Aestheticians are, perhaps, under a duty to write beautifully. Sadly, not all succeed. But amongst those who do, the American aesthetician, Kendall Walton, is surely foremost. This is not (if anything is) merely a matter of style. Rather Walton's lucid conversational tone, like something from a relaxed seminar of familiar colleagues, is of a piece with his method, and indeed, with more than a few of such direct conclusions as he is occasionally inclined to offer. This is not a philosopher to ‘attack’ problems or ‘dissect’ concepts or ‘master’ the issues: though he is of course an analytic philosopher for all that. Rather this is a philosopher in genuine and respectful conversation with the phenomena that interest him. Indeed, perhaps the best way to think of this book, and of Walton's career, is as an extended conversation with the character of the human imagination.
Forming one of a pair, with the forthcoming volume to be devoted to issues connected with empathy, the twelve chapters and two postscripts that make up this collection provide an admirable path to understanding an aesthetician who has done more than anyone to progress that conversation and set the agenda for 21st Century aesthetics. People in the field will probably already have many of these essays in their collection and, such is the influence of Walton, that they will be already be on a easily accessible place on the shelf. Still, many will welcome the additional notes, postscripts and replies to criticisms, especially those that follow the influential essay on photographic transparency.
But is it to be hoped that collection in this form will bring Walton's ideas to a new audience. The collection is indeed a joy to read. The direct yet elegant prose is free from solecism, pretension and unnecessary technicality. Each essay gives the tangible impression of hearing an outstanding philosopher in direct engagement with the issues. Indeed such is the unfussy elegance and clarity of the prose, one can indeed almost see Walton thinking the problems through.
The spirit of the book impresses too. Very noticeable is the generosity in thanking colleagues who have contributed this or that criticism, minor point, worthwhile aside or illuminating example. Moreover the arguments are marked by a confidence, which is happy to concede that, as yet, no solution to the problems described has been found. Instead we get disentanglements, clearings, steps forward, pitfalls avoided.
For all the freshness and directness of style, there is an extraordinary level of subtle nuance and fine distinction. That is impressive enough but, in Walton's hands, what might first seem to be fine and slightly obscure distinctions are revealed as huge gulfs of primary and paramount importance. In particular, the distinction between appearing (to be) different and appearing differently, which might seem to causal interest a difference that makes no difference, emerges as a key insight in the character of the various types of experience and interest we describe as ‘aesthetic’.
One source of the originality of Walton's insights into say, photography or fictions, is that his discussions are obviously motivated by genuine care for the phenomena themselves rather than one mediated by philosophical puzzlement alone. Of course he does still too engage in extensive and continuing debates with both historical figures in aesthetics and contemporaries. But even in the cut and thrust of debate, Walton's writing retains a direct connection with the aesthetic and artistic phenomena under discussion. This is not a ‘mainstream’ philosopher coming to aesthetics, zealously trying out some new theoretical gadgets on temptingly uncultivated fields. He is rather a philosopher with a deep love of the arts who sees in our experience of the phenomena, both an intrinsic philosophical interest and the potential, not merely to illustrate, but to make serious progress with philosophical issues of much more general significance and manages to give equal weight to both. As he writes of the puzzles surrounding the nature of fictions, thinking about these is “to enter, by a side door, absolutely fundamental mysteries about the nature of concepts, supervenience relations, response dependence, normative judgments and the imagination” (58).
Walton's guide to one such side-door, originally opened in his Mimesis as Make-Believe, is typically direct and elegantly effective. Why, he asks, is there science fiction but not moral fiction? That is, we can imagine all manner of counter-factuals being true in some fictional world: that Germany won the second world war, that time travel is possible, that angels watch over us and so on. But imagine an early draft of Miller's The Crucible, in which we are asked to believe it is right not just to hold that there are really witches but that it is morally desirable to burn them alive. Or a novel in which, not only do Germany win the second world war, and people think that the extermination of the Jews was a price worth paying, but that this moral claim is right. Why, in other words, though in a phrase Walton disparages, do we ‘imaginatively resist’ moral fiction?
It is tempting to think that this is a problem not about fictions or about imagination but about morality as such. Some years ago, Mary Midgley drew attention to the fact that classical Japanese had a dedicated verb – tsujigiri – which means to try out one's new sword on a chance wayfarer – a practice which it seems was once de rigueur for any Samurai worth their saki. We can go a long way in trying to understand the moral psychology of this: of how it might come about that concepts of honour, pride in craftsmanship and skill and social status might lead to someone thinking this right. And, critically, an historical fiction might help us with that process. But we, cannot, at least without embracing a facile cultural relativism about morality, think that a Samurai was perfectly right to cut down passing peasants as a means of weapon quality assurance. Our ‘imaginative resistance’ here is surely fuelled by the fact that moral thinking is not just one specialized area of thought, which might thus be imagined taking different premises, but is rather, as Midgley pointed out, a name for thinking as a whole, and for thinking about the world as a whole. And if we therefore accept that the Samurai was right, it is our whole thinking which has, per impossible, to change.
