International Association for Aesthetics

Association Internationale d’Esthétique

Editor: Heinz Paetzold

International
Yearbook
Of
Aesthetics
- Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture -

Volume 3
1999

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INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF AESTHETICS
Contents Volume 3 1999

Editorial ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3

Articles:

Philosophy And/ As Philosophy of Culture …..………………………………………………. 8

Heinz Paetzold
Why Bother with Relativism and Historicism? …………….………………………………… 24
Joseph Margolis
The Understanding of Foreign World Interpretations ………………………………………. 34
Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik
The Art of the Ethnographer ………………………………………….……........................... 42
Ronnie M. Peplow
What’s African about African Art and Thought? ………………………………………...…… 54
Jennifer Wilkinson
Poetics of Intransitivity …………………………………………………………………………….. 69
Tanehisa Otabe
Artistic Expression of National Cultural Identity .……………………………………………. 85
Bohdan Dziemidok

Notes on Contributors …………………………………………………………………………….. 99

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 International Yearbook of Aesthetics
Editorial: Volume 3, 1999

Introduction: In Search of a Cultural Theory of Aesthetics

It seems as if aesthetics, today, stands at a crossroad. One road would lead

aesthetics to further attempts to refine its own terminology. How does one define
form, material, the different kinds of art? As a scientific field of research marked off
against other fields devoted to the inquiry of society, morals or politics, aesthetics is
asked upon to establish and justify the logics of its own terms. What specifically are
aesthetic concepts? Should aesthetics be centered in the notion of beauty or should
the sublime be the focal point? How do the different branches of aesthetic research,
such as philosophy of art, environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of everyday
life, relate to each other and how are they to be bridged in order to make up a
systematic whole?

The essays in this volume of the „International Yearbook of Aesthetics" take a quite
different route. The contributors to this volume share the conviction that aesthetics
should be rethought thoroughly. Which road does one have to follow? The essays
gathered in this volume offer new theoretical tools for the reconstruction of
aesthetics from the perspective of cultural theory and philosophy of culture.
Aesthetics has to be spelt out in terms of culture. What are the topics of such a
shift in aesthetic discours? What kind of arguments constitute the aesthetics as a
philosophy of culture?

II

Heinz Paetzold copes with the multifarious relationship between philosophical

aesthetics and philosophy of culture, both historically and systematically. The
central argument of the essay is that we should bring together aesthetics and the
philosophy of culture by taking the critical philosophy of culture as our point of
departure. Such a philosophical stance finds its historical footing in two strands of
20th century‘s philosophical thought which were not connected at their time, later
Ernst Cassirer‘s philosophy of symbolic forms on one hand and the theorizings of
the authors of earlier critical theory of the Frankfurt School on the other. In order
to find adequate access to current issues in cultural theory today, such as
multiculturalism and the „intercultural turn" of philosophy, we have, however, to
reshape the critical philosophy of culture. In multiculturality, which means the
coexistence of different cultures in one and the same society, a political component,
that is the mutual political recognition, meets with a genuineley cultural one. We
step outside the bounds of traditional aesthetics and enter into the critical
philosophy of culture. As a consequence of such a move, works of art, then, are

3
conceived of as being embedded in cultural worlds which lend meaning to their
aesthetic appearance.

According to Joseph Margolis we have to concede both, cultural relativism and

historicism as integral components of any true aesthetics today. The Platonic
preaching against relativism as well as the Aristotelian bias in favor of bivalence
logics and substantial forms have lost their compelling persuasive force. Margolis
substantiates his license policy for the sake of relativism and historicism by basing
it on cultural philosophy. The cultural world is to be distinguished from nature. We
are not allowd to naturalize culture since characters, such as intentionality,
emergence and embodiment of meaning, artifactuality, self-referentiality and holism
are indispensable for understanding the cultural world which is a world brought
forth and understood by cultural agents in commonly shared practices. The decisive
paradigm for cultural agency is speech which is, in turn, the organon for thought.
Each mode of thinking bears the imprint of history. It is from outset historized,
hence historicism. Although originated in modernity, historicism is closely related
to its ancient relative, relativism. Historicism and relativism are philosophical
second-order claims rather than merely descriptive first-order narratives of cultural
variety.

III

Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik reminds us of the basic structures determining the

processes of understanding other cultures. Such an endeavour cannot be centered
in empathy („Einfühlung"). It has to start from accepting the alterity of the other
culture. In a process of mutual communication, the otherness must be recognized
as something different from one‘s own cultural background. There is no monopoly
on any world interpretation. Each interpretation of other cultures unevitably bears
a practical component. The method of fieldwork as it has been developed by social
anthropology, say, Malinowski may serve as evidence for this claim. Not alone the
material components of the other culture are relevant for its understanding but also
the symbolic interpretations of the world which is shared by the members of the
other culture and testified in their everyday life. Participation observation, however,
confronts the ethnologist with new problems. The ethnologist in the field must be
aware of the fact that his science, the science of other cultures, is nothing more
than one interpretation alongside other views. Science cannot be conceived of as the
paradigm of knowledge, as the ethnomethodology in consequence of late
Wittgenstein´s philosophy of language games revealed. Alluding to Carlos
Castaneda, Schmied-Kowarzik makes clear that true ethnology is doomed to
oscillate between a position attributing pure superstition to the other cultures and
a position of merging in them. Such antinomic contradictoriness, however, is not at
all the privileged offspring of ethnomethodology, rather it is part and parcel of each
ethical practice. Relativizing our own worldviews must have a practical end
fostering human selfdetermination. The endeavour of understanding other cultures,
then, makes sense only if it broadens the horizon of one‘s selfunderstanding which,
in turn, affects one‘s own ethical ends.

4
Although ethnography may pretend to be a science, according to Ronnie M. Peplow,
it cannot avoid the integration of poetic narrations as well. Culture comprises of two
aspects, it is a system and a capacity. This pair of notions was already introduced
by Wilhelm von Humboldt to characterize language, namely as an „ergon" and an
„energeia". It structured the discussion about the dialectic of modern culture, as
outlined by theoriticians, such as Nietzsche, Weber, Simmel, Spengler, Cassirer and
most recently, Zygmunt Bauman. Both poles of a full notion of culture, its
systematicity and its capacity aspects offer the tools for an adequate understanding
of ethnography. Its oscillating status between science and art can, according to
Peplow, be mapped in the following way. B. Malinowski was emphasizing on the
scientificality of fieldwork ethnology which was to replace the former armchair
anthropology. But Malinowski took efforts in order to bestow his accounts of other
cultures with a poetic narrative since he wanted to make them graspable for the
scientific community. In fact, ethnology produces texts, as Clifford Geertz argues,
by writing down its social discourse on other cultures. From Malinowski‘s ‚scientific‘
model, Peplow distinguishes the one offered by Ruth Benedict‘s „The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword". Based on biographical interviews, it was an
account on Japanese culture and was intended to shift the Americans‘
understanding of the Japanese people. Benedict had a clearly defined practical end.
She benefited of her own poetic imagination while performing her cultural mission
of enlightening the American audience. Michel Leiris serves Peplow as a third model
of the art of the ethnographer. In his „L‘Afrique fantôme" Leiris practiced the art of
writing culture by writing a diary. His ethnopoetic approach does not want to strip
off his personal feelings and emotions he had during his stay in Africa. Malinowski‘s
scientific, Benedict‘s imaginative and Leiris‘ poetic ethnography are different modes
of filling in what in contemporary anthropology is called „Writing Culture". All the
three models integrate in different ways science and art. Concepts, imagination and
poetics remain necessary ingredients of each process of cultural understanding.

IV

Jennifer Wilkinson broadens the perspective of philosophical aesthetics by

inscribing this discourse which originated in Europe into cultural philosophy. Her
main argument is that in order to understand African art on its own terms we have
to relate aesthetics to African thought. According to Anthony Appiah the question is
no longer why African art is art but rather must its Africanness become the focal
point. Wilkinson illuminates the different aspects of this theoretical shift. From the
outset, Africa has been a construction of Westerners, their „invention", as Mudimbe
argued, fostering their colonial expansionism. To Western eyes, African art
appeared as strange although many modern artists‘ senses were arroused by its
aesthetic appeal, most prominently Picasso. After the Second World War, Negritude
and Pan Africanism were powerful movements aiming at the renewal of African
culture, but both were still marked by postcoloniality. Longing for the revitalization

5
of the cultural roots, these movements overlooked the plurality of cultures in Africa.
Contemporary African philosophers emphasize on communality as the most
outstanding feature of African art. In African thought, originality which is a deeply
rooted notion in modern Western aesthetic discourse remains linked with the
responsibility to the spirits of the ancestors as well as to the actual community. Art
is understood in terms of a force of life actualized by the creating artist. Personhood
must be conceived of as relational to the community rather than individual. For
Wiredu, the embeddedness of the person in his/her communality is complete
whereas Gyekye argues in favor of partiality. The communitarian ethics of Africa
puts the stress on the duty of the individual to the peers instead of excelling the
lone indidivual. Such components of African thought are relevant in order to
understand and esteem African art as primarily communal. According to Richards,
masks are not representations but rather actual embodiments of spirits. The artist
is asked upon to find contact to their force. The emphasis on communality though,
does not exclude individual artistic styles however difficult it may be for a Western
eye, to discern them. Modern African artists, such as Mothlabane, are struggling to
find an adequate balance between their Africanness and Western expectations. As
Wilkinson underscores, even the painting hanging on a wall has to be understood
on its own terms, that is on the basis of underlying belief systems.

Ken-ichi Sasaki challenges the mainstream Western way of thinking about art and
artistic creation. His central thesis is that artistic creativity cannot be captured by
the poetics of transitivity, but rather by the poetics of intransitivity. He opens with a
reference to Nietzsche who emphasized that true art comes into being not so much
through efforts and activities on the part of the artist but rather through
overwhelming forces which urge the artistic process to be their mouthpiece and
medium. Whereas for Nietzsche, the poetics of intransitivity was part and parcel of
the ancient past of the Western culture, Sasaki argues in favor of its significance for
the present time. The poetics of intransitivity was and still is one of the outstanding
features of Japanese aesthetics. It is shared, however, only by a few Westen
philosophers, notably Merleau-Ponty. In the modern Western civilization the poetics
of intransitivity has a marginal status. In Japan the poetics of intransitivity has
been exposed by Zeami, celebrated Noh-play author, actor and composer during the
14th and 15th century. In order to explain the persistence of the aesthetics of
intransitivity in Japanese culture throughout the centuries, Sasaki makes use of
linguistic philosophy stressing on the bearing of language structures on shaping the
worldview and the way of thinking. Linguists have made clear that Japanese
language shows an overwhelming evidence for the prevalence of intransitive above
transitive structures. It is a language which favors the „logic of becoming" (naru) as
opposed to the Christian „logic of making" (tsukuru), to use Maruyama‘s formula.
Alluding to the philosophy of Gilbert Ryle and the aesthetics of Michael Krausz,
Sasaki points out how difficult it is for Western thinkers to grasp the meaning of
intransitivity. In Ryle‘s theory the opposition between achievement verbs and verbs
of task is underpinned by the assumption that the state of achievement is nothing
other than the result of doing or making something. Krausz conceptualizes
intransitivity as the state an artist can reach after lifelong periods of artistic
creation. The artwork here is still thought of in terms of being created by actions on

6
the part of the artist. The aesthetics of intransitivity, the poetics of „dekiru", on the
contrary, conceptualizes art in terms of becoming, of maturing, hence of grace.

Bohdan Dziemidok opens a field of research to aesthetics which has not yet found
enough attention from aestheticians, namely, how art contributes to the shaping of
national cultural identities. Parallel to or as a consequence of globalization, we
notice not just the rise of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism but also of
nationalism. Up to the ´80s, nationalism as well as accompanying phenomena,
such as xenophobia and ethnic conflicts, seemed outdated and experienced a
revival during the ´90s which, however, became the center of attention in the social
sciences. Dziemidok develops a line of argument which does not separate the
political from the cultural, hence national cultural identity. Dziemidok follows
authors, such as Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka and Andrzej Walicki, who argue that
patriotism and nationalism are closely related. Patriotism should be defined as
„strong citizen identification" (Taylor). Nationalism can be „one basis" for patriotism
but is not the only one. National cultural identities seem to be a condition for
collective identities. They enable the understanding of history and collective
memory, as Taylor and Kolakowski argue. It is due to culture that strong and
emotional ties are created among the members of a nation. Cultural and national
identity has a bearing on personal freedom, since it provides, as Kymlicka argues,
individuals a range of meaningful options for their ways of life. It promises a secure
belonging rather than accomplishment. Here, however, reside the problems.
Doubtlessly art is an important resource for shaping this kind of identity by
enlarging our understanding of our own and other cultures and nations. Often,
however, works of high standard not only picture the own nation in attractive
images and cherish by the same token also stereotypes of the others, nay,
prejudices against them, such as from examples like Sienkiewicz, Tolstoi, Bulgakov,
Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and others can be seen. It is not only in folklore
that prejudices against the others are established and maintained but also in art,
be it high or low culture. According to Dziemidok critical philosophy of culture -
thus an enlarged and reconsidered aesthetics - is called upon, in order to lay bare
all the intricacies of the multifaceted national cultural identities.

Heinz Paetzold (University of Kassel)

7
Aesthetics And/ As Philosophy of Culture

Heinz Paetzold, University of Kassel

In this essay I am proposing a new approach to aesthetics. Aesthetics should be -

that is my point - rethought in such a way that it becomes embedded in a broader
context within philosophy of human culture. Postmodernity has brought about not
only the rise of Cultural Studies within the humanities, but has also put the search
for philosophy of culture on the agenda of contemporary philosophical thought
(Konersmann, 1996; During, 1993). The question, then, is how to link these two
strands?

I am arguing here the idea of critical philosophy of culture. This undertaking finds a
historical backing in the stance of earlier critical theory on one hand and in the
project of philosophy of symbolic forms on the other. I am arguing in favor of a
synthesis between these two strands which moved historically along separate
routes.

In its pre-Habermasian version, critical theory of Frankfurt School had an eye for
the multiform role of aesthetics within cultural and social life. Walter Benjamin's
dealing with modern massculture in his magistral essay "The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) was prompted by Theodor W. Adorno's and Max
Horkheimer's concept of culture industry in "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947).
Furthermore, Herbert Marcuse's essays "The Affirmative Character of Culture
(1937) and "Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture" (1965) along with his books
"Eros and Civilization" (1953) and "The One-Dimensional Man" (1964) were
paramount instances of remapping aesthetics influenced by the perspective of
critical philosophy of human culture. These much promising openings were,
however, later given up by critical theory.

Undoubtedly, Jürgen Habermas' "Theory of Communicative Action" (1981; English

1984, 1987) had lots of merits in making the "linguistic turn" of 20th century's
philosophy operative for critical theory by providing it a sound normative basis.
However, due to his stress on Max Weber's and Talcott Parsons' social theory
Habermas unwittingly subscribed to the orthodox Kantian division of culture into
technological sciences, morality, and aesthetics. In consequence, the critical theory
of Habermas could not find convincing answers to the challenges of postmodern
thought as his "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures" (1985;
English 1987) clearly shows. Critical theory, furthermore, lost any contact with
Cultural Studies.

In order to surmount such Weberian-Kantian restraints in critical philosophy of

culture we have to pick up a different thread. It is the concept of philosophy of
human culture as it was developed by Ernst Cassirer in close relation to the
"Warburg Library for Cultural Sciences" ("Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek

8
Warburg") in his project of "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms". This project first took
shape during the 1920's in Hamburg, but was profoundly reshaped in the late
1930's and the 1940's during Cassirer's exile in Sweden and in the USA. The
crucial devise of it is that we have to leave the Kantian division of culture behind
and, instead, concentrate on all the different symbolic forms, such as myth,
religion, morality, art, language, science, technology, politics, history, and
economics. They all together make up human culture. The "linguistic turn" of
philosophy, introduced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, is necessary, but not
sufficient. It has to be complemented by an "ethnological" as well as an
"anthropological" "turn" inorder to grasp human culture in all its multiform facets
and various appearances.

If we don't stick to the orthodox interpretation of Cassirer, but bring the

uncompleted project of philosophy of symbolic forms into closer contact with
philosophers like Susanne K. Langer, Nelson Goodman, Catherine Z. Elgin, Charles
Taylor, Hans Blumenberg, and Pierre Bourdieu, then we might argue in the
following way. The philosophy of human culture enables us to look at culture as a
plurality of social fields which are accessible to our understanding by virtue of the
various modes and divergent kinds of symbolism implied in each of them.

It is, however, decisive for my argument in favor of critical philosophy of culture

that we take our point of departure from Cassirer‘s later works. We have to
understand late Cassirer's books "An Essay on Man" (1944) and "The Myth of the
State" (1946) as the disclosure of the two faces of human culture. The one route
enables us to spell out culture in terms of the "process of man's progressive self-
liberation" by making use of the plurality of symbolic forms (Cassirer, 1944, p. 228).
But due to its own dynamics, culture also threatens modern society with the danger
of catastrophic disasters, indications of which can be felt in the rise of the modern
totalitarian state, the seductiveness of consumer society and colonial expansionist
politics. All this leads me to the conclusion that philosophy of human culture
becomes a critical endeavour only to that extent that we grasp culture's two sides:
Its hope giving promises and its thorough failures. In doing so, that is to say, by
constituting a truly critical philosophy of culture we avoid the severe shortcomings
of the neopragmatism of a Richard Rorty and a Richard Shusterman. Both these
men, besides stressing rightly on the aesthetic dimension as the dynamizing factor
in contemporary culture are silencing the dark sides of it.

Critical philosophy of culture based on symbolic thinking which I am arguing in

this essay makes us find access to the various poststructuralist perspectives on
culture taken by authors like Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler or Luce
Irigaray. This point, furthermore, links my project of critical philosophy of human
culture with the best of contemporary postmodernist thought, say, a Jean-Francois
Lyotard, a Zygmunt Bauman, or a Gianni Vattimo. Their emphasis on a productive
postmodernism as opposed to a "slackened" postmodernism, as Lyotard has put it,
can be absorbed in my perspective (Lyotard, 1991, pp. 71, 76).

9
II

This brings me to a more systematic mapping of the main subjects of the critical
philosophy of human culture. Three different but nontheless interconnected issues
are pertinent here. First of all, critical philosophy of human culture has to find
answers to questions concerning decisive passages and breaks in the history of
cultural life which lead to more or less clearly cut periods. One of these questions is
without doubt the question of modernity. When did modernity begin? Was it with
the Renaissance period as authors such as Ernst Cassirer, Hans Blumenberg,
Agnes Heller, Ernesto Grassi or Stephen Toulmin have argued or did modernity
start with Cartesian rationalism as mainstream Western philosophy upholds, a view
which is also shared by the great Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji? If we
follow the first outlook, and I believe we should, then the split between modernity
and postmodernity loses its sharp edges. Postmodernity, then, becomes perceivable
as the dynamization of modernity, but it does not completely step out of the bounds
of modernity's legacy.

Secondly, philosophy of human culture deals, as I said, with the plurality of

symbolic forms in a nonhierarchical, pluralistic way. It dethrones the privilege
which the epistemological paradigm had within modern philosophy. This was, as
Richard Rorty convincingly made clear in his "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature"
(1979), a stance articulated first by figures like René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes,
and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and continued by John Locke and Immanuel Kant, a
stance which has lost its credits in contemporary culture. Futhermore, if we deal
with the various cultural fields in a pluralistic way, then we cannot translate
religion completely into morality, as did Habermas by following the theory of Emile
Durkheim and which is subscribed by Rorty. On the contrary, the symbolism of
religious life is much more richer than simply structuring human moral conduct. It
rests on rituals which reconcile human beings with their history, as Louis Dupré
and Catherine Z. Elgin have underscored (Dupré, 1972; Elgin, 1997, p. 13). For
Max Horkheimer, too, religion had an undispensable role for a truely human society
beyond a merely "administred world". That is to say, taking the stance of philosophy
of human culture implies to accept from the outset that a rich cultural life cannot
be attained through one or a limited set of symbolic forms. Dethroning scientific
and technological rationality from being the foundational paradigm of culture does,
however, not mean to enthrone the arts or poetry in place of science as romanticism
wanted to do.

Thirdly, philosophy of human culture includes in one way or the other an answer to
the question: What makes a cultured subjectivity? What are the anthropological
prerequisites for a full participation of a human being in cultural life? I believe that
we cannot uphold any longer the rationalist idea of a transcendental and
transhistorical subjectivity. This would amount to reducing cultural life to pure
thinking, as René Descartes really suggested. Even the Husserlian reworking of the
transcendental ego which interpreted it as an embodied instance of the "life-world"
does not go far enough.

10
Philosophical anthropology - I am thinking of figures like Helmuth Plessner, Max
Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, and also Charles Taylor - and the phenomenology of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty have sufficiently made clear that a full notion of subjectivity
must encompass bodily and somatic components which cannot be sublated into
pure rationality. If we follow this argument then we find an adequate access to what
Cassirer himself had in mind when speaking about "symbolic pregnance". Symbolic
pregnance is a kind of "material apriori" (Helmuth Plessner) of any symbolic
ideation. Cassirer had called it a "genuin apriori" and an "essential first factor"
(Cassirer, 1957, p. 203). John Michael Krois identified "symbolic pregnance" as the
new "transcendental" in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms (Krois, 1987, p.
56).

If we understand Cassirer's definition of man as "animal symbolicum" whose

formula replaces the inherited Aristotelian one of man as "animal rationale" and
which opens the way to philosophy of human culture (Cassirer, 1944, pp. 25-26) as
a functional and not as a substantial definition, then we don't have to stick any
longer to the presupposition of the "transcendental ego". We can then also integrate
the concept of a basically split subjectivity, as it was developed on post-Freudian
premises by Julia Kristeva. The leading idea of her philosophy of culture is that the
battle between what she technically calls the "symbolic" and the "semiotic" is the
very agent responsible for the shifts and dynamism of the symbolic order of culture.
In conclusion, the notion of a cultured subjectivity has to be understood in the
sense of a split subjectivity. This is far from being a mysterious formula. It refers to
descriptions of the conditio humana in terms of contingency, fragmentarization and
non-transparency. Such descriptions are justified because we never can convert the
bodily into the logical.

III

After having outlined the scope of critical philosophy of culture, I now turn to some
details regarding the relationship between aesthetics and philosophy of culture. I
am pointing to a more historical line first and focusing in the final parts of my essay
on contemporary issues.

Already during the rise of aesthetics and of philosophy of human culture in early
modernity we find a rather close relationship between both these newly invented
philosophical genres. Let me just point to some striking facets of a much more
complicated story. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, one of the pioneers of modern
aesthetics, was called by Johann Gottfried Herder who belongs to the pioneers of
modern philosophy of culture "the real Aristotle of our time", "der wahre Aristoteles
unserer Zeit" ("Fragment über die Ode", in: Herder, Sämtliche Werke, 1899, Vol.
XXXII, p. 83). In Herder's view it was Baumgarten who rendered the "most
philosophical explanation of poetry", since he developed the "essence of poetry"
"from the nature of human mind" (Herder, 1899, XXXII, pp. 184-185). The early
"Meditationes" by Baumgarten, Herder continued in the essay "Von Baumgartens
Denkart in seinen Schriften", delivered a "truly philosophical poetics" (Herder, 1899,

11
Vol. XXXII, p. 185). The inherited Aristotelian principle of imitation became replaced
by expressionism.

Baumgarten himself, as is well known, positioned aesthetics as the complement to

rather than as the opposite of scientific rationality. A human being is in need of
both, abstract rationality and concrete sensuousness as well (Paetzold, 1985, pp.
243-249). In a word, Baumgarten was an aesthetician looking at human culture as
a complex differentiated totality. All of it components are important. The symbolic
form of art is one of them, alongside with science, religion, morality etc.

Herder has to be counted among the pioneers of modern philosophy of culture in a

strict sense. He belongs to, as Cassirer said, the "modern founders of a philosophy
of history" (Cassirer, 1944, p. 177). Furthermore, Herder developed more than a
century prior to Heidegger, and also prior to Wilhelm von Humboldt what Charles
Taylor labelled the expressionist-constitutive paradigm of language (Taylor, 1997).
That is to say, Herder's philosophical importance consists in the fact that he
revealed language as a means of world disclosure, and we have to take the
disclosing capacity of language as both, the disclosure of an "external world" of
things and events, and also as the disclosure of the "internal world" of human
sentiments, feelings, and longings.

Reflections on language, poetry, and history as constitutive components of human

culture occupied much of Herder's.energy. What makes him a philosopher of
culture in a strong sense is the attention he payed to myth as the "native soil"
(Cassirer) of culture. Herder, indeed, in his dialogue "Iduna" (1796) was pleading for
a new understanding of myth. Myth is not something of an ancient past and
therefore should occupy the creative energies of contemporary poets. Relativizing
the preeminence of ancient Greek mythology as source for poetry, Herder asked for
a new evaluation of Northern mythology of the "Edda" as well as Indian mythology.
Herewith Herder released what a short time later should become the Romantic
programme of a "New Mythology" (Frank, 1982; Paetzold, 1995a). These few
remarks must be sufficient to substantiate my argument that modern aesthetics
cannot be separated from outlooks on the whole human culture. Philosophy of
culture, in turn, cannot exist without aesthetics.

Herder belonged to the first philosophers of late 18th century's culture who had an
eye for the originality and importance of Giambattista Vico, one of the founders of
modern philosophy of human culture. Vico, indeed, this great adversary of
Descartes rehabilitated the whole range of sciences which are prerequisite for any
serious study of human culture and which were definitively excluded by Cartesian
rationalism. These sciences are history, philology, poetry, mythology and law. They
teach us what man was, what man is and what man is to become, as Isaiah Berlin
underscored rightly (Berlin, 1976, p. 83).

Vico's point was that we are able to understand human culture whereas nature
remains only partly accessible because culture is made by man: Verum et factum
convertuntur. The true and the made converge. We find access even to cultures

12
which are far remote than the ones we are acquainted with, precisely because they
are brought forth by man. We have, however, to invest our power of imagination
and fantasy if we want to understand those cultures which existed in the far
remotest past and which may appear strange to us. The point, which I am making
here, is that according to Vico to understand human culture requires imagination.
We obtain this capacity by being exposed to poetry and by being trained in
aesthetics.

It was especially the great Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce who emphasized on
Vico's pioneering role in the foundation of modern aesthetics. According to Croce,
Vico developed a "poetical logics" independently from and even prior to
Baumgarten's "gnoseologica inferior" (Croce, 1930, p. 240).

The rise of modern aesthetics and modern philosophy of culture was neither an
exclusively German nor an exclusively Italian matter. In order to provide my
narrative a broader European appeal, let me just point to the role which Nicolas
Boileau's commentary on Longinus' essay on the Sublime played. Edmund Burke's
theorizing of the sublime was introduced to Germany by Moses Mendelssohn and
became later operative in Kant. Furthermore, we have to think of the many
reflections on theatre by authors like Denis Diderot, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Friedrich Schiller. Rousseau became a founding figure
of modern philosophy of culture by inventing the genre of radical cultural critique.
He related the ineradicable desire for cultural and ethical authenticity (a high value
for Herder as well) to politics. We can, Rousseau argues, regain the lost authenticity
of culture by just making use of political means. For that reason it was precisely
theatre, the most political of the arts (as Hannah Arendt said) which found
Rousseau's special interest and which led him to criticize d'Alembert's demand for a
theatre in Genova politically. Rousseau's, at his times influential "Letter to M.
d'Alembert on the Theatre" (1758) immediately became a European and not only a
French cultural event (Rousseau, 1996; Paetzold, 1997a).

