The Journal o f Value Inquiry 21:33-43 (1987}. �9 1987, Martinus Ni/hoffPublishers, Dordreeht. Printed in the Netherlands.

A HUMANIST THEORY OF IDENTITY FOR WORKS OF ART

S.J. WILSMORE Hatfield Polytechnic, Great Britain

1. Radical scepticism in a humanist culture

This is an age of scepticism about the understanding of the meaningfulness of the words ' truth' 'knowledge' 'intends' and of 'meaning' itself. Its modern form is linguistic, in that it is expressed in theories about language such as deconstruction and it arises from a denial of the worth of the responsible, creative individual, who knows the truth, acts on his choices, and understands the meaning of what he hears or reads.

But our arts are the expression of humanism - the belief in the worth of the crea- tive individual and his works - shown pre-eminently in his works of art; the music he has composed, the architecture he has erected, pictures painted, and the literary works he has written. When this is denied by the sceptic, it typically manifests itself as a denial of the independent existence of the work of art. Indeed there are many positions which are not as radical as his, such as those advanced by what I will call 'spectator' theories of art, which are also sceptical about the independent existence of the work of art - i.e., that it is something which is real, whose condi- tions for existence, however difficult the task may be, we can come to understand.

These 'restricted' forms of scepticism are about the possibility of our talking of the truth or falsity o f some but not all our utterances; those about works of art, but not about scientific entities. The sources of such scepticisms are multiple. One such source is the belief that in the realm of scientific discourse alone is to be found a foundation of verifiability for the sense of such concepts as ' truth' , 'knowl- edge' 'rationality' etc. Then forms of scepticism about some utterances are them- selves based on the outcome of unsceptical beliefs about others; i.e. in particular beliefs in the utterances of 'science'.

Between our age and our waning faith in the creative individual there is a con- flict; between our age and our heritage in our past arts, traditions and understand- ing of the word 'culture', there is a gap. Though 'a common culture' is the only context in which we can come to a common understanding of those conditions that determine the existence of such objects as 'works o f art', that context relies upon our share understanding of the meaning of such a 'culture'. But do we have that understanding?

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Scepticism about the reality of cultural objects is a consequence of a breakdown in such an understanding. This is apparent in what is called 'the crisis in the humani- ties' - the inroads that have been made by the sceptical doubt that there exists any rationale for those disciplines called 'the humanities' - such as literature, art, philosophy, history, etc. It is no accident that so many disciplines hope for 'scien- tific' status, as do economics, psychology, linguistics, and the social 'sciences' generally. The 'common culture' I am talking about is not sharply defined in our language, but has been used, as Peter Scott writes:

to mean something less intense and elitist than the museum culture of the past and the high culture of the present yet something more prescriptive and discriminatory than the life style of modern tribes. From before Matthew Arnold to after T.S. Eliot culture has been used in this more catholic sense; it did not aspire to be synonymous with grand civilization but the idea con- tained sufficient moral impulses to make a claim to represent the continuity of historical and collective virtues. 1

Without a firm basis in the notion of a responsible individual such collective virtues are inconceivable. Without them there is no place for such a concept of 'culture', nor for that of 'the humanities' which are considered to transmit it, nor for the 'cultural' objects that are said to manifest it within the arts as elsewhere.

Since the early Greeks a humanistic faith in creative man, - man who could choose to act and so be responsible for what he did, made, and built, - was ex- pressed in philosophy in this belief: that as men were rational they could come to an understanding of what was true, and knowing what was true they would choose the right course of action. Such beliefs and values ought to be expressed in their creative works. But such faith is undermined by radical scepticism, which denies that we know how to make a distinction between the rational and irrational, the intelligible and unintelligible, the true and the false, and it is put in doubt by restricted scepticism, which denies such distinctions are possible for us to make in the arts.