For Walton however, such an objection can be rebutted by pointing out that the issue is not just about moral fictions. The fictionally funny is also an area where the imagination is likely to put up a fight. Thus one can see that it is fictionally true that some character finds some non-joke funny. But we cannot concede it to be fictionally true that it really is funny. So, not just the moral, but also the funny and perhaps aesthetic concepts such as elegance, wit and so on too are problematic in this respect. The problem is: is there a common feature in respect of which imaginative resistance (or whatever we should call the phenomenon) is real? Or, to put the problem the other way round, are there characteristic, predictable ways in which fictions must fail?
Walton goes so far as to claim that these ways must involve ‘dependence relations' but declines to offer any such general account. What is fascinating is how much more effective this and a subsequent essay on the same theme are, for not trying to offer a neat thesis. Rather we are left a sense of a whole new philosophical territory opening up and given a summary guide of developments by others since Walton first put the issue in the field. There is surely something here to learn not just about philosophy but about how to do philosophy.
Striking too in this respect is Walton's fascinating account of the problem of motion-depicting pictures: say, to take just one type, a photograph of dog briefly shaking itself after its dip in the sea. In this subtle discussion, Walton carefully outlines the different temptations to which we are prone. He distinguishes first between the duration of the viewer's seeing of a picture and the duration of what the viewer imagines, in the picture, to be taking place. Different possibilities in the latter – what we imagine to be taking place – are then distinguished. In some cases, we will be tempted to say that what we imagine to be the duration of our seeing of the scene is the same as the actual duration of our seeing of the picture. For example, to spend 5 minutes looking at the picture of the landscape may seem to us to be imagining that one has spend 5 minutes looking at the pictured landscape. But in other cases, when we see, say, a photograph of a falling object, ‘frozen in time’, it may seem instead, that we are imagining that we see the object only for that frozen moment. Or, perhaps, we imagine our seeing the object for a moment, but over and over again. But this is not the case in seeing, say, a photograph of children running on a beach. For here we imagine or are likely to imagine that we see the children in motion. But how long then do we imagine them to be in motion and how long do we imagine ourselves to be seeing them in such motion?
Walton is not here interested in forcing a philosopher's problem down throats that were never thirsty. As he wisely points out, giving a twist to the frequently made claim that one task for philosophy is to make the familiar, unfamiliar: “enduring depictions of momentary states of affairs do not ordinarily strike us as strange or puzzling or mysterious. It is surprising that they don't: this is what needs to be explained” (174).
The fascinating reflections on the different things we feel inclined to say here license Walton's general insight that pictures may afford different visual experiences without giving the impression of being different. Which is to say that images may appear different without appearing differently (188). This thought emerges, not as some arcane piece of philosophical hair-splitting but as a inevitable outcome of the more general view, for which Walton is famous, that for us to take something as a picture is for us to imagine that our experience of the picture is an experience of what the picture is of. The concept of appearance takes on these new dimensions of complexity and subtlety precisely, because amongst such phenomena, it is now in the thrall not of perception alone but also of the imagination.
So what is the best theory to hold concerning the relation between the duration of our viewing of our picture and the imagined durations involved in viewing it as a picture? It is noteworthy that Walton's response, invokes a concept from the Mimesis As Make-Believe: his “slightly technical” notion of a “silly question” (190).
For Walton, a “silly” question is one which seems forced on us by philosophical reflection but which does not arise in the course of the practice in question, which practitioners are best advised to avoid asking, and which is unlikely to have a definite answer. The proper response to that situation, is not, as some philosophers are minded, to refine distinctions and press the questions ever harder. Rather we should remind ourselves that it is possible for reason to ask perfectly good questions which experience may nevertheless decline to answer. Walton does well to remind us here of the messiness and mutability of much of our imaginative and aesthetic experience.
These are just two examples from a book, which offers such profound and provocative thoughts throughout. It is especially recommended to those unfamiliar with contemporary aesthetics and who are perhaps wary of having to pick their way through an unfamiliar and likely difficult landscape with an unknown history. They will find in this volume a series of encounters with a philosopher who has that all too rare ability to make both original and profound philosophy both accessible and enjoyable. They will emerge from these encounters with a sense of the general importance of philosophical reflection on the aesthetic and a very particular sense of what a philosopher, of any persuasion, is, or ought to be.
It is a principal conclusion of the opening chapter, which gives the collection its title, that a distinctive mark of aesthetic pleasure is the fact we take pleasure, not just in the object itself, but also in our admiration for the object. Just such a pleasure will be occasioned by this admirable volume. Marvelous indeed.
