing that there is a form of nonexternal critique that does not simply underwrite socially accepted norms" (Stahl 2022 [2013], 4). I would argue that a similar sense of theoretical progress is also present in the project of decolonizing critical theory's normative foundations. I. Reynolds 13 us to Adorno's consistent descriptions of the cultivation of critique, in which a backwardlooking notion of progress (albeit not a stadial or linear form of progress) is present in the concepts of education and formation.14 The importance of learning and development for critical theory-when we disabuse ourselves of any claims regarding "grounding"-is that it allows us to make sense of a process whereby the moments of particularity not subsumable under the concepts of capitalist society are able to become a historical force. In this sense, this form of cultivation is not merely individualistic, although it certainly takes an individualist form in some of Adorno's work, where the possession of resistant sensibility is sometimes described in terms of the luck of a single individual.15 Quite like Vogelmann on this score, and apart from Adorno, I think that we need to recognize the social and material conditions making critique possible, and to move from this to a consideration of "what social and material resources critical theory can enlist" (Vogelmann 2022, 30). This "interdisciplinary materialism" (30), which would recognize the possibility of a critical education of sensibility, would find us asking about the forms of collectivity, educational arrangements, and political institutions through which the criticism of society can be progressively developed. In this way, it would also constitute a project of critical political education.16 Section 3: Normativity and Suffering As we have seen, the early Frankfurt School thinkers have two different conceptions of backward-looking progress that we would do well to remember. In no way are these forms of progress univocal or transhistorical and in no way are they meant to normatively ground critical theory, because the project of normative critique is different from that of the early Frankfurt School. In Adorno's work more specifically, we find an attempt to criticize society from the standpoint of redemption. But this criticism, and this standpoint, cannot be rationally secured once and for all. This means that the precepts guiding critique in Adorno function differently than the normative principles of the later Frankfurt School. As Prusik writes of the standpoint of redemption in Adorno: "Adorno's utopian concept of redemption is not a foundational principle, but a reflexive standard of dialectical criticism, a position that holds the wrongness of present society against a possible future" (Prusik 2022, 19). Prusik is thus right to point out that the kind of education outlined in the last section of my paper and the present article possesses a normative impulse, and it would have been helpful to make this connection clearer in my work. But it suffices, for now, to note the difference between a 14 Prusik agrees: "... the notion of education as political practice is everywhere in Adorno" (Prusik 2022, 19). For more on this, see the discussion in my original paper, at Section 3. 15 See, for example: "If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms-a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment-it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see" (Adorno 1995, 41). See also, similar remarks from Adorno's discussion with Hellmut Becker (Adorno and Becker 1999 [1969], 22–23). 16 The notion of political education underlying the early versions of critical theory make it easy to see why I agree with the impulse of Prusik's criticism when he argues that I come close to suggesting that capitalism will inevitably overcome itself (Prusik 2022, 18 and n. 15). The transformation of capitalist society is not at all guaranteed by its contradictions. The theoretical significance of political education is that it provides a way to work towards this transformation. 14 11 (8): 8-17. 2022. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-72m principle meant to ground a rational account of normativity, and a reflexive standard aiming to express an impulse of suffering humanity. When it comes to critical theory's relationship to experiences of suffering, both Prusik and Vogelmann have articulated a helpful objection to my article. This stems from the way I describe Adorno and Horkheimer as relying on the obvious wrongness of certain experiences, such as pain and misery (Reynolds 2021, 3, 10 n. 5). Vogelmann once again repeats the reading we found in the last section, taking this claim of mine to imply that critical theory is "grounded" on suffering that does not require any theoretical elaboration, and points out that such negative experiences cannot normatively ground critical theory in a satisfactory way (Vogelmann 2022, 31). Vogelmann's problem disappears if we see the need to avoid suffering not as the unquestioned ground of critical theory, but rather as its starting point. My point is not that these experiences of suffering are immediate wrongs whose causes must remain a mystery but which nevertheless assure the rationality of our orientation, but rather that we need not spend our theoretical attention justifying exactly why these conditions are wrong. While this latter project might serve a supporting role in struggles for social change-helping to consolidate, for example, Northern voters during the period leading up to the U.S. Civil War-a theory of society departing from "traditional theory" ought to aim for more: for an understanding of the material conditions causing this harm, and the contradictions in the social order that they index. While the experiences of suffering giving Adorno's social theory its impulse do not provide conceptual grounding, it is clear that this critical theory still rests on these experiences, and on their obvious wrongness. In a few passages of my paper, I went so far as to suggest that these elementary experiences of suffering resist conceptualization. As Prusik rightly notes, however: "Although Adorno refers to a moment of immediacy in all mediation, it is too strong to say that the experience of suffering is free from conceptualization" (Prusik 2022, 18). Indeed, while Adorno is clear that the wrongness of suffering is not an urgent theoretical question, he clearly holds that all suffering is mediated (Adorno 1995 [1966], 202; Prusik 2022, 18). To claim that pain and suffering resist theoretical elaboration indeed carries the risk of positing a false immediacy, especially if we look to suffering to "ground" our theoretical investigations. In light of this criticism, I want to slightly qualify my claim that suffering resists theoretical elaboration by recognizing that critical theory necessarily begins by encountering experiences of social suffering and seeks to uncover the mediations conditioning them. In their works, Adorno and Horkheimer respond to suffering not by developing a theory of justice through which its wrongness can be rationally assured, but rather by discovering its causes and their conceptual correlates in capitalist society. This materialist research program is not a straightforwardly moral or ethical project in the sense that we might use these terms today, since it relates negatively to prevailing moral and ethical conceptions and institutions. As Horkheimer writes