Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

and general in order to be able to be performed on a wide variety of new inputs. The inputs may be an inventory of notes based upon key, style, et cetera. (Pressing’s cognitive model calls this the “referent.”) My taxonomy is a way of making those inputs clear. 184 Since improvisation (and composition) is fundamentally cognitive and motor selection, then this presupposes a set of things from which to select. One can only select if there are options, choices. Now, it seems that whether a person (agent) is aware (conscious or cognizant of the options (all or even some)), one may always post facto reconstruct the set of choices which were available or present to the agent at the time of selection. By this I mean the set of choices that were available to the agent from an objective point of view. This set has little to do with the actual, individual conscious states of the agent; however, it does involve many specific conditions of the agent and the agent’s environment. For example, a musician S may say that “it never occurred to me to play that B-flat after the A,” even though objectively that choice was available to S. Sometimes, however, we describe others, and even ourselves, as just doing something—no other options presented themselves to consciousness. So, “selection” may seem like an inappropriate term or concept for what is going on in improvisation. It may, however, seem more accurate in composition. When humans perform actions in quick succession, consciously it does not seem like a choice or decision is being made for each separate action. In fact, in some cases it may be difficult to individuate the rapid succession of actions into discrete units. It seems to be a unitary flow of movements. These are half-intentional actions. Beside the (SCI) case, examples of this kind of phenomenon are playing sports, talking, and just mundane actions like walking to the market. From a phenomenological perspective, in some moments the choice or decision aspect can be discerned, while other moments “feel” automatic. Consequently, it is in these seemingly automatic moments that selection may be an erroneous description. But there are several pieces of evidence that suggest that in both cases similar or the same processes are realized. First, it would be impossible to account for talent and skill if some sense of choice or selection or decision was not involved. Indeed, psychologists and others 185 indicate that some people are better than others (usually in some specific domain of behavior) in their speed of thinking, choosing, and moving in situations that require rapidity. In other words, if we cannot attribute responsibility to selection or choice, even in an attenuated sense, training and effort would be diminished or demolished. Why would one train if one could not control the automatic thinking or moving? What would be our understanding of talent and expertise? Second, there is reductio ad absurdam argument that can be given here, analogous to the one Thomas Nagel presents in the classic “Moral Luck” article. One could argue that artistic agents are never responsible for anything they do; they have no agency because all novel thoughts impinge. Humans do not cause their thoughts and selection. My only response is that creativity is still a mystery, and we are not yet epistemically entitled to run this argument to the point of absurdity. Furthermore, cognitive science has informed us that even in these moments sub-conscious motor and kinetic programs or mechanisms are running. Some of these were delineated for improvisation above. This is one reason why a phenomenology needs to be appended to cognitive models and the like. One should also be interested in what is present to the consciousness of the agent, and what is consciously occurring while playing (if anything), not only the underlying processes posited by a cognitive theory, nor what could be going on as argued for in a philosophical theory. David Sudnow is perhaps the best example of a phenomenological approach to improvising. By introspecting on his improvised piano playing and his learning how to play 62 For example, see Sian Beilock, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have To (New York: Free Press, 2010). 63 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck” in Mortal Questions, Canto Classics Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38. 64 David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account, foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 186 paino and improvise, Sudnow gives excellent descriptions of the process and actions. One of the most important insights he gives is that selection in jazz piano improvisation is in large part about fingering and the way one’s hands and fingers move across the keys. I can attest that the same is true for stringed instruments, like guitar. Often, when I improvise, my attention is on finger patterns that I know work (with embellishments) over certain “changes.” How strongly the phenomenology of playing an instrument comes to play in thinking about creativity and improvisation in particular comes to the fore in this extraordinary account of a conversation with the famous, brilliant pianist Bill Evans. ... I [Gene Lees] kidded him [Bill Evans] about his rocking a finger on a key on a long note at the end of a phrase. After all, the hammer has already left the string: one has no further physical contact with the sound. ‘Don’t you know the piano has no vibrato?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ Bill responded, ‘but trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase.’ Evans reveals that there are motor selections that do not enter into the perceivable product (in this case sounds) but yet affect properties of that product. Not all selections will be perceivable in the final product (e.g., performance, recording). One should also be aware that selection may be coerced in both a literal and metaphorical sense. External factors such as authorities may constrain what artists do, thereby eliminating or reducing choices. I may only have the resources to learn one instrument. If I only know how to play saxophone, I am not going to pick up a trumpet. At any given time t, the agent (improviser, player, performer) has twelve pitches available in the range physically determined by the instrument. This range is vague because 65 Gene Lees, “The Poet Bill Evans,” in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert, Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 424. 187 given certain techniques, which some musicians are able to do and others not, and physical enhancements to instruments, the range can be extended, both to the top and bottom of the frequency or pitch range. But it would wrong to suppose that this complete selection options set is fully available every time, in every context to an improviser. What decreases the possibilities of the selection options group are the constraints that are given and/or accepted by the player, the genre, context, et cetera. Now, the agent may at any point deviate from these constraints (intentionally or otherwise), but she may not deviate from the complete selection options group, unless she changes instrument or technique. The idealized selection options group is coextensive with the set of all physically realizable pitches and all possible durations. This set may be expressed in many ways. For instance, one could simply give the Hertz (Hz) cycles (frequency) of the pitch indexed to a timed duration, such as eight seconds or two seconds. Obviously, this is an infinite set, because the duration of a produced pitch could be infinitely long, and the sound waves, although severely limited by human audibility capacity (even non-human animal audibility) could be infinitely low or high, although there are frequencies which we cease to call sounds. Practically, in Western music theory, the accepted range of pitches is the human audition range (called audio or sonic), 66 I am assuming the agent is using the Western Equal Temperament (ET) tempered system. On the drawbacks of the exclusive use of the ET system that was more or less codified in the eighteenth century, see Ross W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Scholars have identified at least 150 different temperament tuning systems in Western art music. Of course, ET does not apply to many non-Western music systems. The locus classicus is J. Murray Barbour, Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey, Dover Books on Music Series (n.d., n.p., 1951; reprint ed., New York: Dover, 2004). 188 which is approximately from 20 50 Hz (the lowest pipe organ sounds) to 20,000 30,000 Hz; while the accepted range of durations caps out at 128 notes. Selection is the process of choosing an output. The output may be physically realized or produced sound, or a notation for a realizable sound, or both. A single selection is actually an array of various factors as explicated in Pressing’s cognitive model. In using the term “choosing,” or “choice,” again I make no commitment to a theory of free will. This theory and taxonomy may remain neutral. If free will is false, then the selection process will be a product of some set of causal laws. Those causal laws will still have to operate within the taxonomy. Moreover, ideally a selection may be viewed as a choice of each discrete unit with relevant arrays, even though phenomenologically one may not be aware of all of the arrays. A musical phrase or lick may be played wherein the agent chose to play the lick as a whole. The entire phrase, then, which may consist of several pitches of different durations, dynamics, rhythms, and attacks, is the unit of selection—not each discrete pitch et cetera. Following are the selection options sets for musical sound generation (