Post-Kantian philosophy can be understood as the trial to reconcile both these

strands of modern thought - philosophy of culture and aesthetics - in either the
romanticism of a Schelling or the dialectic idealism of a Hegel. But in the end both
men fell prey to metaphysics by reaffirming an understanding of philosophy as
search for foundations and origins of culture. Either the poetical became the true
origin and foundational source of the whole cultural life - as in Schelling's case - or
culture was converted into pure spirituality, which was Hegel's point. Post-
romanticist Friedrich Nietzsche marked the decisive turning-point in demanding a
thorough redefinition of both, aesthetics and philosophy of culture as well.
Nietzsche's devise is to inscribe them in an explicitly postmetaphysical philosophy.
In Nietzsche's view, the metaphysical bias holding its sway over Hegel and Schelling
was preaching the disdain of the body. It withdrew them effectively from human
finitude. For that reason philosophical thought was prevented from a more
adequate understanding of aesthetics and philosophy of culture.

13
IV

The confines of this essay do not allow me to concentrate in more details on my

narrative concerning the relationship between aesthetics and philosophy of culture
in postmetaphysical intellectual history of the 20th century. Nevertheless I would
like to draw the reader's attention to a very selective number of issues herein.

Georg Simmel should be mentioned as an author combining a strong interest in

aesthetics and philosophy of culture in his own personality. Simmel concentrated
on issues like the frame of a picture, the aesthetics of meal, landscape, style, bridge
and door, ornament, metropolitan life, fashion. He was deeply convinced that
modern culture is characterized by internal tensions and contradictions. He speaks
of modern culture in terms of a "tragedy", that is, an indissoluble conflict between
the advanced culture of the objective things and techniques on one hand and the
vanishing immediacy of the culture of individual subjective life on the other. It is
well known that Simmel not only influenced authors of the first generation of
critical theory like Adorno and Benjamin, Bloch and Kracauer, Lukàcs of course,
but also Ernst Cassirer.

Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, to continue with a quite different strand,

stressed on expressiveness as the core of art as a symbolic form. There is, however,
a severe shortcoming in Croce which sets limits to his approach. He took the
linguistic apparatus as such as the model and paradigm for art's expressiveness.
The creative and inventive power of art has its parallel in language's capability of
being used in completely new and unanticipated situations. Croce lacks, as
Cassirer has argued (Cassirer 1944, pp. 141, 168-169), a full understanding of art's
expressiveness, because he had no eye for the sensoriness und the material
qualities of each of the divergent kinds of art. Croce, in short, abstracted from the
fact that artistic meaning is articulated and fashioned according to the specific
material mediality of the respective art. As we shall see below, Nelson Goodman's
reconceptualizing of expressiveness (in the sense of metaphorical exemplification)
brings us closer to a truly positioning of aesthetics within a broader philosophy of
human culture, a philosophy which spells out culture from the angle of the
symbolic.

Croce and Collingwood, both these men, emphasized that aesthetics should be
positioned within a broadened concept of the "objective spirit" in Hegel's sense. This
understanding of culture also became of paramount importance for John Dewey. He
paved the way for pragmatism as a philosophical movement leading from its initial
privileging natural sciences to be found in Charles S. Peirce to a philosophy of
culture. Dewey made William James' perspectivism operative for philosophy of
culture. Dewey demanded from philosophy to stick to the details of everyday life
instead of its inherited allegiance to metaphysics. The aesthetic experience is a
necessary prerequisite for such a reconstruction of philosophy since it requires
concreteness and somatic sensoriness and enables us to experience what a full and
complete experience really is.

14
Martin Heidegger's polemics against philosophy of culture ("Kulturphilosophie") are
well known. One of the reasons for this is surely his suspicion against and his
complete neglect of the intersubjective dimension implied in the concept of culture.
Heidegger's hostile attitude towards philosophy of culture comes clearly to the fore
in his Davos debate with Ernst Cassirer (Languilli, 1971; Paetzold, 1995 b, pp. 86-
105). In my context here it is interesting to note that the Japanese philosopher
Tetsuro Watsuji belonged to the early critics of Heidegger's individualized
existentialism prior to figures like Afred Schütz and late Edmund Husserl. Watsuji's
charge against Heidegger is motivated precisely on the grounds that the
overemphasis on the isolated individual prevents philosophy from finding adequate
access to culture. Culture by its own essence, Watsuji underscores with reference
to Herder's climatology of culture, is presupposing an intersubjective space between
human beings (Watsuji, 1988; Paetzold, 1996 a).

For my argument, that philosophy of culture and aesthetics developed in directions

paralleling, crossing and overlapping each other quite frequently in 20th century's
philosophy, I cannot borrow much from Heidegger. But one of his pupils, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, did not take any heed of his teacher's aversions to ancient Roman
culture, to Renaissance humanism and to the notion of humanity in Enlightenment
philosophy. Gadamer rehabilitated Renaissance humanism and especially Vico (and
rhetorics) for the purpose of transcending a strictly Kantian concept of aesthetics.
In his "Truth and Method" (1960) Gadamer identified the aesthetics of Kant as the
other half of a restrictive concept of philosophy, philosophy as epistemology. This
amounts to saying that Gadamer is locating art and aesthetic experience within the
broader horizon of culture and historical traditions. Just as Vico Gadamer, too,
reintroduces in philosophical discourse all those disciplines which were considered
within Cartesian and Kantian tradition of rationalism to be of trifle value, such as
rhetorics, poetics, philology and history.

In this section of the essay I am clarifying the leading intention of critical

philosophy of culture of which aesthetics is a component, with regard to a few
issues of contemporary debate. As I already said, we have to reformulate the
Cassirerian concept of symbolic form as cultural field in order to uphold a critical
stance within philosophy of human culture. Along with Pierre Bourdieu such a step
enables us to understand culture as a dynamic struggle for social recognition of
symbolic goods. Within the cultural field which we usually call the artworld, we
have to account for all the various agents which make of material works
symbolically coded cultural works. This happens due to instituional settings. Not
only artists are involved here but also collectors, gallery owners, museum curators,
art critics, art academies and aesthetics conferences. All these different agents are
struggling with each other with the aim of legitimizing cultural codings and
recodings which make works of art understandable as symbolically significant
expressions of culture (Paetzold, 1996 b). In short, a Bourdieu-perspective allows to
introduce into the discourse of aesthetics, social and political structures as its
condition of possibility. Works of art as well as their understanding become

15
embedded in cultural life. Culture is not something to be looked at in the detached
perspective of an epistemological observer but it is produced and structured by
actively engaged people.

Such reconceptions of culture enable us, furthermore, to find access to inter- and
multicultural issues which have become prominent in current cultural theory. I am
suggesting the following mapping. In the shadow of late Cassirer's stress on the two
faces of culture we have to distinguish systematically between two cases of multi- or
interculturality. First of all, we can identify structural, not just occasional
blockades in the symbolic exchange between different cultures. Edward W. Said's
"Orientalism" (1978) and Valentin Y. Mudimbe's "The Invention of Africa" (1988) are
quite prominent examples of scholarship revealing structural restrictions in this
process of cultural exchange, restrictions which are deeply rooted in Western
culture's dynamics. I am suggesting to relate such a body of cultural theory to what
Cassirer was focussing on in his "The Myth of the State". Cassirer had, you will
recall, explained the rise of the totalitarian state as a culturally destructive short
circuit. The totalitarian state is understandable as a fusion between freely floating,
disintegrated mythical energies with highly developed technology with the aim of
overcoming deep social and political crisis. A case like "Orientalism" signifies a
blockade in the symbolic exchange between the Western and the Oriental culture. I
would like to argue that it can be addressed with an enlarged Cassirerian
terminology as an effective mythical veil covering the process of understanding by
withdrawing it from flexible shifts in interpretative perspectives and horizons. The
flexibility of symbolic understanding is, in a word, effectively blocked.

Now, we have, as I said, to distinguish between two cases with regard to symbolic
exchange between different cultures. "Orientalism" stands for the dark side of
intercultural exchange, its failing. The second case is what might be labelled a
productive multiculturality. A fruitful and unrestricted encounter between different
cultures presupposes processes of cultural and political recognition, as Charles
Taylor has shown (Taylor, 1994; Paetzold, 1997 b). A true multiculturalism
encompasses both these dimensions. Cultural and political components meet.
When we enter a cultural world which may appear to us in the beginning unfamiliar
and even strange, because it is beyond and outside our habitualized standards of
values, we gradually shift these standards by experiencing the "otherness" of the
other culture as valuable for our own selfunderstanding.

It is important to realize that such a productive symbolic exchange between

different cultures has to be carried by processes of mutual recognition. Westerners
have, as the philosopher of interculturality, Ram Adhar Mall, underscores to get
used to be described by authors from other cultures. "Orientalism" contradicts the
required condition of mutual recognition. It is a one-way street. Western scholars,
Western politicians and Western poets have over centuries, as Said shows,
interpreted the Orientals from above and from outside in the attitude of detached
observers. Their devise was: The Orientals cannot represent themselves, to say
nothing about representing the Western culture. Hermeneutics has taught us that

16
understanding other cultures in a productive way always affects the
selfunderstanding of ourselves.

It is exactly here, that critical philosophy of culture can make a strong point. It
belongs to the presumptions of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms that the
relationship between the different symbolic forms is not governed by a stable rule.
The internal composition of a given symbolic universe of culture differs from period
to period and from one culture to the other one. At this point a reflection by the
philosopher of interculturality, Heinz Kimmerle, is useful. Kimmerle argues that
Europe could learn from African culture a completely different model of relationship
between aesthetics and ethics compared with the standard European one.

A powerful European tradition which can be traced back to Kant and Hegel
demands from us to separate the aesthetic profoundly from the ethical. Moral
conduct should never be mingled with aesthetic delight, says Kant. For Hegel, the
"beautiful ethicality", the "schöne Sittlichkeit" of ancient Greek polis life had gone
for ever. In Athens both, beauty and moral goodness, made up one undivided
whole. It amounts to a childish dream to desire for a reconnection between these
divergent cultural forces again.

Informed by an intercultural point of view, however, Kimmerle argues, we might

parallel African traditions which did not separate the aesthetic delight from the
ethical precept to hidden and forgotten strands of European thought. We may draw
a line from Friedrich Schleiermacher's project of an aesthetics of existence to the
Foucaultian "art of living" which has become prominent (Kimmerle, 1994; Schmid,
1995, 1998).

If we follow Kimmerle and Taylor, then we have to make the adjudgement of value to
an other culture dependent upon processes of hermeneutical work - Sigmund Freud
talked about "cultural work" ("Kulturarbeit") - which may lead to recognition.
During the 18th century, Herder had attributed value to each of the divergent
cultures on the globe already by principle. This was, however, based on an overt
theological premise. It is, Herder argued, due to God's goodness that a variety of
cultures exist. Each of them has per se value. For us, living in much more
secularized times such a theologumenon is not acceptable any longer. The value of
any culture can be presumed only as a working hypothesis. The process of factual
understanding must prove the adequacy of this presumption. This is the only
reasonable guarantee that we have. Exchange between cultures on the level of
symbolic understanding may or may not gradually lead to recognition. Art and
aesthetics play an important role herein. Aesthetic experiences start in most cases
with curiosity and astonishment. If the process of understanding advances curiosity
and astonishment may be converted into delight and pleasure. Here we have a kind
of analogy to the process of symbolic exchange between divergent cultures.

As an argument I would like to emphasize that the "intercultural turn" in

contemporary philosophy proves to be a further corroboration of the central thesis
of this essay, namely, that today we have to understand aesthetics within the

17
broader context of the philosophy of human culture. Such a philosophy, in turn,
presupposes and implies aesthetics.

VI

Rethinking aesthetics beyond aesthetics from the perspective of philosophy of

human culture, however, does not merely imply to account for the locus of the
aesthetic within the broader cultural context. Such a move beyond aesthetics urges
us to reconceptions of the very concept of art itself. We have to ask: How are we to
rethink art to such a degree that it becomes conceived of as a vital part of cultural
life today?

I am suggesting the following mapping. First of all, we have to reformulate

Cassirer's determination of art's symbolism in the sense of expressiveness along
with Nelson Goodman as metaphorical exemplification. That is to say, the complex
symbolic structure of works of art integrates movements in two directions.
Metaphoricity is a shift in the dimension of denotative meaning. We leave the
familiar meaning of a given symbolism behind and are led to an unusual and
surprisingly new one. Metaphors are effective within the denotative dimension of
symbols. Metaphors, we may argue, are disclosing new aspects of the world. They
are paramount agents for the renewal of the horizons of cultural life.
Exemplification (in Goodman's terminology) signifies a mode of symbolic
referentiality which does not follow the route of denotation, but rather its inversive
opposite. Exemplification consists in a referentiality of such a kind that our
attention is addressed to some of the properties which a given symbol already owns.
As I said, expressiveness as the main characteristic of the symbolic structure of
works of art integrates both these modes of symbolic referentiality. Due to its
metaphorical component the expressiveness of art receives a distinctive cultural
contextuality. The metaphor makes use of the culturally entrenched meaning of
symbols which is at the same time transcended and left behind. Philosophy of
human culture as I claim it here presupposes a functional rather than a substantial
understanding of all the symbolic forms which make up the universe of a given
culture. This Cassirerian devise which is subscribed by Bourdieu applies above all
to art.

For that reason I am emphasizing along with Nelson Goodman that we have to
replace the traditional philosophical question asking for an essentialistic
metaphysical answer to the question "What is Art?" by the more functional one
answering "When is Art?". Indeed, rethinking philosophy in terms of functional
relations rather than in terms of Aristotelian 'substantial forms' made Goodman to
answer to the question "When is Art?" by introducing his doctrine of aesthetic
symptoms. These symptoms of the aesthetic - syntactic and semantic density,
syntactic repleteness, exemplification and multiple and complex referentiality - are
clues to find access to the concrete symbolism implied in works of art. However,
these symptoms of the aesthetic do not allow us to distinguish clearly between
objects whatsoever and works of art. Hence, as I argued elsewhere (Paetzold 1997 c,
pp. 18-35, and Paetzold 1998), rethinking aesthetics as philosophy of culture urges

18
us to reconceptualize art as a symbolic form by linking artworks with the notion of
artistic conceptions, Kunstkonzeptionen. It is here that the intertwinement of
aesthetics and cultural life comes to fruitful bearing.

Moving methodologically from aesthetics to philosophy of culture allows us to

integrate Bourdieu's notion of cultural fields as well as Danto's concept of the
artworld, while at the same moment keep pace with Goodman's productive
reconception of art as a symbolic form in terms of aesthetic symptoms. However, in
order to make all these various components truly operative we have to introduce the
notion of artistic conceptions. Only by doing so can we reach cultural concreteness.
Philosophers as divergent as Arnold Gehlen, Susanne K. Langer and Pierre
Bourdieu and artists as divergent as Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire and
Raimer Jochims made use of this notion. The summarization of my interpretation is
as follows.

First of all, an artistic conception is a clue to unravel the concrete work's

interference with visions of culture as a whole. We may distinguish between the
anarchistic gesture behind works by Willem de Kooning, the desire for the
completely fluid plasticity of democratic institutions expressed in Joseph Beuys'
'social sculpture', the ironic affirmation of bourgeois culture with Jeff Koons and the
feminist impulse of subverting culture behind Cindy Sherman's earlier works.

On a second level, works of art deconstruct, dispute and fight the established codes
of the symbolic order of the visual culture at a given time. The "Fauves" disputed
the necessity of a linkage between the painted object and its presumed 'natural'
'colour tone' (its 'local colour-tone'), which belonged at their time to the axioms of
artistic representation. Daniel Buren's artistic conception consists in questioning
the claim that the museum has to be the exclusive context for exhibiting artworks.

Yet there is another characteristic of artistic conceptions. Whereas the first two
aspects dealt with the locus of art within culture as a whole respectively with the
locus of art within the visual culture at a given time, the third aspect is concerned
with the specific genealogy of each work in particular. Understanding concrete
works of art requires an awareness of whether the work is a part of a cycle, a series,
a model or a sequence. All these possibilities make us pay attention to the fact that
works of art are no longer to be understood as unique expressions of the singular
artistic author. This was, quite surely, the modernist ideology according to which
the artist is the analog to the divine creator who expresses, represents and mirrors
himself in the existing one world. Artistic conceptions such as series, cycle,
sequence, and model pave the way for a visual culture in terms of plurality,
multiplicity and variety. Only by moving through the variety of works we grasp the
symbolism of modern art. Goodman as well as Danto did not address this crucial
aspect of artistic culture today.

There is, however, a fourth aspect which seems to me of paramount importance for
an adequate understanding of artistic conceptions, i. e historicity. It is assumed
that an awareness of art's historicity is a necessary requirement for understanding

19
modern works of art, as Bourdieu rightly has underlined (Bourdieu 1996, pp. 256-
257; pp. 306-307; pp. 309-312). The modern artist has to reflect on the historical
locus of his/her work. For reasons of convenience we may distinguish between a
modernist and a postmodern attitude towards cultural history. The modernist artist
conceived of his work as the ultimate solution to all that tradition was in search of
but had never found. We can contrast to such a 'heroic' narrative, say, a Mondrian
or a Le Corbusier a postmodern one which accounts for the arbitrariness of artistic
gestures. For a contemporary artist such as Jonathan Lasker, for instance, the 'all-
over' principle of the gesture of painting which was constitutive for 'heroic'
modernist artists such as Jackson Pollock exemplifying an ethics of anarchistic
rebellion, is no longer adhered to. In one work, painterly, gestural elements contrast
with a predominantly pink background, marking a historical difference, but this is
a postmodern difference of undetermined distance rather than of progress.

Although I fuelled my scheme of artistic conceptions with ingredients derived from

European narratives, it is nevertheless not restricted to them. It is not difficult to
relate what Jennifer Wilkinson discusses under the heading of the Africanness of
African art, namely art's community relatedness and its social functionality, to what
I am calling art's interference with visions of culture as a whole. Furthermore, what
Ken-ichi Sasaki theorizes as the poetics of intransitivity as a characteristic of
Japanese art relates to what I called the genealogy of works of art. According to
Sasaki, the poetics of intransitivity points to the fact that an artist cannot master
the act of artistic production completely but has to account for 'energies' from
outside which surface while producing.

VII

By summarizing that what I developed in the previous section I should like to

underscore that we have to strive for an aesthetics beyond aesthetics. We have to
inscribe aesthetics within the broader perspectives of philosophy of culture. In
doing so we can achieve an enriched and an enlarged understanding of art. The
outlook which I am arguing enables us to conceive of art as a formative power
within culture as a whole. Artworks intervene into the visual culture of their time
and are dynamizing the modalities of symbolic representation. Focussing on art
asks us for a more detailed understanding of what it means for something to be
considered an artwork. Finally, art requires an awareness of shifts and changes in
cultural life. Historicity is a mark of both, works of art and culture.

In conclusion, then, I would like to argue that aesthetics rethought as philosophy of

culture lets us find access to the various strands in understanding the notion
'culture'. We may distinguish between an ergological, that is a tool related
component in the meaning of the concept of culture, a historicist component, a
moral-political and a societal component. All these facets of the concept of culture
receive a specific colouring if we look from the perspective of human culture at
aesthetics.

References

20
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Bourdieu, P. 1996. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.
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Cassirer, E. 1957. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 3: The

Phenomenology of Knowledge. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven and
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Croce, B. 1930. Aesthetik als Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck.Tübingen: Mohr Paul

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Paetzold, H. 1985. Baumgarten als Begründer der Ästhetik in der Neuzeit, in: Peter
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23
Why Bother with Relativism and Historicism?

Joseph Margolis, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

It is both coherent and plausible to think of human cultures as having emerged

from the biology of a gifted species, Homo sapiens. It is certainly not a necessary
truth --in the pointed sense that the most salient features of any culture, which by
a term of art I collect as "Intentionality" (note, please, the use of the capital "I"), are
real, not eliminable, and not analyzable in terms only of the categories of the
physical and the biological. We do not yet know what (perhaps) very small biological
changes effected the actual emergence of the cultural, and in a way it is not a
necessary condition for any fruitful analysis that we should answer the empirical
question first. Embryonic heart cells, it is said, have their distinctive pulses, but
when they come together their pulses "agree" on a common beat. You have here a
clue, possibly no more than a suggestion, of how primitive sociality may be read in
purely biological terms, where, of course, the biological may prove to be genuinely
emergent--say, in functionalist terms--with reference to inanimate physical nature.
Nevertheless, I insist, the biological cannot encompass the cultural.

I am attracted to the idea that there may have been a very large number of
emergences from, say, the singularity of the Big Bang that physical cosmology now
postulates, and that such emergent phases may not all have survived down to our
own time. Once you admit the possibility, you realize that there is no antecedent
reason why every would-be form of emergence should remain nonreducible, or why
all actual forms of emergence should be generically the same. If life forms and
cultural forms are genuinely emergent, they may both be sui generis.

I do insist that the "Intentional" is sui generis--in a sense that extends congenially
to, say, Ernst Cassirer's mention of "symbolic forms" and Charles Sanders Peirce's
mention of "Thirdness" (if I may also reserve the right to depart from the details of
their particular accounts). If you allow the sense of that association, then, I suggest,
we may address any part of the cultural world without fear of yielding too quickly to
the insistence of any unity-of-science model that would repudiate true emergence. I
urge only this: (i) that emergence is a perfectly coherent notion; and

(ii) that there is no known way of confirming that there are any modal necessities de
re or de cogitatione (certainly none regarding emergence, reduction, elimination,
unity of science, explanatory adequacy, or the like). This double caution leaves open
the possibility--no more than that--that the cultural is not actually reducible to the
physical or biological; that is, is not (as we now say), "naturalizable."

The new naturalism holds that truth-bearing explanations and canonical

descriptions satisfy the condition of the "causal closure of the physical" or (where
mental and cultural issues are at stake) the somewhat freer condition of
functionalist or supervenientist adjustments that at least do not violate the causal

24
closure of the physical. Of course, if the cultural or Intentional is emergent, then
the closure doctrine will be false--on, say, the strength of merely admitting the
causal efficacy of culturally qualified events: the effect, say, of a perceived insult on
heartbeat, breathing, change in skin color or, the effect of listening attentively to
Brahms's Fourth Symphony. The admission of the emergence of the cultural may
require denying that the laws of nature are physically necessary. But that was
already anticipated in urging that there are no demonstrable modal necessities.
Also, of course, up-to-date specialists in the philosophy of science regularly see no
loss of rigor entailed by the denial of the modal forms of nomologicality. Science is
not (for that reason) obliged to deny observational or "phenomenological"
regularities of the kind that might otherwise have led us to propose exceptionless
laws of nature. Even the "naturalists" would wish to claim that their accounts were
suitably addressed to the most challenging features of cultural life, and those are
bound to include the ordinary discoveries of art criticism and history and legal
reasoning and the like. If you grant that much, you grant the reasonableness of
treating the cultural disciplines at face value, even if you harbor naturalizing
convictions.

It is a small step to grasp the philosophical import of imputing the usual cultural
attributes to entities like ourselves and our deeds and creations. There is nothing
inappropriate, therefore, in speaking directly of the cultural (or "Intentional") in
addition to the physical and biological, though the emergence of the one from the
other is hardly accounted for thereby.

By "Intentionality," then, I mean to collect all predicables that signify some real,
indissoluble (emergent) manifestation of significative or meaningful structures. I
concede the importance of needing to determine whether the Intentional is
naturalizable or not; but I put that question aside here, on the plea that we only
strengthen our sense of the task's immensity by collecting its familiar distinctions.
It is enough to say that the paradigm of the Intentional lies with the mastery of a
natural language and with the way in which linguistic competence proves to be
inseparable from further non-verbal abilities and practices (dancing, preparing and
sharing a meal, making love), which I dub "lingual."

The linguistic is, then, the paradigm of the cultural but it is also in some measure
lingual; also, the lingual forms of Intentionality are as individuatable as the
linguistic. Both are "utterances" (both are predicable) of encultured ("second-
natured") selves (ourselves), emergently transformed by internalizing (as pliant,
gifted infants) the language and lingual practices of an environing society of already
apt selves. The picture is incomplete but quite enough for my present purpose: that
is, to account for the explanatory work of literary and art criticism, history, politics
and law, technology and science. All the usual forms of expression, representation,
symbolic import, semiotic force, linguistic and gestural meaning, institutionalized
and traditional behavior, historical and rhetorical and rulelike regularity fit easily
under the range of the "Intentional": they apply to our "utterances" and to
ourselves.

25
This is so elementary an account that one hardly expects it to be challenged. But it
has of course been strenuously challenged. The naturalizers deny that the cultural
world--artworks, histories, selves, human societies--ever manifests the supposed
complexities of Intentionally qualified denotata. All such attributions, they insist (or
their allies insinuate), may be completely neutralized by reductive or rhetorical or
functionalist devices: for example, among English-language philosophers of art, by
Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto. Let us see.

II

The most heterodox doctrines the cultural world invites us to test are surely
relativism and historicism, which have no place in the familiar realist ontologies of
physical nature, unless, conceivably, by linking ontology with the historical drift of
science itself. This was indeed Thomas Kuhn's provocative intuition, which Kuhn
was unable and unwilling to pursue along the lines of actually historicizing science.
Kuhn was committed to a canonical realism that his own intuition made impossible
to defend; for the historicizing of science favors a constructivism or a constructive
realism which, notoriously, threatened Kuhn's orthodoxy. Kuhn was persuaded that
physical nature lacked Intentional properties and remained independent of our
inquiries, all the while those same inquiries had to be admitted to be subject to all
the forces of cultural history. Since he was prepared to abandon the standard
doctrine of scientific neutrality, Kuhn found it impossible to recover any notion of
objectivity, suited to the sciences, that would have permitted him to claim to be
describing the actual independent world. The paradox defeated him, and so he
abandoned both relativism and historicism.

One may reasonably suppose that the "worlds" of art and human history are more
concessive on the matter of Kuhn's puzzle, for of course there can be no question of
the "independence" of cultural events from the activities and reflections of human
selves in anything like the way Kuhn thought of physical nature.

The obvious trick is to demonstrate that, and why, realisms confined to physical
nature are unable to accommodate cultural entities. I hold that to admit the
cultural world as (a) real, (b) Intentionally qualified, (c) emergent, and

(d) sui generis is incompatible with "naturalizing" and with precluding relativism
and historicism from playing a salient role in literary and art criticism, history, legal
and political and moral debate.

Let me move at once to offer a minimal tally on the matter of cultural realism.
Consider the following claims:

(i) since it is Intentionally qualified, the cultural world is constructed

(ontically) in a way physical nature is not; hence, its realist standing
cannot be expressed in terms of the realist/idealist disjunction
featured in early modern philosophy and now, once again, in late
twentieth-century naturalism;

26
 (ii) the emergent denotata of the cultural world are indissolubly
embodied in physical and biological denotata and, correspondingly,
their Intentional attributes are indissolubly incarnate in physical and
biological attributes; otherwise we should lack a viable alternative to
reductionism (or its functionalist variants) and dualism, with respect
to either the mind/body problem or the nature/culture problem, and
we should not be able to account for their being fully natural;

(iii) cultural entities, selves and artworks and historical events

preeminently, are "second-natured" artifacts, subject to the formative,
transformative, and causal processes of their enabling world;
furthermore, all cultural denotata other than selves are the
nominalized utterances of individual and aggregated selves, stable
enough (like artworks and histories) to support interpretation and
interpretively informed judgment and commitment;

(iv) cultural denotata (selves and their utterances) are, uniquely, self-
referentially cognized or cognized by way of self-referential mediation;
but since their natures are formed and grounded in the collective
practices of their enabling society, their cognition (and the objectivity
of their cognition) must be similarly formed and grounded;

(v) despite the absence of Intentional structures in physical nature,

the conditions of objective inquiry depend epistemically on the
conditions of objectivity in cultural inquiries; hence, descriptive and
explanatory power, referential and predicative success of every kind,
are confirmed and legitimated only in terms of viable practices; that is,
only in terms of the consensual tolerance and habits of a society of apt
selves; hence, objectivity in all inquiries depends not on foundational
propositions or criteria but on collective customs, not on knowledge
(savoir) but on know-how (savoir-faire);

(vi) the Intentional structure of the cultural world is benignly holist,

subject to one or another version of the hermeneutic circle, intelligible
only to selves, themselves made competent, conformably, by
internalizing the Intentional policies of their home society;
furthermore, such a holism, like that of language itself, must be
benign enough to permit (without disadvantage), the use of operative
distinctions between cognizing subjects and cognized objects, as well
as the referential and predicative distinctions normally required in
truth-bearing discourse.

