Book Reviews
hyman, john. The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and
Reality in the Theory of Art. University of Chicago
Press, 2006, xiv + 286 pp., 8 color + 97 b&w illus.,
$80.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.
Why do two-dimensional configurations of lines
and colors sometimes strike us as being realistic de-
pictions of three-dimensional states of affairs? Most
contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and art
theorists find it nearly irresistible to think that this
must be because of something about us. Either it is be-
cause these configurations produce a distinctive kind
of psychological effect on our minds, or because of
our familiarity (or lack thereof) with the conventions
used to construct them, or because they reproduce
the geometric structure of our retinal images. John
Hyman seriously doubts whether any of these sorts of
explanations are correct. And, in contrast to all such
subjectivist accounts of pictorial realism, he thinks
that there is something right about the idea, first in-
troduced in Plato’s Cratylus, that a realistic picture
depicts a state of affairs by copying its form and color.
Hyman’s argument proceeds not only by introducing
and examining distinctions that subjectivist accounts
overlook or misunderstand, but also by introducing
a number of his own basic principles of pictorial re-
alism (that is, principles that relate configurations of
lines and colors to the states of affairs they realis-
tically depict). What is striking about the principles
that Hyman introduces is that they make no refer-
ence to the psychological effect that configurations
of lines and colors have on our minds. As such, his
aim is to show just how far it is possible to explain
pictorial realism in purely objective terms.
Hyman critiques subjectivism on three fronts: with
regard to color, depiction, and pictorial realism. His
approach to these topics is remarkably evenhanded.
In each case, he concedes that there is a genuine in-
sight that subjectivists are right about. The problem
is that subjectivists misunderstand the implications of
their insights and wrongly conclude that they imply
subjectivism, when in fact they are consistent with ob-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:4 Fall 2007
jectivism. Hyman then goes on to give independent
reasons in support of qualified forms of objectivism
about each of these topics.
Hyman’s account of color begins from the funda-
mental principle that an object’s color is part of how
it looks. Unlike the shape of an object, which can be
understood independently of how it looks, the color
of an object cannot be so understood. This fundamen-
tal principle has several important implications, chief
among them the following: (1) the causal efficacy of
colors is limited to their effects on the thought and
behavior of beings capable of seeing them, and (2)
the final arbiter of the colors of things is the sense
of sight. These implications support the insight that a
physiological explanation of how color experience is
produced need not invoke colors as the cause of this
experience; the absorption of light by our retinae suf-
fices. But subjectivists mistakenly take this insight to
imply that the objective world, as it is independently
of our experience of it, does not contain any colors.
This mistake is based on the false presupposition that
for colors to be part of the objective world, they must
be theoretical posits that are invoked to explain how
our experience of them is produced. This presuppo-
sition is falsified by Hyman’s fundamental principle,
which limits the causal efficacy of colors and restricts
them from functioning as theoretical posits. As Hy-
man puts this point: colors, like aches, lie too securely
within the ambit of experience for them to function
as theoretical posits, so their existence cannot be de-
cided by experimental science (p. 25).
Hyman’s account of color is among the most sen-
sible of those currently on offer, but it appears to beg
the question against an influential strand of thinking
within contemporary philosophy of color, and one
that indirectly motivates subjectivism. Hyman’s ar-
gument rests on the fundamental principle that an
object’s color cannot be understood independently of
how it looks, but physicalism about color is predicated
precisely on the possibility that an object’s color can
be so understood, and anti-physicalist subjectivism
is largely motivated by arguing that this possibility is
418
coherent but not actual. Of course, if the fundamental
principle is correct, then both physicalism and anti-
physicalist subjectivism are predicated on an inco-
herent supposition, but this only presses the question
of whether the fundamental principle is correct, and
Hyman offers virtually no support for this principle
itself. He suggests it is a conceptual truth, but skep-
tics about conceptual truth (such as most physicalists
and anti-physicalist subjectivists) will hardly be con-
vinced by this suggestion. In short, I worry that more
must be said at this crucial point in the argument.
Hyman’s account of depiction begins from the con-
cept of occlusion shape, a concept he traces to Eu-
clid’s Optics. If you close one eye and look at an ob-
ject through a window, the shape of the mark you
would need to make on the window in order to block
all of and only your view of the object is that object’s
occlusion shape. Although this implies that occlusion
shapes are relative to points of view, it does not imply
that they are in any sense illusory or merely apparent.
Nor does it imply that they are in any sense subjective,
since neither their existence nor identification de-
pends on the experience of observers. Given an object
and a point of view on that object, its occlusion shape
can be identified solely in terms of Euclidean geome-
try. Having thus articulated the concept of occlusion
shape in purely objective terms, Hyman draws on it to
spell out a basic principle of depiction: namely, that a
picture represents an object by copying its occlusion
shape (or, one might say, its form). This principle suf-
fices to undermine the subjectivist contention that
it is only because configurations of lines and colors
produce a distinctive kind of subjective effect on our
minds that they depict anything at all. That said, how-
ever, Hyman concedes that subjectivists are right to
note that one and the same occlusion shape can depict
different objects, such as in the case of the duck/rabbit
figure. However, they mistakenly take this to imply
that occlusion shape tells us nothing about depiction,
whereas a more sensible conclusion is that it is insuf-
ficient, in itself, to fully explain depiction.
Hyman’s account of pictorial realism draws on not
only the concept of occlusion shape, but several other
principles of realistic depiction as well, chief among
them perspective and (what Hyman calls) modality.
In his discussion of these principles, Hyman once
again opposes those who think that these principles
only work to produce realistic-looking pictures be-
cause of something about us. He begins with an ex-
tended criticism of Nelson Goodman’s view that it is
only our familiarity with a system of pictorial repre-
sentation that makes pictures produced within that
system look realistic to us. Hyman’s chief criticism of
Goodman’s view is that it presupposes a form of nom-
inalism that is demonstrably false. It is false because
it assimilates referring expressions and predicates to
labels, which makes a mystery of (1) how the applica-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
tion of predicates to novel cases could be correct or
incorrect and (2) how predication is possible at all—
since referring to an object and predicating a property
of it involves more than just juxtaposing two labels.
The tenor of Hyman’s criticism of Goodman is a good
illustration of the mood of the book as a whole. I can
think of no better way to describe this mood than to
say that it reminds me of George Orwell’s nonfiction,
in that Hyman adamantly refuses to be taken in by
the disingenuous rhetoric of others or to deploy such
rhetoric himself. He consistently cuts to the heart of
the matter and is quite blunt with his criticisms of ri-
val views as well as with the limitations of his own
view.
Hyman takes this direct approach toward an idea
that has influenced thinkers from Descartes to David
Marr, the thought that we can explain the workings
of pictorial techniques (such as Renaissance perspec-
tive) by comparing the geometry of pictures pro-
duced using these techniques with the geometry of
retinal images. A glib formulation of Hyman’s criti-
cism of this idea is that it involves taking something
we do see (pictures) and comparing it to something
we do not see (retinal images) in order to explain
how we visually make sense of the things we do
see. Hyman’s less glib formulation of this criticism
involves reminding us of two crucial differences be-
tween pictures and retinal images. First, the geome-
try of two-dimensional pictures is fundamentally dif-
ferent from the geometry of retinal images—since
the retina is a curved three-dimensional surface—
and flattened-out retinal images do not look any-
thing like two-dimensional pictures produced using
Renaissance perspective. Second, our relationship to
pictures is fundamentally different from our relation-
ship to retinal images, since we do not in any sense
see retinal images nor do they play any role in our
perception of the world. They are produced by the
light reflected by our retinae, whereas it is the light
that is absorbed by our retinae that enables us to see.
Because philosophers persistently tend to forget or
overlook these differences, Hyman thinks that ceas-
ing to compare pictures and retinal images is a neces-
sary first step toward thinking clearly about how the
perception of pictures actually works.
The final principle of pictorial realism that Hy-
man introduces is the concept of modality, which he
defines as “the extent of the range of questions it is
possible to ask about a depicted scene” (p. 200). On
Hyman’s account, the larger the range of questions
we can ask about a picture’s content, the more real-
istic it is. Since Hyman accords this concept a central
role in his account of realism—he goes as far as say-
ing it is “the key to understanding the evolution of
realism in pictorial art” (p. 200)—it is fitting to ap-
proach it with the same critical rigor with which Hy-
man approaches the views of other philosophers. For
Book Reviews
instance, Hyman criticizes Goodman’s claim that pic-
tures are dense symbol systems on the grounds that
Goodman does not provide a way of ordering symbol
systems such that we can measure their relative den-
sity. However, one might ask a similar question about
Hyman’s own concept of modality, namely: How can
we measure the range of questions we can ask about
different pictures? Of course, it seems intuitive to say
that the more realistic a picture is, the more ques-
tions we can ask about it, but I wonder whether this is
generally true. A large, but unrealistic, picture might
sustain more questions than a small, but realistic, pic-
ture. Or they might both sustain an endless series of
trivial questions. The problem is that although the
concept of modality is intuitively appealing, in the ab-
sence of some way of distinguishing between trivial
and nontrivial questions and a way of measuring the
relative number of nontrivial questions we can ask of
artworks, this concept does not rise to Hyman’s own
high standards of philosophical rigor.
What it is for a picture to be realistic is an im-
portant topic not only within aesthetics. Since Plato,
philosophers have invoked pictures as models for un-
derstanding truth, knowledge, and the representa-
tional character of thought (among other things). The
problem is that pictures have turned out to be as hard
to understand as any of these other topics, and con-
fusions about the nature of pictorial depiction have
corrupted our philosophical accounts of these other
topics. As such, as long as these confusions persist, it
is hard to imagine how our philosophical understand-
ing of any of these topics will improve. The Objective
Eye is the best available clarification of these confu-
sions. It should be required reading for many, many
philosophers.
ZED ADAMS
Department of Philosophy
University of Chicago
attridge, derek. The Singularity of Literature. New
York: Routledge, 2004, 192 pp., $90.00 cloth, $29.95
paper.
The Singularity of Literature is a thoughtful and dense
meditation on creating literature and reading it. The
slimness of the volume belies its richness and its ca-
pacity for inducing readers to ponder anew their re-
lation to literature. The writing is honest and open,
importing Emmanuel Levinas’s formulations into lit-
erary theory in an intelligent and rewarding manner,
and the range of the ideas put forth transcends liter-
ature and is applicable to other forms of art.