in "Materialism and Metaphysics": "The materialist view has the negative significance that it rejects a metaphysically grounded morality. But in addition it has always meant to materialists that man's striving for happiness is to be recognized as a natural fact requiring no justification" (Horkheimer 1993 [1933], 44). If "the condition of all truth is to lend a voice to suffering" (Adorno 1995 [1966], 17), and if suffering is thus "the moving force of dialectical thinking" (202), then the expression of this truth will draw on human I. Reynolds 15 misery as an incitement to theoretical elaboration-meaning an incitement to the critique of political economy-but need not need to concern itself with the foundations of its moral claims. In Adorno and Horkheimer's repeated claims that the wrongness of suffering ought to be taken at face value, I see an argument against the project of securing normative foundations for critical theory.17 Section 4: Methodological and Substantial Critique The final point I want to speak to is Prusik's argument against my framing of the critique of political economy as a form of progress with "methodological" importance. As Prusik writes, we ought to remember that negative dialectics, at least as conceived by Adorno, is not a method: "Adorno's presentation of dialectics... refuses the functionalizing of dialectics as a method of critique..." (Prusik 2022, 16). Dialectics cannot be a method because the conceptual work undertaken by this project is not merely conceptual. We can see this, for example, in Adorno's characterization of negative dialectics as a process of "developing a consistent sense of nonidentity" (Adorno 1995 [1966], 5). The moments of particularity frustrating identity's claim to totality also challenge the possibility of a purely or systematically theoretical knowledge, even while thought must work through the medium of identification. Since society's relation to itself is one of nonidentity, the theoretical reflection adequate to grasping this nonidentity will not be exhaustively expressible as a relation of concepts, but will also depend on the development of sensibility, to an openness to otherness incapable of being subsumed under the concept. As Prusik writes: "Adorno's wager is that the concepts of the totality are immanently self-critical, that negativity lives in the abstract stability of identity, and negative dialectics can reflect on the historical contents of concepts by unsealing the reality that comes into contradiction with them" (Prusik 2022, 16). While Adorno's social theory involves a strong methodological critique of positivism, the critique of political economy found in his work is not only a methodological intervention. Adorno's refusal to spell out negative dialectics as a method of social theory is the reason that the second section of my paper-in which I discussed the critique of political economy-does not directly describe his approach to critical theory as a method. At the same time, at the outset, I did frame the two conceptions of backward-looking progress discussed in my paper as pertaining, respectively, to the methods and objects of critique on the one hand and to the substantial development of its possibility on the other.18 I want to clarify that my distinction between the methodological and substantial dimensions of critical social theory comes from my broader project, and is not meant as an interpretation of 17 This is most clear in Adorno's claim that a call to justify the demand of avoiding Auschwitz would be "monstrous" (Adorno, 2005a [1966], 191). While the need to avoid Auschwitz is the impetus of critical reflection, it is clear here that any attempt to conceptually justify its wrongness (as if accepting this wrongness is a matter of rational discussion) is proscribed. Rocío Zambrana (2013) and Justin Evans (2022) provide further discussions of what critique without normative foundations-or critique recognizing neoliberalism's "logic of normative ambivalence" (Zambrana 2013, 116)-might look like. 18 "Since this project must abandon the possibility of a fixed perspective from which they can be resolved, oppositions such as the one between progress and regression are understood to pertain not only to the theoretical systems of social research-conditioning its methods and objects-but also to the subjective conditions allowing for the formation and cultivation of critique" (Reynolds 2021, 1). 16 11 (8): 8-17. 2022. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-72m Adorno. The aim of the broader project is to show that critical theory requires conceptions of educational development that speak to both the (inter)subjective possibility of critique, and its objective area of concern. It might well be, in the light of critiques such as Prusik's and Vogelmann's, that this distinction will ultimately prove irrelevant. After all, as a more thorough study of this issue would have to recognize, one of the defining features of Adorno's social theory is that society is both subject and object-and that this duality of society is the expression of its self-nonidentity.19 Provisionally distinguishing the methodological and substantial (or objective and subjective) sides of critique might indeed be idealistic; and in the final analysis, we might determine that the critique of political economy and that critique's possibility in a critical collective are not meaningfully different. But the path out of idealism is long, and the final analysis is still the object of much striving. I do want to raise, however, one definite way in which this juncture-between the critique of traditional theory and "methodologically unmethodical" development of critical consciousness (Adorno 1991 [1958], 20)-raises questions for future research. This lies in the way that we conceive of the social group articulating critique, and either allow or disallow ourselves from viewing the constitution of this social group itself as a social problem. While Adorno's reflections on sociology helpfully raise this issue, particularly in his debate with Popper, they by no means illuminate an easy path forward. In the constitution of a critical collective, and here we must also understand this collective as an educational group, we might realize the possibility of critique in ways that speak to both dimensions-the methodological and the substantial-that I provisionally separated. But how do we conceive the social and objective distinctiveness of this collective? How can the critique of political economy become the knowledge produced by an expanding, and increasingly self-critical group within society? What are the institutions capable of supporting this project? In the difficulty of reconciling the two forms of progressive development outlined in my paper, we can see the way in which a departure from critique as a rational securing of normative foundations might bring us to a consideration of the educational work of political movements, and the mode of critique specific to their struggle. References Adorno, Theodor W. 1995. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W. 1976a. "Introduction." In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby, 1–67. New York: Harper & Row. Adorno, Theodor W. 1976b. "On the Logic of the Social Sciences." In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. New York: Harper & Row. Adorno, Theodor W. 1976c. "Sociology and Empirical Research." In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby, 68–86. New York: Harper & Row. 19 See, for example: Adorno (1976a [1969], 33; 1976c [1957]). For a helpful exposition of Adorno's sociological thought, see the work of Matthias Benzer (2011). I. Reynolds 17 Adorno, Theodor W. and Hellmut Becker. 