Humanism and the identity of works of art

There are different ways in which humanism enters our individuation of works of art. I am not putting forward the view that the only art is that whose subject-matter is the humanists' ideal of what is good, or, for that matter, how their ideals are made manifest in what they believe evil. The way in which humanism enters into the discrimination of works of art is more fundamental. Such ideals have had a governing influence on what is meant by 'humanism'. Humanist works of art, in both their content and mode of existence since the Renaissance, have been thought to express many of men's highest ideals in the above sense, of what counts as both good and evil for men.

Common to these humanist beliefs it was believed that in their subject-matter

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many works of art expressed the beliefs and feelings of the artists who created them. Since the 18th and 19th century, many works of art have been thought the expression of genius and the artist revered as a man of unusual talent, in portraying such ideals. But it was not only the content of works of art that sometimes ex- pressed humanistic ideals which seemed important to humanists. The artist's mode of existence was also important to them. The very act of creation became an ideal. In it was seen a relationship which each man should have to his labour. Because of its particular intimacy, this relationship was believed to produce a very different product to that of any other worker; -- something that uniquely expressed that man.

Until recently, this belief went unquestioned. The factory worker was thought to stand outside the product of his labour which he makes, but which could always have been produced by someone else. But, differently, the creation of a work of art was thought to be a labour which 'expressed' the artist and was stamped with his imprint in such a way that it could not have been the product of anyone else, and so, in a sense, intimately remained 'his' even when it had passed out of his physical possession.

There are many difficulties in this expressiohist view of art. But what does seem plausible to me and which could be thought to imply an expressionist view of one kind is this: We read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, see King Lear by Shake- speare, look at a Self Portrait by Rembrandt, and hear Beethoven's 9th symphony. In our appreciation - our reading, seeing, hearing - we experience the artists' creative activity within their work. As I will argue, this does not mean that we need always know who created the work; for our understanding of that activity, achieved in our response, is justified in many different ways. We do not infer what that activity must once have been, but perceive it there in the work. The product is the completed process. In that activity the artist shows forth what is uniquely 'his'. Because he created it from his own thoughts and feelings the artist remains unalienated -unestranged - from the product of his labour. 2 Such a picture of the relationship of the artist to his work became part of the ideal of very different social philosophies in the 19th century. Some Marxists saw it as a goal to be at- tained by everyone in an ideal society. Marx and Engels wrote:

We are positing labour of a form that is exclusively characteristic of man. The operations carried out by a spider resemble those of a weaver, and many a human architect is put to shame by the bee in the construction of its wax cells. However, the poorest architect is categorically distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built in in his head. The result achieved at the end of a labour process was already present at its commencement, in the imagination of the worker, in its ideal form. More than merely working an alteration in the form of nature, he also knowingly works his own purposes into nature; and those purposes are the law determining the ways and means of his activity .... 3

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In this.passage at least, Marx and Engels express the belief that the artist is not alienated from his work because his purposes for his work "are the law determining the ways and means of his activity". He not only alters nature, but he alters nature through those purposes:

Marx argued that creative practical activity, engaged in transforming the material environment was one of the major features distinguishing humans from animals. In non-alienated conditions, people have the ability and poten- tial to act, consciously and with the use of abstract thought and imagination to change nature and their surroundings. This labour, then, is creative; it arises out of human needs and intentions, it is freely exercised on its object and it is constructive and transformative. 4

Whilst for the Marxist economic laws determine which creative abilities are possible in a society, in my account these abilities, as manifested in artistic activities, are constrained but not determined by their cultural, social and historical context. The history of production of works of art is a part of such a context and includes the artist's activity.

A respect for the individual creativity of the artist is the basis for our being able to recognise within his agency - within his creative activity as manifested in his work - the identity of the work of art he has created. And this faith is not only naturally opposed to scepticism, it is what modern sceptics set out to destroy. Quite simply - and indeed despite the terminology the thought is simple - it is here, in the imprint of the artist in his product, that we find our justification for identifying it as we do. Here are to be found the principles for its individuation; - how we are to pick out, to distinguish this individual object to be this very work of art.