Derek Attridge aims to respect literature’s re-
silience to its own definition and exhaustive theo-
retical elucidation. Instead of a definition, he under-
scores the ties between literature and creativity, the
419
latter being understood as a stepping beyond the fa-
miliar. He utilizes three concepts: invention, singu-
larity, and alterity. These are unpacked as follows:
creativity or “invention” is success in allowing a con-
frontation with “alterity”—that which lies beyond the
established horizons of a culture—to take place. A
reading is, accordingly, an opening up to alterity, an
encounter occasioned by the work. Noting and ar-
ticulating alterity cannot be willed into existence. It
involves a mix of activity and passivity, permitting a
self-remaking enabling perception and formulation
of the hitherto unthought or unfelt. “Singularity” en-
ters the picture as a regulative concept, separating
uniqueness (the work’s mere difference from others)
from the novelty that we look for in literature. More
than simply differing from other works, singularity
is “a difference that involves the irruption of other-
ness or alterity into the cultural field” (p. 136). The
inventiveness of (good) literary works does not re-
side in producing the merely new, but in bringing out
otherness.
In assessing this account, I was worried less by
an overly tight circular interdependence of the three
cardinal concepts and more with the nagging suspi-
cion that some crucial normative ingredient was be-
ing neglected. Like “novelty” or “originality,” “oth-
erness,” too, is a parasitical value (after all, exposing
exclusion should not automatically prompt us to re-
instate that which was excluded). But how to win-
now out the wheat of omitted matter that should
be importantly exposed from the chaff of the right-
fully discarded, which should justifiably remain in cul-
tural oblivion? Otherness, characterized as implying
“a wholly new existent that cannot be apprehended
by the old modes of understanding, and could not
have been predicted by means of them” (p. 29), fig-
ures both in the book’s account of the creative act
and in its description of reading. Yet even if such
nomenclature adequately captures the essentials of
the creative act, since experiential extension as such
insufficiently characterizes powerful literature, look-
ing for literature’s singularity within a set of parasit-
ical attributes—creativity, novelty, originality, inno-
vation, or alterity—suggests a partial account at best
and risks misplaced emphasis. Here, the book’s dis-
sociation from explicitly political approaches works
against it. For political criticism, the occluded other
is associated with the culturally repressed (and op-
pressed). Demarginalization presents a clear and un-
contested moral objective, clarifying precisely what
aspects of alterity merit exposure and why. “Singular-
ity,” by contrast, seems to me to be too thin to guide
and explain the value of creativity or of perceiving
alterity as such.
Ironically, the extensive stress Attridge places on
creativity and inventiveness increasingly alerted me
to the (surprisingly) limited role that the originality
420
of the work and its exposure of otherness play in
my own strong experiences with good literature. To
begin with, Attridge’s ideal readers are thoroughly
steeped in the cultural matrix within which the work
was produced. Otherwise, they would be unable to
experience the work’s novelty in sensing and express-
ing otherness. Yet while familiarity with the work’s
formative context can amplify pleasure, overempha-
sizing the import of such acquaintance runs counter
to the impression that much of our delight and need
of literature is unrelated to text-context comparison.
Nor does it square with my own reading experience
of canonical or noncanonical literature, both as a sea-
soned reader and as an inexperienced one. Some of
the best novels I have read in recent years, by authors
such as Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Zadie Smith,
Tristan Egolf, and Michael Chabon, do not provide
me merely with crude pleasure. Nor can I bring my-
self to dismiss them as instances of “making” rather
than “creating” (a distinction invoked by Attridge
to describe producing according to tested formula in
opposition to genuine creation). Yet my admiration
for these novels does not spring from them open-
ing up a cultural blind spot. I will not be surprised if
critics would expose such merits. But my pleasure in
reading these had little to do with discovered alter-
ity, and was pieced together from altogether different
qualities (being finely written, complex, insightful,
richly characterized, patient, subtle, funny, intense,
moving, witty, multilayered, alarming, absorbing,
and so on).
How about canonical literature? In the first Shake-
speare class I attended as an undergraduate, we read
some moments from the first act of Richard II. I was
struck by Mowbray’s response to his banishment, his
sense of dissociation not, as could be expected, from
friends and kin, but from language as such: “The lan-
guage I have learnt these forty years, My native En-
glish, now I must forgo . . . Within my mouth you have
engaoled my tongue, Doubly portcullised with my
teeth and lips” (I.3). Appreciating the striking images
in this speech has nothing to do with refashioning con-
ventions of lament. I was taken by the liveliness of the
lines and the imaginative leaps that they make in per-
ceiving teeth as a portcullis of the tongue, construing
displaced existence as a physically disrupted wish to
speak. I recently had occasion to revisit these lines—
this time as a teacher. What I can now find in them is
how they subliminally comment on and criticize the
dull, limited, and militant images of “England” pro-
vided by some of the play’s principal characters. Yes,
it is possible to argue for some growing/emerging na-
tionalism in Shakespeare’s England to which the lines
respond, but doing so is unnecessary, and the power
of the images does not depend on such argument.
Cultural horizons are not being refashioned, for us
or for Shakespeare’s audience, and alterity does not
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
really enter the picture. Yet this speech is surely one
of those moments in which it happens.
Accordingly, for me, The Singularity of Literature
is best perceived as elucidating one modality of liter-
ature’s unique capacities, not a comprehensive the-
ory on literary value or literature’s singularity, or cre-
ativity in literature in general. In its more cautious
moods the book denies that it provides a compre-
hensive explanation of singularity, or that it attempts
to reduce aesthetic merits to locating alterity. In its
more cautious moods, the book presents creativity as
a daily occurrence rather than some profound discov-
ery. Weakening the thesis in these ways could prob-
ably cover all the counterexamples that I marshaled
above. Nevertheless, the thrust of the book surely
translates literature’s contributions into the exposure
of an alterity lying outside cultural horizons. After al-
lowing for the qualifications and restrictions Attridge
adds, I still fear that such extensive reliance on alterity
is too limiting.
As for the weaker version of the argument (accord-
ing to which some literature operates in the ways At-
tridge specifies), here the problem is that harping on
literature’s capacity to step beyond the cultural ma-
trix risks ignoring the fictionality of what a “cultural
matrix” is. Talk of “cultural horizons,” “limitations,”
“lacunas,” and such is never simply descriptive, but is
a fabricated image that is hooked onto an incomplete
collage of texts. Although Attridge would surely ac-
knowledge this, his emphasis on response to alterity
seems to rely on the kind of simplified realism that, if
examined as such, he is bound to reject. The implica-
tion is that we are never in the hypothetical location
Attridge requires us to inhabit in order to appreci-
ate the singularity of literature. We can never know
what these horizons and limitations are. Intellectual
maps are imposed, and once this is conceded, pressing
us to look for the singularity of literature in remold-
ing boundaries sounds more unstable than what first
meets the eye.
One intriguing component Attridge throws into
his account of literary singularity is the idea of perfor-
mance. Literature is an event, enacted—performed—
by the reader. Specifically, Attridge proposes that
salient aspects of reading—relating to the text as
referring to some reality, or as facilitating forms of
witnessing, or as truth-telling, or as disclosing emo-
tional intensity—are all performances of language by
a reader as enabled by a particular text. Literature
does not, for example, provide truths: “We learn from
literature, not truth, but what the telling (or denying)
of truth is . . . literature does not present themes as
such but rather takes the reader through a process of
thematization” (p. 97). In a similar tack, while literary
works can be testimonies, their specific contribution
lies not in recording distressing events but in staging
“the activity of witnessing” (p. 97).
Book Reviews
One would want to know more about this process,
and to see some elaborate examples of such perfor-
mativity (the book offers two samples from poetry,
and Attridge refers us to his book on Coetzee, J. M.
Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the
Event [University of Chicago Press, 2005]—which I
have not read—for examples from prose). But what
he provides here is suggestive and worthy. The nov-
elty resides in what Attridge is positively ascribing to
the act of reading. Others (such as Peter Lamarque
and Stein Haugom Olsen in their Truth, Fiction and
Literature: A Philosophical Perspective [Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997]) have already distinguished be-
tween comprehending thematic content and assert-
ing that it is true (literature, in their opinion, as in
Attridge’s, extends to the former and not the latter).
What I find in Attridge on this front is an impor-
tant exposure of a further facet of literature, situated
in between comprehending and asserting. “Perfor-
mativity” here designates the following through of
a process that is configured by the text and under-
gone by the reader. We can thus distill three layers
of the relationship between literature and concep-
tual/philosophical outcroppings: the first relating to
thematizing, the second to asserting that the thema-
tized content is true, and the third to the process of
weaving together the truth-claims as such. And while
Attridge downplays the import (or the specifically
literariness) of the first two functions, center-staging
the third, I see nothing to prevent welcoming his con-
tribution into more comprehensive accounts of the
relationship between literature and knowledge.
Hopefully, the counterthoughts that I have formu-
lated in response to Attridge convey the book’s ca-
pacity to invite engagement and further investigation.
In all, The Singularity of Literature is a wise and im-
portant exploration into the distinctiveness of litera-
ture.
TZACHI ZAMIR
Department of English
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
mcginn, colin. Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discov-
ering the Meaning Behind the Plays. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2006, viii + 230 pp.,
$24.95 cloth.
Trying to pinpoint exactly what makes William
Shakespeare’s plays so timelessly absorbing is a long-
standing problem of aesthetic criticism and philo-
sophical reflection. There is evidently something
more to the Stratford bard than an evening’s enter-
tainment of tortured prose. Shakespeare’s works are
intellectually stimulating in ways that far surpass the
escapism afforded by comedies and dramas produced
by lesser talents with less serious preoccupations, not
421
to mention considerably fewer literary gifts. It is natu-
ral for a philosopher focusing on Shakespeare’s art to
attribute philosophical ideas to Shakespeare, to see
in his scripts a proclivity for philosophical inquiry,
and finally to come to think of Shakespeare’s works
as embodying a philosophy, if only in a loose and
breezy sense of the word.
Colin McGinn explicates philosophical topics in
some of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary writings
for the theatre. After a brief preface, McGinn’s study
begins with a chapter on “General Themes” and then
proceeds to detailed examinations of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Mac-
beth, King Lear, and The Tempest, before turning
to a suite of essays on specialized topics, including
“Shakespeare and Gender,” “Shakespeare and Psy-
chology,” “Shakespeare and Ethics,” “Shakespeare
and Tragedy,” and “Shakespeare’s Genius.” The book
concludes with notes, bibliography, and an index.