1999. "Education for Maturity and Responsibility." In History of the Human Sciences translated by Robert French, Jem Thomas, and Dorothee Weymann, 12:21–34.3. Allen, Amy. 2018a. "'Decolonization,' Normativity, and the Critique of Capitalism: Reply to Critics." Political Theory 46 (5): 790–800. Allen, Amy. 2018b. "The Ends of Progress: Reply to Critics." Contemporary Political Theory 17 (4): 532–540. Allen, Amy. 2016. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Benzer, Matthias. 2011. The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonefeld, Werner. 2014. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. New York: Free Press. Evans, Justin. 2022. "On the Very Idea of Normative Foundations in Critical Social Theory." Philosophy and Social Criticism, 1–24. Feenberg, Andrew. 2018. "Local Progress and Technical Rationality." Contemporary Political Theory 17 (4): 528–532. Horkheimer, Max. 1993. "Materialism and Morality." In Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey, 15–47. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lotz, Christian. 2014. The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Nichols, Robert. 2018. "Progress, Empire, and Social Theory: Comments on The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory." Political Theory 46 (5): 779–785. O'Kane, Chris. 2021. "Critical Theory and the Critique of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique of Nancy Fraser's 'Systematic' 'Crisis–Critique' of Capitalism as an 'Institutionalized Social Order.'" Science & Society 85 (2): 207–35. Prusik, Charles A. 2022. "Reply to Iaan Reynolds: 'The Dialectic of Progress and the Cultivation of Resistance in Critical Social Theory.'" Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (5): 12–19. Prusik, Charles A. 2020. Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Reynolds, Iaan. 2021. "The Dialectic of Progress and the Cultivation of Resistance in Critical Social Theory." Social Epistemology 1–12. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2021.2000663. Stahl, Titus. 2022. Immanent Critique. Translated by John-Baptiste Oduor. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Vogelmann, Frieder. 2022. "Grounding Critical Theory." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (5): 27–32. Vogelmann, Frieder. 2021. "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Idealism in Critical Theory." Constellations 28 (3): 1–15. Zambrana, Rocío. 2013. "Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory." Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 14 (1): 93–119.


A New Problem for Aesthetics

Philosophy

A New Problem for Aesthetics Kevin Melchionne Abstract The essay introduces the problem of aesthetic unreliability, the variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste. Key Words taste, aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic reliability 1. Introduction Aestheticians have wandered increasingly from the common ground of aesthetic theory into the philosophies of particular arts, such as music, film, dance, or literature. The philosophies of the arts offer a refreshing role for philosophers. By focusing on particular arts, philosophers have been able to speak usefully to art historians, musicologists, and literary critics and answer questions in their disciplines: the nature of our comprehension of film narrative, pictorial perception, moral education in the novel, or composition versus performance-based standards in music, to name only a few. As an added bonus, rubbing elbows in one of the art worlds may also make for a less lonely existence for aestheticians. Perhaps, too, the shift from basic questions to particular arts reflects the belief that all is well with our conceptions of taste and aesthetic experience. The heavy lifting is behind us. Today the basic questions are the stuff of undergraduate surveys rather than advanced research. My view, however, is that aesthetics has not yet faced one the most troubling features of aesthetic life: the very difficulty of knowing our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste. 2 This problem-let's call it aesthetic unreliability-returns us to the very foundations of aesthetics and raises questions about the authority of individuals' assessments of their aesthetic experience and all that follows from those assessments. Aesthetic unreliability requires us to reconsider the individual as both connoisseur and consumer. It suggests alternative explanations for some of the more curious features of cultural life, namely, that our taste is often incoherent, the practice of criticism largely arbitrary, and creative practices something of a free-for-all. Aesthetic unreliability supports the view that our inner aesthetic lives are more anarchic, protean, and unknown than we have been willing to admit. The stakes are high, at least by the standards of aesthetics: whatever we make of our aesthetic lives is typically held to depend in part on our ability to more or less accurately assess our experience of the art that we encounter. Theories of taste presuppose a notion of contemplation as transparent and unproblematic: we know the nature, degree and sources of our satisfactions as well as changes in them over time. Without this knowledge, our aesthetic lives would be no more than what Ted Cohen has called "a concatenation of atomistic expressions," lacking continuity and coherence. 1 Our very ability to direct and enhance our aesthetic experience-quite simply, to have an aesthetic life-is thought to be dependent on the reliability or authenticity of aesthetic selfknowledge. However, certain features of our aesthetic lives compel a skeptical view of the reliability of what we identify as our taste, aesthetic experience, or aesthetic judgment. By these I mean, broadly, the mental states or episodes that occur when attending to aesthetic objects like works of art, especially the affective quality of our responses and the secondary, synthetic process of reflecting on, recalling, comparing, and ordering these experiences. I submit that, often enough, we suppress or exaggerate our responses to the 1 Ted Cohen, "On Consistency in One's Personal Aesthetics," in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cornell University Press, 1998), 106– 3 point of self-deception. We have difficulty in identifying what in an object causes our response to it. The instability of our feelings over time is such that we are unsure if our responses are caused by our mood, factors in our environment, or the object to which we are attending. The unreliability of aesthetic responses is, for aestheticians, the long unacknowledged Cartesian ball of wax, yet to be warmed in the palm. Aestheticians have long assumed the authenticity of aesthetic experience while focusing instead on its objectivity. Since the establishment of the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, conflicts of taste between individuals have been among the discipline's most intractable and popular problems. The resolution of the problem has been thought to be essential to an adequate aesthetic theory. Some of the most commonly considered notions in philosophical aesthetics, for example, Hume's