Items (i)-(vi) are obviously open to dispute, but they are not improbable. On the
contrary, they count as a coherent first pass at the minima of any cultural realism
opposed to naturalizing.

III

27
I believe very deeply in the importance--in the ineluctability, in fact--of favoring
relativism and historicism. I cannot see how any serious philosophical analysis of
cultural life could convincingly fail to make provision for their eligibility at least. I
have of course no illusions about having made the case compelling. The argument
needed is straightforward enough but too busy to attempt to provide it here. Still,
the enabling theme is an obvious one: viz., that, inasmuch as selves are second-
natured, the paradigm of thought is speech. Thinking is not only conveyed by way
of a public language, as Locke supposed, but also, paradigmatically, linguistically
structured (though Locke denied it). We think linguistically, and what we allow as
our nonlinguistic thought (or the mental life of nonlanguaged animals) is
inescapably modeled on the linguistic paradigm. Furthermore, linguistic
competence is formed and continually transformed in accord with our changing
practices. Hence, in the paradigm, thinking is already history, is already
historicized.

I ask you only to grant the plausibility of this line of argument: it's relativism and
historicism that I'm after. They are, after all, the rogue theories normally dismissed.
The thing to grasp is how the supporting argument might go, not the particular
strategy I personally favor. I should like to overcome the old philosophical inertia
that says there's no need for either relativism or historicism--insists that some
variant of the familiar canon addressed to the physical world will surely be
adequate to account for all objective discourse about the cultural world.

I deny that. I claim instead that merely to acknowledge the Intentional complexities
of the cultural world is already to favor some robust version of relativism and
historicism! Few philosophers would agree with me here, but I know of no
compelling arguments in favor of the denial.

The most promising maneuver favoring relativism and historicism emphasizes two
themes. One I've already mentioned: namely, that, once you concede the enormous
difference between the physical and the cultural, you must also grant (contra
Chomsky, for instance) that, however biologically grounded, language is culturally
emergent; also, that the members of Homo sapiens are correspondingly transformed
as selves by internalizing a natural language. Once you grant that, you cannot deny
that the competence and objectivity of the physical sciences are already dependent
on the distinctive realism accorded the cultural world. The second theme follows at
once: you cannot assign epistemic priority to the physical sciences over whatever
qualifies as objective in our inquiries into the cultural world; for, of course, the first
presupposes and is an abstracted part of the competence of the second.

I have already suggested that there are no insuperable necessities de re or de

cogitatione. Here I agree with

W. V. Quine, though for more than merely formal or semantic reasons. The
advantage I draw from all this is simply to allow, wherever useful, disciplined
departures from such canonical doctrines as Frege's view of bivalence and
Aristotle's view of essence and accident. Both Frege and Aristotle favor modal

28
necessities that they cannot convincingly ensure. By contrast, relativism and
historicism require the conceptual freedom that rejecting modal necessity makes
possible. Once you see that, you see how natural it is to replace the familiar canon,
which is at least implicitly committed to a strict bivalence and to some derivative of
essentialism. Aristotle's Metaphysics Gamma is very close to being the archetype of
the master canon.

It's the opposing strategy that counts. If you cleave to the primacy of the usual
models of objective inquiry in the physical sciences, you are bound to be attracted
to the adequacy of bivalence and the reasonableness of conceding nomological
necessities. But if you admit that the cultural world is as real as the physical, that
it embraces causal efficacy, that it is emergent in its sui generis way, that it is
implicated in the competence of any inquiry, you will be bound to treat that world
as historically constituted. You will already then have made provision for
historicism and relativism!

I can sweeten the argument a little. Consider a few associated distinctions. For one:
assuming we adopt a coherent and self-consistent form of relativism (which many
wrongly believe to be impossible), there is no reason why a relativistic logic and a
bivalent logic should not be compatible, so long as we impose relevance constraints
on the assignment of truth-values (in accord with each) so as not to produce formal
inconsistencies in the mere assignment of such values; for a second: it is entirely
possible to subscribe, piecemeal, to either logic without supposing that to advocate
a relativistic logic in, say, literary criticism or history obliges us to subscribe to
relativism in all other areas of inquiry (though it is not to preclude the possibility
either); hence, for a third: there is nothing paradoxical in holding that there may be
bivalent grounds on which to vindicate the piecemeal use of a relativistic logic.
Furthermore, we may be as informal as we please here--even ad hoc--in mingling
our logics, as in literary and art criticism. For example, wherever the meaning of the
words of Shakespeare's Sonnets are not contested (in the context of interpreting a
particular piece), there need be no resistance to treating--in bivalent terms--the
assignment of verbal meaning to standard words: on the contrary, it may provide an
appealing basis on which to defend a relativistic rather than a bivalent reading of
competing interpretations. We are free to choose whatever "logic" fits our critical
practice better than another that would oblige us to disallow interpretations that we
emphatically do not wish to discard--but cannot justify bivalently: famously,
Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Sleep."

If you concede all this, you cannot fail to see that relativism is bound to prosper by
piecemeal gains--perhaps most straightforwardly in the business of interpreting
literary and other artworks. I find that entirely reasonable. But notice that those
who insist (rightly or wrongly) that it makes no sense to apply relativism to physics
or mathematics have not thereby dented relativism's prospects at all. It's more
important to show just where relativism works best than to insist that it cannot
have an inning in this or that particular inquiry. Once we gain a toehold, we may
consider grounds for expanding relativism's application--for instance in history, in
psychoanalysis, in the right description of moral and political events, in

29
conventional conversation, possibly then in philosophy itself and even in high-level
explanatory physics. Once we give up modal necessities and concede the
constructivist reading of realism, there is no compelling way to foreclose on the
eligibility of a relativistic logic wherever one is wanted. What counts as objectivity is
itself a critical construction, subject to reasonable revision relative to our changing
interests and purposes. The conclusion must surely strike you as unforced, despite
the overwhelming animus against relativism itself. In short, if relativism is coherent
and self-consistent, if it has an advantage over bivalence in one domain or another,
or at least over an exclusive use of bivalence, if we abandon all presumption of
cognitive privilege, apodicticity, modal constraints on objectivity, then relativism will
win hands down! What else is there to say?

I have deliberately proceeded in the most general way in relativism's favor in order
to avoid any semblance of special pleading. The history of relativism is rather
curious, in the sense that the tired arguments that anciently intoned the necessary
incoherence of relativism (in Plato's Theaetetus and Aristotle's Metaphysics Gamma)
are still thought decisive to this day. But they are not unequal to the task; because,
in the Metaphysics, Aristotle depends on the impossibility of ever deviating from the
conceptual scheme of essential invariance and accident; and because, in the
Theaetetus, Socrates confines his attack on Protagoras to the offer of an obviously
incoherent and self-defeating option. There's no reason to suppose that relativists
need be as stupid as the contemporary use of the ancient arguments requires, even
if there once was a point to the ancient objections. (Socrates unaccountably
replaces the ordinary sense of "true" with the preposterous proposal that relativists
insist--must insist--that "true" means "true-for-X," meaning, by that "relationalist"
interpretation, that we never admit p to be true in any sense that every possible
claimant could share. But, that's plain nonsense.)

I have tried for many years to demonstrate the formal coherence of relativism. I
believe I've succeeded. But opponents--many, by the way, concerned with the logic
of interpretive criticism in the arts and history and other cultural matters--profess
to see no point to the exercise. Why should we, they ask, abandon bivalence or
essentialism, when those canonical resources are at our beck and call? The answer
stares you in the face. The cultural world is a constructed world, constituted out of
the emergent competences of linguistically and lingually endowed agents
(themselves part of that same world, hence attuned to it: attuned to perceiving,
understanding, creating, and transforming it). Pertinent inquiry is directed to
describing, interpreting, molding, changing the "meanings" (the Intentional
structures) of the denotata of that world, and there is no known way to fix such
structures in any sense that would favor bivalence and invariance or fit the practice
of the physical sciences. Meaning or Intentionality, I suggest, cannot be captured
except in the flux of historical life.

I am certainly familiar with arguments favoring the "canonical" line--in the arts.
Monroe Beardsley, as I've remarked, may well be its most ardent champion. But
Beardsley made his case by assimilating "meanings" to "properties," which ignores
the hermeneutic, reflexive nature of self-understanding in the human world; and

30
even Beardsley conceded (however lightly) the conceptual difficulties of his own
view, which he could never strengthen against the rejection of necessary invariance
(bivalence) or some form of essentialism (objective properties that do not vary or are
not alterable under interpretation). But what if Beardsley's argument fails? (As of
course it does.)

IV

I have the cart before the horse, you'll say. But the question nags: Why bother at all
with relativism and historicism? Contrary to the usual verdict, it's terribly easy to
form a consistent version of each that would come to terms with the ancient
objections against relativism, would accommodate the modern puzzles of history,
and would do so more resourcefully than the presumptive canon. But you insist on
the evidence. Fair enough.

The best clue I can offer runs as follows: you must distinguish between relativism
as (i) a theory about a choice of suitable truth-values properly fitted to one inquiry
or another and (i') a report about "cultural relativity"--

the sheer historical scatter, the diversity, even incompatibility--of the beliefs,
norms, practices, and interests of different societies or societies at different times;
and you must distinguish between historicism as (ii) a pointed theory about the
nature and process of culturally informed thought and practice, a theory that
rejects the supposed neutrality, invariance, universal adequacy of the "rules" of
reason, sometimes said to be imprinted on human nature, despite the vagaries of
history, and (ii') the mere narrative empirical order, whether descriptive or
explanatory, of particular human careers. The principal difference between the
items of each pair is that the first item (of each pair) is a second-order philosophical
claim and the second no more than a garden-variety empirical fact
uncontroversially shared by the partisans and opponents of relativism and
historicism. Interestingly, relativism is an ancient philosophical doctrine, but
historicism is not: it dates roughly from the late eighteenth century. By contrast,
first-order relativity and first-order history belong to every age.

Now, neither relativism nor historicism claims a distinct source of knowledge that
has been neglected by the familiar accounts. No. They claim instead (in different
ways) that objectivity is more problematic than the canon supposes. That's all.

Relativism cannot be more than a fragment of a larger theory. On the supposition

that the denotata of this or that sector of inquiry justify us in refusing to apply a
strict bivalent logic to the run of judgments ranging over such referents, we fall
back to a relativistic logic--by fitting our epistemology and metaphysics to our
practice. The rationale for relativism lies with a theory regarding the nature of a
part of the real world and what it would be possible to defend in the way of
pertinent truth-claims. What is important is how relativism is philosophically
motivated, not the bare confrontation between two "logics."

31
The rest of the story is entirely straightforward. All that is needed is that we invoke,
where wanted, the formal resources of a many-valued logic (suitably demarcated
from the resources of a bivalent logic), in which claims that, on a bivalent logic (but
not now), would count as contraries, incompatibles, or contradictories, and are
open to joint validation--not as jointly true of course, only when assigned suitably
diminished truth-like values. I call such judgments "incongruent": I take them to be
objectively confirmable; and I take their "objectivity" to be a constructive (second-
order) posit matching our analysis of the domain in question. In context, we disjoin
True and False, keep False and bracket True (we need not abandon True), and allow
a range of new (many-valued) truth-like values to intervene between, and oppose,
both True and False (so that the denial of the True does not entail the False, and
the denial of the False does not entail the True). The rest has to do with the
cosmetics of inquiry: with our sense of rigor, with avoiding arbitrariness, with the
generosity of our logic.

There appear to be more historicists than relativists, which is surprising, since, as I

see matters, historicism is or entails an adherence to some form of the relativism I
have just sketched. In any case, historicism should be construed as any of several
narrowly circumscribed doctrines that explain why the canonical view of neutrality
(or objectivity construed as neutrality) is untenable and why, as a result, whatever
objectivity we care to defend cannot be recovered except in constructivist terms that
change with the movement of history. In particular, historicism holds that thinking
(the paradigm of thinking) is historicized: contingently constituted and subject,
through use and societal change, to ongoing historical transformation.

Broadly speaking, we suppose (that is, we say)--the matter is a vexed one--that

physical predicables are determinate, in the sense that they can in principle be
made increasingly determinate by ever-more specific determination; alternatively,
we say that all predicables are general and therefore determinable, however
determinate we take them to be. (Think of increasingly determinate shades of red.)
But "meanings" or Intentional structures are not determinable in that sense: the
increasing specificity of an interpretation of a poem, say, is not normally a linearly
increased determination of some already determinate "meaning." That is at least
one important reason for invoking relativistic constraints under historicist
conditions. Also, short of Platonism, we know of no way to fix the determinate
general feature of any predicable (apart from acknowledging that every predicable is
in fact general); and we have every reason to believe that what we should count as a
proper extension of a given predicate will be a function of the historicized drift of its
consensual use. For these and related reasons, historicism is well-nigh impossible
to oppose and, because of that, relativism is as well.

But if you concede the point, you cannot fail to see that there is every prospect that
both historicism and relativism are bound to extend their fiefdoms into other
inquiries that may reach up to the supposed exemplars of neutral or canonical
science. I remind you once again that it was Kuhn's most important intuition that
the recovery of scientific neutrality is--as he himself came to see quite hopeless. I
take Kuhn to have been right about that, but to have been unable to defend the

32
claim compellingly. The requirements of objectivity ineluctably show the way to
vindicating the central role of relativism and historicism in all inquiry. But, of
course, just as we rightly reject the ancient prejudices against relativism, we are
entitled to set aside incoherent versions of historicism as well--for instance,
Ranke's.

33
The Understanding of Foreign World Interpretations

Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik

Foreign cultures have a peculiar fascination for us today. The different way of
dressing and adorning oneself, the different way of living and organising everyday
life, the difference of the language, customs and way of seeing the world - all this
provokes curiosity and interest in learning more about other cultures and in
learning to understand these cultures from their own perspectives.

At the same time it is important to recognize that this desire to understand is by no

means an original and general attitude towards other peoples, but itself a result of
our cultural development. Where cultures foreign to one another meet, they first of
all tend to see the things that separate them, which means that they meet one
another at best with indifferent tolerance; but often this can also climax in a
pathological fear of loss of one’s own identity or in a hostile aggressiveness to
everything foreign.

Also the understanding of what is different in the other culture is by no means as

easy to execute as often assumed, but on the contrary an exceedingly fragile
dialectical process, which I will try to illuminate in the following.

1. A General Notion of Understanding

Not only in ethnology but also in general, we speak of understanding if we try to

grasp and comprehend another person from his own subjectivity. That already puts
us in the middle of the dilemma of understanding, however, for neither subjectively
nor objectively can we penetrate to the core of the subjectivity of another person or
culture. The theoretical notion which wishes to trace the understanding back to
empathy, overlooks the fact that empathy undermines that very understanding of
the Other, for it would mean an intrusion into the inner world of the Other and a
coerciing them with one’s own feelings, views and thoughts, without paying
attention to what the Other says. Understanding the Other requires exactly the
opposite, a suspending of one’s own subjectivity, feelings, views and thoughts, in
order to open oneself to what the Other is saying. Understanding the Other
presupposes the complete acceptance of the subjectivity of the Other .

Understanding, therefore, is, since it can not penetrate into the subjectivity of the
Other, dependent on the utterances and visible deeds of the Other, for it can only
grasp the Other from its gestures, utterances and acts. But the subjectivity of the
Other does not emerge in the objective, visible deeds as such. The latter must first
be interpreted, whereby this interpreting act starts from one’s own subjectivity.

In understanding, therefore, we have two contradictory, dialectically mutually

communicating movements before us, which never fully come to rest, since they
refer to the subjectivity of the Other, without being able to reach it. 1. The material
basis of understanding the Other is the experience of actual utterances and

34
objective manifestations of the Other. In their objective manifestation they do not
yet reveal the Other to us however, they must first be related back to the
subjectivity of the Other through our interpretation. This act of interpretation,
however, is always only our interpretative approach towards the subjectivity of the
Other. 2. The formal basis of understanding, by contrast, entails the complete
recognition of the subjectivity of the Other, which implies a suspension of any
interpretive monopoly on the part of one’s own subjectivity in order to open oneself
to manifestations of the Other in word and deed, to be able to understand him from
his point of view.

Although understanding is an act of knowledge, which is performed only by one

individual in relation to another, it presupposes 3. the possibility, in principle, of
communication with the other individual. Such a basis is fundamentally possible
with all human beings. The communication is however also the last goal horizon of
any understanding of the Other, for such understanding does not find fulfilment in
pure knowledge, but opens up a horizon for shared communication, that is at the
same time human and aware of its practical and moral qualiity.

2. The Ethnological Concept of Understanding

Ethnology has been aware of the fact that understanding what is foreign is one of
its most fundamental problems since its scientific beginnings. "Understanding"
means here the attempt to grasp a foreign culture as it understands itself in ist
daily life.

In contrast to the preceding forms of procuring ethnological data on foreign

cultures, the first generations of a scientifically thought-out ethnology have
recognised and tested the problem of field research and ultimately found the
methodical answer to the problem of how to approach a foreign culture in
participating observation.

Today the research institution of participating observation has been generally

recognised beyond the boundaries of ethnology in other social sciences and is
discussed and refined - with different methodical emphasis - as ethnomethodology,
symbolic interactionism or phenomenology of behaviour.

A culture is determined by the behaviour of its members, by behaviour which

extends from daily essential activities and human relationships up to the symbolic
interpretations in which the members of a culture reflect the world and themselves
in it. Behaviour in all its forms constitutes the reality in which the members of a
culture experience the world and themselves in it. That underlines that not only
material works or social relationships are the product of human behaviour, but also
that which counts as reality for the members of a culture, that is their experience of
nature and the way they explain to themselves the world in which they experience
themselves as part of it and from which they determine their behaviour. The

35
members of each culture experience themselves in interpretations constituted by
their cultural experience. If we want to understand foreign culture, we must try to
comprehend it from the overall context of the interpretations constituted in
everyday behaviour.

This appears first of all only to be a revision of the demand for participating
observation, but proves however very quickly to be a radicalization of the problem,
which threatens to question the entire institution of participating observation as a
secure starting point for understanding foreign cultures. As long as the
observations refer to daily activities and habits, there appear to be no problem,
since it would seem unproblematic that we can understand these from experience
in our own culture. However, where we leave our familiar own experience and find
ourselves in the sense world of an archaic society and confronted with a fully
foreign, even eery way of seeing the world in the magic and myths of another
culture, suddenly our familiar patterns of how to understand the foreign collapse.
Since however these ways of seeing the world have a determining influence in the
daily actions and communication of the foreign culture, it becomes subsequently
doubtful whether we have at all understood also their daily behaviour, having
allowed ourselves to colour the evidence from the expectations we bring from our
own societies.

3. Understanding Foreign Interpretations of the World

The problem may still not be visible for many even now, for they live in the safe
belief that our scientific description of reality is unquestionably valid, so that in
comparison magical and mythical thinking show themselves to be prelogical, as
Lucien Lévy (1927) already explained.

But this belief proves very quickly to be a superstition, if we take recourse to our
mode of thinking and ask ourselves a procedural question about the criteria which
could prove it valid as a method which allows us to gather correct data. For then
the fact emerges that none of our sciences can claim in any point whatsoever to
reach reality as such; they prove, rather, to be more or less "linguistic games" as
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) put it which give us rules to organize our experience in
structures which however by no means copy reality itself. All in all, our scientific
rationality is likewise only one interpretation of reality among many and by no
means a privileged form of the correct method of gathering data on reality. It proves
to be superior to other interpretations in many areas of our daily life, but in some
areas and above all in the context of foreign ways of living it shows itself to be at the
same time fully underdeveloped.

Via the reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein this philosophical criticism of scientific

methodology entered especially the ethnomethodological discussion and has made
it possible for the ethnomethodologists to also observe and describe our conduct
and thinking via participating observation just as Evans-Pritchard demonstrated

36
with respect to the magical thinking of the Azande. There is, then, no privileged
interpretation of reality, but only different cultural interpretation systems, which
can be analysed and described with ethnomethodology.

Indeed there can be no genuine understanding for such scientific reconstruction of

interpretations and modes of action; for although one can explain by
reconstructiion why a member of a culture interprets a situation in this or that way
and acts accordingly, that does not occur because of the "understanding" of the
actual behaviour. Even one’s own interpretations and real-life decisions are
alienated from our self-understanding by such ethnomethodological reconstruction
of their interpretation and action basis, i.e. the scientific description never reaches
the core of existential, practical reason, from which we or members of a foreign
culture think and act. When ethnomethodology reconstructs interpretations and
acts from a real-life context, it alienates these simultaneously from the actual
meaning and decision horizon of the people concerned.

Without being able to enter here even roughly into all nuances of the
ethnomethodological discussion, we should include a second example, the science
novels of Carlos Castaneda, on the teachings of the Indian Don Juan. Here it is
fully immaterial whether the Indian Don Juan really exists, or whether he is an
invention of Castaneda, or whether both Don Juan and Castaneda represent an
ingenious construction to lead ethnomethodology ad absurdum.

In these novels the ethnologist and ethnomethodologist Castaneda, sets out to learn
from an Indian, Yaqui magician Don Juan, something about hallucinatory herbs,
and we find out how the ethnologist’s scientific credulity and western rationality is,
with the aid of Don Juan, step by step shaken by selective, but increasingly more
and more strange experiences, which he cannot integrate into his scientifically
preformed daily sense patterns of reality, and in the process he is enabled to
understand the strange interpretations of the Indian more and more. The
ethnologist is extremely cleverly introduced as the conscientious scientist who
wants no more than to observe loyally, and who thereby simultaneously in
penetrating obstinacy refuses to understand anything not familiar to him from his
experience and science background, and who therefore is again and again shocked
by the to him inexplicable experiences.

Don Juan, for his part, combines the wisdom of Socrates, Wittgenstein and
Heidegger - he is like Sokrates in his continual efforts to make the ethnologist reach
understanding, reminiscent of Wittgenstein in his attempt to shake scientific
rationality in linguistic games, like Heidegger when he speaks like an oracle on the
fact that we cannot reach reality linguistically, although we nevertheless find
ourselves in it. The serialized novel of Carlos Castaneda admits of no other end
than that one day the ethnologist will be so shaken in his scientific self-
understanding that he stops being an ethnologist and scientist and like Don Juan
begins to live from reality, which needs no scientifically mediated explanation
anymore. Here a way is implied, then, which makes complete understanding of the

37
thinking of the Yaqui magicain possible, but this way entails a complete initiation
into the world of Don Juan - from here there is no stepping back.

In the understanding of a foreign culture, where it becomes a problem for us in the

foreignness of its modes of interpretation and in its realities, then, we find ourselves
in the following dilemma: On the one hand it appears that there can be no genuine
understanding of what is foreign, since we all live from fully different interpretations
of reality, which do not allow common denominators of understanding. Then only
an ethnomethodological description of different world interpretations and actions is
possible. If we accept this, though, we cannot understand even how we make sense
of our own experience; this then appears to us, where we approach it
ethnomethodologically, foreign to us, a superstition like any other.

On the other hand an understanding of the foreign does seem to exist, but only at
the price of a total relinquishing of one’s own scientific explanations of reality and
complete initiation in the experience and interpretations of what then is no longer
so foreign. There is, however, no scientific statement on iit, since precisely scientific
explanations of reality must be given up to understand the completely different way
of thinking from its own point of view. Each meaningful experience can only be
understood therefore from its own point of view, i.e. there is no understanding
through participating observation; and one can only understand that interpretation
of reality of which one is existentially convinced and which one lives.

4. What Makes Understanding Possible

Now the dilemma seems to be radical and total, and yet it is not philosophically
acceptable. For it is based on the presupposition that the interpretation of the world
and the behaviour of each culture absolutely constitute and correspond to one
another. Both attempts ignore the possibility that we can well distance ourselves to
our own cultural experience and world interpretations and that this can lead to a
practical change in our cultural attitude. We are, then, not necessarily completely
chained to the world interpretations of our occidental experience; we can relativize
our initial interpretations and do so, where we engage in understanding foreign
cultures in their own mode of self-understanding. But the fact that we can
transcend our own modes of interpretation and enter upon foreign ones does not
mean a conversion to the foreign, but does however mean a change of attitude with
regard to our own sense of destiny. Philosophical reflection on practice in our
western culture has always been aware of this possibility.

The ethnomethodologists absorb only one aspect of philosophical reflection, when

they register from philosophical science criticism that no science can reach reality
as such, but only develop a regulated procedure which makes it possible to organize
given phenomena according to certain structures. They forget to add that Kant -
from whom this judgment ultimately comes - at the same time underlines that we
as protagonists nevertheless always find ourselves practically in reality and are

38
thus put in decision situations, although we can never catch up with theoretically.
Kant’s primacy of practical reason says, with reference to our understanding
problem, that we can never relax - as the ethnomethodologists think - with a total
relativisation of world interpretations as they appear before theoretical reason, since
we are always asked as persons in reality, in which we live, to stand up for
something and to make decisions. All our theoretical knowledge and so also the
theoretical relativisation of all interpretations of reality ultimately - whether this is
confessed or not - stand in the service of practical tasks of human self-
determination.

Two things must then be ascertained: In the first place the relativizing theoretical
reason protects us from wrong arrogance of the sciences towards other world
interpretations and thus makes a description of foreign sense worlds possible, (for
with our scientific knowledge we do not have by any means reality as such
available, in contrast to which all other explanations would prove to be illusions
and superstitions, but with the sciences we only weight and structure our
experiences differently. But we cannot let it go with this relativisation however, for
secondly we always find ourselves practically called to instigate meaningful action
in reality, and all our theoretical activity serves in the end to fulfil this practical
demand. It is not any disinterested knowledge interest and passion for collecting
data that makes us explore foreign cultures and foreign ways of seeing the world,
but rather we can say that the understanding of the foreign serves us both morally
and practically in communicating with other people as well as in aiding our self-
understanding in our human existence.

That does not mean that we should look for alternative world interpretations in
foreign cultures, although it can hold individual alternatives, but foreign experience
and world interpretations must be understandable to the degree that they reach our
own practical decisions on meaning. This does not mean on the other hand that the
foreign should be alienated and related back to our own already prevalent
experience and world interpretations, but just conversely, that the foreign must be
understood to be a challenge, making us reconsider our own current experience
and world interpretations anew and perhaps change them also.

5. Ernst Cassirers Phenomenology of Mythical Thinking

Now we have reached the point at which we can consider Ernst Cassirer’s important
work Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923-29). Although it already was
published in the 20s, it has not yet found adequate recognition in the literature on
cultural philosophy and ethnological discussion. Mediating Kant and Hegel, taking
up thematically the large drafts of Humboldt and Schelling, Cassirer develops a
philosophy of the genesis of consciousness forms - in the first volume with reference
to language, in the second to "mythical thinking" and in the third to the conceptual
thinking of the sciences.

39
Those who - from the magic up to daily practice as the ethnomethologists in present
discussion - preach total relativism of reality concepts and action concepts in highly
differentiated, scientific terminloogy, know not what he is saying or doing. For such
a conception forgets that the conceptual thinking which is its operating basis not
only historically but also in the logic of its concept of reality has broken away from
genetical predispositions of mythical thinking by an act of negation and criticism .
By no means does that mean that through this act of emancipation thinking only
wins and has not also lost modes of experience. But an analysis of different
interpretations of reality must accommodate this fundamental revolution of
consciousness through a differentiation of categorial operation in mythical and
scientific thinking. Cassirer tries this in differentiating intellectual form, perceptual
form and mythical life forms in his comprehension classes of understanding,
learning and self-determination. Only via this categorial analysis, which presents at
the same time a genesis of human intellectual forms, can we begin to understand
the reality of mythical world interpretations.