Throughout, McGinn demonstrates great sensi-
tivity to a variety of narrative nuances in Shake-
speare’s plays. In the course of presenting sharply
focused overviews of plot lines and character devel-
opment in the works he discusses, McGinn identifies
three major categories of philosophical preoccupa-
tion. Shakespeare, he claims, is particularly interested
in epistemological problems of knowledge and skep-
ticism, citing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Oth-
ello as prime examples; the concept of self , treating
Hamlet, among other works, as illustrating his the-
sis; and the metaphysics of causality, especially in
Shakespeare’s King Lear. McGinn retells the essen-
tial details of these plays as they relate to his argument
that they exemplify interest in a specific problem of
philosophy. He gathers evidence from the texts to
make the case that Shakespeare was engaged in the
literary exploration of contemporary philosophical
questions in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and
metaphysics.
Thus, in describing the role of Puck at the conclu-
sion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, McGinn writes:
“The epilogue to the play, spoken by Robin Good-
fellow (Puck), reminds the audience of its own role
in imaginatively generating the play it has just wit-
nessed, and toys with precisely the dream skepticism
invoked by Descartes and Montaigne: ‘If we shad-
ows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here, While these vi-
sions did appear; And this weak and idle theme, No
more yielding but a dream, Gentles do not repre-
hend. If you pardon, we will mend.’ Robin is suggest-
ing that the audience has itself been dreaming—and
how, indeed, can they be certain they did not dream
the whole thing? Surely, as Descartes would insist,
it is logically possible to dream that you have been
watching a play about dreaming, taking it to be real-
ity” (p. 33).
422
This single passage illustrates McGinn’s general
method in discovering and documenting all three
of the philosophical themes he attributes to Shake-
speare. Spending time at the theatre is indeed a kind
of holiday from reality, as are fantasy and dreams.
When Robin proposes conditionally that the audi-
ence members might consider that they have been
sleeping and rapt in dreams during the play’s perfor-
mance, he does indeed sound a philosophical theme
that Montaigne, Descartes, and later philosophers
have entertained. McGinn identifies these lines of
dialogue or situation in which a Shakespearean char-
acter as spokesperson in some sense for the author’s
ideas can reasonably be construed as caught up in
considering a philosophical subject. McGinn then
characteristically proceeds to attach a higher level
of contemporary professional philosophy’s concerns
with the topic than it appears plausible to ascribe to
Shakespeare himself.
In the above quotation, for example, Robin Good-
fellow does not challenge the audience to prove that
it has not merely been dreaming. He merely invites
those in attendance to consider that they may have
dreamt the events of the play if the performers have
in any way offended them, entirely, it appears, as a way
of assuaging the possibility that they might otherwise
have taken the comedy too seriously or literally. In ef-
fect, Robin says, if you are annoyed by what you have
seen, treat it as though the scenes were played before
you in a dream. This strikes me as a rather far cry from
saying that Shakespeare was questioning the episte-
mology of sense certainty in light of the logical possi-
bility that the contents of sense experience might be
nothing more substantial than a well-ordered series
of dream images. This is, as McGinn rightly remarks,
something that Descartes would have insisted was
conceivable, at least until Meditation III in his Med-
itations on First Philosophy, when the “solution” to
skepticism appears in the existence of God as guar-
antor of the veracity of all our clear and distinct per-
ceptions. But is it also true of Shakespeare? Robin
Goodfellow does not mention the concept of cer-
tainty when he playfully proposes to the audience
in jest that it discount whatever may have failed to
please it in the play as though the same were merely
the product of a dream. An equally if not more credi-
ble interpretation of the epilogue is that Shakespeare
is indulging in simile, declaring through Robin that
watching a play unfold is rather like a dream; not that
we cannot tell the difference between the two, let
alone that we cannot do so to a high degree of epis-
temic certainty. Shakespeare barely skins these philo-
sophical issues, where McGinn adds many a pound of
flesh.
McGinn knows that Shakespeare read Montaigne.
Beyond his early education memorizing the pithy
pronouncements of classic Latin authors, however,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
there is little evidence that Shakespeare, despite wide
reading in history, geography, and literature, visited
many other philosophers’ pages with serious intent.
If the argument for Shakespeare having a philosophy
is in part that he read, sometimes even cribs from, and
weaves reflections from Montaigne’s Essays and the
Defense of Raymond Sebond into his plays, we must
further ask whether and in what sense Montaigne is
or has a philosophy. Some commentators today are
willing to extend this label to the essayist, while oth-
ers are more skeptical. What is not in doubt is that
Montaigne and Shakespeare examine in literary fash-
ion ideas that are in one way or another the common
property of every thinking person, part and parcel,
so to speak, of the human condition. Iago deceiving
Othello by concealing his true thoughts, and Othello
being unable to know this other conspiring revenge-
ful mind as well as he understands his own beliefs and
intentions is, of course, a problem of interest to episte-
mologists and philosophical psychologists. Whether,
in portraying such commonplace occurrences, shared
by innumerable works of fiction whose authors one
would not dream of classifying as philosophers or as
having a philosophy, Shakespeare should be ranked
in this way is a matter about which McGinn in the end
does not entirely persuade a reader who is looking for
something more definitive of genuine philosophical
reflection.
It is worth remarking also in this connection that
McGinn finds in Shakespeare precisely the kinds
of philosophical topics that McGinn himself, among
others, has actively pursued in his own philosophi-
cal writings. Other Shakespeare critics, such as Terry
Eagleton in his celebrated 1967 Shakespeare and
Society: Critical Studies in Elizabethan Drama
(Schocken), William Shakespeare (Rereading Liter-
ature) (Blackwell, 1986), and Literary Theory: An In-
troduction (Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1997), have looked at
some of the same plays as McGinn and found rather
different topics of equally general “philosophical” in-
terest. Where McGinn considers Lear and Hamlet as
deep probings of the concept of self, a chapter in verse
of inquiry into the philosophy of mind and the limita-
tions of knowledge, Eagleton finds evidence of social
instability and a breakdown of the feudal order, lead-
ing to the rise of capitalism in Shakespeare’s time,
interpreting the assassinations of royalty as emblem-
atic of the general social upheaval. Where McGinn,
quite insightfully, in my opinion, characterizes Ham-
let and Macbeth as diametrically opposed in char-
acter portrayal when read as studies of personhood
in relation to the theory of action, Eagleton over-
looks these differences for the sake of the underlying
unity of political turmoil and disorder the two dramas
represent. Shakespeare’s narrative poem “Lucretia,”
not mentioned by McGinn, is another good case in
point, with a political moral presented as a human
Book Reviews
drama. The infamous rape of a virtuous woman by
Sextus Tarquinius represents royal abuse of power
more generally, and leads historically to the perpe-
trator’s undoing by an outraged public, and subse-
quently to the dismantling of the royal house and
founding of the republic in ancient Rome. Richard
Louis Halpern’s Shakespeare Among the Moderns
(Cornell University Press, 1997) offers yet another
choice of topics that are interesting to philosophers,
on the strength of which we would be equally hard-
pressed to describe Shakespeare as a philosopher or
as possessing a philosophy in anything like the man-
ner of such contemporaries as Francis Bacon or Nic-
colo Machiavelli. It is one thing to pick up philosoph-
ical ideas from others and lace them into a work of
literature, and quite another to address philosophical
problems philosophically as original contributions to
philosophy.
Moreover, there are serious gaps in McGinn’s crit-
ical methodology that make it difficult to share his
enthusiasm for Shakespeare as a philosopher. For
one thing, McGinn does not venture far enough into
the historical background of the works he exam-
ines. He does not look into the precursor sources
of plays written by other authors that, in many in-
stances, Shakespeare adapted. Shakespeare is well
known and widely appreciated as having made bet-
ter use of source material when rewriting in his own
idiom extant plays that were already available in
manuscript or playbooks of the time. An in-depth
and authoritative examination of Shakespeare’s pre-
decessors is made, among others, by Park Honan in
his Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press,
1998). There, we learn important details about the
content of plays by other writers that Shakespeare
assimilated and improved on in producing scripts for
the theatre. Nor, of course, was Shakespeare alone
in this practice at a time when writing for the stage
was not regarded as legitimate literature and when
plays evolved as they still do today through improvi-
sation and additions made by actors in the course of
their actual performance. If it turns out that some of
the philosophical ideas touched on in Shakespeare’s
plays are part of the sources from which he borrowed,
then at most we can make the case for his choices as
reflecting a certain philosophical disposition, rather
than as the original product of a creative philosophi-
cal intellect. These vital topics, again, do not occupy
McGinn in identifying what he takes to be the main
lines of Shakespeare’s philosophy.
The question of Shakespeare’s own attitude to-
ward his plays, as opposed to his narrative poems
and sonnets, raises yet another problem about the
extent to which Shakespeare can seriously be consid-
ered to have developed a philosophy, or even to have
scrounged one from Montaigne. In keeping with the
attitudes of his time, Shakespeare is known not to
423
have depended on his plays, as opposed to his poetry,
for securing his literary fame. Yet the poems, inter-
esting as they are as classical mythological set pieces
in their own right, and the enigmatic sonnets, if these
represent Shakespeare’s own sense of his importance
as a serious writer, have nothing particularly philo-
sophical about them, nor does McGinn devote any
space in the book to their consideration.
Rather than expressing a philosophy, McGinn’s
own remarks on Shakespeare’s plays evince instead,
and far more convincingly, a penetrating grasp of
a variety of aspects of psychology. Indeed, a more
accurate title for the book would be precisely this.
McGinn seems to recognize the theme in many places
throughout his discussion, and especially in the essay
on “Shakespeare’s Psychology.” Another important
psychological theme McGinn touches on in several
places is that of every person as adopting a mask or
literal persona for social interaction. In many of the
plays McGinn explores, Shakespeare seems to antic-
ipate an attitude, as McGinn notes, that is more fully
developed by Erving Goffman in his 1959 study, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Doubleday).