standard of taste and Kant's sensus communis, arose in part as answers to this problem. Similarly, the most familiar folk maxims concerning taste, such as "To each, his own" or "One man's treasure is another man's trash," are essentially rules of thumb for contending with conflicts of taste. By contrast, one familiar saying touching on aesthetic unreliability simply dismisses it: "I do not know anything about art but I know what I like." It is easy to see why conflicts of taste have attracted more attention than aesthetic unreliability. Conflicts of taste are easily observed. The friction of cultural differences like race, class, and gender is manifest in them. In a back-handed way, conflicts of taste remind us that culture matters and, in the right measure, we relish this reminder. Disagreements over taste reach the heart of aesthetics: the objectivity of aesthetic judgments, the catholicity of aesthetic experience, and the very possibility of good and bad taste. Through such conflicts, we confront and learn to live with our differences. Yet even as philosophers have wrung their hands about this conflict between selves, they 125, here 107. 4 have remained oblivious of the confusion within selves. 2 Our personal aesthetic confusion is not so easily observed. We take our self-understanding of our aesthetic experience and taste as self-evident. However, the objectivity of judgments of taste is moot if we are unable to form them with much reliability. Aesthetic unreliability is a new problem for the discipline, requiring us to reconsider the very cognitive and affective bases of taste. In this essay, I want to make the case that we need to return to the question of taste, not as a point of interpersonal conflict, but instead as one of personal confusion. It is the difference between, on the one hand, determining the extent of the objectivity of aesthetic judgments and, on the other, the extent of their authenticity. Our problem is not so much the nature of sensus communis as the extent of sensus ignarus. 2. The Reliability of Self-Knowledge Philosophers of mind have been reluctant to accord much credibility to anti-reliabilist positions. 3 Arguments against aesthetic unreliability have emphasized: 1. a noncontingent relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness, that is, the impossibility of being unconscious of a conscious emotion or thought; 2. the assignment of difficulty in self-appraisal to the overall difficulty in understanding the world itself rather than to the process of self-appraisal; and 3. a shift in the grounds of authority from accuracy to deliberative or agential responsibility. 1. Focusing on the problem of affective self-knowledge, Christoph Jaeger observes that philosophers commonly accept that when subjects are in a state of mind, they strongly believe they are in that state of mind. It is in the nature of a mental state that, when we 2 My first attempt at this problem was Kevin Melchionne, "On the Old Saw, 'I Know Nothing About Art but I Know What I Like,'" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 2, spring 2010), p. 131-141. 3 Among them are Richard Moran, Authority and estrangement: an essay on selfknowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Tyler Burge, "Our entitlement to self knowledge," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996), 91– 116; John Heil, "Privileged access," Mind, 97 (1988), 238–251; Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995); Sydney Shoemaker "Moore's 5 are in it, we know we are in it. This principle of self-intimation, as Jaeger calls it, is taken as "a requirement for minimally (epistemically) rational subjects." 4 However, Jaeger argues that it is internally inconsistent to admit first-person authority but reject the possibility of agnosticism about our own feelings. 5 If we are necessarily taken as authorities about our feelings, then professions of ignorance about our feelings must also be admitted. With them, the possibility of affective ignorance is also admitted. Therefore, there is nothing logically impossible about aesthetic unreliability 2. It is sometimes argued that skepticism about self-knowledge is a false problem generated from a Cartesian theory of mind according to which objects are mistakenly held to appear to the mind's eye as "inner objects," Davidson's famous "myth of the mental." 6 However, it is important to recognize that that we are speaking not so much about our beliefs about objects in the world as what Victoria McGeer calls our "cognitive and emotional situation." What is at issue is, as she puts it, "an agent's ability to use and understand the conceptual repertoire of folk psychology, particularly with regard to interpreting her experiences and, so, explaining and justifying her own reactions to, and behavior in, the world." 7 By contrast, reliabilism rests only on what Jaeger calls "positive affective introspection." What is reliably registered is a simple valence or state of mind, that is to say, knowledge of whether we are happy, sad, bored or excited. One of the staunchest defenders of reliabilism, Sydney Shoemaker, clarifies the limits of the reliabilist position: paradox and self-knowledge." Philosophical Studies, 77 (1995), 211–228. 4 Christoph Jaeger, "Affective Ignorance," Erkenntnis, March 2009, 4. 5 Jaeger, "Affective Ignorance," 8. 6 Donald Davidson, "Knowing One's Own Mind," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 30 (1986): 441-58, here 453. 7 Victoria McGeer, "Is 'Self-Knowledge' An Empirical Problem? Renegotiating the Space of Philosophical Explanation," The Journal of Philosophy, 93 (1996): 483-515, here 485. 6 The knowledge I have in mind is not, as you perhaps hoped, the difficultto-get knowledge that arises from successfully following the Socratic injunction "Know thyself"; it is the humdrum kind of knowledge that is expressed in such remarks as "It itches," "I'm hungry," "I don't want to," and "I'm bored." 8 To be sure, aesthetic responses often involve simple self-intimation. However, we typically expect a bit more of our aesthetic assessments. And, it is here that antireliabilism finds its footing. As Eric Schwitzgebel asks, "Does the apparent difficulty in going wrong in simple judgments of color and pain experiences in canonical conditions reflect the general security of our judgments about our ongoing stream of conscious experience, or are those cases exceptional, best cases?" 9 Schwitzgebel suggests that the geography of reliabilism may consist only in familiar albeit scattered islands in wider seas of unreliability. Reliability is undermined not by "humdrum" mental states but rather by complex and ongoing consciousness. The difference between mere selfintimation of positive affective states and authentic self-knowledge is something like the difference between knowing one is unhappy and knowing the nature of that unhappiness and its causes: what does this unhappiness feel like right now? Why do I feel it? Was I happier in the past than I am now? As many a counselor will aver, mere positive affective intimation is rarely sufficient to contend with unhappiness. As with our emotional life, aesthetic life requires more of us than mere status reports. A degree of rumination is involved. For these experiences, we cannot dismiss skepticism about introspection (not to mention the empirical studies which support it) as a false problem. 