A bulwark against scepticism

In this paper I offer a theory of identity for works of art which resists that re- ductionism implicit in many forms of scepticism in the arts, a scepticism which insists the work of art 'is' another thing: - nothing but the text, an appearance, a state of mind, etc.

The artist includes in his activity of making the work governing intentions which for us, as spectators, identify it, and thereby provide the conditions for its existence. Thus the extent to which a picture is destroyed, is the extent to which the artist's 'intentional 's activity - activity which is governed by his artistic calcula- tion - is erased from being recognisable. It makes sense to say an individual work exists if such criteria of identity are satisfied by it as were provided in the artist's intentional act iv i ty : If X is to be said to be 'a work of art ' then there must be an answer to the question "What is i t?" If such an answer is correctly "a work of art" then it is a member of the extension of the ultimate 'substance' concept 'a work of art ' . This is a 'sortal ' concept for such individual objects, that is, such a concept as

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"implicitly or explicitly determines identity, persistence and existence conditions for members of its extension". 6

Let us see what David Wiggins in his book Sameness and Substance means by a 'sortal' concept, in the simpler cases o f concepts whose extension covers living or other natural substances, or artifacts, which are material continuants, - that is, ones which can be traced through space and time to be one and the same F (where F stands for such a concept) - like a human being, say, or a chair, i.e., an ordinary artifact, or an animal. In Wiggins' view a concept that suffices to determine and thus allow us to trace out the life-history - the existence - o f such a continuant so that we can understand it to constitute one and the same individual animal, or man, or chair, is a sortal concept which gives us an understanding of what kind of substance it is. So a human being is understood through his whole existence to be that individual human being. To individuate him at any stage in his existence, man or boy, he must be understood to be that very same man who was before or would be afterwards so identified. Identity and individuation for spatio-temporal con- tinuants are then, as Wiggins writes, "two aspects of one and the same thing". 7

This means that the substance of a thing is given, in most cases, by a general concept such as 'man' , 'person', 'table', 'fish'. One thing can be understood in terms of several substance concepts, so a man is a 'human being' and 'an animal'. But in that case "they cannot disagree in the conditions for persistence and exis- tence that they ascribe". 8 I f there is such a disagreement then the reason might be that there is not one, but more objects enjoying the same space at a time, 9 as human beings share the same space and time at a given moment with the objects that constitute them at that moment as living cells, but 'a human being' is not iden- tical to 'all the cells that constitute him'. The principle of activity or development that organises living organisms and is expressed in the laws of nature as we under- stand them to apply, supply us with their substance concepts under which we are able to individuate them from other things in the world. Very differently, the cri- teria of identity for artifacts are generally given in their function: 'a chair' is an object that is constructed in a certain way in order to fulfil a certain function; in order that we can sit in it.

However, in Wiggins' view an exception to this rule are those artifacts which are works of art. The principle of activity that organises the criteria of identity and the principles of individuation for works of art like paintaings, are given, not in a natural law, nor in a function, but by the -

artist's conception o f his own making of the work and its outcome (and the effect that the artist envisages the work's presence having on an ideal spec- tator) ~~

- however implicit rather than explicit these might be in many cases. This means that in the case o f works of art which are spatio-temporal continuants, for Wiggins the principle for individuation - how we pick out the work - is given by the artist's conception as realised in his work, i.e. by the resulting constituent aspects of what it is - i.e., of its identity so that:

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we think of the artist as making something which is calculated to have an ef- fect which cannot be characterised in instrumental or non-aesthetic terms, and cannot be identified independently of some totality of relevant features that are individuating features of this or that individual work. 11

This is as far as Wiggins goes with his theory of identity for works of art. I go much further, in holding many of the considerations that are true in determining identity for spatio-temporal continuant works of art like paintings, are also true for those that are not, like works of literature. Their identity, and therefore the conditions for their existence and persistence, are likewise given in the artist's creative activity.