Shakespeare’s personal involvement as an actor and
author of so many distinctive three-dimensional char-
acters, together, perhaps, with the need during his life-
time to disguise his own Catholic religious beliefs in
a generally Protestant community, makes the discus-
sion of persons appearing masked in society an im-
portant connecting thread in many of McGinn’s chap-
ters. McGinn, on the other hand, who surely knows
better, nevertheless confuses things terminologically
by referring to the problem of subjective opacity as
the problem of other minds, a label more standardly
used to designate the epistemic difficulty of know-
ing whether other subjectivities exist posed by the
conceivability of solipsism, or by the outright meta-
physical denial that minds other than one’s own exist.
The real theme of Othello, I would say, in any case,
from a psychological point of view, and contrary to
McGinn, is not the title character’s jealousy or the
universal epistemic limitations to which he and every
other thinker is limited, but his unruly pride.
Having criticized the premise of McGinn’s recent
exposition of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, I now want to
say that none of these misgivings makes any differ-
ence with respect to the enormous value of McGinn’s
book. That Shakespeare makes reference to many
aspects of human life that are of interest to philoso-
phers is something we may have suspected before
reading McGinn. What we gain from McGinn is im-
measurably worthwhile if we take from it not a con-
viction that Shakespeare is himself a philosopher, but
rather the insights of McGinn’s own philosophical de-
liberations on an interrelated set of topics by which
Shakespeare’s dramatizations are uniquely illumi-
nated. When we read McGinn on Shakespeare we
424
are prepared to reread Shakespeare with a new un-
derstanding and deeper appreciation of the artistry,
profound perception of human character, and com-
plexity of Shakespeare’s achievement. We may read
Shakespeare thereafter through the eyes of a philoso-
pher, even if we are not equally tempted to read much
philosophy into Shakespeare.
DALE JACQUETTE
Department of Philosophy
The Pennsylvania State University
krasner, david, and david z. saltz, eds. Staging Phi-
losophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance and
Philosophy. University of Michigan Press, 2006,
344 pp., $70.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.
Although canonical philosophers such as Plato, Niet-
zsche, and Rousseau were very much interested in the
form and substance of theater, this ancient art form
has been mostly neglected by contemporary aesthet-
ics, especially analytic aesthetics, even as the other
narrative arts have received a great deal of attention
in recent years. Many different professional philoso-
phers have analyzed film, literature, and even televi-
sion in a variety of ways, but “very few professional
philosophers have focused in depth on questions per-
taining to the phenomena of theater or performance”
(p. 1). The near total silence on theater is particu-
larly strange in the context of the still raging moral-
ism/autonomism debate in analytic aesthetics, since
of all the arts theater has the richest and longest his-
tory of conflict with morality in its various forms—
secular, religious, and philosophical (see my “What
Rousseau Teaches Us about Live Theatrical Perfor-
mance,” JAAC 62 [2004]).
However, this state of affairs may be changing. The
2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for
Aesthetics will feature a panel on the aesthetics of
theatrical performance. In December 2007, Kansas
State University will be hosting a symposium on “The
Art of Performance.” And since late 2006, a number
of philosophical works on theater have been pub-
lished, including James Hamilton’s The Art of The-
ater (Blackwell, 2007), my “What is a Theatrical Per-
formance?” (JAAC 64 [2006]), and the book being
reviewed here.
Staging Philosophy is a collection of fifteen essays
by fifteen different scholars. The essays represent a
variety of disciplines, including analytic philosophy,
continental philosophy, performance studies, and lit-
erature, and are grouped into three main thematic
categories: “History and Method,” “Presence,” and
“Reception.” The editors’ aim in compiling this col-
lection of essays, as stated in their Introduction, is to
“examine key issues in theater and [live] performance
from a philosophical perspective” (p. 2). There is no
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
unifying theme to the book—in fact, the editors take
pains to explicitly reject the existence of any unifying
theme and to point out that some of the essays deploy
arguments that contradict arguments found in other
essays.
The editors do, however, express a belief that the-
ater and philosophy are “kindred disciplines”—that
they share important similarities of method and telos.
Specifically, “[t]he critical link that holds theater and
philosophy together is the act of seeing. Observing
events, actions, responses, gestures, and behaviors,
along with hearing sounds, voices, tones, and rhythms,
brings us closer to understanding the realities that un-
derlie surface appearances. . . . Both theater and phi-
losophy represent humans actively engaging with and
in the world, and a basic technique both employ to
that end is dialogue” (pp. 3–4). The dialogue referred
to is not only that of certain philosophical works, such
as those by Plato or Hume, but the dialogue with one
another through which professional philosophers re-
fine their ideas and further various inquiries. This lat-
ter type of dialogue, the editors contend, is an “action
performed within a dramatic exchange of arguments
and assertions” (p. 4)—just like the dialogue that fur-
thers the action in many theatrical performances.
The view that there is a link between theatrical per-
formance and philosophy is intriguing and has an an-
cient pedigree. For instance, the French philosophes
believed that theater, especially comedy, not only
served the same purpose as philosophical ethics, but
did a better job of achieving that purpose (Jean-
François Marmontel, “Encyclopedia: Comedy,” in
Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski,
[Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974]). Perhaps most
famously, Nietzsche characterized theater (or, more
precisely, tragedy) and philosophy as two antagonis-
tic competitors for the same prize: each of them at-
tempts to conceptually structure human culture, but
in fundamentally different ways (as in his The Birth
of Tragedy). Theater’s medium is emotion and de-
sire, whereas philosophy deploys logic and reason.
On this view, the Platonic dialogues represent phi-
losophy’s triumph, and it is no coincidence that they
usurp theater’s form in the process.
Though Staging Philosophy contains no unifying
theme or thesis aside from the link between phi-
losophy and theater discussed above, four of the
essays—as it happens, the first essay in Section 1,
the first two in Section 2, and the first in Section
3—take up a theme that is central to the philoso-
phy of theater: the ontological character of theatri-
cal performance. Are theatrical performances inter-
pretations of their scripts and therefore secondary
to the art of literature, or are they a separate,
primary art form that cannot be reduced to any writ-
ing? Each of the four essays is concerned with this
question, but in completely different ways. Julia A.
Book Reviews
Walker’s “The Text/Performance Split Across the
Analytic/Continental Divide” analogizes the onto-
logical question to the debate between different styles
of philosophy. Philip Auslander and Noël Carroll, in
back-to-back essays entitled “Humanoid Boogie: Re-
flections on Robotic Performance” and “Philosophy
and Drama: Performance, Interpretation, and Inten-
tionality,” respectively, engage each other from oppo-
site ends of the ontological debate over the status of
theatrical performance. And in “Infiction and Outfic-
tion: The Role of Fiction in Theatrical Performance,”
David Saltz attempts to reconcile the two sides of the
question by preserving the value of theater’s unique
liveness while at the same time explaining the role
of interpretation in understanding theatrical perfor-
mances after the live moment has passed.
In the “History and Method” section of the book,
Julia A. Walker superimposes what she calls the
“text/performance” split onto the divide between
continental and analytic philosophy. Walker believes
that the clash in philosophy of theater between those
who privilege the script versus those who privi-
lege the live, embodied performance is essentially
the same clash we find in twentieth-century West-
ern philosophy between the “analytical tradition of
Bertrand Russell,” which privileges “the formal rela-
tions among propositions in statements made about
the world,” and the “phenomenological tradition of
Edmund Husserl,” which privileges “the knowing
subject who engage[s] in [formal] relations with the
world” (pp. 25–26).
Walker’s analysis is interesting and sugges-
tive. However, I would point out that the
text/performance debate in philosophy of theater is
not about different approaches to a particular prac-
tice but about the proper ontological account of the-
atrical performance. The question at the heart of
the split is: Are theatrical performances essentially
scriptable such that they are either interpretations
of written plays or, in the case of certain improvised
works, the genesis of written plays, or is there some-
thing aesthetically significant about the live event that
is more than just an interpretation of a script and,
because of the ephemeral and event-specific condi-
tions of the life performance, cannot be completely
captured in words after the performance has ended?
Walker is correct that there is something of this di-
chotomy in the methodological split between ana-
lytic and continental philosophy. Painting with a very
broad brush, we can say that analytic philosophers,
as a general rule, have faith in the ability of the third-
person perspective of objective reason to capture
the truth about the world, whereas many continental
philosophers (particularly phenomenologists) main-
tain that an aspect of the world—the subjective, first-
person point of view—will always be hidden from ob-
jective reason and must be approached through other
425
means (as Walker puts it, “to understand something
fully, we must inhabit both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ per-
spectives while interpolating the difference between
them in a reduction ad absurdum” [p. 38]). Though an
analogy can be drawn between the debate about the
ontology of theatrical performance and the debate
about the proper method and scope of philosophy,
we must be careful not to carry it too far.
The “Presence” section of the book begins with
a fascinating debate between Philip Auslander and
Noël Carroll about whether or not live performance
is aesthetically significant. The point of departure for
Auslander’s argument is a work called Abacus by
Sergei Shutov, which was displayed in the Russian
pavilion at the 2001 Forty-Ninth Venice Biennial In-
ternational Exposition of Art. The work consists of
“forty crouching figures draped in black, which face
an open door and pray in numerous languages rep-
resenting a multitude of faiths while making the rev-
erential movements appropriate to prayer” (p. 87).
The figures are robots, but Auslander nevertheless
claims that the artwork is a performance. On his view
(which he derives from a distinction first proposed by
Stan Godlovitch), performers can have either inter-
pretative skills or technical skills. Interpretive skills
create meaning, either emotional or cognitive, for the
audience. Technical skills create actual, physical ef-
fects. In music, technical skill governs the manipula-
tion of musical instruments such that the appropri-
ate range of sound is produced. In theatrical perfor-
mance, the actor’s body and voice are the instruments,
which are skillfully deployed to create the appropri-
ate range of gestures, poses, and mannerisms. Aus-
lander argues that the Abacus robots, while bereft of
interpretational skills, possess technical skills, “since
their actions cause the effects that constitute the
content of the piece” (p. 89). He compares this al-
leged performance to certain mass-produced theatri-
cal performances. Are the Abacus robots so different
from the touring company production of The Lion
King, where human actors give exactly the same me-
chanical performance—the same choreography, the
same line readings, the same blocking—night after
night? The implication of Auslander’s view for the
ontological question is that liveness cannot be used
to aesthetically distinguish theatrical performances
from their scripts because liveness has no aesthetic
significance.
Carroll’s essay in response covers much of the
same ground regarding theatrical performance he has
already covered in A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford
University Press, 1998) and “Interpretation, Theatri-
cal Performance, and Ontology” (JAAC 59 [2001]).