3. Where philosophers have conceded introspective unreliability, they have been 8 Sydney Shoemaker, "Self-Knowledge and 'Inner Sense,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54 (1994), 2, 249-269, here 249. 9 Eric Schwitzgebel, "Self-Ignorance," forthcoming in Jee Loo Liu and John Perry, eds., Consciousness and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Version cited: www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SelfUcs-101118.pdf, 5-3. 7 reluctant to accord it much significance. For Richard Moran, self-knowledge is authoritative because it is the result of the deliberative process. Although introspection may often be less than accurate and sometimes downright self-deceptive, it remains authoritative not because we always know our own thoughts best but because it is up to us to know it. As Moran puts it, it is "our business" to know: "It is not just the report that the person is author of, but also, in a central range of cases, the person can be seen as the author of the state of mind itself, in the sense of the being the person responsible for it." 10 The deliberative process makes us responsible for our self-ascriptions, even illusory ones. Fallibility has no bearing on authority: we are responsible for the results of our own deliberation. However, Krista Lawlor has argued that even deliberation is not sufficient to secure authority. Lawlor argues that "one might be ready and able to deliberate about what one's attitudes should be, and successfully deliberate oneself into a particular attitude, but one's resulting self-ascription lacks authority nonetheless." 11 For, as we will see, we often unconsciously abandon the results of deliberation in future action. And deliberation itself can undermine accurate self-ascription. Thus, our self-ascriptions built from deliberation lack authority because they do not play an authoritative role in will formation. It may well be "our business" to know our preferences but, when it comes to complex self-ascriptions like aesthetic preferences, what we claim to prefer has little relation to what we do. As an alternative, Lawlor roots authority in agency, in what we end up doing. On this view, self-ascriptions may be considered reliable when they are confirmed by what we do. Lawlor is close to the consensus of social psychologists who, as we will now see, find self-ascription most reliable when it conforms to behavior. When it does not 10 Richard Moran, "The authority of self-consciousness," Philosophical Topics, 26 (1999), 184. 11 Krista Lawlor, "Elusive reasons: a problem for first-person authority." Philosophical Psychology, 16 (2003), 4, 554. 8 conform to behavior, it is reasonable to doubt its authenticity. 3. The Paradox of Introspection Psychological studies of consciousness have long been hampered by what Jonathan Schooler calls the "paradox of introspection," namely that "experience is subjectively self-evident but empirically inscrutable." 12 Despite the introspective sense of certainty, it has been difficult to empirically determine if introspective reports are accurate. Nevertheless, individuals typically have high confidence in their self-appraisals. However, cognitive and social psychologists have slowly chipped away at what Timothy Wilson calls the illusion of authenticity. 13 In Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson synthesizes a range of empirical research to present a general case against self-knowledge, reinforcing the findings of his seminal article on the issue from 1977. 14 In recent years, a number of empirical protocols have enhanced the acceptability of empirical research on introspection. 15 Methodologically, researchers must rely on the "triangulation" of introspective reports with physiological and behavioral evidence. In this spirit, they have provided a steady diet of studies that reinforce the plausibility of what Daniel Haybron calls affective ignorance 16 or what John Lambie and Anthony Marcel call emotion unawarenesss 17 or Eric Schwitzgebel introspective fallibilism. 18 Even as they argue for 12 Jonathan W. Schooler and Charles A. Schreiber, "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11 (2004), 7–8, 2. 13 Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 14 R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson, "Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes." Psychological Review, 8 (1977), 231–259. 15 For an account of these advances, see Schooler and Schreiber, "Experience, Metaconsciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," 17–39; and Anthony I. Jack and Andreas Roepstorff, "Why Trust the Subject?" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10 (2003), 9–10, v–xx. 16 Daniel M. Haybron, "Do We Know How Happy We Are?: On Some Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall," NOUS, 41 (2007), 394–428. 17 J. A. Lambie and A. J. Marcel, "Consciousness and the Varieties of Emotion Experience: A Theoretical Framework," Psychological Review 109 (2002), 219–259. 9 the use of introspection under rigorous methodological conditions, A.I. Jack and Andreas Roepstorff acknowledge the discontinuities between consciousness and introspection. They write that "patterns of behavior, neural processes, and experience exist as distinct facets of the mental." 19 Jonathan Schooler has argued that the process of introspectively representing mental content invites the possibility of error or distortion. 20 For Schooler, such errors are more than glitches in research programs; they are part and parcel of everyday life, including, by implication, aesthetic life. 21 Schooler's balanced approach seeks the strengths and weaknesses of introspection under different conditions. The main problem with introspection for Schooler is that when we try to characterize an experience, we risk distorting it. Schooler discusses the conditions where introspection proves most vulnerable, and he identifies distortions in the weighting of parts of experience (the peak/end effect), recollection with verbalization (verbal overshadowing), and hedonic appraisal as three situations where introspection is weakest. 4. Peak/End Effect One of the most familiar forms of introspective illusion is the peak/end effect. Our knowledge of prior experiences is often distorted by biases of recollection. Schooler writes that introspective reports "fail to fully reflect what was actually experienced See also A. J. Marcel, 'Slippage in the unity of consciousness,' in Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness, ed. G.R. Block and J. Marsh (Chichester: Wiley, 1993). 18 Eric Schwitzgebel, "The Unreliability of Naive Introspection," Philosophical Review, 117 (2008), 2, 245-273. 19 Jack and Roepstorff, "Why Trust the Subject?" viii. See also Jack and Roepstorff, "The 'measurement problem' for experience: Damaging flaw or intriguing puzzle?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2002), 372–4. There is a response from Schooler, "Establishing a legitimate relationship with introspection: Response to Jack and Roepstorff," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2002), 372–3. Schooler and Schreiber have a list of protocol in "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," 22. 20 Jonathan W. Schooler, "Re-representing consciousness: Dissociations between consciousness and meta-consciousness," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (2002), 339–44. 21 Schooler and Schreiber, "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," 22. 