It would seem appropriate to interpret Cassirer’s approach a little differently in two

points, though. 1) Of course Cassirer, as a critical philosopher in Kantian tradition,
is never duped by positivist faith in science, indeed he emphasizes even explicitly
that myths can never completely be replaced by science, but lives on for instance in
artistic and religious experience, and yet his analysis of intellectual forms is always
affirmative towards science. By contrast, we today already experience the crisis-like
boundaries and the negative consequences of scientific efficiency in all areas of our
own experience, so that science criticism for us must have another, more radical
accent. At the same time we experience mythical thinking not only as a still
influential initial stage but also as a suppressed one. For us there can of course be
no step back to myths, but the deeper understanding of mythical thinking can be
helpful in the disclosure and overcoming of the negative contractions of scientific
efficiency. 2) Of course Cassirer also emphasizes that myths must be comprehended
from their total context of the life form; and yet it is for him the myth, from which
an archaic life world must be approached, and so for him - as previously for
Schelling the becoming of mythical consciousness in the differentiations of his
categories is the "subject of the culture process". In contrast it appears necessary to
us to see the myth as a moment of the total context of cultural experience and thus
to recognize social behaviour itself in keeping with materialistic theory of history as
the "subject of the cultural process", whereby mythical thinking belongs as a
reflection form directly to social behaviour.

Now we return, after an overlong excursion, to our initial problem of the

understanding of foreign cultures from our own experience. This digression, which
led us further to the problem of understanding foreign world interpretations, was
necessary however, to get away from the misunderstanding that we could
understand foreign experience by applying our own life and concepts to it. Such
attempts, which allege that they can start from some general human experience,
wrongly apply our experiential self-image to the understanding of foreign cultures.

40
If we want to understand a foreign culture from its own point of view and yet avoid
misconstruing it from our understanding horizon, so must open up on the one
hand a dialogue with the foreign which also questions our own culture and on the
other hand - as paradoxical as this first may seem - reach a comprehensive theory
of the forms of social behaviour in history, from which we can grasp the world of a
foreign culture including their mythical world interpretations from the moments
that structure human behaviour.

Translated by Allan R. Smith

41
The Art of the Ethnographer

Ronnie M. Peplow

Science, Art and Culture

There still is a gap between Art and Science.
Science is conceptual, it tries to integrate things into an order of general and
abstract laws and principles and it aims at an understanding of the reasons of
things. Art on the other hand is visual, it confronts us with the appearance and
gives us an opportunity to experience and enjoy the richness and variety of the
visual appearance of things. We learn about and train our perception and intuitions
by art, we discover here a more vivid and colorful image of reality than by science.

This definition of art in contrast to science is given by the Philosopher of Culture,

Ernst Cassirer in his Essay on Man in 1944.i[1] Cassirer argues for a plurality of
world views, but analyzes and characterizes the difference of science and art in a
traditional way. Science is conceptual, reasonable and leads to general models of
reality. Art shows us the colorful side of the world in visualising it in a special way.
Whereas science seems to be an "abbreviation of reality", Art is a "continuous
process of concretion".ii[2] In science the phenomena and data drawn from
experience are the raw material from which the analyzing, sytematizing and
generalizing of the scientific endeavour starts. In the end, the individual
characteristics of a "case" are eliminated, what is left is an abstract formula that fits
the general structure of numerous single cases. The richness of experience is
narrowed down to the solid scientific knowledge. In art, the role of experience is
very different: "Aesthetic experience is (...) pregnant with infinite possibilities which
remain unrealized in ordinary sense experience."iii[3] As opposed to science, art
seems to be a playground where everything is possible. Therefore some scientists
think it is not a serious form of human experience. But Cassirer is not one of them.
In his Philosophy of Culture all symbolic forms are equal. "It is characteristic of the
nature of man that he is not limited to one specific and single approach to reality
but can choose his point of view and so pass from one aspect of things to
another."iv[4]

What I will bring into question in this paper is the strict separation of science and
art. My thesis is that in the so called soft sciences, the cultural sciences, both
forms, science and art mingle. This is so because the object, "culture", is very
special. Since the invention of the concept of culture in the 18th century, there have
been two major discourses about what culture essentially is: a capacity or a
system.v[5] None of these concepts cover all aspects of the phenomenon "culture". By
the use of one of the different vocabularies, a shape of our model of culture is
preformed, which has got its advantages and its limits.

The idea that so called "primitive" cultures are static, because they have no history,
implies the possibility of a description that grasps all relevant aspects of a culture.

42
Culture as a totality is a system or has a basic structure. But a cultural dynamic
does not fit in this model of culture very well, it will remain as an accessory to the
cultures basics. The consequences of cultural and social change are the subject of
modern theory and philosophy. Very different thinkers like Nietzsche Spengler,
Dilthey, Weber, Wittgenstein, Simmel and others, thematize the end of the system,
which is a symptom of the fact, that the description of society and culture as
totalities is not satisfying anymore. The big ideologies tried to hide this insight, but
in a way they have been reactions to the instability of the modern cultural
consciousness. Georg Simmel for example speaks of the "tragedy of culture"vi[6],
which he sees in the fact that the cultral tradition is so overwhelming that the
individual is not able to realize its self in the world. This at the same time means
that the end of the new forms of expression, such as the cultural forms (for instance
arts and architecture) seem to be empty and lifeless. The whole European cultural
critique since Rousseau starts with this observation: the cultural forms of the noble
or the bourgoise are of bad quality, because they are repetitive. And since
Columbus´ discovery there is an image that promises a different form of cultural
life: In the primitive cultures, the bond that ties the community, the bond that in
Europe has been destroyed by factors of civilisation, such as industrial revolution
and social changes, that have prevented developement, still guaranties authentic
forms of cultural production. Right from the beginning, modernism and anti-
modernism are two sides of the same coin.vii[7]
So what we have got is a simple feature: little primitive cultures in which the people
are able to live with authentic cultural forms and big modern societies on the other
hand where people are in a dilemma, because they cannot use the traditional form
to express themselves nor develop new forms. The first step into modernity seems to
be the destruction of tradition. Tradition in primitive cultures is seen as something
positive, because it gives life a shape, tradition in modern societies has got a
negative connotation, because it hinders people to be individuals.

This dilemma or paradoxicalness is derived from different anthropological concepts

underlying the two concepts of culture: firstly, man the creator is the modern
definition, formulated in modern times for modern societies and secondly man the
authentic cultural agent, which is the definition of man living in other cultures. The
second definition is made in modernity by cultural theorists and although it seems
like all human beings live in a cultural environment, the difference between the
tragic modernity and the authentic paradise is impossible to bridge.

What Simmel called the tragedy, Zygmunt Baumann describes as the

paradoxicalness of the two different dicourses on culture, the discourse on the
system and the discourse on capacity. Reformulating Simmel, he interprets the
paradoxicalness like this: "The more self-conscious, determined and resourceful the
ordermaking urge is, the more visible is the birth-mark of fragility carried by its
products; the weaker the products‘ authority appears to be, the less 'timeless'
proves their fixity."viii[8]
Alongside the ideology of modern structuralism, which emphasised the idea of the
system, also in the theory of language, there has always been the position that
language cannot be described by one model exclusively. Wilhem von Humboldt once

43
said, that language is both a system and a capacity, ergon and energeia, a work
and an energy. Modern linguistic, in trying to become a serious science,
concentrated its effort on the ergon, while it still seems to be impossible to make the
energeia an object of exact and solid scientific endeavour.ix[9]
What is a true problem in the field of language can be applied to all fields of culture,
because language is a special symbolic form. It is situated between science and
myth, which means it bears the function of distance, but is still sensual. Cassirer
who entered into the heritage of Humboldts philosophy of language and worked it
out as a philosophy of culture criticizes Simmel‘s "tragedy", because he sees just
one aspect of the "dialectical structure of culture."x[10] Cultural pessimism does not
realize that the stableness of cultural works are not a hindrance for cultural
production but its precondition. To be inventive means to work with the old forms
as material for new ones. Cassirer is not just optimistic, he uncovers one of the
central laws of cultural production: it is necessary to master the tradition and to
inscribe oneself in it in an individual form. The idea of an artistic genius has been
one formulation of this insight in the function of culture.

What has all this to do with the Art of the Ethnographer? My thesis is that
ethnography as a part of cultural theory has to deal with the above described
problem. And most ethnographers deceide wether s/he tends to the system or the
capacity. But if the system is preferred, even in the most functionalistic case, we
can demonstrate that the ethnographer had to use the knowledge of culture as
capacity as well.
The tragedy, the paradoxicalness or the dialectics of culture, a common motive in
modern thinking, becomes one motif of theorizing culture, if we take a closer look
on artistical and cultural production. I will argue, that theory and science as forms
of cultural praxis, are not sitiuated on some kind of a meta level. It is possible to
have a look from a distance, but still, this transcending is part of the function of
cultural production. "to look from a distance" does not mean to look from above,
from a "higher" point of view.
I will argue that for decribing and theorizing "culture", we need to reflect on the
paradoxicalness, the dialectic of culture, which in cultural theory means that we
have to be aware of the translucence of the borders between science and art. I will
use three ethnographers as examples: Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and
Michel Leiris. With the discussion of their writings I will give a little categorization of
ethnography and demonstrate how the dialectics of culture is visible on a first level
in their work and on a second level in the new paradigm of cultural anthropology.

The problematic text

A time companion of Cassirer was the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. His
major works on the different aspects of the cultural life of the people in northwest
Melanesia have been a breakthrough for a new paradigm in cultural anthropology.
Malinowski established a new method in fieldwork, participant observation, and he
defined an ambitous aim for the case study: it should give the reader a vision of the
native as he is, show his point of view of his world. In his first monography about

44
the people in northwest Melanesia, where he did research in 1914-15 and 1917-18,
he defined as the final goal of ethnography: "to grasp the native´s point of view, his
relation to life, to realise his vision of his world."xi[11]
An enterprise like this cannnot be pure scientifically in the above mentioned sense.
A writer, who likes to give an insight in the world view of another culture has to
paint a vivid picture instead of giving pure information about the material culture
and the social institutions. It is impossible to represent the world view of another
culture, the point of view of the native, in scientific concepts only. To comprehend
the world view of a member of another culture is more than what can be grasped by
concepts. The writer Malinowski knew about that. His Argonauts are not just a
report from the field, but a vivid picture of another world. The facts that the
fieldworker gathered, remain dead material unless they are presented in a special
way, so that the reader will be lead to an "understanding" of the "natives life".
Malinowski called this the "ethnographers magic, by which he [the ethnographer] is
able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life."xii[12]
Although he did not explain what this magic is, his works like the Argonauts of the
Western-Pacific and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia are still
interesting to read and enjoyable, not because of their objective truth about the
societies they describe, but because of their literary attempt and style. They are
convincing. The reader believes in the authority of the ethnographer. He has been
there for all of us.
Cultural Anthropology is one discipline among the humanities that had and still
has a close relationship with literature. Before it has been established as an
academical discipline, the knowledge about other cultures has been collected and
written down by various kinds of travellers, explorers and adventurers, most of
them had no intention to contribute to a scientifical discussion. On the other hand,
scholars in general did not travel, they used to do armchair anthropology,xiii[13] a
speculation about the origin of man and culture inspired by the the various
travellers‘ literature. Malinowski tried to bridge these two branches of anthropology:
he created a model for fieldwork, a methodology that could have been followed by
others and he established a form of canonical text, which every discipline needs: the
monography.
The monography is a problematic text: it pretends to be objective, to represent the
other culture as it is, to give an idea how reality looks like in another culture... and
it is fiction.xiv[14] As long as the ethnographer is in the field, s/he is collecting data,
of which s/he does not have an overview, which s/he constructs at home, going
through her/his notes, trying to sythesize the partiality and arbitrary of her/his
observations, interviews and impressions. The dominant model in cultural theory
has been and mostly still is a holistic one: a culture is a social functional context of
different symbolical systems, it is an individuality, a pseudo entity, that can be
described as a wholeness, integrating the variety of human life. No one ever
experiences culture as such, as a totality, but the ethnographer in trying to give the
reader an impression of the other culture, is constructing an artifical thing which is
cut loose from its relation to its history and its neighbours, just by using the
restricted amount of information s/he has acquired from other books and the
collection of data s/he got during a few week or months which s/he spent in a
foreign country with a group of strangers.

45
What happens at the ethnographer´s desk? What are her/his problems in writing a
coherent (objective) text? What are her/his intentions and what is s/he aiming at?
These questions have not been asked for a long time in ethnography. It has been
the gifted writers among anthropologists who have been able to write books that
became popular. Ruth Benedict, Margret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss are a few
very famous examples.
But the problematic question about the relation between science and literature has
not been raised until the whole idea of cultural representation slipped into a crisis.
Nearly thirty years ago Clifford Geerts initiated the so called interpretive turn in
cultural anthropology with his concept of thick description. According to this model
the ethnographer gives an interpretation of the sign systems that the other culture
is. "Doing ethnograpy is trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a
manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations,
and tendencious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of
sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior."xv[15] The metaphor of culture
as a manuscript, that means culture as a text, has been very inspiring not only for
cultural anthropology, but for the whole field of cultural studies. But although the
idea of culture as a text solves some of the problems of ethnography, it does not
solve all of them and it causes new ones. With the textuality of culture still the
holism is not to be overcome. If the ethnographer is someone from the outside who
has the overview to perceive the text, even in the form Geertz describes, as an
incomplete manuscript, it appears like a culture as a net of meanings, has an
overall meaning altogether. It still is the scientist who uncovers the hidden meaning
of a culture and writes it down,xvi[16] and by that s/he produces knowledge about the
other culture (explicit) as well as gives evidence about the relation between her/his
own cultural framework and her/his object (implicit). By representation of the other
culture, by "writing down" the social discourse, by deciphering and naming the sign
systems, by his fiction, the ethnographer does not give just an individual and
subjective image of the object. S/he will situate the text in a body of other texts,
other description of that or nearby cultures, other texts about similar religious
systems, and so on. The product of this working process, the monography on a
certain culture, will then represent this culture. For a long time the image of the
Southern Sea as a paradise has been influenced by Margret Mead´s Coming of Age
in Samoa, a true story, which says more about Mead‘s theoretical background and
the jokes told by the girls she interviewed, than about their adolescence.xvii[17] But
for the readers and in a certain cultural discourse in the western world, the idea
that the Samoans lived a non repressive sex life before they got married, had got the
status of a fact.
To get to the second point, textuality does not only mean the metaphorical use of
culture as a text, but the other way round: that texts about other cultures are taken
to be "true", that they will be incorporated in the cultural discourse and cause
consequences . Edward Said calls this the "worldliness" of texts and he does not
limit it to cultural monographies. "It is not only that any text, if it is not immediately
destroyed, is a network of often colliding forces, but also that a text in its actually
being a text is a being in the world."xviii[18]

Scientific, Imaginative and Poetic Ethnography

46
Anthropological texts are about cultural alterity, what they represent is our
knowledge about the Other, and our understanding of the relation between Us and
Them. And with their worldliness, their being in the world, they shape our approach
to other cultures. "Representations are social facts"xix[19] in two ways: as documents
they represent a society´s way of dealing with alterity and as cultural works, they
prestructure our perception of alterity. The concentration on the system in cultural
holism misses not only the description of the other cultures‘ dynamics, it is also
blind to the involvement of anthropology in the process of Othering.xx[20] If
anthropology itself is not perceived as a cultural praxis, "an activity which is part of
what it studies," then the We of anthropology "remains an exclusive We, one that
leaves the Other outside on all levels of theorizing exept on the plain ideological
obfuscation, where everyone pays lip service to the 'unity of mankind.'"xxi[21] This
insight about the exclusion of the Other in anthropological writing is called the
crisis of representation, because anthropology as the science of cultural alterity
claimed to represent the other. As I argued before, this demand is not valid
anymore, but it still makes sense to analyze anthropological writing because what it
represents are models of our relationship with the cultural other. These models
depend on the way the writer deals with the discourses on culture as a system or as
a capacity. The more s/he is aware that culture is both and that the ethnograper is
involved in the praxis of cultural othering, the more s/he will tend towards an "open
description". Diaries are examples for such an enterprise. When Michel Leiris
discussed the question of a diary about the expedition, he came to the conclusion
that he should tell everything.xxii[22] Everything in this case means not only the
things that seems to be worth being documented, but also how he felt like while
doing research, dealing with people he hardly knew anything about. Leiris, who is
mainly talking about himself does not produce "knowledge" about the culture he
visited, he gives a report on how it is to do fieldwork in Africa, about his relation
with his "object".
Between the method of Malinowski‘s writing, which intended to establish a
canonical text for a science and the very personal writing of Leiris´ lies another
position.
Not every person who did ethnography and anthropology understood her/his work
as a merely scientific project. The first anthropological study about Japanese
culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict published in 1946
has been written on the basis of interviews and imagination. Benedict was much
more in love with literature than with science. Working with the great old man of
American Anthropology, Franz Boas, she was familiar with the then current
paradigm of ethnography. Boas is well known for his work on Northamerican
Indians. Although he never did the form of participant observation like Malinowski
(living among the natives like a native), he did fieldwork himself and sent his
students into the field. (Margret Mead‘s Coming of Age in Samoa, is such a work.
Mead has been sent to the Southern Sea to proove Boas‘ evolutionistic thesis, that
social repression on sexual life has been developed in higher cultures.)
Benedict had been a writer before she started studying anthropology and she
already had established an own style and a form. Working on a project on early
feminist writers, she intended to present the material in order to give the reader the
opportunity to reexperience the dominant motives in the lives of people of other

47
cultures . This form of empirical biography became the blueprint for her work on
Japan. In the empirical biography, Benedict "intended to present the material so
that the reader might share - reexperience - the dominat motives in a life different
from their own."xxiii[23] Reexperiencing is a special way of understanding, it demands
the ability to envision the others´ world in its difference without judging.
Philosophically influenced by Nietzsche‘s idea of two forms of cultures, appollonian
and dionysian,xxiv[24] she was convinced that every culture has a basic theme around
which the cultural patterns are taking shape. "A culture, like an individual, is a
more or less consistent pattern of thought and action."xxv[25] In the case of Japan, it
is the cultivation of the Chrysanthemum and the cult of the sword, a popular cult of
aestheticism, which fascinates Benedict and many others.xxvi[26] Around this theme
she wrote a cultural biography of Japan, which became a success in post-war
America and Japan. Although she had never been to the country she wrote about,
the book gives the reader the impression that s/he is able to understand the
experiences and emotions of the Japanese people. And it shows the Japanese as
human beings. This is very important.
Since Pearl Harbour, the Japanese were the most dangerous and unknown people
for the U.S. Benedict, working for the office of war, officially charged to write studies
on the national characters of others nations,xxvii[27] wanted to contribute to the
communication and understanding between the two war enemies. Her aim was not
to show the world view of the native, but to demonstrate that the most alien nation
(to the U.S.) has got a highly developed culture and that it is possible to understand
the way of Japanese life. From her point of view, anthropology as the science of
cultural difference has to demonstrate that "even bizarre behavior does not prevent
one´s understanding it."xxviii[28] Therefore her main problem was not to tell the truth
about Japan, but to use rhetoric and literary strategies in order to make this
bizarre behavior understandable. Japan was the impossible objectxxix[29] and
Benedict does not make it understandable by showing that the Japanese people do
things like We (here: the U.S. Americans) do, but that their behaviour has an inner
logic that is as logical or absurd as our own.
Using the dichotomy of We and They, Benedict deconstructs the American cultural
system: what is concluded at the end of a long list of comparisons is that we do
things like we do, not because it is better or more wise than to do them in another
manner, but because we do them like we do. The other culture is not been used to
criticize the own culture, just to show that every culture has its own inner logic, its
"design for living"xxx[30] and that one cultural system might be as good as the other.
But of course there is a lot of irritation coming from Benedicts work: if our own
habits and behaviour, compared to another one and perceived from a distance, can
look like the culture of a very strange and foreign tribe, then the confidence and
pride of the national Self develops a little crack.
The individual Self is in question with another ethnographer/writer, who came from
a surrounding where ethnography and art were intervowen: Michel Leiris was close
to the Parisian surrealists when he decided to participate on an expedition, lead by
Marcel Griaule, from Dakar to Djibouti. His Diary L´Afrique fantôme is scandalous:
he does not describe the other culture, but rather his impressions, his experiences
and his images. The diary is subjective, written to be published, but not pretending
to be scientifically objective.Leiris writes about the ethnographers who make strange

48
deals to get masks and other materials, who even steal sometimes to get what they
need for their work. He writes about the loneliness and desperation and about his
own disappointments.xxxi[31] He joined the expedition in a period of his life when he
already was desperate and he hoped that Africa would open his horizon. He wished
to make a new personal experienxce in a foreign country, being confronted by
people from other cultures. But he has not been able to overcome the gap: the
others remain strangers and his self does not become more clear to him. The
journey changes the personality just for a short time, but remains mainly the same
as before.xxxii[32]
Compared to Malinowski´s work, Leiris is aware of his own role as colonialist/
ethnographer, as an individual in relation to the complexity of the cultures he visits
and of the limits of understanding and proximity between him and his informants.
But when Malinowski´s A diary in the strict sense of the term had been published by
his wife after his death, it became obvious that subjectivity cannot be banished
form the working process. With his ethnopoetic approach Leiris thematizes his own
Self under strange but distinctive conditions. Malinowski, who intended to be
objective, definded the Self of the ethnographer as the eye of a camera.xxxiii[33] But in
his diary we find out that this is a construction that made the monography
possible, but never happened in reality. Of course Malinowski said that he lived as
a native among natives, but he never told the story about what it really was like,
how he felt as a stranger in this savage community. In his diary he wrote about his
own Self, about the long boring hours when nothing happend, when he was
dreaming of his financee and a career in England, about his personal resentments
against the natives, about his despair and lonelines, it is "an inventive polyphonic
text."xxxiv[34] All these subjective things about the man Bronislaw Malinowski do not
appear in the monography. Here the ethnographer is not involved in what is
happening. Malinowski‘s work is a kind of schizophrenic: In order to constitute a
new scientific paradigm, he tried to erase the trace of his own subjectivity in his
work, knowing that he had to create an artificial subjectivity for his readers. This
artificial subjectivity is the authority of Malinowski´s monographies. The
authorityxxxv[35] of his work comes from the artificial subjectivity of the ethnographer,
who is there, witnessing what is happening, acting for the reader, who sits
comfortably at home. The reader is convinced that Malinowski tells the true story,
because he has written the text as if a general Self has been there, a Self that could
be filled out by the reader as well. His text is vivid and colorful, but the Self is never
part of the action, it is observing. The reader is convinced that Malinowski tells the
truth, because the text gives the impression that s/he, the reader, would have seen
the same things. Such is the scientific fiction of Malinowski: the ethnographer as a
person can be replaced, whereas the story about the culture remains the same.
Malinowski‘s concept of objectivity is a scientific one, it stands on the erasion of the
subjectivity of the author. Leiris has another concept of objectivity. He is neither
able to write a monography nor give an official report on the expedition. His thesis
is that objectivity will be reached by subjective writing.xxxvi[36] By making transparent
his position as a witness and his personal experiences and impression. His idea of
truth is a concrete one, by writing down his point of view he hopes to approach the
truth as far as possible. The truth Leiris speaks about is not the true story about
another culture, it is the story about the expedition, about a handful of people who

49
travelled through the African continent in the thirties. This story is not satisfying
for a discipline which has to and is willing to produce knowledge about so-called
primitive cultures. Leiris does not say much about the Others, it is the relation
between him and the Others, the impact the strange African world and people had
on his personal Self, that he tries to capture in his diary.
Although Benedict did not write a diary, she does fit in the little typology of
ethnography that I am trying to give here. She claims to grasp a certain truth about
another culture but does not write about her personal impressions, because she did
no fieldwork. In Chrysanthemum and the Sword, she argues for a distant look on
the Others to see more clear what is special about Them when compared to Us. She
is thematizing the relation of Them and Us in a different way than Leiris and she
does not intend to see the world with Japanese eyes (like Malinowski would have
done), but to give the reader an impression how his world looks like if compared to
another cultural logic. For her, imagination is the clue to other cultures. Her data
basis might be better than for the anthropologists of the nineteens century, but in a
way her writing is as imaginative as Bachhofen‘s Mutterrecht or Morgan´s Ancient
Society. The difference is in the intention: to transform the impossible object into a
partner of crosscultural communication.

Messengers and Tricksters

The three names and works I have mentioned are exampels for different types of
ethnography: Malinowski stands for the scientific approach, Benedict for
imaginative and Leiris for poetic ethnography. For all three types other examples
can be found and maybe there are more types of ethnography. At the desk of the
three ethnographers different things happen, Malinowski´s construction of a
cultural monography needs other rhetorical and literary strategies than Benedict´s
cultural biography. The man who spent some time abroad might be surrounded by
his notes, by objects and a collection of data. Benedict used formal interviews as
their information basis about Japan and her own imagination, Leiris wrote most of
his diary in the field. They are all part of an enterprise that theorists in the eighties
called Writing Culture.xxxvii[37]
Writing Culture indicates a fundamental shift in ethnography. And it has got two
connotations: The writing culture of the ethnographers is a culture of its own, that
can become an object of study and writing culture as an activity by which culture is
produced.
The culture of ethnographers is of interest for a sociology of science. The writing of
ethnographers is situated, as I demonstrated with the three types of ethnographers,
between science and art. Some theorists tend not to include ethnography as a
science, but mainly as literature. Both understandings of writing culture lead to a
crisis of the discipline.
If ethnographers and anthropologists take their own community as a culture which
produces knowledge about other cultures, then the scientific culture should become
the object of their work. The question, how do we produce knowledge about other
cultures? is important to ask if anthropology wants to survive as a self-reflective
discipline. Becoming its own object, means that anthropology looses its traditional
object: the other cultures. The suspicion of some anthropologists, because of the
uncleared relation between Us and Them, Self and the Other in ethnography, is

50
that it says more about the ethnographer than about his/her object, the other
culture. The whole epistemological ground of the discipline is in question.
If the art of writing of ethnographers becomes the object of interest, the discipline
becomes another form of literary studies, it has to get rid of its own methodological
framework and borrow all theoretical tools from other disciplines. But anthropology
has never been a pure discipline, it has always been in contact and interchanges
with other disciplines like sociology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and others.
The danger of a methodological or theoretical decentering of the units of cultural
anthropology belongs to its history: as the discipline of alterity, anthropology has
always been in contact with an impossible object. The ethnographer tries to make
sense of this object, the other culture: he translates and interpretes a complex
foreign symbolical system in order to bring us its message. In doing so he has to
make two basic assumptions: that the foreign makes sense at all and that a
distinctive interpretation is possible. Using the figure of Hermes, Vincent
Crapanzano, tries to enlighten the role of the ethnographer as a messenger and
trickster. Hermes promised Zeus not to lie, but he did not promise to tell the
truth.xxxviii[38] The ethnographer, as a scientist, promised to tell the truth, but he
needs a lot of tricks to construct it. S/he has to make her/his message convincing,
s/he has to convince the reader that there is a true message at all and that s/he
knows it. From this point of view what looks like ethnography is mostly rhetorics
while it claims to be truthful and objective. The ethnographer appears as a trickster
who does or does not have some kind of secret knowledge, but who knows how to
give the audience the impression that he can unmask the truth of the other culture.
I think this image does work with the scientific ethnography of Bronislav
Malinowski, in which the claim to truth and the rhetorical tricks can be studied in a
clear shape. But for Benedict and Leiris, truth and rhetorics have a different
meaning. Both, in different ways, knew that culture is not something we can simply
tell the truth about. And while Benedict used her own imagination and appealed to
the imagination of her readers, Leiris did not trust in the objectivity of science, but
in poetics. They both take the relation between their own cultural (Benedict) and
individual (Leiris) Self and the Other into account and demonstrate that
ethnography, as a part of cultural theory, has to deal with concepts (science) and
vivid, colorful images (art) in a special way: it is not enough to instrumentalize both
forms of symbolic representation, like Malinowski did, but to reflect on the
complexity of transcultural understanding. All three, concepts, imagination and
poetics are involved in the process of cultural understanding, that is at the same
time an understanding of the Other, of the Self and the Self through the Other and
the Other through the Self.

xxxix[1]Cf.: Ernst Cassirer: An Essay on Man. New Haven and London: Yale Uni. Press
1944, p. 169.
xl[2]Ibid. p. 143.

xli[3]Ibid. p. 145.

xlii[4]Ibid. p. 170.

xliii[5]Cf.: Zygmunt Baumann: Culture as Praxis. New Edition, London: Sage 1999, p.