He believes that scripts are the “recipes” for live per-
formances. Every performance of a play is a token of
that play, just as every screening of a film is a token
of the film. The difference between play-types and
426
film-types is the process by which their particular to-
kens are generated. Film-tokens are generated by
means of a mechanical “template,” whereas play-
tokens are generated via the interpretive acts of the-
ater artists: templates are functions of nonintentional
mechanical or electrical processes, whereas interpre-
tations are the actions of agents.
To this account Carroll adds the notion that “ac-
tors adjust their performances to live audiences; they
assay the temper of the crowd, and reinterpret their
lines appropriately. Tonight add a dash of irony; to-
morrow, be a pound more serious” (p. 119). The claim
is that in theatrical performance, “liveness” is not sim-
ply a matter of living people up on stage. Rather,
“liveness” stands for the fact that during the course
of every live theatrical performance, actors and audi-
ence have to contend with each other in shared phys-
ical space. If this is an accurate account of “liveness”
(and I believe it is, since it is the exact same account
of liveness I present in “What is a Theatrical Perfor-
mance?”), then Auslander’s analogy between robot
performers and mechanical human performers col-
lapses. Regardless of how mechanical a human per-
former is from night to night, he or she still has to con-
tend with the live audience and, more importantly,
the live audience has to contend with him or her.
This is a capacity automatons simply do not have. To
put the same point in a slightly different way: when
a human performance is characterized as mechani-
cal, this is merely an axiological, not an ontological,
consideration.
“Reception”—the final section of the book—
opens with David Saltz’s attempt to explain the role
of fiction in theatrical performance. His thesis is that
theatrical performance does not comprise a fictional
world that facilitates the audience seeing through to
some reality that the fictions stands for or signifies;
rather, theatrical performance is a real event, and it is
this reality that allows theater to survive in the “film
age.” Saltz argues against a view he calls “dualism.”
According to this view, “the events that actually tran-
spire in the theater assume significance only insofar
as they apprise the audience of some other event, of-
ten fictional, always absent. The audience looks at
the stage in order to look beyond the stage. In per-
formance, actors cease to exist as or for themselves,
and become instead the stand-in for an absent and
perhaps nonexistent other” (p. 204). There is also a
modified, weaker version of this view that conceives
the fictional and performative (real) aspects of a per-
formance as existing side by side, but in such a way
that an audience member can focus only on one or the
other at any given moment: either I am conscious of
Olivier playing Hamlet, or I am conscious of Hamlet,
but I cannot be conscious of both at the same time.
Saltz’s alternative to these views is that, rather than
a theatrical performance signifying or existing side
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
by side with the fictional story of its script, the fic-
tional story structures the real event of performance.
He calls this the “infiction” of a performance—
”the fictional schema that structures the performance
event.” A theatrical performance also has “outfic-
tion,” which is the “narrative content that we extract
from the performance event through an act of in-
terpretation” (p. 214). Thus Saltz’s view attempts to
explain the role of interpretation in theatrical perfor-
mance and thereby put what I have called the on-
tological question to rest. According to Saltz, per-
formances do not interpret scripts. They use scripts
to structure the performance event for both actors
and audience, and thus make the performance in-
telligible. Audiences may interpret the performance
in such a way that the story of the script is de-
rived. However, “the infiction alone is often suffi-
cient to render a moment meaningful in the theater”
(p. 216).
Staging Philosophy is an important contribution
to the philosophy of theater, and to theater studies,
that will hopefully spark further scholarship in this
underexplored field. Though not all the essays will
appeal to all readers, the book is recommended.
DAVID OSIPOVICH
Department of Philosophy
University of Iowa
ridley, aaron. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to
Nietzsche on Art. London: Routledge, 2007, 208
pp., $90.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Aaron Ridley’s stimulating new book testifies bril-
liantly to the dynamic interpretive growth in English-
language Nietzsche studies during the past twenty
years. In this text aimed at nonspecialists, Ridley as-
sembles many of the major voices to have spoken to
Nietzsche’s views on art and considers their contri-
butions to the most prominent and distinctive ques-
tion to sustain his critical engagement, that of art’s
necessity. Given their variety and detail, Nietzsche’s
views on art through the years of his writing appear
unlikely to underwrite a single prevailing philosoph-
ical thesis, and Ridley eschews such an exegetical
course. The book instead considers the question con-
cerning art that most occupies Nietzsche’s attention
through successive periods of his work and that elic-
its varying responses as the metaphysical, ethical, and
broader aesthetic commitments of his texts continue
to fluctuate. In introducing this question and exam-
ining its significance, Ridley outlines an element of
Nietzsche’s thought in a way likely not only to clarify
for nonspecialists the character of Nietzsche’s rela-
tion to the arts, but further to stimulate ongoing work
on Nietzsche’s treatment of art by Nietzscheans and
aestheticians alike.
Book Reviews
To ask, as Nietzsche does, whether art is necessary
and why that should be so, invites several rejoinders
that Ridley sets out to consider. Which arts? And
necessary for whom? From the vast cultural array of
artists, media, audiences, through the movement of
historical epochs, we might expect necessities to di-
verge, and it is this multiplicity of answers that Niet-
zsche’s writing on art endeavors faithfully to appreci-
ate. The necessities for a Sophocles as a tragedian may
differ from those of a Wagner, as may those of their
principal audiences, while the tragic forms properly
may lend themselves rather to a range of necessities
distinct from those of the other dramatic arts. Once
a bearer of the return of healthy Dionysian forces
into European culture, Wagner becomes associated,
for Nietzsche, with the necessities of his culture’s
decadence, its requirement for no less than a saturat-
ing narcosis in the face of exhaustion. Alongside the
decadent, healthy artists and their interpreters and
spectators have their necessities as well: to cultivate
the interests and perspectives that return an intensity
to their willing activity—evidence the Renaissance.
Against these two pictures of health and decadence,
Nietzsche examines artists and the arts, and Ridley’s
discussion of the “need for art” (p. 78) leads through
the shifting incarnations of his thought to provide a
portrait of one of the most striking themes of this
engagement with art, that of falsity.
As falsity remains an issue that has occupied the
attention of numerous commentators and colored Ni-
etzsche’s reception within the philosophical commu-
nity, Ridley is no stranger to the debates over truth
and the so-called perspectivism through which it here
is framed. Indeed, one of the particular strengths of
Ridley’s account is his handling of the broad assort-
ment of interpretive positions concerning these is-
sues to appear in recent literature. Given the abun-
dance at times of more labored readings of Niet-
zsche’s perspectivism, Ridley approaches the ques-
tions of truth, falsity, and perspectives through their
treatments from within Nietzsche’s texts, beginning
with “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”
(in The Birth of Tragedy). This exegetical work gen-
erates a series of questions about art and falsity that
would be perhaps less likely to emerge from perspec-
tivist orthodoxies of the past—to wit, whether falsity
is necessary, at times due to our decadence, at times
for our health, and whether the arts afford us admis-
sion to perspectives from which such falsehoods may
best be entertained. Falsification can make “bear-
able” the meaning of realities (p. 85, cf. pp. 44, 139),
particularly those that support our static reactivity. It
can also express a creativity whose “patterns of need
and feeling” may be unfamiliar within the perspec-
tives to which we have become accustomed (p. 75).
While at times Nietzsche lauds our ability through
art to “adopt a perspective that is external” to those
427
we commonly employ (p. 32), this ability is not ad-
mired through all the moments of his thought, as for
instance when the artists (Künstlers) in guilt feelings
make their appearance in the final essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals (cf. p. 81). Falsity, then, modi-
fies Nietzsche’s understanding of the necessity of art,
revealing distinct meanings for different artists, spec-
tators, and interpreters. Whether and why such falsifi-
cation is necessary speaks to the health and the deca-
dence with which it is sought, questions that come
more fully into view as Ridley’s discussion of the fig-
ures and periods paramount in Nietzsche’s reflections
unfolds over the course of a half dozen chapters.
In surrounding the arts with such issues as neces-
sity, truth, decadence, health, production, and con-
sumption, Nietzsche’s writing also raises broader
questions about the proper province of the arts and
the ethics that may accompany our relations to it. One
of the virtues of Ridley’s analysis appears in the at-
tention he affords to the aesthetic considerations that
come to govern the relation to the self in Nietzsche’s
later work. An art of the self, discussed sometimes
as “self-creation” in the secondary literature, draws
Nietzsche’s interest through a sequence of develop-
ments Ridley catalogues, most emphatically in the
Gay Science section “One Thing is Needful.” Here,
Nietzsche declares that a project of giving style to
one’s own character can begin to be defined, com-
plete with the characteristic ironies such dispensa-
tion implies and the quality of the “needfulness” that
may be involved. As a topic already familiar, certainly
for readers of Ridley’s work, the “self-stylization” (p.
131) sections of the book reflect something of the
ground that is covered in the present account. Here,
an art of the self, together with a conception of char-
acter as itself a work of art, raises challenging ques-
tions regarding our capacity for aesthetic relations
toward human character, our tendencies to falsify, fic-
tionalize, conceal, and rearrange that character, and
the relative decadence and affirmative amor fati with
which our style emerges in this creative process. Ap-
parent tensions over this mixture of falsification and
yes-saying come into view here, perhaps more clearly
than elsewhere in Nietzsche’s thinking, and Ridley
again develops a range of responses that add to the
literature as it presently stands.
Perhaps one of the most compelling discussions in
the book engages Nietzsche’s own attempt at self-
expression in the vexed and daunting Zarathustra
that begins the later period of his work. Why, in-
deed, was Zarathustra necessary at all? Here, Rid-
ley’s analysis proves increasingly instrumental, as he
pries apart Nietzsche’s efforts to impart to his audi-
ence a prophetic sense of amor fati from the activity
of other prophecy or ethical teaching against which it
might be compared. Rather than prophesy that “un-
hinges” (p. 81) its adherents from the interests and
428
affects their activities reveal, Nietzsche’s text draws
its audience to a way of seeing it has developed an
“ingrained tendency to reject” (p. 99). These difficul-
ties are compounded by the problems of a form of
art that tends to portray its leading character as it-
self needing to believe the doctrine of eternal return.