Works of art as normative structures governed by the ultimate sortal concept 'work of art'

We should take the highest autonomous individuating sortal concept to be 'work of art ' and not as Wiggins does, 'material particular work of art, ' for the substance- sortal 'work of art ' is competent to cover and determine identity conditions for both objects instantiable in different material particulars (books, performances, etc.) and those constituent by individual material objects (paintings etc.). True, in most cases an answer to what something is, when individuated as 'a work of art ' , is usually too unspecific to tell us much. But it suffices to pick out an individual as a normative structure, as a kind of entity having within it a specific activity which alone created its essential properties. We are then in a position to individuate those properties eva lua t ive ly ; - for it is true of this kind of entity, a 'work of art ' , that it holds its properties evaluatively. Aesthetic values are implied by the use of the substance concept 'work of art'. Our individuative practices show this. The reason for determining which objects we are to say exist must be found in their 'grammar' - the way we use the words of our language within the context of our practices - and not in a pre-existing theory about what we, as philosophers, will allow to be an object.

So Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations:

Para. 370. One ought to ask, not what images are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word 'imagination' is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question as to the nature of the imagination is as much about the word 'imagination' as my question is ....

Para. 371. Essence is expressed by grammar.

Para. 373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as gram- mar) 12

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Investigating that grammar will tell us what kind of object anything is. Accepting this stance is not inconsistent with adopting as our basis a theory of identity like Wiggins', because Wiggins intends only to delineate the individuative practices that we have, and not to stipulate a change in them. Let me take two cases to illustrate first the kind of 'grammar' involved in the case of a spatio-temporal continuant which is a work of art, and then, differently, one that is not, in order to raise the possibility that some of the same considerations apply in identifying all works of art.

(i) I f someone intentionally paints under the concept 'painting' then he intends that what he is doing satisfies the conditions for the existence of 'a painting'. And if it does, then he has made a painting come into existence. Our understanding just what painting it is that he has painted will be shown in our ability to pick it out from others, to discuss intelligibly the extent of any damage or alteration in the work - i.e. to understand the extent to which this is or is not the same work, as was painted by that artist.

This theory of art is general for all works of art

This is equally true for works of art such as literary works. As with a painting, in the case of a literary work it is equally true that " to visit any interference upon the set, whether for better or for worse, is to threaten the work with obliteration...". In the case of both, 'the set' refers to the "countless particular details" that were "conceived as so central to the aim or mission or notion of this particular member of a K that its very existence depended on their presence". 13

The concept of 'a novel' is equally competent to govern the conditions necessary to identify the individual novel, as they entered into the conception of the working novelist and resulted in his individuation of it through the essential properties which he created within it.

(ii) So the bibliographer who distorts 'the novel' he is editing by leaving out what count aesthetically as 'crucial' passages has provided us, at best, with but a partial work of art; what might be judged by some to be not the same work as was written by the artist. And note, that this is true whether or not his omitting the passage makes it 'a better work' , - unless he can show that this was within the artist's project for the work and so justified as being incorporated in it.

Values and the identity of works of art

Works of art are 'normative' structures, because from the start judgements of value must enter into our practices in individuating the work of art, - in picking it out, or excluding it from, other things in the world, - because they did in the artist's activity that determined it to be what it is, i.e., to be this 'painting'. To illustrate: Wollheim gives us this account of how we could decide that 'a surface' is imper-

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missible for 'a painting' - i.e.; of having the 'substance - sortal' concept 'painting' ascribed to it:

If I am to rule out a surface as impermissible for a painting, then I must also know what the painter's intention was, or what he was trying to achieve. For a painting does not take on the surface that it has simply through being a painting; nor, to put the matter the other way round, does the painter simply set out to paint some painting or other. The surface is as it is because the painter sets out to paint a specific painting: and our judgement that what is before us isn't a painting because its surface doesn't look as the surface ought to look, must generally be against this background. ~4