XVI.

51
xliv[6]Georg Simmel: Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur. In: Ralf Konersmann ed.:
Kulturphilosophie. Leipzig: Reclam 1993, S. 52f.
xlv[7]A good example is the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. He brought the ideas of

functionalism, namely of Wright and Sullivan, to Austria and built the first non-
ornamentical fassade in Vienna. With his critique on the old forms he was one of
the modernist theoreticians in Austria. At the same time he proclaimed the
simple life. In his workers housing project, the garden was very important and
the center of the house was the kitchen, where the products of the garden were
cultivated and the social life of the family took place.
xlvi[8]Zygmunt Baumann: Culture as Praxis. p.XIX.

xlvii[9]Wittgenstein is close to Humboldts Energeia when he thematizes the use of

language in his Philosophical Investigations.

xlviii[10]Ernst Cassirer: Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Darmstadt:

Wissenschftliche Buchgesellschaft 1961, p. 105.

xlix[11]Bronislaw Malinowski: Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton &

Co. 1961, p.25.

l[12]Ibid. p.7.

li[13]For instance Lewis H. Morgan´s Ancient Society or Bachhofen´s Mutterrecht.

lii[14]Cf.: Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

1973, p.15. Geertz refers to the original meaning of fictio: something made.
liii[15]Geertz, The Interpretation, ibid. p.10.

liv[16]„The ethnographer „inscribes“ social discourse; he writes it down.“ Geertz, The

Interpretation, p.19.
lv[17]Cf.: Derek Freeman: Margret Mead and Samoa. The Making and Unmaking of an

Anthropological Myth. Cambridge: Harvard Uni. Press 1983.

lvi[18]Edward Said: The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Vintage 1983, p.33.

lvii[19]Cf.: Paul Rabinow: Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-

Modernity in Anthropology. In: James Clifford, George E. Marcus eds.: Writing

Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Uni. of California Press
1986.
lviii[20]Cf.: Johannes Fabian: Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971-

1991. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers 1991, p.209.

lix[21]Johannes Fabian: Time and the Other. How Anthropology makes ist Object. New

York: Columbia Uni. Press 1983, p.157.

lx[22]Michel Leiris: L´Afrique fantôme. De Dakar á Djibouti 1931-1933. Paris:

Gallimard 1934. Cf.: Dec. 28th. 1931.

lxi[23]Judith Modell: Ruth Benedict. Patterns of a Life. London: Chatto and Windus

1984, p.105.
lxii[24]Cf.: Ruth Benedict: Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

(1934) 1989, p.79.

lxiii[25]Ibid., p.46.

lxiv[26]Ruth Benedict: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese

Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (1946) 1989, p.2.

lxv[27]Here she established the form of research that is called „study of culture at a

distance.“
lxvi[28]Benedict: Chrysanthemum, p.10.

lxvii[29]Cf.: Clifford Geertz: Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford:

52
 Stanford Uni. Press 1988, Chapter 5. I used the german translation: Die
künstlichen Wilden, München: Hanser 1990, p.115.
lxviii[30]Benedict: Chrysanthemum, p.12.

lxix[31]Michel Leiris: L´Afrique fantôme. March 31st. 1932.

lxx[32]Ibid. Cf.: Feb. 15th 1932.

1[33]Malinowski constructed the authority of the ethnographer as an eye-witness. In

the Argonauts we see the Melanesian culture through his eyes. Partizipant
observation is observation still, which means that the involvement of the
ethnographer in the action is not reflected.
lxxi[34]Cf.: James Clifford: The Predictament of Culture. Cambridge and London:

Harvard Uni. Press 1988, p.97.

lxxii[35]On the construction of ethnographic authority cf.: James Clifford: The

Predictament, p.21-54.
lxxiii[36]Michel Leiris: L´Afrique fantôme, Cf.: April 4th 1932.

lxxiv[37]This is also the title in which the contributions to a research seminar are

published: James Clifford, George E. Marcus eds.: Writing Culture. The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Uni. of Californie Press 1986.
lxxv[38]Vincent Crapanzano: Hermes´ Dilemma and Hamlet´s Desire. On the

Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge and London: Harvard Uni. Press 1992,

p.45

53
What’s African about African Art and Thought?

Jennifer Wilkinson, University of South Africa

Although the problems inherent in the term "African art" and how our perception of
it has been affected by them, are wellknown, there is little consensus on how to
resolve these and even less appreciation of the actual consequences they have for
contemporary African artists. This is mainly due to misunderstandings and their
perpetuation, misdirection and therefore as well perhaps to misdiagnosis.

Being essentially non-functional, its purpose exhausted by the aesthetic

contemplation of it, art, it continues to be argued, cannot include traditional
African art because this art is primarily functional. It is not surprising therefore
that philosophers, concerned about the boundaries of the concept of art and fearing
relativism, have interpreted the challenge presented by African art (and other so-
called primitive art) to the category of art, to be conceptual. The point is that in
spite of their functional origins these artefacts have, over time, come to be seen as a
form of art and to be categorised as such, albeit uncomfortably, so presenting
philosophers with what appears to be a case of conceptual confusion. Given the
practical situation of its partial inclusion, many of the proposed solutions to the
problem as perceived have therefore consisted of attempts to adjust the category of
art to allow for the inclusion of African art. Enlarged definitions of art formulated
for this purpose have however, tended to be paradigmatic and instead of enabling
African art to be properly accommodated within art’s logical borders, have had the
unfortunate and probably unforeseen effect of increasing marginalisation.1) Add to
this the fact that one result of this conceptual adjustment has been the overlooking
of the very features that make this the kind of art that it is, it is not surprising that
the issue has now become political and the intrinsic value of this art remains
hidden to most foreigners while contemporary artists have to try to reconcile the
particularity of their Africanness with the demands of universalism.

It is true that African art is fundamentally different from the art of the West (and
elsewhere) because its making is guided by specific socio-cultural and often
practical functions. But what is seldom realised is that because the particular kind
of socio-ethical humanism of its guiding framework excludes individualism, no
conceptual engineering will force African art into what will always be an alien
concept. And nor should it. Ironically, another oversight which inevitably
accompanies the prevailing perceptions of African art has been the
acknowledgement that the origins of the very Western art which is taken as
paradigmatic and which therefore excludes its African counterpart, also has roots
in social and ethical ideas. In this case though, the different intellectual climate has
allowed its particular development into art for art’s sake. But it must follow that
since the origins of even the central examples of Western art are also mainly
religious and functional and hence overwhelmingly culture specific, that the
universality of the present concept which ostensibly overlooks its own regional
beginnings, is itself debatable. Derived from Kant and the concomitant notion of
rationality which legitimises art for art’s sake, and perpetuated by Romanticism and

54
the socio-culural intellectual context which freed art from functional exigencies so
making personal expression possible, and as part of a dominating culture, what is
most likely just a local hegemony has, over time, become elevated to the status of
the metacontextual.2)

When Anthony Appiah recently suggests not just asking why African art is art but
also why it is African he invites us to shift attention away from the concept to a
different aspect of the problem. But because of what Kimmelman (New York Times,
24 May 1998) has called the "eternal debate about African art" does not solve the
problem but means facing a different kind of risk:

... how much (he asks) do we need to know about these objects to
appreciate them? This is the eternal debate about African art. Do we
recolonise the art by aestheticising it in Western terms? Or do we
demean it - segregate it from other art - by stressing its
anthropological side?

It is worth pursuing Appiah’s question even though the challenge now is how
avoiding one horn of the dilemma will not ensure impalement on the other. The
answer I think, lies in identifying the source of the dilemma. According to Nkrumah
(Quaison-Sacke 1975: 75) this is that "... for too long in our history, Africa has
spoken through the voice of others". The problem when so specified can be seen to
be that previous attempts to show what is African about African art and the
thought manifested by it, being either descriptive accounts by foreigners who
studied Africa as an object of curiosity, or reactions to these efforts, have indeed
anthropologised and so demeaned it. More recently though, African philosophers
have, in trying to reconstruct African thought by evaluatively analysing its
intellectual foundations, shown how there can be a different and more worthwhile
way to identify what is authentically African about African thought and therefore
African art. My aim here is to assess their efforts and their findings within the
context of the dilemma of African art with special reference to the contemporary
situation.

Two prominent but misleading views about Africa have motivated these
philosophers. Deriving from a search for what, it is claimed, does not really exist,
these - also called inventions - have been blamed for the misconceptions about
Africa, its traditions,culture, thought and art and for many of its problems.
Proposed solutions to them having been inevitably of the wrong kind, have, it is
argued, in turn contributed to - if not directly caused - poverty, famine, disease and
corruption all of which have led to the present prevailing malaise of Afro-pessimism.
One of these inventions, it is argued, depends on the "voice of others"; the other,
ironically, comes from Africans themselves.

In discussing the first of these, Mudimbe (1988) has argued that the Africa of
Westerners is a construct of foreigners who, coming with their own categories and
conceptual schemes, interpreted Africa as the dark and mysterious continent
inhabited by people whose lives were said to be "infiltrated" by paganism, mysticism

55
and fetishism as well as by witchcraft. It is little wonder therefore that although
artefacts of some aesthetic value were found there, because these were used for the
various mystical and other ceremonies making up part of the ritualised life of these
people, they were originally accepted only for their curiosity value and for the
information they could provide about the strange practices of the equally strange
inhabitants who were observed to throw bones, dance themselves into a trance,
worship their ancestors as well as a variety of obscure deities, and who believed in
spells, evil spirits, sacrifices and magic. Although no recognisable art practices,
individual artists or art institutions could be found in Africa, these objects, thanks
mainly to Picasso and his contemporaries who marvelled at their force and powerful
aesthetic form when they first saw them displayed in Spain and then incorporated
features of them into their own work, did eventually find their way, via
archaeological and cultural museums, into the art galleries of Europe and America.
Here they have been classified accordingly and although they are sought after by
collectors, are still usually appreciated more for their decorative value than their
original merit. Not surprisingly, fed by over-romanticised views of the Dark
continent and later by a Hollywood inspired safari-type scenario, removed from
their authentic habitat and contextualised and reconceptualised according to
foreign norms, they have now become the source of an apparent conceptual
confusion.

But the problem is more complex and even more pernicious than it first appears
because this version of Africa has led to what Appiah (1993) identifies as a different
invention of Africa, its thought and its art.

Among the legacies of colonialism there has been a crisis of identity in Africa - both
at the personal level of the individual and at the wider continental one. First of all,
the imposition of Western religious, political, social and cultural traditions which
were forced onto the local population, relocated and in many cases, replaced the
local ones so disrupting the conceptual schemes of the indigenous people.
Secondly, the dominance of the colonial mentality, which Wiredu (1992: 62) says,
continues to "make a formerly colonised person over-value foreign things coming
from his erstwhile colonial master", persists to this day in some places. As a result
there has been a shift towards adopting Western norms - in many cases at the
expense of the local ones. But even though the colonialists did bring superior
science and technology, sophisticated forms of government as well as literacy, by
imposing these onto the locals rather than by using a process of education, they did
not entirely remove indigenous practices and the two continue to exist side by side
in an uneasy alliance. The result has been a curious mix of Western and African
ideas which to the outsider is responsible for what is perceived to be the often
frustrating inability of Africans to become completely "civilised". It is also the root of
many of it problems. Not surprisingly there has been a reaction by Africans to this
distortion of their African identity which has led to a struggle for authenticity and to
the reassertion of cultural identity.

Mainly a movement of African intellectuals, many of whom had experienced post-

world war Europe and who had lived and studied in France, Germany and England,

56
the struggle to regain a genuine Africanness eventually became associated if not
synonymous with race. Rejecting the previous identification by Europeans who
could find no specific common or binding features to give unity to Africa and its
peoples and who therefore conveniently came to see Africa merely as a landmass
and hence as a geographical entity, this identity now rooted itself in a common
descent - which had previously been ignored - by people united in their desire to
reclaim what they saw as their true heritage. And so Negritude and Pan Africanism
were born. Encouraged by the calls of Africanists like Leopold Senghor who lobbied
for "a Negro style of sculpture, a Negro style of painting and even a Negro style of
philosophy" (El Hadji 1995: 84), and the consequent search - especially in America
by African Americans who nostalgically yearned for what they took to be their true
homeland - for a black aesthetic, artists in Africa were pressurised into reasserting
the Africanness of Africa. This was taken to imply the resuscitation of the
traditional forms as found in the masks, shields, vessels, headdresses and other
appurtenances of tribal life. But driven mainly by anger and the need to reject
foreign interpretations and because colonial intervention had disrupted allegiance
to and belief in the underlying metaphysical, social and cultural framework within
which the originals were made, most of these modern works, having lost this
guiding force, have become at best derived and, at worst, obviously inauthentic and
lifeless.

Appiah claims that this version of Africa and hence of Africanness, arguably still
harboured by those who are seeking for their roots in a continent from which their
forefathers were driven by slavery, has been just as much a construction as that of
the colonialists. He argues that the basic premise of a homeogenic Africa is
mistaken because, on the contrary, he says, it is a well known fact that Africa is
divided and disunited. It is indeed true that Africa is composed over over three
thousand ethnic groups in over fifty five nation states. And the fact that these
nation states are not natural groupings of people with like interests and heritage,
but were artificial creations of the colonial powers further fueled the urge to find a
cultural unifying force.3) Like its colonial predecessor, this Africa has therefore
tended to ignore the cultural plurality of the people and the - quite marked -
differences in the art of the various regions. The results have been that instead of
turning their attention to the real problems of diversity, pluralism and
multiculturalism and in this way redressing the devastating consequences of
colonialism which still plague the continent (which is now even further divided by
political nation building) and the resultant many costly and continuing wars,
Africans, encouraged by mainly alienated and disenchanted African Americans in
search of a cultural homeland, have been pursuing what is arguably nothing more
than the red herring of essentialism. And as a result of the search for a common
heritage, this African essence became identified with the one obvious commonality,
namely, a black skin.

The consequences of these inventions have led to a reassessment of Africa mainly

by African philosophers through a systematic investigation into African thought and
rationality but with the aim of revitalisation rather than revival.4) And as these ideas
have gradually begun to infiltrate all thought, so leading to the rejection of previous

57
interpretations of the African identity, there has also been the beginnings of a
similar reconstruction of African art both with respect to its Africanness and its
status as art. The depth and strength of its African roots are evident in the fact that
in spite of the influence of Western ideas and the contact with Western art and
artists, because this art is an authentic attempt to be truly African, in being African
it cannot also be art for art’s sake.

If Africanness is neither identification with a landmass nor with a black skin, then
it makes sense to ask what it is and what it is about it that makes it uniquely
African. Ki-Zerbo (1995: 61) in approaching this question asks what Africa is if not
the African people because, as he says, "What is a country if not above all, the
humans who live in it and are part of it?". If he is right then reconstructing African
and African thought would mean analysing how the people of Africa live and the
thought systems shaping that lived experience. But if the old problems are to be
avoided the aim of such an endeavour must not be essentialism and should rather
be to for look some binding practices or beliefs that can distinguish them from the
rest of humanity. There is a way to do this because inherent in Ki-Zerbo’s claim is
the further one that what it means to be African implies that being African is
intimately connected with what it means to be an African person. And since social
and other institutions are constructed around and for human beings, they in turn
will embody a perspective of human nature and personhood, it therefore also makes
sense to turn to these institutions as they function within Africa - broadly
construed - to examine the belief systems on which they are built and the world
view or views they encompass. This is precisely what many African philosophers are
now doing. This phenomenon, however, not being unique to Africa means that the
practice should be (and generally is) common to any attempt at understanding a
culture. Ironically, though, while accepted as legitimate in the civilised world the
same exercise in Africa is suspected of being nothing more than anthropologising.
Such a perception however, indicates a lack of understanding of what is involved in
this kind of process of analysis, re-evaluation and revitalisation.

Even if empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports culture specific philosophy in

Africa, and one of the problems of the past has been the result of overlooking the
diversity of Africa and so to lapse into generalisations, it does not follow that there
are no detectable common trends at all in African communities. Sometimes it is just
that the overwhelmingness of the numbers of different groups and peoples has
buried any repetitive manifestations under the impact of this diversity.

There is general agreement that what has been found in this process of analytic re-
evaluation is that traditional African life, originally organised around clans, is still
structured around the community and even though colonialism (and in South
Africa the harsh separatist policies of the apartheid system) has disrupted families
and communities while the lure of the cities, personal wealth and the sophistication
of Western life-styles has attracted large numbers away from traditional
communities, communalism remains the source of accepted values. But, of course,
communalism is not unique to Africa. What makes this communalism, the
underlying thought and, by implication, the art specifically African Gyekye (1997)

58
argues, is the particular form of its socio-ethical humanism where actions are
motivated by concern for others rather than the recognition of individual rights.5) If
this is the case then it follows that understanding the nature, the place and the role
of art and artists in this communalism requires knowledge of the system of beliefs
on which it is based. This includes socially and culturally embedded personhood,
the sociology of knowledge, communitarian ethics, consensual and participatory
forms of democracy, a holistic and idealist metaphysics (which embraces both
primary and secondary causes) and an inclusive ontology. What emerges from this
is indeed a uniquely African conception of what it is to be a person and an artist -
and no conception of l’art pour l’art.

Underpinning all African thought, it is claimed, is a closed metaphysical system in

which everything hangs together in a hierarchy from the Supreme Being who
although variously conceived within different societies, is usually described as the
source of life, and who is followed by lesser deities, the ancestors, humans,
animals, plants and matter in that order, all forming a universe containing
interacting forces. Being conceived as a closed vertical system there is no radical
distinction between the natural and the supernatural and no complete break
between mortal and immortal life. Since the basis for differentiation lies in the place
and the order of things within the hierarchy rather than in different forms of being,
the dead as well as the living (and the Supreme being and other spirits) must
therefore all share in the same life force which in turn cannot be replenished or
depleted from without. And since these animating life forces are merely passed on
in an interactive process, it follows that the dead are not seen as inanimate but,
having moved on and up in the hierarchy, just occupy a different and superior
position from that of the living hence, unlike, as in Western customs where the
dead are accorded no such status - often interpreted as lack of respect by Africans -
reverence for the dead is an important part of African life. And it follows that if all
beings interact then the living dead can and do play a role in the lives of the actual
living and may be called upon to intervene or for counsel, or may themselves choose
to interact and communicate with the living. Since the deceased and the deities are
part of ordinary life they can be appealed to for guidance and are consulted when
required. Veneration, appeasement and communion with the ancestors which can
have both practical and spiritual benefits - misconstrued and condemned as
ancestor worship by Westerners - is therefore not unusual and may require
sacrifices or special rituals because these and other spirits have the power to cause
both harm and good. However, since such communication needs special gifts and
practices those chosen for it are considered to be endowed with unique attributes
(which in turn need to be developed) and, as a result, are highly regarded by the
community.

Included in this holistic metaphysics is a dual notion of cause. Together with an

acceptance of natural causes of events there is also a more important causal
explanation for why a particular event should happen to a particular person at a
particular time and hence an explanation especially for unusual circumstances or
for what in Western thought systems is known as luck or co-incidence and which
answers questions of Why me? Why this? Why now? So, for example, although the

59
bite of the mosquito is known to cause malaria and both preventative and curative
measures can be taken which succeed in many cases, an answer to questions
neglected by Western medicine is why this particular child is bitten and why it does
not respond but dies. Floods, drought, famine, and epidemics are all attributed to
both types of cause and since they are deviant events, are at least partially
explained as the displeasure of the ancestors, the spell of an evil spirit or witchcraft.
Because such events are not the result of natural causation only and require non-
natural as well as natural treatment, the relevant ancestor or spirit must be
appeased or the spell lifted by the appropriate means. It is the specialised domain of
Seers and Sangomas to identify these causes and their cures, perhaps by throwing
bones and by appealing to the responsible spirits and/or ancestors. And, since the
methods are learned through and passed on by the ancestors, only those who can
communicate with them possess the relevant knowledge and skills. 6)

Thus a more complete explanation especially of unusual events is sought and

provided, and technology finds its place as only part of a wider scope of cause and
effect. This is why knowledge performs a practical, social function and why there
has been little interest in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or for
investigating the theories underlying the technologies developed or adopted to cope
with everyday contingencies.

Given the overall picture, the notion of personhood must be relational rather then
individual although the degree of this cultural and communal embeddeness is a
matter of dispute - Wiredu arguing that is it complete, Gyekye more moderately that
it is partial. Either way the implication is that the person therefore is not seen as
separate or separable from the community. As expressed according to the Southern
African notion of Ubuntu which can permeate all life, for example, a person is a
person because of other persons.7) Thus collective action, mutual aid,
interdependence and consensus politics are all necessary conditions for a person’s
welfare and for the collective good. And, as Gyekye says, since the welfare of each is
dependent on the welfare of all and individual worth is measured and determined
through a person’s contribution to the general welfare, the highest good is to be
found in relationships with others and in working for the common good. The role of
the individual within this system is to work for the common welfare and through his
or her own deeds promote the general good. This communitarian ethic therefore
subverts the importance of rights by the importance of duty to others and the
recognition of individual rights means the recognition of obligations to others.
Although Gyekye (1987: 156) acknowledges that communitarianism is

... the recognition of the limited character of the possibilities of the

individual, which limited possibilities whittle away the individual’s
self-sufficiency.

he denies that it stifles the individual. On the contrary, the implied co-operation not
only promotes the individual good but allows for individuality provided this aims at
the common good, for, as he says (1987: 157),

60
 ... the communal order is worthwhile. Its intricate web of social
relationships tends to ensure the individual’s social worth, thus
making it almost impossible for an individual to feel socially
insignificant ... the individual feels socially worthy and important
because his or her role and activity in the community are appreciated.
The system affords the individual the opportunity to make a
meaningful life through his or her contribution to the general welfare.
It is thus part of the doctrine of communalism that the individual can
find the highest good - materially, morally and spiritually
(psychologically) - in relationships with others and in working for the
common good.

The good of the community therefore, rather than denying individual endeavour,
requries the "moral worth, capacities, talents, and the general conditions of self-
development of the individual human being" (Gyekye 1997: 288) but within and as
part of the activities of the community and not just as the pursuit of lone goals.
Thus the African socio-humanism of Ubuntu already mentioned finds it’s more
Northern African counterpart in the anti-Cartesian Akan concept that "I am
because you are and since you are therefore I am" (Gyekye: 1997: 37).

Within this system, aesthetic practices as part of a holistic and relational worldview,
have followed different forms from their Western parallels where persons are
conceived primarily as the individual bearers of rights and therefore where personal
creativity, honour and expression have become hallmarks of excellence and
endeavour. So while Western aesthetic activities, finding their apotheosis in Kant
and the Romantic tradition and the accompanying notion of individuality have
became and are valued for a function wholly internal to them and exhausted by it,
within African communalism, aesthetic activities and their products serve the
practical and spiritual needs of the community as these have developed as part of
an extended social system which includes the holistically conceived order of things,
the individual as person-in-community and the living dead. With survival often
dependent on the harsh and unpredictable forces of nature and the supernatural
who have to be venerated and appeased, there is no requirement or even possibility
for isolated aesthetic contemplation for its own sake. Instead the celebrated but
misunderstood artefacts collectively known as African art were made to serve the
purpose of communicating with the living dead and the deities in special
celebrations and rituals. Even apparently decorative objects like jewellery were
functional since they were meant to proclaim the power of the chief or king.

The makers of these artefacts, in order to be well versed in the practices and the
beliefs guiding them if their relevant purposes are to be successfully achieved,
undergo long apprenticeships to study the various ceremonies, rituals and festivals
and their underlying metaphysics, as well as to perfect their own techniques. Since
the general purpose of these various rituals is to maintain harmony, defeat chaos
and recreate order by making the supernatural accessible to human will, the
relevant spirits must be perceptible to all those who partake in them. And so the

61
entire community participates in the many and varied occasions on which it is
necessary to call uopn these beings either for blessing or for absolution.

Hence the artefacts are ontologically different from Western art objects: not being
just representations of the spirits but, given the holistic metaphysics, they are
taken to be the actual embodiment of them and hence are conceived as animate.
Animation, part of the process of creation, itself requires contact with the relevant
spirit or being and revelation to the general populace and so in turn is highly
ritualised and usually intensely emotive. Richards (Welshe-Asante 1993: 66) in
describing the mask as "... the quintessential statement of the unity of spirit and
matter" gives some insight to the radically different way in which Africans conceive
of what is now called their art. Unlike its Western counterpart, she explains that

... the African mask is in essence not a representation. It is not lifeless

matter. It is not a work of art to be admired on a wall ... It is a force. It
has being and as such can be/should be powerful. Its power lies in its
ability to transform. Masks are used to transform young boys into
men... Masks are used to assure the presence of the ancestors at
ceremonial occasions and judicial procedures. They are used to heal,
to frighten, to make fertile, to initiate, to bind in oath, to appease and
to atone.

They are certainly not just to be admired for their aesthetic appeal.

Of its creation and creator, also very different from the creative process and the
artist as conceived in the West, she says,

The mask is created by the artists and as such must be given life,
since it is to have being and force ... The artist puts part of his being
into the mask. All African artists (creators) must sacrifice in order to
create; for that which they create is animate, the artist is therefore
giving birth.

Hence we can now understand why there are no equivalent terms in African
languages for who in the West is called an artist or, that matter, for art as it has
come to be conceived. In their place are appropriate terms for appropriate people
and practices. In the Cameroun, for example, the closest to "artist" is "saar" where a
saar is anyone who creates and, since doctors are seen as creating healing and
teachers wisdom, they too are saars as are all members of society who "create" in
this wider sense. It follows that not all saars are required to or can create and
animate masks and other artefacts. But it is also interesting that the closest Xhosa
word to art seems to be "skill" so clearly suggesting an alliance with Plato’s notion of
techne and demonstrating that the origins of art in Africa and that in the West
might therefore after all not have been that different Therefore it must have been
their subsequent development, depending as it has on the relevant and differing
socio-cultural factors rather than on universal logical conditions, which has
diversified so leading to the different current practices and conceptions.

62
It is not surprising therefore that the exaggeration of the physical features of most
traditional African aesthetic artefacts, which enthralled Picasso and which has so
often been described as their grotesqueness, is not co-incidental or even
attributable to mere aesthetic preference, but has a particular purpose. This is to
ensure effective arousal of the emotions without which the spirit or spirits can not
be invoked. Many and various ceremonies have been devised for all the occasions
on which it is necessary for the population to have contact with the spirits and for
which masks and other relevant artefacts are required. These include the harvest,
rites of passage (which in turn are marked by various initiation ceremonies each
with its own regalia), marriages, burials, and so on as well as special events like
wars, floods, famine, floods and epidemics. As a result the originality of works of
African art, unlike the conception of originality in Western art, does not imply the
uniqueness of an object or its creator but rather its use in these actual ceremonies.
And when artefacts become damaged or weathered and are no longer suitable for
the purposes for which they were made they are discarded and replaced by new
ones. It follows that musuems and galleries or their counterparts are unknown in
traditional Africa since it would be inconceivable for an infrastructure to protect
and preserve these artefacts in isolation from their use to be developed because
their value lies in their effectiveness as prescribed by their specific function and
their originality in their use in actual ceremonies which is not confined to
individuals but extends to all members of the society who in turn use their
combined creative energies co-operatively for the ongoing purpose of ensuring the
common good. Even today curators find it diffcult in Africa to persuade local
populations to view and appreciate artefacts in what is to them a foreign and
meaningless environment. Strange as these conceptions are to foreigners who have
tried to make sense of them in their own terms, so the Western desire to preserve
art is contrary to the continuous African need to ensure the general welfare. In
comparing the to him odd desire to preserve works of art in isolation rather than to
see them as part of the practice of ensuring the ongoing common good, Motlhabane
Mashiangwako, a contemporary South African artist has commented: "You want to
create a forever, but we want to forever create" (in conversation: Pretoria 1998).