To Ridley, the instabilities here are too great, and
the text never resolves these tensions. Yet the project
does achieve an affirmation of Nietzsche’s sense that
art’s power “to invade and colonize the soul” of an
audience is unique (p. 111), and not the business of
philosophy, or philology, or the natural and human
sciences to curry to themselves. Art may be necessary,
but it also makes itself necessary, and its perspectives
may be difficult to unsettle; hence the challenges for
new creative lines wherever the arts are at play.
My criticism of Nietzsche on Art would be its
brevity. Such themes as these call for heavily de-
tailed exposition of original texts, historical influ-
ences, and surrounding interpretive literature, all of
which Ridley handles adroitly. Yet at times the issues
at stake invite a more extensive consideration. This
may be forthcoming in a subsequent work, and at
times the book takes on the appearance of precursor
to a larger project. Particularly provocative are some
of the larger questions of tensions that surround Ni-
etzsche’s conception of falsification in the arts. Their
resolution may be well underway in the book already,
but lengthier treatment would be welcome. As Niet-
zsche says in his own nostalgic reminiscence at the
closing of Beyond Good and Evil, there is a moment
of felt failure in the dullness of the “painted thoughts”
he has recorded, almost a falseness in his “truths,”
that would seem also to drive him onward. Tensions
over truth run through Nietzsche’s work to the end,
and associating them with an account of the arts may
give a view of his concerns that properly incorporates
the place of truth and falsity in the creative processes
of thinking Nietzsche has sought to embody and
examine.
Aaron Ridley exhibits Nietzsche’s evolving
thought on art in a manner suited to stimulate de-
bate regardless of specialization. The details of his
account attest to the progress in Nietzsche studies’
treatment of many of these questions that surround
the arts over the past two decades. That his account
speaks as well across lines of specialization attests
to a further dimension of what Nietzsche might con-
sider progress in interpretation during this time. As
the need for careful and creative understanding of Ni-
etzsche’s thought continues, Nietzsche on Art invites
future returns to Ridley’s work. It’s an argument to
health.
TOM MEYER
Department of Philosophy
Temple University
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
bonds, mark evan. Music as Thought: Listening to
the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton
University Press, 2006, xx + 169 pp., $29.95 cloth.
When Arturo Toscanini conducted concertos with
the NBC Symphony in the 1940s, the radio audience
heard something they would never hear today. What
they heard was applause—the live audience clapped
after the first movement. Applause between move-
ments was reported in Vienna in 1938 when Bruno
Walter conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony—one
of his last performances before the Anschluss (al-
though the clapping was removed from the ultimate
recording of this concert). By the 1950s, though, audi-
ences no longer clapped between symphonic move-
ments, setting aside a loud and lusty practice that was
centuries old. Some ascribe the first suggestions of
this change to Richard Wagner’s “Bayreuth Hush”—
a moment of golden silence before the downbeat,
while others blame the band of silence placed on
mass-produced vinyl LPs. (And there are those who
fault conductor Leopold Stokowski, who signaled the
audience for silence between movements in the late
1920s.)
Concern about historically informed performance
practice has become rather commonplace. We don’t
use pianos for Bach basso-continuo if we can help
it, and we worry which note should start the trill
and whether the ornament is on or off the beat.
(The issue of how to present an operatic castrato
part authentically is still a sticky wicket.) However,
recreating a historically informed listening practice—
understanding the historical context in which music
was heard—is relatively new territory.
Mark Evan Bonds’s thesis is that “people began
to listen to music differently in the closing decades
of the eighteenth century, and this change in listen-
ing opened up new perceptions toward music itself,
particularly instrumental music” (p. xiii). For his orig-
inal project, funded by the National Endowment for
the Humanities, he translated an array of commen-
taries on the symphony between 1720 and 1900. He
was a DaimlerChrysler Fellow in the fall of 2002 at
the American Academy in Berlin, where he was able
to observe “the immediacy of the continuing artistic,
social, and political traditions that link an orchestra
and its listeners” (p. xi).
Bonds is not the first to point to the year 1800 as a
pivotal moment in music history, but few accounts
bridge social, political, philosophical, and artistic
events as successfully as his Music as Thought: Lis-
tening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. The
gradual shift in performance venues from aristocratic
salons to public concert halls is at the crux of his ar-
gument, and this momentous change in music’s re-
ception is too often ignored. The symphony became
an expression of a communal voice—a spiritual link
Book Reviews
between performers and listeners in these specially
constructed places. It is not an accident, he argues,
that Beethoven’s early decades in Vienna coincide
with this move from private to public venues (al-
though some scholars have pointed to London for
a clearer example of this change, fascinatingly wit-
nessed in the newspaper articles of the time; see Si-
mon McVeigh’s and Alyson McLamore’s work in this
area).
The new symphonies for orchestra were expensive
to publish and required a large number of musicians
for performance. As Bonds writes, “[t]he emergence
of the symphony as the most prestigious of all instru-
mental genres in the closing decades of the eighteenth
century was in many respects an unlikely develop-
ment” (p. 1). Possibly, the expanded musical range
of the symphony was a natural result of improve-
ments in the instruments themselves. In the early
nineteenth century, timpani began to have chromatic
pedals, valves became common on brass instruments,
and woodwinds developed more efficient fingering
systems. There was also a growing (and fortunate)
realization that organized rehearsals were essential
to good performances of large-scale pieces.
At the vortex of Music as Thought is this question:
What caused the transformation of attitude that oc-
curred between Kant’s Critique of Judgment in 1790
and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony in 1810—from Kant’s view of instrumen-
tal music as “more pleasure than culture” to Hoff-
mann’s assertion that music is the highest of all art
forms (p. 8)? Bonds’s belief is that Hoffmann stated
a new paradigm, applied by virtually all subsequent
commentators, in which Beethoven’s music created a
new aesthetic: Listeners were now compelled to rise
to the level of the composer (p. 9). In Hoffman’s re-
view, Mozart and Haydn act as individuals, leading us,
but Beethoven is invisible, opening up to us: “Thus
Beethoven’s instrumental music also opens up to us
the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Burn-
ing rays of light shoot through the deep night of this
realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that
surge back and forth, closing in on us in ever nar-
rower confines until they destroy us, but not the pain
of endless longing” (p. 35).
On Bonds’s view, Hoffmann’s idealism prioritizes
spirit over matter. Special importance has now been
placed on the active nature of aesthetic perception, as
Bonds puts it: “the true essence of the artwork could
be grasped only through the power of imagination—
Einbildungskraft—a faculty capable of mediating be-
tween the senses and reason” (p. 12). Hoffmann’s
Beethoven review “articulates the shift from the En-
lightenment’s perception of music as a language, op-
erating under the principles of rhetoric, to Romanti-
cism’s perception of music as a source of truth, op-
erating under the principles of philosophy” (p. 34).
429
In Hoffmann’s own words: “Yet how does the matter
stand if it is your feeble observation alone that the
deep inner continuity of Beethoven’s every compo-
sition eludes? If it is your fault alone that you do not
understand the master’s language as the initiated un-
derstand, that the portals of the innermost sanctuary
remain closed to you? . . . [A]nd at the center of the
spirit realm thus disclosed the intoxicated soul gives
ear to the unfamiliar language and understands the
most mysterious premonitions that have stirred it”
(p. 36).
For the first time, Bonds states, in this one criti-
cal review, we have an image of music as an organic
whole, where a work encompasses “the unfolding of
a central musical idea, the close integration of con-
trasting gestures, a trajectory leading from struggle
to triumph, all within a general framework of the
sublime” (p. 57). Hoffman’s urgent tone asserts that
Beethoven’s Fifth and large symphonic works like it
are perceived no longer as vehicles of entertainment
but as vehicles of truth—a perception that has per-
sisted today. We don’t end the Olympic Games with
a Mozart symphony. We end them with Beethoven’s
Ninth and the “Ode to Joy.”
Hoffmann’s now infamous Romantic review is
made to do some fairly heavy lifting here. A little
E. T. A. Hoffmann goes a long way, but not nearly
far enough to shore up a comprehensive argument
for such a sea change in musical reception. To help
make his case, Bonds points to a number of contem-
porary writers and clothes the beginnings of Ideal-
ism in meticulous social and political documentation.
Ample support is presented from the works of Jo-
hann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Wilhelm Hein-
rich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Johann Gottfried
Herder, and Christian Friedrich Michaelis, as well as
from Hegel, Novalis, and Goethe. (Twentieth-century
music philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Peter
Kivy, and Jerrold Levinson are mentioned only in
passing.) Bonds identifies the principal social ideals
in early nineteenth-century Germany as a paradox-
ical blend of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The
state, having previously been seen as a machine, is
now viewed as an organic conception: the individual
should self-realize to the maximum so that he or she
might in turn contribute in the fullest manner to soci-
ety as a whole (p. 71). Beauty, and especially musical
beauty, develops the spirit of the individual and the
community.
Bonds parses these contemporary reviews and ac-
counts to find a sense of exertion on the part of the au-
dience, seeking the beginnings of an Idealism requir-
ing active listening and the reconstruction of musical
works in the mind for full aesthetic effect. He makes
believers of us—the musical discourse in German-
speaking lands during Beethoven’s lifetime certainly
430
seems extensive enough that we can reconstruct these
earlier modes of musical perception at least in broad
outline (even though most of these writers speak only
very generally to music’s affect, and do not usually
discuss specific works in detail).
Aestheticians are conversant with many of the
philosophical writings featured here, particularly
those of Kant and Hoffmann, and the argument for
the year 1800 as a pivotal point in Western music is
familiar. Bonds’s contribution is in his wide embrace
of sociopolitical as well as philosophical sources. A
lagniappe is insight into the intrepid beginnings of
musical criticism as such.
JENNIFER JUDKINS
Department of Music
University of California, Los Angeles
cooper, david e. A Philosophy of Gardens. Oxford
University Press, 2006, 184 pp., 9 b&w illus., $35.00
cloth.
David E. Cooper’s A Philosophy of Gardens is the
first major contribution in nearly a decade to what
should be a burgeoning subfield field of philoso-
phy, the study of gardens. (The last was Stephanie
Ross’s What Gardens Mean [University of Chicago
Press, 1998].) It is an intricately argued, beautifully
nuanced, and highly sensitive analysis of what gar-
dens mean and what sort of enterprise they are.