The word 'ought' is indicative that values are implied from the start in our individ- uative practices, just as they are in the artist's activity which determines the iden- tity of the work. The agency of the artist is shown in his choosing to work under the concept of 'painting' in that context. But not anything can be 'a painting' just because paint is put upon a canvas. To be 'a painting' it must satisfy the evalua- tive conditions for being recognisably such. in satisfying the conditions for looking how 'a painting' ought to look. So normativity enters at a fundamental level be- fore we can talk about the painting looking in a way that satisfies either artist or spectator, or whether, again differently, it could be called 'a good painting'. Unless the painter includes in his intentions that his work be, in principle, recognised to have satisfied those conditions for being 'a painting' then he has not painted 'a pic- ture'. Of course, this is not to deny that artists react against constraints that they are aware of, as they have done against conventions previously established, and towards collages, print technique, photography etc. which the vagueness of the concept 'work of art' allows.

Furthermore, as Wollheim has pointed out, the artist who is working within 'a theory' of art which holds that the painting is to be seen as the surface of a paint- ing, has already accepted this as his framework for both his and our individuating it to be that very work. We come to pick out things in the world to be the works of art that they are in the essential setting of their complex history of production. Such a history is itself partly comprised by the artist's activity of creating the work.

Thus, without our practice of acknowledging and being guided by the artist's activity of creation, there could be no works of art as we know them, because there would be no principles of individuation where we now find them. In this, artistic practices have their basis, as does humanism, in individual actions being recognised for the agency reflected there. Respect for the practices we have is, in part, a respect for the agency of the artist in his creation. It is a presupposition of the pos- sibility of appreciation as we know it, in which we learn to recognise the infinite variety of kinds of works of art of which artists are capable.

'Sortal' concepts then are those which determine the substance of entities which are identified through them. They determine identity, persistence and exis- tence conditions for members of their extension. Ultimate sortal concepts, such as

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'work of art' determine the identity of individuals to be such. The less ultimate identifying 'substance' concepts of art such as 'painting' 'statue' - and, in my view, such as 'novel', 'poem' and 'symphony,' - provide the further constraints under which, if applicable, we are able to recognise something to be what it is. These concepts are vague, in that what satisfies them depends on many different factors in different contexts. Working under the concept of 'a painting' does not suffice for the artist to produce a surface that counts as that of a 'painting'; the result of the artist's activity must also satisfy his intention, by, in principle, its being capable of being perceived as a painting.

But what could count as 'a painting'? In recent times the concept could be satisfied by a cubist collage, which was mainly comprised of old newspapers and sticks. Much depends on the aesthetic aim of the artist and whether the result of his work is allowed to be an 'achievement', in that it is recognisably covered by the substance-sortal concept intended in the artistic context in which he is working; - in the case of the cubist, that his work is recognised as 'a painting'. As the possi- bilities of such recognition lie in the surrounding culture, the artistic tradition and present practices, we are not forced to say that the artist knew beforehand - in the sense that he could say before-hand - that he intended to make 'a collage'. The sense in which he intended it could have been given by his knowing what he was making in his making of it, and that later he would have accepted, in making a collage, that this was what he had intentionally achieved. As long as we know that he is working under the ultimate substance concept 'a work of art' we are in a posi- tion to understand the kind of entity it is and to identify it, even if it might be more difficult to determine precisely what kind of work of art it is.

Vague substance concepts

The vagueness of the substance concepts of art must be such that the practices in which the artist participates suffice to provide his work with covering concepts at different levels. His intentional activity specifies what he is creating from different directions, and so enables re-classifications when needed. After all, the artist is creating a 'work of art'. We might suppose that he realises and incorporates into his activity the project of creating 'a work of art' and yet, in doing so, does not yet know of what kind; but this is made possible only because the range within which others have participated in a like endeavour now provides a background in which to understand this artist's novel aims and achievements. In our coming to under- stand what an individual artist has achieved we take into account a criss-cross of indications from the context in which he worked for characterising his project, and so also its result in that very work of art.