Finding no musuems or their equivalent and no conception of preservation in

isolation, Westerners were also unable to recognise individual artists in Africa.
Instead what they saw were groups of artesans working together in collaboration.
What they failed to realise, however, was that the works they made could not be the
products of mere personal expression since they were meant for communal use
which included use by the natural as well as the supernatural. In keeping with the
communal system’s inhospitability to lone endeavours and individuality, and being
counter to these communal interests, in some cases where such an individual
contribution was seen not to be aimed at the general good but rather at selfish
enrichment or fulfilment, it was even considered an abheration and punishable.
Secondly since it served particular ritual purposes, each work had to conform to
certain forms and of course since each one was the embodiment of a particular
supernatural being, these were strictly prescribed. But even though artists did not
work alone and a work was usually the product of several artisans all working
together, given the importance of an individual’s contribution to and within the

63
community, the assumption that therefore there could be no recognisable
individual artists has been challenged. Biebuyck and Fagg among others have used
empirical evidence to point this out, arguing that the lack of appreciation of
individual artists was due rather to the inability of the foreigners to recognise
indivdual styles than the fact that there were none for, if we know what to look for
we shall be able to identify personal differences. Although Fagg (African sculpture
quoted from flyer for the Master Hand exhibition Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York 1998) refutes what he sees as only colonial (mis)perceptions when he says, "...
every artist has his own personal style, which we can identify, and is as much of an
artistic individualist as his Western counterpart" and each artist could develop his
or her own style, the equivalent of the creative genuis starving alone in a garret was
indeed unkown because even these recognisably individual endeavours were not
just for personal expression but ultimately aimed at the communal good. And
although the notion of an equivalent to the lone creator working in isolation was out
of the question, the makers of these creations (as well as the artefacts themselves
which were used in the many rituals and ceremonies) were highly regarded since,
unlike other members of the society, they had the knowledge and the skill to make
and animate the objects to invoke deities and the spirits of the ancestors and hence
to fulfil a communal role. Then, since each object served particular ritualistic
purposes and embodied a particular supernatural being, a work had to meet
aesthetic as well as formal criteria if the relevant being was to be properly honoured
. So it does not follow that the look of the thing was unimportant since it would
have been considered to be insubordination (and probably the work itself would
have been ineffectual) to make technically inferior or aesthetically poor pieces and
the works were therefore indeed appreciated for their aesthetic appeal although not
just for its own sake but because of this appeal’s contribution to their overall
effectiveness and function.

The legacy of misconceptions has placed a heavy burden on contemporary African

artists who have their roots in the traditions but who have also been open to what
Gyekye (1997: 219ff) calls cultural borrowing (as opposed to cultural imposition).
They are expected on one hand to combine the conflicting demands of being African
and at the same time, as artists, to work within Western norms and conceptions of
what this means, on the other. Hence they are caught within the wider dilemma of
the relativism of their own particularity and the perceived requirements of
universalism.

Although many Africans have become Westernised through cultural contact and
through contact with other societies, just as it would be a mistake to underestimate
the importance of the influence of their own inherited belief systems, so it would be
wrong to underestimate the role of Westernisation in the creation of much
contemporary African art. Some artists in Africa, removed from their original
traditions, indifferent to the old metaphysical visions and pressurised to revive a
pan-African perception of African art, not surprisingly often produce work lacking
the force of the originals they are expected to emulate. In many cases these artists,
under Western influences and a changing society and encouraged to be "African"
merely use African forms for their own expressive purposes. But these works

64
although recognisably African remain caught in the unfortunate space between
opposing conceptions.

But even though many of these works are indeed of merit, it is the work of other
artists, who, resisting the call to traditionalise, have absorbed Western aesthetic
ideas and yet who create within African communalism, and who are trying to
reconcile the fact of their Africanness with what appear to be the conflicting
demands of the artworld into which they are being synthesised, which is of special
relevance, interest and value. The objects produced, even if superficially
indistinguishable in type from those of their Western counterparts, although some
may look like traditional wooden masks and other paraphenalia actually used on
ceremonial occasions, still serve a socially functional and instrumental purpose.
Mothlabane, for example, explains the images in his paintings which are framed in
the usual way and hang, like most paintings, on gallery walls, by saying that they
come to him in dreams and therefore from the ancestors and other spirits and that
his role as an artist is to communicate the ideas of the ancestors through his
works. But because he produces works in a genre recognisably artistic, and
ostensibly falling within the concept of art, he is unproblematically categorised as
an artist - even though he conceives of his role differently. However, if the viewer is
properly to understand the work and to perceive it as African in the way that
Africans perceive it, then he or she does need to be aware of the wider metaphysical
framework informing it. Approaching African works, either traditional or
contemporary, exclusively from within a non-African worldview belittles them
because even those presented in what appears to be a personal and hence Western
idiom are also part of the wider African communal world-view deriving their real
value from their socio-ethical humanist purpose. The story of African art shows that
there is little to be gained from trying to fit a foreign concept of art onto aesthetic
activities and products alien to it and then trying conceptual engineering when
none can be made. On the contrary the value of this art is in recognising and
appreciating the works as the manifestation of the African aesthetic experience
when that experience is articulated within the underlying belief systems. Although
contextualisation is now the practice in understanding all art, African art, ironically
through its tangled history of misunderstanding, has been singled out for its
deviance or judged for what it was not meant to be precisely because proper
understanding and contextualisation has been denied it. So rather than lamenting
its shortcomings because its purpose is never exhausted by mere contemplation,
African art can and should instead be assessed according to its function of serving
the needs and concerns of the whole community - even when works look as if they
are the creation of a single individual articulating what on the surface seems merely
to be his or her personal idiom.

It does not follow though that even traditional African art cannot justifiably be
appreciated and enjoyed as if it were art in the accepted sense even if this does
mean viewing it for no purpose other than aesthetic contemplation. As Appiah
(1995: 24-26) has argued, when invited, we can take these works as art for art’s
sake because: ... "what is important is not whether or not they are art or were art
for their makers: what matters is that we are invited to treat them as art". But as

65
Mothlabane cautions us, we should also be aware that Western artists are not put
in the same dilemma as he and his colleagues: Africans and African artists don’t
view Western art as if it were meant for functional and instrumental purposes. In a
parallel situation when seen by Africans as if it were African art and hence art for
life’s sake, this art, being art for art’s sake, and hence both purposeless and
individualistic, and serving no social humanist function, would at best be trivial.8)
Why, he asks, can the trouble not be taken to extend the same courtesy to them?

Notes

1. These include Kamber, R. 1993. A modest proposal for defining a

work of art. British Journal of Aesthetics, vol.14:3.

2. See Gyekye 1997: 27-33 where he discusses how particular ideas

have achieved the status of universals. The term "local hegemony"
comes from Margolis, J. 1995. Historied thought, constructed world.
University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles.

3. The much publicised African Renaissance as envisioned by the

South African Deputy president Thabo Mbeki which aims for the
rebirth of Africa within a modern global economy, will need to find a
balance between these differences and commonalities if it is to
succeed.

4. These include Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Godwin Sogolo, Didier

Kaphagawani and Anthony Appiah.

5. The new South African constitution, a rights based doctrine, is,

interestingly, often interpreted according to communalist principles.

6. Lack of appreciation of this notion of dual causes has often been the
at the base of many puzzling medical phenomena in Africa such as
inexplicable deaths after spells having been cast on patients who until
then had been making rapid recovery. Only recently In South Africa
have so-called "traditional healers" have been accorded official status.

7. Ubuntu is a particular form of Southern African socio-ethical

humanism permeating all aspects of life among many Southern and
South African people.

8. The phrase "art for life’s sake" comes from the title of Jegede’s
article in Welshe-Asante: 1993.

Bibliography

Appiah, A. 1993. In my father’s house. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Appiah, A. 1995. What art? What Africa? , in Phillips, T (ed.). 1995. Africa: the art of
a continent. London: The Royal Academy of Arts.

Blocker, HG. 1993. The aesthetics of primitive art. Lanham: University Press of
America.

Coetzee, P and Roux, APJ. (eds.). 1998. Philosophy from Africa. ITP: Johannesburg.
The following articles:

Coetzee, P. Particularity in morality and is relation to community.

Kaphagawani, D. What is African philosophy?

Kaphagawani, D. African conceptions of personhood and identity.

Sogolo, G. The concept of cause in Africa.

Wiredu, K. The moral foundations of African culture.

Wilkinson, J. Using and abusing African art.

de Beer, F. 1997. Ethnicity in nation-states with reference to South Africa. South

African Journal of Ethnology, vol. 21: 1.

Gyekye, K. 1987. An essay in African philosophical thought. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Gyekye, K. 1997. Tradition and modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Houtondji, P. 1983. African philosophy. London: Hutchinson University Library for

Africa.

Mudimbe, VY. 1988. The invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mutiso G-C M and Rohio, SW (eds.). 1975. Readings in African political thought.
London: Heineman Educational Books. the following articles:

Molema, SM. African manners and customs.

Nkrumah, K. The African personality.

Ki-zerbo, J. African personality and the new African society.

Diop, A. Remarks on the African personality and Negritude.

Quaison-Sacke, A. The African personality.

Senghor, L. What is Negritude?

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Sogolo, G. 1993. Foundations of African philosophy. Ibadan: Ibadan University
press.

S, El-Hadji. 1996. Objects of performance: A story from Senegal, in Havell, J. (ed.).

1996. Seven stories about modern Africa. Paris and New York: Flamminarion.

Welshe-Asante, K. (ed.). 1993. The African aesthetic: keeper of the tradition.

Westport: Greenwood Press. The following articles:

Richards, DM The African aesthetic and national consciousness.

Jegede, D. Art for life’s sake: African art as reflection of an Afrocentric

cosmology.

Wiredu, K and Gyekye, K. (eds.). 1992. Persons and community. Washington: The
Council for Research and Values in Philosophy. The following articles:

Abrahams, WE. crisis in African cultures.

Abrahams, WE Sources of African identity.

Gyekye, K. Person and community in African thought.

Wiredu, K. Death and afterlife in African culture.

Wiredu, K. Moral foundations of African culture.

Gyekye, K. Traditional political ideas: Their relevance to development

in contemporary Africa.

68
Poetics of Intransitivity

Ken-ichi Sasaki, University of Tokyo

0. Presentation of the Theme.

For a long time now, I have vaguely noticed a certain tendency in my way of
thinking in aesthetics. I do not know why, but I have found myself agreeing
absolutely with, for example, the words of Nietzsche on inspiration:

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets
of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.-- If one had the slightest
residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea
that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming
forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with
unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that
shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one
does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like
lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed-- I have never had any choice. An
ecstasy whose tremendous tension... 1

I have neither seen this 'lightning' with my eyes, nor experienced this 'ecstasy' in
myself. However, I have been convinced that if something truly valuable is brought
into being, it must be in this way. Looking back to my past work in aesthetics, I am
now inclined to say that all my speculations have centered on this thesis 2 . But,
through familiarity, I have overlooked the first line of the quotation above, where
Nietzsche presents this conception of inspiration as something completely out of
date, foreign to the general way of thinking of the people of his time. Without
alienating ('verfremden') my own usual way of thinking, I could hardly even
understand the philosophical situation of Western aesthetics at the end of the
nineteenth century.

As is easily seen from the title, the present paper concerns two opposing ways of
conceiving artistic creation. The intransitive notion, proposed in the title, is
naturally defined in opposition to the transitive. The conception of inspiration under
the Nietzschean description is an intransitive one, and the modern orthodoxy, by
contrast, a transitive. The transitive notion considers artistic creation in terms of a
subject-object relation---"an artist creates an artwork". The intransitive notion takes
the opposite viewpoint and underlines the, as it were, autocreative character of
artworks; in other words, this latter poetics represents the phenomenon of an
artwork creating itself 3 . While transitive poetics insists on the leading idea and
creative power of the artist, the intransitive aims to avoid his/her artifice and
intervention and let the work be by its own becoming power.

Taking intransitive poetics as my subject, I aim at proving that in Japanese

aesthetics intransitive poetics is tightly linked to the verbal system of Japanese.

69
This thesis belongs to the field of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposes that
structural features in various phases of a language determine the ways of thinking
and the world vision of the users of the language, and conversely that the world
vision of a people dominates the structures of their language. On this reciprocal
relation between idea and language, we find a penetrating analysis and examination
in the paper of the French linguist, Emile Benveniste, titled "Categories of Thought
and Categories of Language" (1958). Benveniste does not position himself in terms
of the dichotomy, that is, does not declare whether the priority is to be accorded to
language or to the world vision. He speaks rather of "two opposing illusions" coming
from "the nature of language": on the one hand, he takes as "tautological" the
understanding of those who interpret "the formal system of language" as a copy of
the universal "logic"; on the other hand, however, he refuses to admit that language
is a transparent medium serving autarchic thought. Our linguist concentrates his
efforts on demonstrating concretely the second case, and showing that by trying to
establish "the framework proper to thought", we grasp nothing but "categories of
language" 4. For this purpose, he takes the ten Aristotelian categories as examplary
and points out how tightly they are related to the linguistic system of Greek 5.
Benveniste concludes with the assertions that they are only a "transposition of
categories of language", and that "language provides the fundamental configuration
of the properties that mind recognizes in things" 6. From this point of view, every
language constitutes the basic means of handing down the thoughts peculiar to the
culture organized upon that language. My basic viewpoint here is the same: I am
going to demonstrate that in Japanese aesthetics, the poetics of intransitivity is so
to speak "configured" by the verbal system of Japanese.

1. Poetics of Transitivity and Intransitivity.

I do not, however, mean by the above that the poetics of intransitivity is peculiar to
Japanese aesthetics. Rather, I present the pair of concepts of transitive and
intransitive poetics as a universally valid one. The poetics of intransitivity is
orthodox in Japan. In the West, the transitive notion of human creation has been
dominant in its modern civilization. This tendency is most strikingly expressed in
art theory: it is not the artwork but the artist and his/her original idea that
dominate. A number of rival "isms" symbolize this standpoint. It does not however
mean that the Western world ignores intransitive poetics. We have already met with
them in Nietzsche, who suggests that they were the dominant idea in the ancient
world. We might even be able to trace a series of intransitive poetics in the history
of Western aesthetics from ancient times on. That however is not our subject: it will
be enough for us to glance at some representative thoughts.

The 'inspiration' spoken of by Nietzsche presents a classical concept of

intransitivity. According to this notion, the real agent of poetic creation is other
than the poet. If the work retains traces of the human hand, then it is not worth
being called a poem, which requires something transcending human powers. So the
ancient Greek people sanctified poetry and invented divinities such as Apollo and
the Muses. This concept is expressed in the address to the Muses in the opening
lines of the epic: Homer begins his Iliad with this formula: "The wrath do thou sing,

70
O goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, that baneful wrath which brought countless
woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of warriors,
and made themselves to be a spoil for dogs and all manner of birds 7".

This Homeric concept of inspiration should probably be interpreted not in terms of

intransitivity but transitivity, because believing in the Muses, Homer might have
literally thought that his poem was made by them. But this transitivity lost its
strong sense as the existence of the Muses became more a matter of convention.
Eventually the poet remains alone in the scene of poetic creation, and the theory
becomes intransitive. This is just the same case as with our notion of 'tenrai',
originated in China (the Western world has exactly the same notion in the English
word 'heaven-sent'). With these concepts, we express the idea that it is not the poet
who makes the poem, but rather that it comes from we know not where. In fact, the
Homeric address to the Muses became a cliché of epic, which subsisted until
modern times in the Western world. This fact shows that probably even Western
people believe a certain intransitivity is indispensable for a poem to be really poetic
8.

Let us skip at once to our present century to notice the poetics of intransitivity
finding voice in several philosophers and artists. I limit myself to quoting, from
Merleau-Ponty, just one phrase which includes, however, several testimonies:
"Apollinaire said that in a poem there are phrases which do not appear to have been
created, which seem to have formed themselves. And Henri Michaux said that
sometimes Klee's colours seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have
emanated from some primordial ground, 'exhaled at the right place' like a patina or
a mould 9". This "autofigurative10" character of a masterpiece of art is not only
observed by artists such as Apollinaire and Michaux, and probably Klee, but also
asserted by Merleau-Ponty with regard to his ontology of Being with a capital 'B'.
Here we have the definition of inspiration which he gives: "We speak of 'inspiration',
and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of
Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to
distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted
11 ".

2. Intransitive Poetics in the Japanese Traditional Aesthetics.

We have thus examined some typical cases of intransitive poetics in the Western
history of aesthetics. So you now have a clear notion of our key concept. The poetics
of intransitivity is a theory of artistic creation that insists on the necessity of
avoiding and transcending artifice, and letting the work form itself in an
'autofigurative' way. If you like, we may take as motto of intransitive poetics the
famous dictum of Pascal: "the true eloquence laughs at eloquence 12". As far as the
doctrine is concerned, I am thinking of exactly the same thing when I speak of the
poetics of intransitivity in Japanese aesthetics. I mean that you don't have to expect
anything exotic. I don't deny that the spirit of Japanese theory is quite different and
linked to the core of the culture, but the doctrinal formula is the same. Besides, as I

71
don't aim in this paper at exhibiting many classical texts from Japanese aesthetics,
I limit myself to quote just one text as example.

I choose a text by Zeami (1363-1443?), a Noh-play master, playwright and

composer as well as actor, who brought this form of spectacle to perfection. The text
is entitled Yugaku shudou fuuken (My view on the system of training of Noh). As in
many other texts of Zeami, he explains the points of training for the Noh-player
stage by stage. The first of the advanced stage is called "the stage of Perfect
Fluency" (yasuki-kurai): a Noh-player who has attained this stage can play any
piece with ease. But he must not take his art for that of 'muhu' (art without style, or
art of stylistic indifference), because "the danger of an artistic error that lies beyond
the subjective evaluation of the artist is ever present13". The final stage must be the
one where he can execute unorthodox styles as well as the standards, without fear
of such errors. In order to explain this stage of absolute indifference, Zeami quotes
a masterpiece of 'waka' (Japanese poem) by Teika Fujiwara (1161-1241), and
comments: "the poem is very well known, and of course when we hear it we are
touched; yet it is difficult to point out precisely what the elements are in this poem
that make it so moving14 ". Finding there the essence and secret of the perfect art,
Zeami concludes as follows:

Therefore, as concerns the skill of a truly great artist, there must exist some
profound and undefinable quality in his art. There is a teaching in Tendai
Buddhism that says, "cut off all verbal expression, transcend thought, and enter
the Realm of Peerless Charm". Can we say that this "Realm of Peerless Charm" is
represented in Teika's poem? In our art as well, when a perfected level of
accomplishment has been reached, then, just as in this poem by Teika, there will
seem to be no artistic craft involved, no concern over theatrical effect ; rather, the
actor is able to transmit an emotional state to his audiences that cannot be
articulated in words 15.

So the "Peerless Realm16" or 'myô' in Japanese, is the final stage of the perfection
in artistic training. At this stage, the artist has no need of discerning and caring
about technical details. Moreover, there exists no difference between poetry and
drama any more, and they communicate even with the religious training of
Buddhism: 'myô' is originally a concept in the religious training of the Tendai sect of
Buddhism. This universality or indifference is achieved, because the perfect
masters in every field (all arts and religion) have transcended all the kinds of artifice
which make the difference between particular arts. At this stage a masterpiece is to
be realized in an absolute intransitivity: it must be as if it forms itself or appears
spontaneously, beyond any intervention of the artist, either technical or conceptual.
This conception is one of the most basic ideas in traditional Japanese aesthetics.
We can find a similar argument in any art theory from any period. I am sure that
the idea is perennial.

3. Intransitivity in the Japanese Verbal System and in Aesthetics.

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We have a keyword expressing intransitivity in traditional Japanese thought:
"naturally". The word is composed of two Chinese characters. Generally speaking,
we can use a word in this form as of any category: noun, adjective, adverb, and
sometimes even verb. The same word is used today mainly as noun meaning
"nature", but it is a use established about the end of the 19th century under the
influence of Western ideas17. Before the modern era, the word was used mainly as
an adverb, meaning "of itself" or "of its own accord" 18. Already in medieval times,
this concept was an "idea common" to different cultural fields: especially the
concept of "hongaku" of the Tendai sect, which represented its origin, became the
core of the theories of waka (poem), the noh play, the tea ceremony, flower
arrangement, etc.19. The thought of Zeami, as we have seen above was formed
against this background. In modern times (17-18th centuries), the Neo-
Confusianist notion of 'natural' as 'mui' (inaction, doing nothing) exercised a very
strong influence on the trends of thought, and its adverbial use, 'naturally', which
is very familiar to us was established20. Today historians of the Japanese thought
agree that this concept is one of the most fundamental elements in Japanese
thought 21. However, Buddhism as well as Neo-Confusianism were ideas of foreign
origin. Even if they were Japanized in the process of adoption, there must have
existed an indigenous concept of nature in order that the Japanization of these
great thoughts could take place. Indeed, the same spirit is noticed in the indigenous
religious praxis (Shugendo), which is penetrated by a primitivism willing to refuse
all cultural things (including vegetables and grains cultivated by human beings) as
impurity 22.

So intransitivity is one of the most basic moments of the Japanese world vision, and
has constituted its tradition, to which belongs an intransitive poetics. How, then, is
such a tradition supported and transmitted from generation to generation? There
exist several systems supporting tradition, such as religion, custom and convention,
literature including folk tales and ballads. These communicative items are, however,
highly cultural products, which have to be supported from the bottom in order to
constitute a true tradition. It was thanks to the people who sympathized with its
world view and thoughts that a religious sect could survive and a text could become
classic. As for the basis of this kind of anonymous philosophy of intransitivity, I
underline the role of the verbal system of Japanese. In pronouncing a word and
writing a phrase, we steep ourselves in the way of thinking embodied in language,
and thus become well versed in it. Of course I mean the system of intransitive and
transitive verbs.

The famous political philosopher Masao Maruyama opposes the Japanese 'logic of
becoming ('naru')' to the Christian 'logic of making ('tsukuru')' 23: 'naru'(become) is
intransitive while 'tsukuru' (make) is transitive. Now, as this opposition between
'naru' and 'tsukuru' is semantic or ideological and not linguistic, we can adopt an
older word for 'making' and say 'nasu'. Then, we get the pair 'nasu' (making) and
'naru' (becoming), which represents a most elemental form of the pair of transitive
and intransitive verbs, with 'na-' as common stem, and '-as-'/'-ar-' as "transitivitizer
/intransitivitizer 24". Linguists of Japanese take this type of verb as a peculiarity of
Japanese 25, so that some of them give a particular name to them such as "ji-ta-

73
taiou-doushi (verbs of transitive-intransitive correspondence) 26", "yuutsui-
tadoushi/jidoushi (transitive/intransitive verb having its pair)27", and apparently
"transitive-intransitive correspondence" is now accepted as a technical term among
the specialists. As it is a peculiarity of Japanese, it is difficult to present analogies
in Western languages. In order to give a notion how they work, I may perhaps quote
the English pair 'lay'(transitive) and 'lie' (intransitive), and 'raise' (transitive) and
'rise' (intransitive). But these are exceptional in English, and most verbs are solely
transitive or intransitive, otherwise the same verb can be used in either way. The
differentiation, then, is determined by the syntax: if it takes a direct object, the verb
is transitive, otherwise it is intransitive. Here the distinction of transitive-
intransitive is given from outside, by the phrase construction. In the case of
Japanese, however, this pairing is rather systematic, and the differentiation of
transitive-intransitive is made from inside, by the distinctive form of the ending:
these transitive and intransitive verbs have, respectively, quite regular forms of
ending. By changing the ending of the verb, we pass from the transitive to the
intransitive, or vice versa. We feel this as a quite radical change, because it is the
viewpoint we take which changes. The subject of a transitive verb of this kind is
always a person, and that of the intransitive a thing: for example, "I lay a desk" is
contrasted with "A desk lies". So while the transitive takes the form of ego-centric
vision, the intransitive represents a vision of the world or the objective thing as the
center or subject.

In the language life of Japanese, the experience of this opposition is basic, because
"especially among the basic verbs, we have many which have transitive-intransitive
correspondance28". It is not easy to estimate its importance. In a corpus
constituted of 740 basic verbs, 440(59,5 %) make pairs of transitive-intransitive
correspondence. But the more samples one takes, the smaller becomes the ratio: in
another corpus of 4800 verbs, the ratio is reduced to 17,5 % 29 . Just to quote
some examples, we have in Japanese this pair form of transitive-intransitive verbs,
which mean: breaking, cutting, curving, destroying, enlarging, widening, burning,
drying, wetting, dyeing, deciding, beginning, stopping, erasing, flowing, removing,
dropping, descending, taking, stripping, entering, planting, burying, piling... 30

4. Intransitivity as efficacy.

Most importantly, the result of the change one wishes to cause is different with
regard to its efficacy, when described either with an intransitive verb or with a
transitive verb. True efficacy is acknowledged in Japanese to belong not to the
transitive but to the intransitive verb. To appreciate this, we may consider a certain
kind of formula combining a transitive verb with its corresponding intransitive verb.
Using our canonical pair 'nasu' and 'naru', we get a proverbial formula: "nase-ba
naru", put literally into English: "if you make/do (transitive), the thing is
made/done (intransitive)". This expresses a quite similar sense to the English
proverb, "Man proposes, God disposes" (you remember the Homeric address to the
Muses), with this difference that the 'dispose' phrase is expressed in Japanese with
an intransitive verb suggesting that "the thing is arranged naturally or by itself". So
this differentiation of the transitive and the intransitive implies the idea that man

74
begins and makes efforts to realize something, but it is the thing itself that
effectuates the final realization. From the human viewpoint, the realization of an
object is given to him/her.

This distinction can be confirmed in a more striking way in a particular kind of

formula, which combines corresponding intransitive and transitive to emphasize
vain effort. An example is: "Kitte-mo, kitte-mo, en-ga kire-nai", in English:
"Although I have many times broken (tried to break) (transitive) it, the relation is not
broken (intransitive)". As is expressed here, the transitive verb expresses only the
intentional action of the subject, and the effective result is expressed by the
intransitive verb (here in negative form) attributed to the object. Interestingly, this
kind of formula is used even with regard to the effect realized by an instrument or
machine: concerning a photo, we say "utsushita-noni utsura-na-katta" (literally:
having taken a photo, it was not taken). Using the general verb 'toru'(=take), we can
adopt the same formula as for recording too.