10 moment-by-moment (even when the episode is brief and the introspection occurs immediately after the experience ends)." 22 In work exploring recollections of annoying noises and induced pain, hedonic appraisals rarely capture the overall experience of an episode. Instead, as Schooler puts it, "individuals' retrospective evaluations overemphasize the pleasure or discomfort at the episode's most extreme moment and at its ending, the peak and the end. Other moments have little effect on global hedonic assessments." 23 Taste inevitably involves reflection and recollection of prior experience. As we move to each successive work of art, we produce comparisons that are fueled by memory and introspection, recollections of work and experiences, prior measurements. The peak/end effect suggests that there are ways in which retrospective, comparative assessments of works of art, crucial to taste formation, are distorted. 5. Verbal overshadowing Schooler acknowledges that recently recollected visual imagery can be quite accurate. However, it is less accurate when accompanied by a verbal overlay. In a widely replicated study, subjects viewed pictures of faces. 24 Later, they were asked to recall the faces, with one group verbally describing them in detail. Researchers found that when 22 Schooler and Schreiber, "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," 29. 23 Schooler and Schreiber, "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," 29. See also B. L. Fredrickson and D. Kahneman, "Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (1993), 45–55; D. A. Redelmeier and D. Kahneman, "Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures," Pain, 66 (1996), 3–8. D. Ariely, "Combining experiences over time: The effects of duration, intensity changes and on-line measurements on retrospective pain evaluations," Journal of Behavioral DecisionMaking, 11 (1998), 19–45; C. A. Schreiber and D. Kahneman, "Determinants of the remembered utility of aversive sounds," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129 (2000), 27–42.; D. Ariely and G. Loewenstein, "When does duration matter in judgment and decision making?" Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129 (2000), 508–23. 24 J. W. Schooler and T. Y. Engstler-Schooler, "Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid," Cognitive Psychology, 17 (1990), 36–71. 11 subjects are asked to provide verbal descriptions, they are much more likely to misremember. The cross-over between the verbal and the visual seems to create the cognitive difficulty. The very process of translating non-verbal introspection into words is disruptive. In attempting to verbally recall features of an object, our memory of other aspects is interfered with. The verbal overlay tends to result in an over-emphasis of some features and the simplification of others. Schooler speculates that verbalization "breaks apart" the image in ways that are difficult to later reassemble: "cognitive operations engaged in during verbalization dampen the activation of brain regions associated with critical non-verbal operations." 25 6. Hedonic Self-Appraisal Estimations of our satisfactions are essential to the self-understanding of taste. Relying on methodological triangulation, researchers can cross-check self-appraisals of preferences and pleasures with behavior. When our appraisals correspond with our behavior, researchers have reason to trust their reliability and grant them authority. If we report liking something and move on to buy it or use it in a way that optimizes satisfaction, our report may be considered reliable. Here, it is the combination of activities that matters. Hedonic self-appraisals become doubtful when they do not correlate with behavior. Schooler finds that appraisals are "often closely calibrated with external events, related behaviours, and physiological responses." 26 However, when subjects are asked to reflect on experience, reliability decreases. In an experiment involving assessments of jam, Wilson and Schooler compared preferences, asking one group for an explanation for their 25 J. W. Schooler, "Verbalization produces a transfer inappropriate processing shift," Applied Cognitive Psychology, 16 (2002), 989–997. For an overview of research, C. A. Meissner, "Applied aspects of the instructional bias effect in verbal overshadowing," Applied Cognitive Psychology, 16 (2002), 911–28. 26 Schooler and Schreiber, "Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection," p. 28. 12 preference. 27 Preferences for both groups matched the preferences of experts. But, when asked for reasons for their preferences, the explainers changed their preferences with greater frequency. Their new preferences diverged further from expert opinion than their initial responses. In a study with still greater resemblance to a conventional aesthetic situation, subjects were exposed to art posters and asked for preferences, again having one group also provide reasons for their preferences. Subjects were allowed to select and take home the poster that they preferred. 28 Individuals who were asked for reasons for preferences were less likely later to hang their poster on their walls at home than those who were not asked to analyze their feelings. The findings suggest that, when asked for reasons, our reports of our preferences are more likely to vacillate, depart from expert opinion, and be abandoned later. In all, preferences accompanied by reasons are less likely to be authentic. We choose our jam, wine, or poster in accordance with one train of thought; then, with another, we eat, drink, and decorate. Similar findings run throughout the literature on repression, where subjects regularly adhere to self-ascriptions running counter to observable behavior. 29 These studies identify "top-down influences," among them conceptual or normative frameworks that limit our capacity to acknowledge our real responses. Top-down influences define our experience independently of what experimental observers take as our real responses. Taste is especially vulnerable to top-down influence. 27 T.D. Wilson and J.W. Schooler, "Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (1991), 181–192. 28 T.D. Wilson, D. J. Lisle, J. W. Schooler, S.D. Hodges, K.J. Klaaren, and S. J. LaFleur, "Introspecting reasons can reduce post-choice satisfaction," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19 (1993), 331–339. For a similar study using wine, see Joseph M. Melcher and Jonathan W. Schooler, "The misremembrance of wines past: Verbal and perceptual expertise differentially mediate verbal overshadowing of taste memory," Journal of Memory and Language, 35 (1996), 231-245. 29 For instance, Anthony G. Greenwald, "Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception: Further Consideration," in The Mythomanias: The Nature of Deception and Self-Deception, Ed. Michael S. Myslobodsky (Erlbaum, 1997), 51-71. See also Lambie and Marcel, "Consciousness and the Varieties of Emotion Experience." 13 Now, these studies may strike some readers as too simplistic to warrant application to our engagement with art. Works of art, it may be argued, give rise to far more complex responses than do jams or even wines. It might even be argued that viewing fine art posters in an experimental setting has little to with our real encounters with fine art. Yet assuming the greater complexity of real life aesthetic situations scarcely allows us to increase confidence in our responses. Real works of art introduce complex art historical, cultural, intentional, and interpretive contexts, requiring us to appraise our responses under a variety of rubrics. The difficulties of hedonic appraisal only increase in real life aesthetic situations. 