Most important, it tackles the big questions about
gardens and gardening: How should we conceptu-
alize the relations of gardens to “nature” (however
that is conceptualized) and to “art”? Why do people
garden? What is its relation to “the good life”? And
what are its relations to ethics? What is the meaning
of “The Garden” (as he eventually phrases it)? And
how does this meaning of “The Garden” relate to the
various other kinds of meaning that people notice
and describe in gardens?
Because of the importance of its central argu-
ments, its applicability to garden traditions around
the world, its accessible style, and its insistence on
exploring the meaning of gardens to ordinary peo-
ple who garden and enjoy gardens (rather than, say,
to the field of philosophical aesthetics or the profes-
sion of landscape architecture), this book should be
taught in every landscape architecture, architecture,
city planning, and aesthetics program where students
speak English.
The book begins with a comment about the still
great gap between the importance of gardens and gar-
dening (by virtually any measure) on the one hand
and the relative paucity of philosophical examina-
tions of the topic on the other—a gap many have
remarked. Cooper’s handling of this question is typ-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ical of his general thoroughness: he does not restrict
himself to a single type of reason, but acknowledges
contributing philosophical, historical, economic, and
art-historical factors. Specifically, these are (1) differ-
ences between gardens and artworks that are taken
as paradigmatic by philosophers of art—here he ac-
knowledges my contribution; (2) the success of the
“museum conception of art” (as John Dewey called
it), to which gardens are stunningly in-apropos; (3)
the philosophical influence of Hegel; and (4) the in-
creasingly divergent developmental paths of gardens
and other arts during the “late modern” period.
It is this sort of rejection of the usual disciplinary
(and cultural) confines that permits the greatest
strengths of the book. His examination is exemplary
and the answers he provides are by and large con-
vincing. If taken seriously, A Philosophy of Gardens
will move the field forward.
Let me begin with a brief summary of its many
strengths. (There are no significant weaknesses; com-
ments on a few limitations appear at the end of this
review.)
As a scholar of Aristotle as well as the author of
a book on Buddhist ethics and environment, Bud-
dhism, Virtue and Environment (Ashgate, 2005), and
fully conversant with the phenomenological litera-
ture as well, Cooper brings a valuable range of philo-
sophical resources to bear on the topic.
Cooper rounds up a lively bunch of garden writers
from across the centuries (and around the globe) to
provide the insights that provide the foundation for
his analysis—although his use of his own first-person
experience is also evident and valuable. There are
wonderful quotations—including some that made me
laugh out loud.
The argumentation is rigorous. Cooper seems to
acknowledge all possible arguments and counter-
arguments. (At times this is as exhausting as it is
exhaustive; there were a couple places, especially
in Chapters 2, “Art or Nature?” and 3, “Art-and-
Nature,” where it began to feel a bit maze-like
even for me, but the sense of this as overly meticu-
lous scrupulosity disappeared entirely in subsequent
chapters.) If he overlooked an opportunity to present
the arguments for an assumption or premise he uti-
lized, or a conclusion he drew, I missed it.
The focus is on ordinary rather than “great” gar-
dens (which are unsatisfactory as the object for our
philosophical analysis because they comprise such
a numerically small portion of garden/ing encoun-
ters; also because they are not representative of en-
counters that might be considered either “typical” or
deeply significant personally). It is, ultimately, a study
of why people garden, of the significance of garden
practices, rather than of end products—on garden-
ing practices rather than final products (which are, in
the case of gardens, a notoriously difficult stasis to
Book Reviews
achieve, after all). This means on the one hand that it
speaks to everyone’s everyday experience; it thus is
both more inclusive and more pertinent than an ac-
count of “great gardens” would be. It also means that
the study of gardens is set up in such a way that their
relations with ethics—in several forms—become per-
spicuous and logical, rather than another or a special
category of the ethical dimensions of art.
The book is one of the rare works of Anglo-U.S.
philosophy that does not proceed solely on the basis
of Western examples, but draws its basis of data from
around the world, and not simply after the fact (just
enough to make it “cross-cultural”), but in ways that
are allowed to shape the analysis from the beginning.
Cooper faces head on four persistently thorny is-
sues in the philosophical study of gardens. First, the
fourth chapter, “Gardens, People, and Practices,” is a
fine study of the question whether the object of philo-
sophical analysis should be the finished garden, the
“product” or artwork (if it is one), or the process of
gardening itself. And if the latter—as he decides—
what processes are important? Here, he reaches a
conclusion that moves the field forward: what counts
is not just the actual gardening, the creation of the
work, but the various mental and social practices that
are enabled by the process and the “finished” work
(or work in progress, as is usually the case).
The second vital issue is whether gardens should be
considered “art” or “nature.” Cooper bites the bul-
let and argues that gardens occupy a unique position
beyond the purely aesthetic and different from that
of “wilderness.”
Ultimately (third) he is interested in the meaning
of the garden, which, of course, can be answered only
after (fourth) one has figured out how to determine
what counts as an answer (pp. 131 ff). Cooper dis-
tinguishes the significance of the garden from seven
modes of meaning commonly discussed in relation
to gardens: the philosophically uninteresting “mere-
ological” and “instrumental”; two modes of repre-
sentational meaning—“depictive” and “allusive”; ex-
pression; “symptomatic meaning” (Paul Grice’s “nat-
ural” meaning, a symptom or sign by reason of a
causal or contingent connection); and “associative.”
None of these, he concludes, account for the sense of
significance we attribute to gardens, which is, for him,
inseparable from the question of the ethical contri-
butions of the garden. These he situates within the
classical framework, namely, Aristotelian eudaimo-
nia—although he also relates it to other traditions
and draws comparisons with Buddhist ethics.
Ultimately, Cooper argues for two versions of a
unique capability that gardens have. The “Modest
Proposal” is that “The Garden exemplifies the mas-
sive, but often unrecognized dependence of human
creative activity upon the co-operation of the natural
world . . .. [T]he second theme is The Garden’s exem-
431
plifying the degree to which, more subtly, experience
of the natural environment depends upon human cre-
ative activity. When combined, the two themes de-
liver the idea of The Garden as embodying a unity
between human beings and the natural world, an inti-
mate co-dependence” (pp. 135–136). Oddly, he seems
unaware that something very like the reciprocality he
posits between human beings and nature has been the
subject of a vast literature in Chinese philosophy, art,
and religion. Use of some of these Chinese ways of
formulating the issues might have been valuable.
His more radical proposal is that “this co-
dependence itself embodies or refers us to the
co-dependence of human existence and the ‘deep
ground’ of the world and ourselves. By embodying
something that itself embodies something further, the
Garden—in one of [Nelson] Goodman’s ‘chains of
reference’—embodies this ‘something further.’ The
Garden, to put it portentously, is an epiphany of
man’s relationship to mystery. This relationship is its
meaning” (p. 145).
Although Cooper does not explicitly avow a Bud-
dhist philosophical methodology or logic, it is not only
as data—Buddhist examples of gardens and ways of
using gardens—that Buddhism shapes the argument.
Buddhist ways of thinking are crucial to his solution
of the basic problems in two ways; first, in his will-
ingness to reject dichotomous habits of thinking (be-
tween product and process, and art and nature), and
second, in the ultimate emphasis on the processes of
gardening (gardening practices) rather than the final
product.
Still, it stops far short of being a “Buddhist” analy-
sis. Although he mentions the “ineffable,” he does
not develop it. His rejection of the art/nature di-
chotomy is empirical rather than based on Buddhist
logic. That is, he rejects it because it happens, on em-
pirical grounds, not to fit the case, not because gar-
dens can in principle be “neither art nor nature, nor
both art and nature.” Nothing is made of central Bud-
dhist notions such as transience, detachment, and il-
lusion.
The following are meant less as criticisms of what
is a major contribution to the field, than as caveats
that he has not done everything.
First, in spite of the fact that gardens seem to
have been invented (both as a phenomenon and as
an idea) as a contrast to the farm (no less than to
“wilderness” and the city), Cooper does not even al-
lude to the many important—and increasingly well-
understood—connections between gardening and
agriculture. These connections need to be integrated
into our thinking about gardens. They have particu-
larly important implications for our understanding of
how “virtues” have historically been associated with
gardens and gardening, one of Cooper’s important
themes.
432
Second, his version of “allusion” is misleading in a
book that draws so heavily on Japanese material. (His
first example of allusion is of rocks in Japanese gar-
dens.) As he defines it, allusive meaning is the ability
of a physical/visual object (or formal arrangement of
objects) to suggest or represent something physical,
an idea (“impermanence or honor and fate” [p. 116]),
or an affective state: “[r]ocks in Japanese gardens rep-
resent islands and mountains . . . [or] ‘symbolize time
in its longest imaginable extent, and therefore the
impermanence of all things’” (p. 117, quoted from
Sunniva Harte, Zen Gardening [Sterwart, Tabori and
Chang, 1999]). The mention of affective states then
turns him to a discussion of expression. But in the
study of Japanese arts and culture, allusion—often
contrasted with symbolism—usually means referring
to another subjective experience (often of art), which
may include ideas or affective states—one’s own or
that of another person—and, especially, an experi-
ence that has been captured in a work of art or liter-
ature. A poem or painting of cherry blossoms alludes
to other artistic representations of cherry blossoms as
experienced by someone, it is the capturing of the re-
spective layers of subjective response that comprises
the allusion.
Third, his analysis of symbols is unduly restricted—
although ultimately it gets him where he wants to
go, to the idea of “something ‘spiritual,’ and possibly
ineffable, [that] ‘shows itself’ in sensible form, and
thereby enables human beings to gain a sense of un-
derstanding of it” (p. 130)—which he calls, ultimately,
“epiphany.”
Finally, his analysis of gardens’ ability to repre-
sent or convey ideas suffers from the fact that he as-
sumes any idea a garden represents (such as “liberty”
in eighteenth-century England) must already exist—
and in an already-settled linguistic form—rather than
be an early form that is capable of influencing the
way the idea develops in the first place. In other
words, didn’t the eighteenth-century ideas of liberty
develop partly in response to their at first dimly per-
ceived intuitions that gardening was very like edu-
cation and the political process—much as the early
ideas of the modern self and the value of the individ-
ual were shaped by the development of Renaissance
one-point-perspective in painting? This is, perhaps,
an arcane point (albeit one I argued for in The Gar-
den as an Art [SUNY Press, 1993]), but there are three
implications of this view.
First, if one does not acknowledge the possibility
of originary contributions to intellectual thought by
gardens, one is reduced—as he is—to seeing those
“ideas” that one finds in gardens as little more than
allegory—a conclusion he reaches that forces him to
dismiss the importance of ideas in gardens.