The metaphysics of improvisation

The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy

Volume 1: 1. Prologue Part I. Aesthetics in Britain, 1725-1800: 2. Hutcheson to Hume 3. Hogarth, Burke, and Gerard 4. From Kames to Alison and Stewart Part II. French Aesthetics in Mid-Century: 5. Andre to Rousseau Part III. German Aesthetics between Wolff and Kant: 6. The first generation of Wolffian aesthetics 7. German aesthetics at mid-century 8. Coming closer to Kant Part IV. Kant and After: 9. Kant 10. After Kant. Volume 2: Part I. German Aesthetics in the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century: 1. Early Romanticism and idealism 2. In the shadow of Schelling 3. The high tide of idealism 4. In the wake of Hegel Part II. (Mostly) British Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: 5. Ruskin 6. Aestheticism 7. Bosanquet and Tolstoy Part III. German Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: 8. In the shadow of Schopenhauer 9. Neo-Kantian aesthetics 10. Psychological aesthetics: play and empathy. Volume 3: Part I. German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century: 1. German aesthetics between the wars: Lukacs and Heidegger 2. German aesthetics after World War II Part II. Aesthetics in Britain until World War II: 3. Bloomsbury, Croce, and Bullough 4. First responses to Croce 5. Collingwood Part III. American Aesthetics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: 6. Santayana 7. The American reception of expression theory I: Parker to Greene 8. Dewey 9. The American reception of expression theory II: Cassirer and Langer 10. After Dewey and Cassirer Part IV. Wittgenstein and After: Anglo-American Aesthetics in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century: 11. Wittgenstein 12. The first wave 13. The second wave.

A History of Modern Aesthetics

We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displaying these spatial relations between its objects and us, the perceivers, perception places us in the perceived world: our world and the world we perceive are one. Clearly this is not achieved by our continually perceiving ourselves along with the things around us, and thus recovering our position with respect to them. Indeed I shall argue that there are serious difficulties with the suggestion that this might be the basic mechanism for perceptual self-location. Furthermore, I shall argue that our existence as an element of the objective order cannot be inferred from the raw given in sense perception. Hence it cannot even be on the right lines as an answer to the question "What is it for perception to represent its objects as environmental to the subject?", that it should present these objects, along with the perceiving subject himself, or along with something from which his existence in the perceived world could be deduced, in the very same frame so to speak. Nevertheless, it yields him an awareness of himself as there in the wings of that scene, genuinely located with respect to the action, yet somehow not normally quite getting onto the stage. And I shall argue here, that perceptual contents succeed in being self-locating in this way, in virtue of their immediate role in the control and coordination of spatial behavior. What we need is an account of what it is in virtue of which the perceived world is represented as containing the perceiving subject himself. What is it in virtue of which perceptual contents are thus self-locating? Perception places the perceiver in the world of its objects by representing their spatial relations with respect to him. So our problem is to give an account of what it is in virtue of which perceptual experience carries, such egocentric spatial content. What is it in virtue of which perception represents things as standing in various spatial relations with the perceiver?'