Such vagueness is complemented by a precision in the artist's specific intentions for this very work, which, if achieved, become its necessary properties, without which it is destroyed. Thus erasing the organised paint work of one of Monet's paintings of lilies would damage or wholly destroy it if we could no longer see in it

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any 'lilies' - if what it had represented were no longer, in principle, perceivable. This complementary state of affairs, of vague covering concepts and precise

necessary properties given intentionally by the artist in its creation, helps to explain how the work of art becomes a unique object individualised through them and recognisable as 'a work of art' under one or more covering concepts, of growing greater specificity: - 'a work of art', a 'painting', a 'representation' and so forth. More needs to be said here about what I mean by 'vague' and 'precise'. The 'vague- ness' of a covering concept such as 'a painting' is clear enough, in that changing traditions provide different contexts in which this or that could count as being 'a painting'. For instance, in the 16th century no cubist 'painting' that was a collage could have been created because nothing like a cubist work could then have count- ed as the surface of 'a painting'. Practices in which such identifications now have their place had yet to grow. What makes sortal (substance) concepts possibly ap- plicable, is reciprocally dependent on which intentions are possible for an artist given his time and place. A vague covering concept like 'a painting' becomes ap- plicable in a context where it can be understood of individuals, - e.g. cubist works involving collages - only given the rest of the culture in which they are created. However, in its application to a particular instance, such a vague concept is precise. If I talk of a 'cubist painting', few are then in doubt about what I mean by my use of the covering concept 'painting'.

Again, we have to be careful with the word 'precise'. In contrast to the 'vague- ness' of the covering concepts under which we identify works of art, we contrast the relative 'precision' of the properties given to the work in the artist's intentional creative activity. But this 'precision' does not rule out either (i) The possibility of essential properties of the work of art which were not strictly 'intended' by the artist, or (ii) A disjunction of these properties being sufficient, rather than any of them being necessary to a particular work's identity and therefore existence - though for some works one or more property may be necessary.

To illustrate these two possibilities, let us take (1) a Monet lily painting as an example. Monet painted many pictures which represented the lilies in the pond of his own garden, but unlike the well defined lilies of previous representations of lilies by other artists, Monet's lilies were dabs of colour over the canvas. Though the Monet painting is not that painting unless, in principle, 'lilies' could be seen in it, there is no precise boundary line which helps us to say just how many 'lilies' must be seen. Though any that are erased count in some measure towards the destruction of the painting only some of them are essential to (i) the survival of the painting as 'a painting' at all, and (ii) as recognisably that painting. Yet, can we say which lilies?

On the other hand (2) Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa would be for the most part destroyed as that very painting, if we erased the paintwork that composed 'her smile'. While we would judge the painting to be intact, but slightly damaged if the same area of paintwork which composed the background were erased. On the other hand, if nothing were capable of being perceived in the paintwork any longer, then that very painting would be utterly destroyed. What properties are essential to

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the work of art being that work of art are different in different cases, depending on

the different aesthetic projects of the artist of which they are the product.

In this paper I have defended a theory of identity for works of art which pro- vides a rationale for their independent existence and which shows that our in- dividuative practices are based in a humanist belief in the artist as creator of the aesthetic properties of works of art which are theirs essentially. Scepticism which denies this must, more radically, be denying that these practices need exist.

NOTES

1. Peter Scott, 'Towards a Common Culture' back page of the Higher Education Supple- ment, 3 August 1984.

2. The notion of 'alienation' derives from Marx's use of the term in Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).

3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress, 1973), pp. 53-54. (Collection first published in translation.)

4. Janet Wolff, The SocialProduct of Art (Macmillan, 1981), p. 14. 5. Problems of the notion of 'intentional' activity are notorious but not discussed

here. 6. David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 62. 7. Ibid.,p. 60. 8. Ibid.,p. 60. 9. Ibid.,p. 16.

10. Ibid.,p. 126. 11. Ibid.,pp. 125-126. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein,PhilosophicalI~vestigations (Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 116. 13. Ibid., p. 125. 14. Richard Wollheim, 'The Work of Art as Object' in On Art and the Mind (Allen Lane,

1973), p. 124.