This means that (second) the contributions of vi-
sual arts to the history of ideas continue to be over-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
looked and underappreciated by philosophy. This
matters more with an author who otherwise willingly
rethinks the disciplinary assumptions so profoundly.
In a similar vein, the possibility of gardens’ contri-
butions, by means of their sophisticated formal or-
ganization of somatic and kinaesthetic experience,
to the historical development of ideas is utterly
ignored—a more notable omission in one who cites
Merleau-Ponty than it would be in the work of others.
This also (again, and as usual) leads philosophers
away from the fundamental rethinking of vision and
visual organizations (artistic and other) of experience
such as those that are routinely undertaken by psy-
choanalysts.
These are less flaws than oddities in a book that so
masterfully moves us from the minutia of everyday
experience to an explanation of the achievement of
gardens to address ultimate issues and transform our
lives.
David E. Cooper has written a book that anyone
who wants to understand gardening, our relation-
ship with nature, and the arts will want to read. It’s
the book I wanted to read (needed to read) twenty-
five years ago; if it had existed then I wouldn’t have
needed to write The Garden as an Art. His success
with the most important of the issues will revitalize
the field.
MARA MILLER
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
quacchia, russell. Julia Morgan, Architect, and the
Creation of the Asilomar Conference Grounds.
Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2005, 253 pp., 75 b&w
illus., $21.99 paper.
The appearance of Russell Quacchia’s book on Ju-
lia Morgan has a special significance for members of
the American Society for Aesthetics. Since the 1960s,
the Pacific Division of the society has been meeting
on a yearly basis, always in the spring, at the Asilo-
mar Conference Grounds designed by Morgan. It is
no doubt the exceeding beauty of the architecture
as well as the coastal setting in Pacific Grove that
prompted the Pacific Division to make this location
the permanent home for its conference. This is prob-
ably also the reason why the conference has never
been strictly regional, its participants coming from
throughout the world. Quacchia, a San-Francisco-
based architect who was a partner in John Funk & As-
sociates and, later, architectural project manager for
Stanford University, started visiting Asilomar during
the 1960s and presented his first paper there on Julia
Morgan in 1977. A regular participant in Asilomar
meetings, he also gave presentations on Morgan’s ar-
chitecture at the ASA Asilomar meetings in 1999 and
in 2004.
Book Reviews
Julia Morgan, born in San Francisco in 1872, was
the first woman to receive a civil engineering degree
at University of California, Berkeley (1894), the first
woman to be accepted into the Ecole des Beaux Arts
in Paris (she tried and failed to be accepted for two
years before success in 1898), the first woman to grad-
uate from that institution with a degree (1901), and
the first woman to receive an architecture license in
the State of California (1904). She is one of the most
famous and well-loved architects in the state’s history.
Having studied under and worked with well-known
Californian architect Bernard Maybeck when she was
still an undergraduate, Morgan became a strong prac-
titioner of the “Arts and Crafts” style in architecture,
although, as an architect who practiced eclecticism,
she was also a master of the “Mediterranean” and
the “Classical” styles. The Arts and Crafts Movement
stressed harmony, utility, simplicity, and economy and
encouraged dissolving the distinction between fine
and applied art. Having started in England, the move-
ment gained an architectural foothold in northern
California in 1876 when Joseph Worcester, a Swe-
denborgian minister, built his home in Piedmont us-
ing unpainted shingles on the exterior and unpainted
redwood boards in the interior. Influenced by Span-
ish design and by observation of miner’s cabins, his
house was intended to exemplify the simple, natural
life. This was in part inspired by his friendship with
naturalist John Muir. The next important work in this
tradition was Maybeck’s house for Charles Keeler
(1894), which was distinctive for leaving the struc-
tural system of the house exposed.
Among Morgan’s buildings are the Hearst Greek
Theater at UCB (which she helped design in 1902);
the Campanile (or El Campanil) and the Margaret
Carnegie Library at Mills College, Oakland (1905);
restoration of the Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco
(1907); Saint John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley
(1910); the Hearst mansion at San Simeon (1919–
1947); the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Memorial Gym-
nasium for Women, UCB (1927, with Bernard May-
beck); and the Berkeley Women’s City Club (1930).
She was made the architect for the YWCA Asilo-
mar Camp in 1912, completing her buildings there
between 1913 and 1928. All in all she designed more
than 700 buildings. For an excellent illustrated web-
site, see Julia Morgan Index at http://www.bluffton.
edu/∼sullivanm/jmindex/genericindex.html.
The current book includes a short biography (Mor-
gan left very little information about herself when she
died in 1957), chapters on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
during the time of Morgan’s training there, the Arts
and Crafts Movement, the formative years of the San
Francisco Bay region, a comparison of Asilomar and
Hearst Castle (her other major work), the history of
Pacific Grove, the founding of the Asilomar Confer-
ence Grounds, and two concluding chapters on her
433
Asilomar buildings—“Artistically Considered” and
“Experientially Considered.” There is also a series of
appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The book
is well illustrated with historical photographs.
I will summarize Quacchia’s take on Morgan’s aes-
thetic assumptions at Asilomar and then make some
brief comments. Although not much given to theo-
rizing, Morgan favored A. W. N. Pugin’s formula-
tion of the essence of architecture as “Commodity,
Firmness, and Propriety.” “Propriety” here refers to
“observing decorum, aptness, fittingness or rightness,
in both a moral and non-moral sense” (p. 38) and
has the special implication that the architect could
follow an eclectic style. In accord with this eclecti-
cism, Morgan kept a library of reproductions and
plans to which she constantly referred. She usually
followed the desires of her clients closely, as she
saw the architect as an anonymous servant seeking
to meet the client’s aesthetic and practical needs (p.
37). Thus, although in the case of the Asilomar Con-
ference Grounds she was allowed to follow her own
taste, she gave the campus an overall ethos of simple
modesty appropriate to the institutional client’s need
(p. 107).
Much that we approve of in architecture today is
found in Morgan’s work at Asilomar. In particular,
she was an early advocate of site specificity. Trained
as a landscape architect, Morgan designed, as archi-
tect Walter Steilberg said, “from the inside out,” and
this included the out of doors (p. 106). Her pathways
were created to shape the experience of those who
came to Asilomar. Moreover, she would not cut away
hillsides, but would instead situate buildings on the
natural contour of the landscape. Even the buildings
located around the “commons” were all at slightly
different elevations. This is where the historical pho-
tographs illustrating this book come in handy, as some
of the site-specific features have been lost over time.
For example, the original stone and concrete terrace
and stairs of the Phoebe Hearst Social Hall were
replaced by a wooden deck, thereby eliminating the
sense that the building was “on and with” the site,
making it seem “above and apart” (p. 176). Another
site-specific feature associated with Arts and Crafts
style is her “adoption of local uses of form, rusticity
of materials, and . . . blending of colors and textures
with those native to the site” (p. 79). The campus
was also created with an eye to what Quacchia calls
“casually interested observations” (p. 107). For ex-
ample, although many of the buildings are formally
symmetrical, Morgan designed pathways so that one
would have to approach the buildings asymmetrically
(p. 188).
We should be cautious, however, in attributing all
the features of Asilomar to Morgan’s architecture in
general. Quacchia nicely contrasts Asilomar to Mor-
gan’s other major project, the Hearst Castle at San
434
Simeon. San Simeon is organized hierarchically, with
the “Casa Grande” in the center, reflecting Hearst’s
power over his kingdom, with an emphasis placed on
self-indulgence. Asilomar, by contrast, is set out in a
way symbolic of egalitarian arrangements and social
solidarity (p. 105). In each case, Morgan reflected the
purposes of the client.
Central to Morgan’s aesthetic was the concept
of developing “a feeling” that was unique to the
site. Buildings should have a certain personality that
would resonate in the experience of the users. In
particular, she sought to create the kind of feeling
that Maybeck would create in his buildings. But how
is this feeling to be characterized more specifically?
At one point, while discussing Asilomar’s main hall,
Quacchia mentions a feeling of “warmth and com-
fort.” He also speaks of the foyer-lobby of the Lodge
building as “a very pleasant restful place.” The feel-
ing achieved is not only organized but harmonious.
Quacchia quotes critic Allan Temko that no build-
ings by Morgan “had more warmth, strength and sure
feeling for the land than Asilomar” (p. 189).
This stress on feelings of warmth, pleasantness,
comfort, and restfulness in architecture has brought
aestheticians back to Asilomar again and again.
Perhaps this fact has some bearing on the aesthetics
of architecture itself. It is arguable that the last really
significant movement in architecture was deconstruc-
tivism. David Goldblatt nicely describes the motives
behind this movement in his article “The Disloca-
tion of the Architectural Self.” Goldblatt describes
how Peter Eisenman rejected the aesthetics of com-
fort and function as “a way, in Derrida’s phrase, of
‘letting other voices speak’” and in order to express
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
a power that has been “repressed by an externalized
quotidian life” (JAAC 49 [1991], p. 338). This was
exemplified in Eisenman’s La Guardiola House, in
which there were windows in the floor and one had
to overcome obstacles to get from one room to the
next. As Goldblatt observes, Eisenman calls for a dis-
location of the architectural self to achieve a deep
exploration of meaning. This was precisely not Julia
Morgan’s direction at Asilomar. There is much to be
said for the explorations characteristic of deconstruc-
tionist architecture, but one suspects that this is just
one pole of legitimate architectural experience, the
other of which has not been represented strongly in
recent architectural discourse, and that may even be
seen as a kind of kitsch. But just as Robert Solomon
argued famously for the value of the sweet sentiments
represented by kitsch (“Kitsch,” JAAC 49 [1991]), so,
too, one could say a word for the feelings of comfort,
functionality, harmony, simplicity, and “feeling” that
are perhaps represented best in the Asilomar archi-
tecture of Julia Morgan. As Quacchia says: “In so
many ways, while always attentive to formal qual-
ities of design, she treated the design of buildings
in their expressive capacity as metaphors, reflective
of human character, revealing of what we are or, al-
ternatively, wish to be” (p. 188). Reflection on such
sentiments might be recommended to aestheticians
as they visit Asilomar in the future. I recommend
Russell Quacchia’s book as an on-site guide to this
thought.
THOMAS LEDDY
Department of Philosophy
San Jose State University