Self-location and agency

ion we arccapable of, hut it is identical with the proposition 'There are objects for me', and this is identical with 'I am a subject', which contains no more than ' I ' .The suggestion is that the attempt to set up an instance of knowledge of oneself as a knower collapses. What Schopenhauer says about the 'abstracted' proposition 'I have cognition' carries conviction. To know this about myself is ultimately to know only that I am a subject, which presumably I already know in knowing that I am. But it cannot be right, surely, to say that my knowing that I have a particular cognition (c) is not distinct from my having c. For here we have two cognitive states with different prepositional contents, which surely ought to make them distinct cognitive states, even if it is true that I cannot have c without knowing that I do so (which is by no means uncontestable). And if it is perfectly legitimate to say that I know that: I have a particular cognition (at a particular time), then in one sense I can have knowledge of myself as a knower. The general assumption that Schopenhauer makes is that if I know about a state I am in, then the state known about and the state of knowing must be distinct. However, the two states that he cites can perfectly well be regarded as distinct, so the claim that we can have selfknowledge does not fall foul of the general assumption. It begins to look as if Schopenhauer does not have any good arguments for holding that the subject of knowing and the object known must be distinct. As I said earlier, he usually proceeds on the basis that this is a self-evident, truth—in at least one place he says quite tersely that the knowing subject is completely unknowable because it is thai which knows}'' To all intents and purposes, he treats as an assumption the following proposition: necessarily, if x is an object for y, then x andj are

Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Contents: Introduction, Peter Lewis Part I Tradition, theory and practice: Wittgenstein and the aesthetic domain, Kjell S. Johannessen Wittgenstein, anti-essentialism and the definition of art, Terry Diffey. Part II Criticism, rules and judgement: Rules, creativity and pictures: Wittgenstein's Lectures on Aesthetics, David Novitz Criticism without theory, Mark W. Rowe On aesthetic reactions and changing one's mind, Lars Hertzberg. Part III Music, language and performing art: Wittgenstein and the arts: understanding and performing, Graham McFee Wittgenstein's music, R.A. Sharpe Wittgenstein on music and language, Oswald Hanfling. Part IV Literature, ethics and the self: Ethics and aesthetics are one, Carolyn Wilde Fiction and reality in the arts, lham Dilman Literature, human understanding and morality, Ben Tilghman 'The self, thinking': Wittgenstein, Augustine and the autobiographical situation, Garry L. Hagberg. Bibliography Index.

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Wittgenstein, aesthetics and philosophy

Schopenhauer's Laughter

L'A. defend la these selon laquelle la conception de l'art comme medecine de la communaute chez Collingwood permet de comprendre la place de l'art dans la societe. L'analogie medicale ne signifie pas que l'art est capable de soigner la conscience, mais qu'il doit preserver la sante mentale de la communaute

Art, the community's medicine

In Art and Its Objects, Richard Wollheim devotes considerable space to attacking a theory he calls the Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art.1 According to this theory, as Wollheim presents it, an artist's capacity to create works of art consists in his being able to elaborate images or intuitions in his own mind, irrespective of whether there is any means of publicly externalizing them in the form of paintings, poems, symphonies, etc. Wollheim argues, I think rightly, that this conception of artistic creation is absurd. But it can also be argued that neither Croce nor Collingwood ever espouses this absurd theory.2 I will not develop that argument in this paper; instead, I want to draw attention to an aspect of Wollheim's discussion which concerns the relations between Collingwood's aesthetic and concepts of psychoanalysis. After demonstrating the absurdity of the Croce-Collingwood theory, Wollheim introduces Freud's comparison of the artist and the neurotic. Both the artist and the neurotic find substitute gratifications for their desires in fantasy; and yet, we are told, the neurotic is recognized by his continuing to remain in the world of his fantasy, whereas the artist, in Freud's words, 'finds a path back to reality'. Wollheim interprets Freud to mean by this that in making his work of art the artist renounces the immediate gratification of fantasy by making an object which 'can become a source of shared pleasure and consolation' for other people. And, Wollheim maintains, it is precisely this feature of art as renunciation which is totally denied by the CroceCollingwood theory because it does not allow, except incidentally, for the artist's having to produce a work in a medium for an audience.3 However apposite Wollheim's discussion may be to the so-called Croce-Collingwood theory, it is important to realize that it constitutes a grave injustice to the theory of art developed by Collingwood in The Principles of Art.4 For, as I hope to show, not only does Collingwood

Peter Lewis

Papers

Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Wittgenstein, aesthetics and philosophy

Schopenhauer's Laughter

Art, the community's medicine

Collingwood on Art and Fantasy