Judge, a housemate, told me that I hadn't updated for a long time, so here it is.
I wrote a paper recently for my philosophy of aesthetics class that I really liked. That class as a whole has been one of my most rewarding classes at Cal. The professor is Alva Noe, and I really wished I had taken more classes taught by him. Really, in college, the professor makes all the difference.
Anyway, the essay prompt was "is art a source of knowledge?" I titled my paper "Is Art a Liar?," in honor of Plato's argument that art is a liar and therefore should be banned. One of the major arguments I gave in favor of my thesis that art is a source of knowledge is basically that art can give us "what is it like" knowledge (or, a more fancy way of saying it is "phenomenological knowledge"). To do so, I had to first prove that there is real knowledge besides just factual knowledge, that "what is it like" knowledge is actually knowledge. In support of this claim, I cited two articles, first "What is it Like to be a Bat" by Thomas Nagel, and then "What Mary Didn't Know" by Frank Jackson.
In his article, Thomas Nagel first describes the process through which a bat can navigate through echolocation, emitting sound waves and detecting the walls of the caves and nearby objects in a sonar-like fashion. But even though we have could have a complete physical description of what's going on, can you imagine what it would be like to be a bat, travelling through a cave using echolocation? This points to the fact that there is real knowledge besides just factual knowledge. Frank Jackson makes the same point in his article "What Mary Didn't Know." Imagine a little girl who's confined to a black and white world but has complete scientific understanding of the color red. We bring her out to the world of color and for the first time she sees red. She learns something new: what red looks like. Thus, there's more to knowledge than just facts, and this "what is it like" kind of knowledge is what art offers us.
My main argument in response to the argument that art is a source of knowledge is a modernized version of Plato's argument against art. It begins by saying sure, I'll grant you that "what is it like" knowledge is a valid kind of knowledge, but art is a liar. A liar can sometimes tell you the truth, but often just enough so that you can’t tell when he’s lying. Art, in the same way, can sometimes provide knowledge whether propositional or phenomenological, but also deceives so much that really art is a liar. Consider this – how do people build much of their understanding of the world? Observation. Over time, we make a lot of observations, we perceive a lot of things about the world, and from these we infer what is true about the world. Our perceptions of the world can lead to an incomplete understanding of the world because we only see a slice of what’s real. Art can be a gateway into knowledge about life beyond the familiar day-to-day; but if the thing it is teaching is something that we are unfamiliar with, how do we recognize whether it is truth or lie? Like the man who keeps his deceptive senses in check and through his knowledge knows that the sun is not really the size of his thumb, with the proper knowledge we could discern truth from lie in art.
At least with real life, however, our perceptions are only once removed from reality, at least we know that what we are seeing is the appearance of what is real. Art, on the other is twice removed from reality, it is an appearance of an appearance of what is real, completely chosen and shaped by the artist. If we trust the artist, then we have good reason to trust his artwork is not lying to us, but in all the television and ads and media we take in nowadays, rarely do we know beforehand whether the artist is trustworthy. In fact, we have good reason to believe that these Hollywood producers are simply producing something that they think will make them a lot of money. Thus, art really has the reliability of a liar, sometimes providing knowledge and often lying, and so like we would say of a liar it is not a source of knowledge.
I like this argument a lot, actually, and I think it holds a lot of truth to it. I won't go so far as Plato and say that art should be banned, because art can convey things that simple fact-telling can't. But art does have the potential to be very deceptive, and I think it is wise to remember that art has the power of making false fiction seem true and real.
When we were talking about Plato's argument (which I didn't exactly give here, just something similar) in class, the professor talked about how we even though nowadays we think it's outrageous to even consider banning all art, we do believe that it is important to protect children from watching excessive amounts of sex and violence on TV. We want to protect them because we have this belief that they won't be able to process these things properly, and that it'll have a negative effect on their development. As adults, we have knowledge to keep the things we watch in check, but he said that he doesn't have a TV because he'd just leave it on all the time and wouldn't be on guard to all the things he'd be taking in.
So, basically, the stuff you take in can affect you, especially if you're not on guard. My church says that, and that's why none of us have tv's, but we're all puritans anyway right? But Plato and my philosophy of art professor say it too, and if I was a psych major I'd cite various studies to support the claim. Anyway, art can be good and useful, but be careful what you take in, it can mess with you.
2 comments:
Hmm, interesting article Joe, though I can't quite say that I agree. I think it's incorrect to call art a liar, as if art was a non-created (by God) entity, like a dog, or our friend Judge. Instead, art is created, so its reliability directly depends on that of the author, and not because art has the potential to be deceptive.
Good art (as you said) can give the viewer phenomenological knowledge. Bad art can give the viewer false phenomenological knowledge, but so can any created medium. A sculpture can lead men to think that all bodies should look like David, an essay can lead us to think that there is no God. All created things, in this sense, can lie, but the lie depends on the author. My point is that the authors are the liars, not the work.
Maybe your point is that art lies more often than other mediums, which may or may not be true. I can agree that today's modern media is incredibly deceptive, so maybe that's where you're going, but there is certainly a lot (of good knowledge) to be gained from art.
You're right, Wesley, sorry if that confusing. In my essay I included a full rebuttal to that "art is a liar" argument, which goes something like this:
"There’s merit to this cautious approach to art, but it’s unfair to characterize art as a whole as a liar. The skeptic’s argument hinges much on the issue of recognizing truth raised by Meno’s Paradox that goes something like this: if we know something already, we wouldn’t need to learn it, and if we don’t know it already, how would we recognize it? The art skeptic made a similar move against art (not exactly the same move) by stating that to discern truth from lie in art we must either already know enough of the subject or have reason to trust the artist, and since often times we have neither, art as a whole is too unreliable to be considered a source of knowledge. But the same goes for people, books, and other things we normally consider sources of knowledge. The issue raised has really been one about the difficulty of recognizing truth in general, and so the difficulty of recognizing truth in art applies just the same to people and books. The only difference pointed out has been that we have reason to believe that most art (considering the vast quantities of television and media in general) nowadays is an unreliable source of knowledge, but it is unfair to then say that art is an unreliable source of knowledge. That is like making the jump that if many people nowadays are liars, that people are not a source of knowledge. Good art is a source of knowledge and deceptive art isn’t, good people are a source of knowledge and liars aren’t, and so to be fair either both are sources of knowledge or both aren’t. And since we consider people to be a source of knowledge, it’s fair to say that art is a source of knowledge."
In my post, I skipped a couple of transitions and there's a few holes, which I'll try not to do next time. But I cited my anti-art argument basically just to make the point that art can be very deceptive, not that art itself is a liar.
But, thanks for pointing that out, I'll try to be more clear next time.
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