7. Reasons for Preferences Deliberation and discourse do not in fact generate more reliable self-appraisals. The phenomena of peak/end effect, verbal overshadowing, and hedonic misappraisal suggest that in situations where aesthetic experience is accompanied by debate and discussion, the reliability of our knowledge of the experience decreases, calling into question the very discourse that is generated by the work of art. For this reason, critical discourse may be less reliable as a guide to our experience than we have supposed. These findings run counter to some of the most fundamental convictions of aestheticians and other arts professionals. Through contemplation, deliberation, and discourse, we are expected to discern what in a given object causes our response. In aesthetics no less than other philosophical disciplines, we honor the roles played by contemplation, reflection, and debate in our assessments. Opinions are considered stronger for having survived scrutiny. Revision is a healthy component of the search for truth. Criticism is thought to enhance our experience of art. Judgments are held to be authoritative to the extent that they are the product of deliberation. Artists make things that inspire feelings of beauty or satisfaction. Appreciating art is 14 thought to require not just liking the right things; it is to know-or at least, attempt to know-what makes them right. When I ask myself why I like the Cézanne or why I find the Cézanne beautiful, I am not asking for an argument. I am asking for an explanation for a mental state, an aesthetic experience. In principle, it is the work, not the reason, that causes the experience. I do not like Cézanne because his use of color happens to be a good reason for liking a painting. Rather, Cézanne's use of color explains why I like his paintings, that is, why I have the feeling of pleasure or satisfaction when I look at the Cézanne. But, is this something I can know with reliability? The theory of taste is faced with the daunting task of explaining why commonplace expressions like "I like Cézanne because of his use of color" or "Cézanne's Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair is beautiful because of the color" can be reliable statements. Now, the statement, "I like Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair because of the blue armchair" is obviously false. Yet, an accurate color ascription to the armchair does not necessarily make the statement true. It is possible that I appeal to a prominent feature of the object such as the red armchair only because of its prominence. But do I know that this feature of the object is also the cause of my pleasure? Consider the art historical theory about Cézanne, namely, that his special place in our pantheon rests on his innovative use of color. I am acquainted with this theory and speculate that the use of color must have a certain aesthetic force, a certain impact on a viewer like me. It is possible that, from this theory and not from any aesthetic rumination, I infer that my satisfaction with the Cézanne stems from his use of color. In this light, art history and art theory are nothing more than very specialized kinds of folk psychology. What makes these folk psychologies persuasive? We lack any significant empirical ground for judging the adequacy of these theories for aesthetic experience. To the extent that they are sound, mastery of them is far from widespread. In all, it is far more difficult to attribute my satisfaction with the Cézanne to the red armchair than our traditions of criticism and education let on. 15 Rumination produces its own discoveries. 30 Those discoveries are not necessarily descriptive of mental states. When asked for reasons, we are more likely to change our mind than when unasked. Often, reasons themselves have their more or less appealing qualities. We sometimes shift about in our preferences as we seek those that best match the most attractive reasons. Higher order deliberations are especially vulnerable to distortion of the weights given to competing reasons. 31 As advertisers have long known, the search for status through taste can be helped along by distinctive albeit arbitrary reasons. 32 Nor must we be motivated by social climbing when we misattribute our experience. Given the difficulties of self-attribution, especially the distracting role of what Nisbett and Wilson call "noninfluential stimuli," whatever comes to mind when we look for reasons has a chance to serve as a reason. 33 As Krista Lawlor writes, "a thought that comes to mind in the course of what one understands to be a search for reasons is taken to be a reason, simply because it occurs in the context of a search for reasons." 34 In these ways, the search for reasons distorts our understanding of our prior experience. The more complicated the reason-giving process, the more likely it is to generate confusion and error. 30 M. G. Millar and A. Tesser, "The effects of affective–cognitive consistency and thought on the attitude–behavior relation," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25 (1989), 189–202; T.D. Wilson, J. A. Bybee, D. S. Dunn, D. B. Hyman, and J. A. Rotonda, "Effects of analyzing reasons on attitude behavior consistency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47 (1984), 5–16; T. D. Wilson, D. Kraft and D. S. Dunn, "The disruptive effects of explaining attitudes: the moderating effect of knowledge about the attitude object," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25 (1989), 379–400; T. D. Wilson and S. Hodges, "Effects of analyzing reasons on attitude change: the moderating role of attitude accessibility," Social Cognition, 11 (1994), 353– 366. 31 Ap Dijksterhuis, "Think Different: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Preference Development and Decision Making," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (2004), 5, 586–598 and J. A. Bargh and M. J. Ferguson, "Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes," Psychological Bulletin, 126 (2000), 925–945. 32 Itamar Simonson and Stephen W. Nowlis, "The Role of Explanations and Need for Uniqueness in Consumer Decision Making: Unconventional Choices Based on Reasons," Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (2000), 49-68. 33 Nisbett and Wilson "Telling more than we can know." 34 Lawlor "Elusive reasons," 558. 16 8. Reason-Shopping and the Art Worlds If aesthetic experience is in fact unreliable, then it is not surprising that descriptions can be easily mistaken, confused, and replaced. Reason-shopping may account for some part of the intellectualism in the more avant-gard corners of the art world, such as art schools, niche publications, and alternative venues. The pretentiousness of some of the art encountered in these milieus may be due to an overemphasis on the critical activity that accompanies and frames the work. Much contemporary creativity, at least in its most avant-garde manifestations, is no more than a search for interesting reasons. For, reasons have their own beauty, which is easily confused with the works themselves. At times, what art world insiders are unwittingly experiencing are the reasons rather than the works themselves. If only to impart to their vetting process a sense of rigor and purpose, insiders are more likely than casual art-goers to form their taste around the reasons rather than the works themselves. With reason-consumption replacing genuine aesthetic experience, insiders end up with conceptually exotic but experientially thin works of art. When outsiders later encounter the very same work of art and are dumbfounded by its extreme austerity or perversity, what they miss is that admirers are not so much consuming this austerity or perversity as the reasons that are attached to it. It is at this point that a misguided "art education" enters to feed reasons to the outsiders, consolidating the negative feedback loop which is today's contemporary art world. 