With this distribution of different efficacy to intransitive and transitive verbs,

Japanese differs, perhaps radically, from Western languages. Suggestive is a
misunderstanding made by a Western linguist, Wesley Jakobsen, when treating of
the Japanese transitive verb. According to Jakobsen, intransitive phrases like
"ongaku-ga kikoeru" (music is heard) or "kokuban-ga mieru" (a blackboard is seen),
"mean unintentional events, or states of things", that are "results of intentional
actions", such as, respectively, "ongaku-wo kiku" (I listen to the music) and
"kokuban-wo miru" (I look at the blackboard) 31. His remark may seem reasonable,
judging from the above mentioned negative formula such as "kitte-mo kirenai": a
human effort comes first, and then there may or may not be an efficacious result.
But in fact, his remark is purely and simply a mistake. "Ongaku-ga kikoeru" (music
is heard, but expressed in an intransitive phrase having 'music' as subject) is not a
result of "ongku-wo kiku" (I listen to the music). As far as it concerns the relation
between these two Japanese phrases, the reverse order is right: "we listen to the
music", because "the music is heard". Of course, it does not concern such cases as
listening to the music in a concert hall, but rather when, for example, it happens
that we notice music coming from somewhere. In the case of intentional listening,
such as in a concert hall, the music does not 'kikoeru' ("is heard" intransitively) to
the concentrated consciousness. We are not concerned here with the type of
situation where a human intention and effort result in a efficacious change, like in
the negative formula above: rather an efficacious change in the world evokes our
effort32.

In order to show that Jakobsen's mistake is peculiar to those whose mother tongue
is Western, it is pertinent to consult the concept of "achievement verbs" (or "success
words", "got it words"), which the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle presented in his
classic book, the "Concept of Mind" (1949). According to Ryle, "many of the
performance-verbs with which we describe people and... animals, signify the
occurrence not just of actions but of suitable or correct actions. They signify
achievements33". He gives the example of such verbs as: spell, catch, solve, find,
win, cure, score, deceive, persuade, arrive, etc.. Ryle, then, compares these

75
achievement verbs with "task verbs" (or "try verbs"): for example, 'cure' is an
achievement verb, but 'treat', which corresponds semantically to it, is a task verb,
and a similar relation is found between 'travel' and 'arrive', 'kick' and 'score'. What
interests him in these oppositions, is "the differences of logical behaviour", or the
difference between their "logical forces": a task verb signifies only "the performance,
if any, of the subservient task activity", but an achievement verb asserts, over and
above that, that "some state of affairs obtains".

The point of Ryle's argument is that when we succeed in perceiving this kind of
difference, which is ordinarily overlooked, we mistake it for "differences between co-
ordinate species of activity or process". He alleges two reasons: in the first place, the
achievement verbs are "active verbs", and in the second place, they are often used
to describe the "tasks" before the achievement 34. These two reasons are probably
correlated; the first at least is hard for us to understand, because it seems no
wonder that verbs describing "achievements" in Western languages are transitive.
Ryle might mean that tasks and achievements are hard to distinguish, because they
are both expressed with active verbs. We should pay attention to the fact that
perception verbs are cited as typical examples of this differentiation between task
and achievement. After pointing out that "failure to notice" this difference in the
nature of the respective verbs "has been the source of... some mystery-mongering
theories", Ryle continues as follows:

Special cognitive acts and operations have been postulated to answer to such verbs
as 'see', 'hear', 'taste', 'deduce' and 'recall' in the way in which familiar acts and
operations do answer to such verbs as 'kick', 'run', 'look', 'listen', 'wrangle' and 'tell';
as if to describe a person as looking and seeing were like describing him as walking
and humming instead of being like describing him as angling and catching, or
searching and finding35.

Ryle argues that looking and seeing are not two distinct acts such as walking and
humming, but only two different phases, which are task and achievement, of one
continuous act such as "searching and finding". The above underlined phrase is
exactly the same as the description by Jakobsen, which shows that probably this is
a natural understanding in English. What is interesting is the fact that the
Japanese translator of the Ryle's book uses here the intransitive verb 'mieru' for the
achievement verb 'see'. It is a precise translation for the meaning of achievement,
but there is a decisive difference: while it is a person who 'sees', it is the object
which 'mieru' (=is seen by itself/become visible).

It goes without saying that, among the experiences described with Japanese, there
are cases in which a looking makes something visible. The expression "to make
something visible" implies that something is not easily visible, but rather obscure,
far away, hidden, difficult, so much so that it takes a certain time to make it visible.
"Being visible", not as a simple state but as achievement (mieru), is an effect coming
to us from the thing or the world, 'mieru' is not the result of the act of 'looking',
which is a simple preparation of the conditions for the thing to become 'visible'
(mieru): this is the meaning of the phrase "to make something visible". In simple

76
cases caught by the schema "look-see", such as "look at the blackboard" quoted by
Jakobsen, the result is not expressed as "blackboard becomes visible". We must
acknowledge that we do not say a blackboard is visible in such a case. As the result
of looking, we simply 'notice' the blackboard. If you feel something unnatural in this
expression, it is because of the artificial character of the example: when we look at a
blackboard, it is not the blackboard we notice, but something written or drawn on
it.

I do not mean to imply that in Japanese achievement verbs are always intransitive.
When we describe the achievement of a human act, we use an active verb just as in
Western languages. Rather what we are discussing is the efficacy or "the logical
force" of the intransitive verb which has a corresponding transitive, such as 'miru -
mieru' (look -become visible). I wish here to quote a Japanese linguist's opinion in
this regard. On this problem, we have a systematic argument in the book
"Descriptive Studies on the Meanings and Uses of Verbs" (1972) by Tatsuo
Miyajima. He writes as follows:

The meaning is different between a transitive verb having a corresponding

intransitive and one without: the former expresses the acting on the object and the
change of the object as well, while the latter only the action. Intransitive verbs such
as 'takamaru' (rise), 'shizumu' (sink), 'somaru' (dye), 'kuzureru' (collapse), 'yogoreru'
(become dirty) express the change itself in the object, and the corresponding
'takameru' (raise), 'shizumeru' (sink), 'someru' (dye), 'kuzusu' (demolish), 'yogosu'
(make dirty) express the change as well as the action. By contrast transitive verbs
without a corresponding intransitive describe only the action, and are indifferent to
its result. As a result, the partner may be hurt or fall down, but that is not
something the verb 'naguru' (knock) or 'ketobasu' (kick) express positively 36.

It seems that the Rylian concept of achievement verbs will not exactly apply to the
intransitive verbs which takes a thing as subject: 'achieve' is a typical active verb.
So, in the case of Japanese, it is probably better to speak of "realization". We can,
then, summarize the "logical forces", concerning "task" and "realization", of
Japanese verbs according to Miyajima as follows. The pure transitive verbs (which
have no corresponding intransitive) are "task verbs"; the intransitive verbs having
corresponding transitives are "realization verbs"; the transitive verbs having a
corresponding intransitive represent the task as well as the realization. We might
ask how the transitive having a corresponding intransitive can express the task and
the realization as well? Of course it is reckless to ask the reason for a real
phenomenon. But at least it seems that this kind of transitive gets its connotation
of efficacy from its corresponding intransitive because it shares a stem with the
latter.

Conclusion Poetics of <dekiru> .

We have been emphasizing that in Japanese we attribute the real efficacy not to
transitive verbs, having persons as subject, but to intransitive verbs, having things
or the world as subject, concerning changes in the world ("achievement" in Ryle's

77
sense) 37 . Our theme consisted in finding in this verbal system a reflection of a
fundamental world vision. I think the point has been proved. To conclude, I wish to
point out that the intransitive world vision has a very strong sense in poetics, or the
theory of creation. In the case of a perception, such as 'mieru' (being visible) or
'kikoeru' (being audible), it is not hard to consider the force as coming from the
world to us, because it concerns a phenomenon of reception. In the case of creation
or making, on the other hand, the intransitive conception is more remarkable, all
the more so, because it is essentially our active act. As mentioned above, Masao
Maruyama opposed 'naru' (become) to 'tsukuru' (make/create). It is proper to use
'naru' as an intransitive principle in the field of politics or morals, in the broader
sense of the word. In the field of human acts, 'tsukuru' is rather figurative. But in
the field of artistic creation or the making of things, by contrast, the intransitive
principle must be acknowledged to belong not to 'naru' but 'dekiru' (become
finished). This verb 'dekiru' has a peculiar semantic characteristic, so much so that
we may symbolically entrust this word with the intransitive world vision.

If you ask anyone having Japanese as his/her mother tongue the meaning of
'dekiru', he/she would answer that it means 'can' or 'be able to'. It is the word that
most directly indicates human active power. The typical use in this sense is the
phrase "dekiru-hito" (=able/bright man). This word meaning the active power is,
however, an intransitive verb. If we change the verbal part of this "dekiru-hito" into
the perfect, we get "dekita-hito", which gives a completely different image: this
means "someone who is considerate because of his rich experience of hardship; or a
perfect and affable man" 37. In this phrase, 'dekiru' is 'mature', 'ripe' or 'aged': the
product or effect of long "experience". Maturity or agedness is a grace of time,
situation, or the world. 'Dekiru-hito", one who is excellent in his subjective ability,
does not become "dekita-hito" because of his ability.

Let me add, finally, another illustration that shows how distant the Western way of
thinking is from this intransitive world vision, this time concerning the concept
'become' ('naru'). It concerns the paper "Creating and Becoming" by the American
philosopher and painter Michael Krausz 38. Its title strongly suggests an analogy
with our thesis: it goes without saying that 'becoming' is one of the most
representative concepts of the intransitive producing of the world. From the title, I
expected, in fact, an exceptional intransitive poetics in the paper. Indeed, the thesis
of Krausz is exceptional among the Western theories of creation. He does not plead,
however, for intransitivity. His 'becoming' is not that of artworks but of artists: he
means the maturing effect on the artist of his/her creative activities, which include
not only producing artworks, but also the effect on his/her personality, and he
claims it is the second aspect that should be emphasized. Indeed, most theories of
creativity take a "product-centered view" (Krausz), so his opinion is original and
fresh. However, he remains always within the framework of the S-V-O structure of
"Artist creates artwork": he simply moves the focal point, from the object to the
subject. In a sense, the Western manner of ego-centric vision is even more
emphasized here. The possibility for the work itself to 'become' is completely out of
sight. Indeed, we find in his conception of the maturation of the artist something
similar to the Japanese 'dekiru'. But the maturation implied by the notion of

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'dekita-hito' is a grace of the world. Even in the case of the artist, it is not only
his/her technical activities and skill that lead to maturity. Rather, this kind of
maturity should be avoided as an 'evil way' ('jado'), because of its partiality. The
true maturation is a grace of the totality of different kinds of experiences of the
world.

The 'dekiru' of a 'dekita-hito'(matured person) comes from the authentic intransitive

meaning of the verb. If we understand accurately that 'dekiru' is an intransitive
verb, such phrases as 'dekiru-hito'(able person) look almost like a Westernism. The
etymological meaning of 'dekiru' is "(something) comes out" (dete kuru). Man makes
things, creates history, and modifies the world. But 'dekiru', the verb which
signifies most directly this active power of man, is in its original meaning an
intransitive verb having a product or the world as its subject. No active human
intervention can produce the decisive effect. With the maturation of the artwork or
the world, something can be done ('dekiru'). The true maturation of an artist
consists in arriving at the stage where he can observe his work to mature by itself.
That is the quintessence of the poetics of 'dekiru', and the philosophical sense of
the poetics of intransitivity, exemplified in Zeami.

1 Nietzsche,Ecce Homo-How one Becomes What One Is, «Thus Spoke Zarathustra»
3, translated with an Introduction and Notes by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1
1979, 5 1985, pp.102-03.

2 I want to mention some papers of mine just as indices of how deeply this way of
thinking--which, as shall be clarified later, is far from being merely my personal
thought, but is something imposed by Japanese itself-- has been rooted in me. On
the theory of creation, "Ethique propre à l'artiste" (JTLA, vol.6, 1982; its first
Japanese version was published in 1962, which was, besides, my first speculative
paper); "Beyond the analogia creationis --Structure of Artistic Creation" (in
Japanese, 1981); "Acte et connaissance dans l'art--Retour de poïétique à
herméneutique" (JTLA, vol.5, 1981); "Rhétorique comme ars inveniendi--une
philosophie des figures" (JTLA, vol.13, 1989; first Japanese version, 1983); and
some articles in my Dictionary of Aesthetics (in Japanese), The University of Tokyo
Press, 1995. This conception that something truly valuable (or beautiful) is not
made by man, but given to man not only concerns the theory of creation, but also
"aesthetics" as theory of appreciation. The Western conception that our peculiar, so-
called "aesthetic" (=disinterested) attitude makes the object aesthetic (beautiful or
beautiful-like) is a diametrically opposite view to intransitivity. In fact, I know now
that a critical stance toward the concept of the aesthetic and modern Western
aesthetics has always been the leading idea of my studies in aesthetics: "Puissance
du beau, Impuissance de l'esthétique--Considération sur l'essence du beau naturel"
(JTLA, vol.2, 1978: my first French paper), "L'Esthétique de l'intérêt--de d'Aubignac
à Sulzer" (JTLA, vol.10, 1986). The former is related to one of the basic ideas of my
recent small English book Aesthetics on Non-Western Principles, version 0.5, Jan
van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1998, and the latter constitutes the basis of my

79
doctorate thesis: Studies of the History of Aesthetics in the 18th Century, mainly in
France, (in Japanese 1997, forthcoming).

3 Grammatically, the middle voice in some Western languages represents this

intransitive conception. Especially in a language such as Greek or Latin, in which
the middle voice is distinguished morphologically from the active voice, there is
some similarity to the verbal system of Japanese as I will explain below. I am sure
that it is because of this similarity that many Japanese scholars are willing to speak
"in the sense of middle voice". But, according to Benveniste (see below, note 5) the
Greek middle expresses the state of things, while Japanese intransitive verbs
express the efficacious change in things (see the conclusion to the present paper). I
here thank Prof. Arnold Berleant who put the question on the middle voice, when I
presented the original version of this paper at the XIVth International Congress for
Aesthetics in September 1998, at Ljubljana, and Prof. Gianni Vattimo who made the
same remark at the Colloquium on "Japanese Hermeneutics" organized by Prof.
Michele Marrar at UCLA, in December 1998.

4 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, Gallimard, chap.6 [firstly

published in Les Etudes philosophiques, No.4, 1958], 1966, pp.63-74; the quotes
are taken from p.73.

5 Ibid., pp.65-70. The first six concepts (substance, quantity, quality, relation,
place, date) among ten "all relate to nominal forms. It is in the particularity of the
Greek morphology" (p.67). The "substance" refers naturally to the substantives. The
"quantity (poson)" and "quality (poion)" correspond to the "two types of adjectives
that Greek closely associates". The "relation" reflects also a basic property of Greek
adjective, found especially in the comparative form. The "place (pou)" and the "date
(pote)" are not only symmetrical in their formation, but also belong to the same
class of adverbs which use the locative forms (pp.66-67). The other four relate to
verbs. The last two ("action" and "passivity") relate, needless to say, to the active
and passive voices (p.67). By contrast the first two ("position" and "state", or
according to Benveniste "être

en posture" and "être en état") are usually neglected as accidental, though in fact,
they come from linguistic categories too. The "position (keisthai)" is judged, from the
Aritotelian examples, as something expressed by the middle voices, and our linguist
points out that the true opposition in the Greek verbal system is to be found
between the active and the middle, and that the passive derives from the middle
(pp.68-69). In the last place, it is also these examples that teach us that "state
(ekhein)" corresponds to the perfect of verbs. "Ekhein", which means "state" and
"having" at the same time, coincides with the property of the perfect: "he is
shod"(hupodedetai) is equivalent to "he has shoes on his feet". The fact that the
middle and the perfect are close to one another, explains how the "position" and the
"state" pair up (p.69). (Incidentally, after this demonstration, Benveniste continues
by showing that the philosophy of "being" was invented on the basis of the
peculiarities of the Greek verb "to be (ekhein)" (pp.70-71).) To sum up, the
"substance" relates to the noun, the "quantity" and the "quality" to the adjective

80
deriving from pronouns, the "relation" to the comparative of adjectives, the "place"
and the "date" to the adverbs of place and time, the "position" to the middle, the
"state" to the perfect, and the "action" and the "passivity" to the active and the
passive (p.70).

6 Ibid., p.70.

7 Homer, Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray, The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University
Press, 1965, p.3.

8 We can quote some examples (I do not dare to translate the French ones). "La
Franciade" (1572) by the French poet P. de Ronsard begins with these lines : "Muse
qui tiens les sommets de Parnasse,/ Guide ma langue, & me chante la race / Des
Roys francoys yssuz de Francion / Enfant d'Hector, Troyen de nation,..." (v.1-4.).
The second example is from "Paradise lost" (1667) by the British poet J. Milton : "Of
Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal
taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of, till one
greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, / Sing Heav'nly Muse, ..."
(v.1-6). The third one is taken from "Le Lutrin" (1674), the parody by N. Boileau,
which represents the phase of transition from the archaic to modernity : "Je chante
les combats, et ce Prelat terrible, / Qui par ses longs travaux, et sa force invincible,
/ Dans une illustre Eglise exerçant son grand coeur, / Fit placer à la fin un Lutrin
dans le Choeur. / C'est envain que le Chantre abusant d'un faux titre, / .../ Deux
fois le reportant l'en couvrit tout entier, / Muse, redy-moy donc quelle ardeur de
vengenance, / De ces Hommes sacrez rompit l'intelligence..." (v.1-10). In these lines,
the poet distinguishes his role from that of the Muses: the poet presents the
concrete story, and the Muses inspire him with the idea of the subjective motives of
the heroes ("quelle ardeur de vengence"). A further modernization is given by
Voltaire in his "Henriade" (1728): "Je chante ce héros qui régna sur la France / Et
par droit de conquête et par droit de naissance; / Qui par de longs malheurs apprit
à gouverner, / Calma les factions, sut vaincre et pardonner, / Confondit et
Mayenne, et la Ligue, et l'Ibère, / Et fut de ses sujets le vainqueur et le père. //
Descends du haut des cieux, auguste Vérité! / Répands sur mes écrits ta force et ta
clarté!" (v.1-8) The Muses have departed, and in their place, the poet relies on
Truth.

9 M. Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in :H. Osborne (ed.),
Oxford U.P., 1972, p.77.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p.63. As for Klee, the preceding quote presents only an understanding by
Michaux; but the thoughts of Klee himself inspire much in Merleau-Ponty, passim.

12 B. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschwicg, fragment 4.

81
13 On the Art of the No Drama--The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas
Rimer, Yamazaki Masakazu, Princeton University Press, 1984, p.116. Here the title
of the treatise is translated as "Disciplines for the Joy of Art".

14 Ibid., p.117.

15 Ibid., pp.117-18. I have cut some words I find superfluous. My emphasis.

16 I find the word "Charm" in the above translation too strong and inappropriate to
the original religious meaning; it seems to me that the translators take the word
"myô" from the viewpoint of modern Western aesthetics. Accordingly, I have
modified the expression.

17 Cf. Akira Yanabu, Honyaku-no Shisou (Thoughts of Translation), Heibon-sha,

1977, p.75; Honyakugo Seiritsu-jijô (How the terms translating Western concepts
were made), chap. 7 "Nature", Iwanami-shoten, 1982.

18 This is the paraphrase given by Shinran (1172-1262), founder of the Jôdo-

shinshu sect and one of the greatest figures in the history of Japanese Buddhism in
his writings on "jinen hôni", which means "let the thing to be by itself such" (cf. M.
Satô, "Jinen hôni in Shinran", in: Collection of Japanese Thoughts, I <Naturally>,
The University of Tokyo Press, 1983. Cf. also the Introduction by T. Sagara to the
same book. I learned many things about the traditional notion of 'nature 'from this
anthology.

19 Y. Tamura, "Hongaku thought in the History of Japanese thought", in the above

mentioned Collection..., pp.127-28. About the basic notion of thought, cf. pp.123-
27.

20 Cf. T. Hino, "Nature and artifice in philosophy of Sorai", in the above mentioned
Collection..., pp.192-95.

21 That is indicated by the fact that one volume out of the five of the above
mentioned Collection: Japaanese Thought, The University of Tokyo Press, 1983, is
dedicated to "The Naturally". Cf. also Tohru Sagara, Heart of the Japanese, The
University of Tokyo Press, 1984, Chap.8 "Naturally". Prof. Sagara quotes at the
beginning of that chapter the notion of the philosopher Shûzo Kuki on the Japanese
character, who counted three basic moments of it: "naturally", "(high) spirits", and
"resignation", ibid., p.219.

22 Cf. Shigeru Gorai, "Training of 'Shugendô' and the return to the primitive", in the
above mentioned Collection..., p.56.

23 M. Maruyama, "'Ancient layer' of the historical consciousness", in: Japanese

Thoughts 6: Thoughts on History, Chikuma-shobô, 1972, pp.3-46. More exactly
speaking, his idea is not dichotomous but tripartite, and rather more typological
than in the style of a comparative cultural study. His basic categories of cosmogony

82
are :'tsukuru (make)', 'umu (give birth to; produce)' and 'naru (form itself; become)';
and Japanese thought and Christianity represent the two extreme cases.

24 These concepts belong to Keiichirô Okutsu, "Transitivitization,

Intransitivitization and Polarization", in: K. Suga, E. Hayatsu (eds.), Intrransitive
and Transitive of Verb, Hitsuji-shobo Publisher, 1995, pp.73, 65-66.(The paper was
firstly published in 1967).

25 T. Nishio, 1954, p.45; T. Nomura, 1987, p.140; W. M. Jakobsen, 1989, p.170; E.

Hayatsu, 1989, p.179, all in op. cit.. (24).

26 Cf. K. Okutsu, art. cit., p.73. Another notion "tairitsu-tadoushi / jidoushi

(opposing transitive/intransitive verb)" is found in: R. Aoki, "The causative--with
regard to the transitive and the intransitive", 1977, in the same anthology, p.115.

27 E. Hayatsu, "On the difference of the transitives with and without its pair
intransitive", 1989, in the same anthology, p.179.

28 Hayatsu, ibid., p.192.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., pp.181-82. It is sometimes a delicate matter to identify the transitive and

the intransitive: on this aspect, see the above mentioned papers by Okutsu, Nishio,
and Aoki.

31 Wesley M. Jakobsen, "the Transitivity and the Theory of Prototype" (in

Japanese), extract in the same anthology, p.168.

32 Here is another contact point with poetics. At least for me, the authentic creative
effort needs to be incited by something given. This is not only valid for art, but also
for philosophy and science: in short, this is one of the necessary conditions of all
creative activity. This was the theme of my paper "Ethique propre à l'artist" (see
note 2). Among Western ideas, I am absolutely in sympathy with the idea of Charles
Dullin, the French actor and producer, that an excellent expression is born where
"the voice of the world" encounters "the voice of ego" (Souvenir et note de travail
d'un acteur, Paris, Odette Lieutier, 1946, p.111-12).

33 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, University Paperbacks, Barnes & Noble, New
York, 11949, 2 1965, p.130.

34 Ibid., pp.149-50, 152 (for the name "try verbs").

35 Ibid., p.151.

36 Quoted from the commentary of the editors "In order to review the transitive and
the intransitive", in the anthology Transitive and Intransitive of Verbs, p.228.

83
37 The linguist Y. Ikegami proposes a typological distinction between "the language
of 'suru (do)'" and "the language of 'naru (become)'": of course, the latter is
Japanese, while the former is represented by English (Linguistics of 'do' and
'become', Taishûkan-shoten, 1981, esp. the last chapter). Because of the thesis, his
arguments are necessarily general. Let me quote, as an example, the discussion on
achievement verbs (not called such here): "When there is a semantic difference
between the Japanese and the corresponding English <action verbs>, schematically
speaking, the Japanese verb signifies only 'action', while the English 'action' plus
'achievement'" (p.268). This seems too hazardous an affirmation.

38 "New Meikai Japanese Dictionary", version 5, Sanseido, 1998.

39 Michael Krausz, "Creating and Becoming", in: D. Dutton and M. Krausz (eds.),
The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, pp.187-200.

84
Artistic Expression of National Cultural Identity

Bohdan Dziemidok, University of Gdansk

The turn of the 20th and the 21st century is a very interesting period. On the one
hand, there is a growth of internationalist tendencies, which make us look for
common values and universal culture, and on the other hand, the centrifugal
tendencies lead to the revival of new forms of nationalism and national and
religious conflicts.

Integrative tendencies are an unquestioned fact of every aspect of societal life:

economic (emergence of the world market, rise of international exchange and
cooperation, modernization of technology, popularization of Western patterns of
consumption, great development of transport and means of communication, etc.),
political (expansion of liberal democracy, creation of an united Europe), and in
culture, which succumbs to a tendency to create global and universal mass culture
(mass media, tourism, fashion, show business, etc.). It turns out, however, that
neither international commerce, nor the blossoming systems of communication and
transport, provide us with the common feeling of identity or belonging. At the same
time the need for those does not cease to exist. As a result, „people rediscover or
create a new historical identity", since they feel uprooted and „need new sources of
identity and new forms of stable community, new systems of moral imperatives,
which could give them a sense of a meaningful and purposeful life" (Huntington,
1997, pp. 132, 133).

One of the most important forms of collective and cultural identity still turns out to
be the national one. The prophecies of the end of the era of nations have not come
true. „The strength of national sentiments", writes Jerzy Szacki, „even if changeable
in time and diverse in space, does not show any symptoms of clear decline,... the
era of nations keep lasting and nothing predicts it will end soon" (Szacki, 1997, p.
58). In 1982, Isaiah Berlin called nationalism „the neglected power", having at the
same time supposed that „nationalism can dominate the last part of our century to
such a degree, that no movement or revolution will have any chances of success
unless allied with it" (Berlin, 1982/1991, p. 206).

In the eighties, Berlin‘s conviction might have seemed exaggerated. Some claimed
that nationalism would either become a merely historical term or would function on
the peripheries of the ‚civilized‘ world and definitely would play no part in the
unified communities of Europe. Truly, during the Cold War, international conflicts
were mainly of an ideological flavor and many observers thought the situation to be
unlikely to change quickly. However, the end of the Cold War brought a radical
change of the situation. One of the main reasons (but not the onyl one) for that, was
the collaps of multinational states like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, and
binational ones like Czechoslovakia. The problems of nationalism, xenophobia,
ethnic conflicts, national identiy, autonomy, and national culture became the center
of attention in the social sciences. This happened not only because of the situation
in Central and Eastern Europe and in the East, but also due to the growing

85
separatism or claims for cultural autonomy in Belgium, Spain, Canada and Great
Britain. „With the end of the Cold War", writes Will Kymlicka, „the demands of
ethnic and national groups have taken over centre stage of political life, both
domestically and internationally" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 193). The same author
underlines in another paper that „a striking fact of 20th century history is the
tenacity with which ethno-national groups have maintained their distinct identity,
institutions, and desire for self-government" (Kymlicka, 1995b, p. 164).

Before one can begin dealing with the question of artistic expression of national
cultural identity, one has to deal with several fundamentals. What is „identity",
what is „nation" and „nationalism", and, finally, what is „collective identity"? The
issues of nation, national culture, international coexistence, national conflicts,
nationalism, patriotism and national identity are still crucial and complex. The
complexity is to a large degree caused by the lack of clarity of the terms themselves
(especially national identity, nationalism, patriotism) which greatly adds to the
difficulty of the theoretical discourse. For the purpose of this essay, some working
distinctions between those terms are made below.

I believe that an attempt to clarify the term ‚nationalism‘ should be our point of
departure. Ernest Gellner, an outstanding theoretician in the field, coined a well-
known and popular definition of nationalism. According to him „nationalism is
primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit
should be congruent" (Gellner, 1983, p. 1). This definition seems to be, on one
hand, too narrow for it does not cover some forms of nationalism, e. g. cultural
nationalism; and, on the other hand, too broad, since it implies that all supporters
of nation-states would be nationalists, regardless of the fact that some of them are
opposed to nationalism as an ideology. In consequence, it can be argued that
Gellner‘s definition is insufficient.