9. Implications for Art Institutions Nearly all of modern art education presses upon us the crucial difference between merely liking great artists and knowing what makes these artists great, that is, what makes them have their effect on us. Certain habits of discourse-reviews, theory, crit sessions, docent tours, and now blogging-are thought to offer us special opportunities to have deeper experiences and, by implication, better taste. Art historians, critics, curators, and the artists themselves are eager to provide us with reasons for our experience. Entire institutions-museums, schools, publications-are built upon the production of reasons. 17 However, empirical research on self-appraisal suggests that the institutions and the discursive habits they favor may not really support the growth and refinement of aesthetic experience or at least not in the ways we think. Our cultural institutions may be simply the reification of our illusions about attribution, working more in the manner of a placebo effect than as efficacious practice. By encouraging us to pay some kind of attention, criticism and education accidentally lead us often enough to pay a rewarding kind of attention. If introspection is unreliable, accounts of the effects that works of art have on us may be less useful than ordinarily assumed. Admittedly, this is a far reaching conclusion, but it may capture something of what is wrong with today's art institutions. Speculatively, a certain widely observed cultural demoralization, a stand-off between the so-called philistines and snobs, may be exacerbated more by the discursive habits of insiders than by the stubborn ignorance of outsiders. Next Steps for Aesthetics Reading in philosophical aesthetics, one is left with the impression that our aesthetic lives are made up of tranquil satisfactions, with the occasional avant-garde head-scratcher thrown in for good measure. We contemplate, reflect, and debate the aesthetic qualities of works of art, aided by well-ordered art institutions and insightful art critics. And, happily, our taste, good or bad, is thus formed. From academic aesthetics, one would not be able to glean that our aesthetic experience may be at times marked by boredom, ambivalence, and confusion. On closer inspection, we do not have the kind of aesthetic life long assumed by philosophers. Taste is far more anarchic, protean, ambivalent, underdetermined, and confused than philosophers have allowed. It is marked by pretending, exaggerating, vacillating, conforming, wishful thinking, and pure invention. We often lack coherence among judgments and continuity between what we experience and what we take as our taste. Often, it is more like Cohen's "concatenation of atomistic 18 expressions." Subjects have a contingent relationship to their self-appraisals, including those involving aesthetic experience. Yet the theory of taste has little to say about this side of our aesthetic lives. It is as if the concept of virtue had developed in moral theory without any consideration of vice, or truth in epistemology without any conception of bias. If this view of aesthetic experience is correct, what are its implications for the theory of taste? A better theory of taste may concede that our taste is probably far more disconnected from our real moment-to-moment aesthetic experience than we have assumed. To the extent that aesthetic deliberation is successful, our attributions may be chalked up to a variety of behavioral and cognitive processes, in addition to or instead of the contemplating, beholding, or attending emphasized by conventional models of aesthetic experience. For instance, blind trial-and-error, unconscious incubation, and inference from bodily sensation may play influential roles. Inferences from theory (both folk and academic theory) probably play a considerable role in attribution, leaving us heavily reliant on the quality of these theories, which is not a promising prospect. In order to understand taste, we need to see that it plays a restrictive role in our aesthetic lives rather than just an enabling one. Often taste is commissive; we adjust our selfappraisals in order to fit our taste, inhibiting our capacity to grasp what McGeer calls our "emotional and cognitive situation." 35 A commissive notion of taste explains how taste may be thought of as authoritative, even when it is "top-down" and disconnected from experience. Over time, our accounts of our experience end up as "true" because we make those attributions work in the ongoing elaboration of our taste. We create for ourselves the experiences which live up to the taste we want to have. In tailoring our responses to our taste, we engage in a form of self-creation through taste. 36 Yet there are surely limits to the docility of experience before taste. After all, our aesthetic lives are built around 35 McGeer, "Is 'Self-Knowledge' An Empirical Problem?" 485. 36 For instance, Luc Bovens, "Sour Grapes and Character Planning," Journal of 19 experience. Without experience, it would be difficult to imagine what an aesthetic life would be. 37 Whereas we can imagine a purely moral or cognitive being lacking experience, we can not imagine such an aesthetic being. The aesthetic self has a fundamentally different relationship to experience. It remains to be seen just where the point of equilibrium between commissive taste and mindful experience rests. Wherever it is, we can call this point well-formed taste. Well-formed taste pertains to the basis of taste in experience, the extent to which and ways in which taste must be based in aesthetic experience: entirely or not at all or somewhere in between. The job for aestheticians is to determine what counts as well-formed taste under the more complicated description of aesthetic experience advanced here. How do we distinguish authentic and inauthentic aesthetic judgment? Can my taste be well-formed when it runs counter to my experience? How much or what kind of variance is permitted? How does taste really happen? What is aesthetic life really like? With these questions, aesthetics has never been more valuable to the various art worlds. However, the role for aestheticians may lie less in lending philosophical weight to the questions of particular disciplines than in bringing to these disciplines a genuine knowledge of what is known about how human beings respond to works of art. To play that role, aestheticians will have to return to the basic questions of aesthetics. Kevin Melchionne is a painter who writes about art. Philosophy, 84 (1992), 2, 57-78. 37 For instance, Robert Hopkins, "How to Form Aesthetic Belief: Interpreting the Acquaintance Principle," Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, No. 3, December 2006.