It seems that any definition of nationalism should be descriptive, and axiologically

as neutral as possible. Such an approach would allow us to avoid the impoverished
vision of nationalism as exclusively aggressive, expansionist and xenophobic. This
narrow, clearly pejorative understanding of nationalism is, for example, very
popular in the Polish speaking world. The meaning of this term should be broad
enough in order to cover all its most distinguished forms. Its definition,
furthermore, should integrate not only ethnic nationalism (also called ‚ethno-
nationalism‘), but also civic as well as (political) nationalism (present both in liberal
democracies and in autocracies), cultural nationalism (the necessity to differentiate
this particular form of nationalism is mainly argued for by the Canadian
philosophers W. Kymlicka, 1995a, and K. Nielsen). It should also reflect the
differences between imperialistic and liberationist nationalism, as well as that
between aggressive, „hot" (in its exclusive and inclusive, expansionist form) and
banal nationalism ( see M. Billig, 1995), specific for the developed nation-states of
the West (e. g. USA or UK).

Andrzej Walicki approaches nationalism as an ideology „centered around the

concept of nation, promoting national ties, national identity, national consciousness

86
and nation-state" (Walicki, 1997, p. 32). Also Isaiah Berlin thinks that
„‚nationalism‘ is not only a state of mind but also a self-conscious doctrine" (Berlin,
1982/1991, p. 206). Nationalism „is an elevation of values of unity and self-
determination of a nation to the position of the highest good" (Berlin 1982/1991, p.
202). A similar definition of nationalism can be found in the book by Peter Alter:
„Nationalism exists everywhere, where individuals feel belonging above all to the
nation and where sentimental ties and loyalty to a nation trump all other bonds
and loyalties" (Alter, 1989, p. 9; see Szacki, 1997, p. 27).

The quoted definitions of nationalism are formulated in such a manner, that the
term ‚nationalism‘ can be substituted by that of ‚patriotism‘. Still, most authors
believe that it is rational and right to distinguish the two related terms. I would like
to analyze three out of many avenues to draw the line between them. The simplest
approach is the one declaring „patriotism as a feeling and nationalism as a
doctrine" (see J. Jedlicki, 1997). This simple distinction, however, does not get us
far, since even if nationalism is mostly treated as an ideology or a doctrine, we still
can speak about nationalistic feelings or behaviors which do not construe an
ideology. Patriotism, indeed, is very often seen as love of the homeland and the
nation or „strong emotional ties with the nation" (Waldenberg, 1992, pp. 18-24).
Antonina Kloskowska defines patriotism as a „strong, emotional attachment with
one‘s own ethnic group" (Kloskowska, 1996, p. 16). Morris Janovitz distinguishes
patriotism from xenophobia and hatred for foreigners as „the persistence of love or
attachment to a country" (Janovitz, 1983, p. 194).

Patriotism understood in such a way is opposed to nationalism in a narrow sense.

Consequently, patriotism is seen as a synonym for love of homeland or nation but
lacking aggressive sentiments towards other countries or nations. At the same time
nationalism represents primordial aggression, irrational exclusion, xenophobia, and
fanaticism. This picture of patriotism and nationalism as two different sentiments
or states of mind cannot be seen as satisfactory. As A. Kloskowska and M. Billig
rightly point out, in practice it is hardly possible to distinguish the one from the
other. There is a popular tendency to call one‘s own nationalism ‚patriotism‘ and to
treat the patriotism of others as ‚nationalism‘. „The problem is how to distinguish in
practice these two allegedly very different states of mind. One cannot merely ask
potential patriots whether they either love or hate foreigners. Even the most
extreme of nationalists will claim the patriotic motivation for themselves" (Billig,
1995, p. 57).

The third method of telling nationalism and patriotism apart is suggested by

Andrzej Walicki and Charles Taylor. As opposed to nationalism being connected
with „nation", patriotism is linked to the concept of „patria" defined politically, i. e.
„without reference to a prepolitical identity". Patriotism is „a strong sense of
identification with politics"; it is „a strong citizen identification" (Taylor, 1997, p.
253). Walicki sees patriotism as „a territorial concept which can be separated from
nationalism" (Walicki, 1997, p. 34). Both authors claim that patriotism understood
in such a way was present in both the American and French Revolution. „The
concept of Frenchman... was shaped under the influence of territorial and state

87
identity" (Walicki, 1997, p. 34). This profile of patriotism is/was present in
binational states like Czechoslowakia or multinational ones like the Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia, and the USA. As a result, if patriotism is merely a political/territorial
phenomenon, „nationalism can provide fuel for patriotism, can be one basis for
patriotism but not the only one" (Taylor, 1997, p. 253). This situation makes them
difficult to distinguish from one another, however, although this distintion should
be clearly made, „if we want to understand our history" (Taylor, 1997, p. 253).

A similar understanding of patriotism is shown by Kymlicka, who thinks that we

„should distinguish ;patriotism‘, the feeling of allegiance to a state, from national
identiy, the sense of membership in a national group" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 13). The
necessity to distinguish those concepts justifies the relation between patriotism and
national identity of the Swiss. Kymlicka says with regards to Switzerland: „national
groups feel allegiance to the larger state only because the larger state recognizes
and respects their distinct national existence" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 13). All three
approaches towards the divisive line between patriotism and nationalism can be
argued for and against. The latter one, however, seems to be most precise.

As is well known, the concept of identiy has two essential meanings: one is
„remaining the same" (sameness) and the other points to differentiation
(distinctiveness) from other subjects of individual or collective identity. Neither can
be overlooked in reflecting on national cultural identity. There is no „we" without
„they". Some authors (e. g. F. Barth and Z. Bokoszynski) are even of the opinion
that it is not the tenacity of national tradition or culture, nor the collective memory
and a feeling of commonality of fate, but precisely the borderlines between „us" and
„them" which are the most important for collective identity.

In contemporary theories of the nation and nationalism, alongside the

anthropological and cultural construction of nation and national identity (B.
Anderson, J. Armstrong, A. Kloskowska, W. Kymlicka, Y. Tamir and others) there is
also a political or „civic" way of defining a nation (its origin and functioning) and
nationalism (E. Gellner, L. Greenfeld, E. Hobsbawm, M. Ignatieff and others). In
both these approaches what is stressed, however, is the importance (although
different) of culture (variously understood by different thinkers) in shaping the
nation and national identity. The national cultural identity is usually treated as a
very important form of collective identity because of its tenacity and axiological
essentiality.

The question of collective identity is an equally controversial and vexing problem.

This is so because it is neither quite clear who, and in which sense, is the subject of
the collective identity, nor which is the role of the subjective and the objective
indicators of that identity. It would be interesting to propose some fresh answers to
these questions, but as I need to get to the question of the artistic expresion of
national identity, I will base my fundamental distinctions on the findings of other
authors.

88
The problem of a culturally defined national identity is one of the most crucial
(urgent and controversial) issues discussed today within the domain of the social
sciences. The notion of „national identity" should be distinguished not only from the
notion of „patriotism", but also from that of „nationalism". Even staunch adherence
to a given national identity does not necessarily lead to nationalism. After all, it
follows from the sociological research carried out by Antonina Kloskowska and her
associates that, „individual cases prove that there is no necessary connection
between strong, assertive national identification and ethnocentric nationalism"
(Kloskowska, 1996, p. 468).

Research carried out by scores of sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists,

historians and social psychologists demonstrates that national identity is one of the
most importatant and most stable forms of collective identity. Most research
workers today believe that ethnic identity and national identity are rooted in culture
which serves as the main bond within a group. Some authors go so far as to use
interchangeably in some contexts the notions of „national identity" and „cultural
identity", since any national or ethnic identity could be largely reduced to cultural
identity. For example, according to Kloskowska, both ethnic and national groups
are „corporate bodies in the form of communities determined by the relative identity
and relative separateness of their cultural traits" (Kloskowska, 1996, p. 36), since „a
common national culture constitutes a stronger, more tenacious and more effective
determinant of social bonds than a common government" (Kloskowska, 1996, p.
27). The persistence of national culture endows the national community with a
sense of continuity which is a prominent element of any identity.

Literature on this and related issues abounds in different, although often

convergent, justifications of the special status of national identiy. For example,
Walicki notes that „the nation... possesses a powerful, historically shaped collective
identity, encompassing both past and future generations, which is constantly
bolstered even while it is being contested, and finds expression in the shared
perception of a communion of anxieties, of a shared responsibility for the past and
the future" (Walicki, 1997, p. 45). Other factors which highlight the importance of
national identity are discussed by Kai Nielsen, who states that it is „indeed a very
important identity, an identity essential for many people to give meaning to their
lives, vital for their sense of self-respect, essential for their sense of belonging and
security - all things of fundamental value to human beings" (Nielsen, 1996, p. 43).

An interesting vindication of the importance of national and cultural identity for

individual human beings may be found in the works of W. Kymlicka and the Israeli
researcher, Yael Tamir, who emphatically state that an individual cannot function
outside his/her cultural context. It therefore follows, that his/her autonomous
decisions must depend on the cultural context. The instrumental value of national
identity is largely based on the above observation. The cultural-national
background plays a crucial role in the shaping of human axiological vistas and
orientations, guiding individuals in their choice of appropriate conceptions of a good
life, lifestyles, preferences and interests. And in particular, in shaping „their self-

89
esteem demand on their ties with a lively and well respected community" (Tamir,
1993, p. 111).

But it is in the work of Kymlicka that one may find the most comprehensive
appraisal of the value of national and cultural identity. I will limit myself to a
representation of only two of his main arguments. First and foremost, it is this
identity which is particularly important from the point of view of an individual‘s
personal freedom. For freedom cannot be simply reduced to the possibility of having
a choice. Actually, freedom involves making a thoughtful, sensible choice out of
„various options". It is thanks to the allegiance to their national culture that „people
have access to a range of meaningful options" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 83), if only
because allegiance to a culture and „familiarity with a culture" determines the limits
of human knowledge and imagination. Broadly understood societal culture, which
„tends to be a national culture" „provides its members with meaningful ways of life
across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious,
recreational, and economic life, encompassing both the public and the private
spheres" (Kymlicka 1995a, p. 76). Secondly, „cultural identity provides an anchor
for people‘s self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging"
(Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 89). The point is that identification ensured by national
identity „is based on belonging, not accomplishment" and such form of
identification, independent of an individual‘s personal accomplishments, „is more
secure, less liable to be threatened" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 89).

Some contemporary authors, writing on national identity, claim that inevitable

modernization processes and the liberalization of social life must result in the
diminishment of inherited national identity, which today increasingly often becomes
a matter of free choice. In this context some authors mention individuals who,
opting for a cosmopolitan identity, try to find happiness precisely in the possibility
of functioning between different cultures and making use of their divergent values,
and who, not feeling any need for being firmly rooted in one culture, change their
national identity at will (cf. J. Weldron).

Kymlicka and Walicki disagree with such views and defend the importance and
persistence of national identity, which in their opinion may not be a question of free
choice. First of all, the processes underlying national identity changes are of a
highly individual and idiosyncratic character. They function over long time periods
and are often difficult and even painful for the persons concerned, a fact which can
be verified by any Czech who tried to become a Frenchman, or any Pole who wanted
to be an Englishman, or a Vietnamese who would like to become Japanese.
Secondly, it is not necessarily true that modernization of the world and
liberalization of social life must inevitably endanger national identities. In some
countries of the West (e. g. Canada, Belgium or Great Britain), „far from displacing
national identity, liberalization has in fact gone hand in hand with an increased
sense of nationhood" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 88). The pro-autonomy aspirations of the
Flemish, the Scots and the Quebecois constitute more than adequate evidence for
this suggestion. The fact that „culture became tolerant and pluralistic has in no
way dimished the pervasiveness or intensity of people‘s desire to live and work in

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their own culture" (Kymlicka, 1995a, p. 89). Claiming that modernization does not
constitute a threat to the persistence of national culture and national identity,
Kymlicka nevertheless completely agrees with Samuel Huntington, in spite of the
obvious differences between their views, on such issues such as multiculturality,
the role of immigration and ethnic minorities in America.

One of the main motives of Huntington‘s seminal book was his constantly voiced
opposition to the conception of the globalization of culture and Westernization of
the world. In his opinion, Western civilization is not a universal model, and
Westernization is not a neccessary procondition for modernization. Even if the
inevitable advent of modernization does destroy old authorities and communities,
thereby uprooting people, this is not necessarily concomitant with the loss of the
need for a separate identity. It often turns out that people need „new sources of
identity, new forms of stable communities and new systems of moral norms, which
would provide them with a sense of life and meaningfulness" (Huntington, 1997, p.
152). Modernization is not to be equated with Westernization, and at times it may
even oppose to it. The adoption by non-Western societies of „Western democratic
institutions rouses nativist and anti-Western political movements" (Huntington,
1997, p. 127).

It follows from Social Identity Theory that „people determine their identity on the
basis of who they are not... on the basis of what makes them different from others"
(Huntington, 1997, p. 85). In the usual circumstances this capacity relies on
stereotypes, both those describing the members of their own community and those
of others. „To achieve this positive identity, groups will tend to compare themselves
positively with contrasting outgroups, and they seek dimensions of comparison on
which they feel they fare well. For instance, nations will produce flattering
stereotypes of themselves, and demeaning stereotypes of those other nations with
which they compare themselves. The dimensions on which they pride their own
qualities will be accorded importance. The flattering stereotypes, held by the
ingroup about itself, and the unflattering ones about outgroups, will maintain the
positive self-identity, which is necessary for the group‘s continuing existence"
(Huntington, 1997, p. 66).

Thus it is absolutely impossible to avoid national stereotypes in the determination,

articulation and consolidation of national identity. But if this is true, then there is
only one small step from the defense of national identity to nationalistic
xenophobia. The existence of national stereotypes is a universal and inevitable
phenomenon. „One might conceivably argue", notes the American anthropologist
Alan Dundes, „whether or not there is such a thing as national character... but
there can be absolutely no question that there is such a thing as national
stereotypes" (Dundes, 1983, p. 250). The same author, a renowned expert on
folklore, writes further: „Folklore provides one of the principal sources for
articulation and communication of stereotypes. An individual may gain his first
impression of a national or ethnic or religious or racial group by hearing traditional
jokes or expressions referring to the alleged personality characteristics of that
group" (Dundes, 1983, pp. 250-251).

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Today folklore no longer plays the important role it used to have in the past, but
there exists a quasi-folklore in the form of mass culture which popularizes its own
national stereotyypes (usually xenophobic) to an extent quite comparable with that
of traditional folklore. But what is even worse, it is not only folklore and mass
culture but also official culture and authentic high art which contributes to the
consolidation of national stereotypes. It is beyond the slightest doubt that national
literatures have considerably contributed to the shaping of national identities. The
classical example in Poland are the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz, particularly his
„Trilogy" and „Teutonic Knights". A similar role was played by Walter Scott,
Alexandre Dumas, Lev Tolstoy, Alois Jirasek or Mor Jókai. They all glorified the
magnificent past of their nations, and did not shun stereotypes in their literary
missions. The first part of Sienkiewicz‘s „Trilogy" is absolutely cluttered with
positive and negative national stereotypes, a fact which the Ukrainians were quite
justified to criticize, pointing out both the glorification of Polish knights and the
simpified, obviously negative image of the Cossacks. However, Sienkiewicz‘s
Cossacks are almost angels compared to the Polish gentry as represented in Gogol‘s
„Taras Bulba". We may of course say that Sienkiewicz is „a first-class second-rate
writer", but we would certainly not venture a similar remark about Tolstoy. And yet
we will also find out that in „War and Peace" negative characters are almost
exclusively foreigners, while Russians epitomize all virtues. The same might be said
about the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. Negative characters are invariably foreigners
(Poles, Jews, Ukrainians), while Russians are always presented in a posiitve light.

I think that in our times, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, art in a broad
sense (comprising both ‚high‘ and ‚low‘ art) can, and indeed does play a very
important role vis-à-vis reviving aggressive nationalism and a real need to preserve
national identities. The problems of reviving or strenghtening national identities and
of the phenomenon of reviving authentic and radical nationalisms that,
unfortunately, often accompany it, are - as evidenced by the number of publications
on this subject - the object of much contemporary research conducted by
historians, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists. These important
current problems only to a slight extent attract the interest of aestheticians and
other art students, though art has been and still is efficiently used in these two
related but so different matters.

The argument about the future shape of Europe concerns, among others, the issue
whether this will be a commonwealth of citizens, or a commonwealth of nation-
states, each of them preserving its distinctive autonomous culture. It is hard to tell
what the final results of the unification process will be. At the moment, though, the
opinion that the lesser stress is put on national identity, the more European the
entity becomes, does not stand the confrontation with reality.

There is no doubt that in many European countries one can presently observe a
visible revival of nationalistic ideologies. This revival may be a result, among others,
of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and regaining of independence by such
countries as Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia, Belorussia, Moldavia and
Ukraine; the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the regaining of

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greater autonomy by Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. In all the countries
which have recently gained autonomy the issue of national identity became
paramount. It is different in countries with a strong national identity and a long
history of independent statehood (e. g. Poland and Hungary), and different in
countries which have a history of national statehood but which were subject to
Russification over the last 50-70 years (e. g. Armenia, Lithuania, and Ukraine). Still
different is the situation in those countries lacking a history of past statehood (e. g.
Belorussia, Moldavia and Slovakia). In some of these countries the national identity
has to be rebuilt and strengthened (e. g. Ukraine), in others it has to be built from
the scratch (e. g. Belorussia or Moldavia).

Taking this into account, artists, scholars, journalists and other creators of culture
may and should play an important role. They have to discover how to contribute to
the rebirth of their national culture and identity, and how to support the validation
of true national values without falling, at the same time, into radical nationalism
and isolationism.

If we abandon the vague idea of „Volksgeist" which, according to Herder, can be

found in national culture and collective behavior, then one may say that national
identity is a „specific form of collectve identity" and that the factor constituting this
identity is, first of all, the existence of national culture and collective historical
memory. „National identity", writes Leszek Kolakowski, „requires historical
memory....The thing is that no nation can exist without being conscious of the fact
that its present existence is an extension of the existence in the past, and that the
further back these real or imagined memories reach, the better grounded its
national identity is. Apart from historical knowledge, the past is also stored in
various symbols, means of self-expression, in old buildings, temples and graves"
(Kolakowski, 1995, p. 49). It follows, then, that the historical memory is
consolidated by monuments of the national culture. „The national culture is a
repository, inter alia, of classificatory systems. It allows ‚us‘ to define ourselves in
opposition to ‚them‘, understood as those beyond the boundaries of the nations."
(Schlesinger, 1991, p. 174).

The importance of historical memory is also stressed by Michael Billig. According to

him, „national identity is not only something natural to possess, but also something
natural to remember. This remembering, nevertheless, involves a forgetting, or
rather there is a complex dialectic of remembering and forgetting" (Billig, 1997, p.
37). „Every nation must have its history, its own collective memory. This
remembering is simultaneously a collective forgetting: the nation which celebrates
its antiquity, forgets its historical recency. Moreover, nations forget the violence
which brought them into existence." (Billig, 1997, p. 38). The importance of the role
of national culture for preserving national identity is consequently stressed by
Antonina Kloskowska (see Kloskowska, 1996).

The formation, retention and reconstruction of national identity is not only a single
act, but a continuous process. In some historical periods the formation of national
identity was a part of the nationalistic program. „However, once the political

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boundaries of the nation-state have been achieved, a national identity, with all the
accompanying mythico-cultural apparatus, may be in place and is not necessarily
identical with nationalism as such." (Schlesinger, 1991, p. 168).

One can easily notice that at the turn of the 20th and the 21st century also the
disciplines of philosophy and aesthetics face new important scholarly challenges.
How can one find common denominators and combine the universalizing tendencies
with the wealth of regional and national cultures? How can one preserve the variety
and identity of national cultures without giving up integration and a search for a
better mutual understanding and closer ties between nations?

As is well known, art broadly understood is often treated as a source of knowledge

about cultures different from our own. Indeed, art in general (and literature and
film in particular) can be employed as a very effective („objective" and suggestive)
form of presentation of another culture: of a different system of values, different
attitudes and different mentality. In this respect, art can be a very useful and
helpful means of mutual understanding between people of different cultures. On
the other hand, however, it can also be used very effectively to achieve the opposite
objective: namely, the presentation of a one-sided, tendentious - shortly, false -
picture of a different culture and of the representatives of a different system of
values. Thus, instead of enhancing understanding, it becomes a source of
misunderstanding, cultural prejudices and hostility.

I am interested in the question of how and when such a distortion is possible in the
case of a novel or a film which at the same time is aesthetically valuable. This again
raises the need to answer the following question: which is the mutual relationship
between the cognitive, the aesthetic and the artistic values of a work of art and its
ideological function? Is there any dependance or some other kind of regular link
between the cognitive, the aesthetic and the artistic values of a work of art which
presents an alien culture in a false way, but at the same time does it so suggestively
that to the majority of beholders the work in question may seem aesthetically and
cognitively valuable? I have no doubts that in such artistic domains as, for example,
literature and cinema, there exists a mutual connection between the cognitive
aspects of a work and its artistic value. There is also a relation between the work‘s
aesthetic attractiveness and the effectiveness of its ideological function, i. e. the
higher the aesthetic clarity and suggestiveness of a work, the greater is its
ideological impact.

The relationship between the truthfulness of the message carried by the work and
its artistic status and ideological effectiveness is much more complex. This is so
because the knowledge which we derive from the arts is, in comparison to scientific
knowledge, less systematic, less profound and specific, not always equally well
founded and as thoroughly verifiable and, as a rule, much more ambiguous.
Consequently, it is much more difficult to separate the truth from the falsehood in a
work of art. Hence art may very efficiently misinform us and very convincingly and
suggestively present various false and groundless historical and political claims,
interpretations and evaluations. It seems quite probable that in many national

94
cultures one could identify artworks which have played a significant role in shaping
this nation‘s consciousness and identity, which are placed in the pantheon of
national culture despite the fact that the picture of history or society they contain
is, according to historians or sociologists, very one-sided, tendentious or evidently
false. Hence one could risk the claim that even in those arts in which the cognitive
values are very important - because they contribute to the value of the work itself
(like in, e. g., literature or the cinema) - the cognitive (e. g. historical) falsity does
not always disqualify the work of art qua work of art, provided that the work is
distinguished by its formal perfectness and is not without some philosophical or
psychological cognitive value.

In our discussion I propose, however, to concentrate on still other, equally

fundamental and difficult questions which will highlight further aspects of the
questions of national identity, collective consciousness, etc. These questions will
deal with the role of art and artistic expression in shaping (structuring, sustaining,
changing, etc.) the collective identity of nationals. Here I will try to specify the
following problems:

1. What is the specificity, importance and value of national identity, not only with
respect to a nation and a country but with respect to an individual, too?

2. Is it possible to combine one‘s loyalty to national values with national openness

and, additionally, with axiological and cultural pluralism?

3. Is it possible to have a double or even triple cultural identity? Can one

simultaneously feel Bavarian, German and European or Kashubian, Polish and
European.

4. Can one speak of regional (subnational) and supranational cultural identities? Is

there, for instance, on the one hand, a Moravian or Silesian cultural identity and,
on the other, a General European, Latin-American, Slavonic or Islamic identity?

5. What are the relationships between one‘s national identity and the symbolic
culture, and especially with its broadly understood artistic means of
communication (proper not only to high art but also, to some extent, to mass
media)? Can various forms of artistic expression only express (reveal and bring
forth) and preserve, or also shape and even construct someone‘s national identiy?

6. What is the relationship between national values and artistic values? I ask here
not only whether art can strengthen a national culture, popularize a set of national
values and strengthen one‘s national loyalty, but also whether the national values
may enrich art, and, especially, whether in the situation of the emergence of a
global culture and market economy (which has also left its imprint on art) the
national character condemns art to parochialism and provincialism. Is it true that,
in order to endow a piece of art with universal values and ensure for it an existence
on the international art market, one has to necessarily minimize its national

95
provenance, its ethnic coloring and dress it up in a cosmopolitan way? And, finally,
is it true that in all arts and on all their levels the situation is exactly the same?

I hope that a thorough discussion of the above questions can throw more light on
the role of the arts in shaping the national (collective) identities of peoples.

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(This paper has been prepared as part of the research project „We - The Good
People" and the „Dreadful They" funded by the Research Support Scheme of the

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Open Society Institute (RSS No. 23/1996. The paper was included in: Ales Erjavec,
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 International Yearbook of Aesthetics
Contributors: Volume 3, 1999

Bohdan Dziemidok is Professor of Aesthetics and Dean of the Faculty of the Social
Sciences, University of Gdansk and Head of the Chair of Ethics and Aesthetics of
the University of Gdansk. His publications include the books: On the Comic
(Warsaw, 1967), Theory of the Aesthetic Experience and the Aesthetic Values in
Polish Aesthetics 1918-1939 (Warsaw 1980); Art - Values - Emotions (Warsaw
1992); The Comical. A Philosophical Analysis (Dordrecht 1993). He is co-editor (with
Peter Mc Cormick) of the book: On the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden.
Interpretations and Assessments (Dordrecht 1989).

Joseph Margolis is at present Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple

University in Philadelphia. He is the author of more than twenty books. His
publications include the books: Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht 1984); The
Truth About Relativism (Oxford 1991); Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The
New Puzzle of the Arts and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993); The Flux of
History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley 1993), Historied Thought, Constructed
World (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1995) and most recently: What, After All, Is a
Work of Art? (Pennsylvania 1999). He is the editor of the series „The Arts and Their
Philosophies" at Temple University and co-editor of the „Series of the Greater
Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium" published by Penn State Press.

Heinz Paetzold is Professor of Communication Theory at the University of Applied

Sciences in Hamburg and Professor of Philosophy of Culture at the University of
Kassel. His publications include the books: Ästhetik der neueren Moderne
(Stuttgart 1990); Profile der Ästhetik in der Postmoderne (Wien 1990); Die Realität
der symbolischen Formen (Darmstadt 1994); The Discourse of the Postmodern and
the Discourse of the Avantgarde (Maastricht 1994); Ernst Cassirer - Von Marburg
nach New York (Darmstadt 1995); The Symbolic Language of Culture, Fine Arts and
Architecture (Trondheim 1997). He is the editor of: City Life: Essays on Urban
Culture (Maastricht 1997) and was the editor of the periodical: Issues in
Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics (Maastricht 1995-1999).

Ronnie M. Peplow teaches Philosophy at the University of Lüneburg (Germany).

His publications include the book: Ernst Cassirers Kulturphilosophie als Frage
nach dem Menschen (Würzburg 1998).

Ken-ichi Sasaki is Professor of Aesthetics and Head of the Department of

Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art at the University of Tokyo (Todei). His
publications include the books: Structure of Theatrical Language (Tokyo 1982, in
Japanese); Philosophy of an Art Work (Tokyo 1985, in Japanese); Dictionary of
Aesthetics (Tokyo 1995; in Japanese); Aesthetics on Non-Western Principles
(Maastricht 1998) and: Studies of the History of Aesthetics at the 18th Century,
mainly in France (in Japanese 1997; publication under preparation). Ken-ichi

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Sasaki is (co)editor of the periodical: JTLA (Journal of the Faculty of Letters The
University of Tokyo Aesthetics).

Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik is Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Kassel. His publications include the books: Das dialektische Verhältnis des
Menschen zur Natur. Philosophiegeschichtliche Studien zur Naturphilosophie bei
Karl Marx (Freiburg/München 1984); Franz Rosenzweig - Existentielles Denken
und gelebte Bewährung (Freiburg/München 1991); Richard Hönigswalds
Philosophie der Pädagogik (Würzburg 1995); „Von der wirklichen, von der seyenden
Natur." Schellings Ringen um eine Naturphilosophie (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt
1996); Denken aus geschichtlicher Verantwortung. Wegbahnungen zur praktischen
Philosophie (Würzburg 1999). Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik is (co)editor of the
book: Grundfragen der Ethnologie (Berlin 1993).

Jennifer R. Wilkinson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Africa

(UNISA) in Pretoria and Deputy Chairperson of the Philosophical Society of
Southern Africa. Her recent publications include: Using and Abusing African Art
(in: The African Philosophy Reader, London New York 1998); Africanising UNISA
(Pretoria 1998).

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