RR @ MOMA

[Dave Monroe]

An extracurricular research byproduct I thought might
have some resonance here.  From Ricahrd Rorty,
"Reamrks at MOMA," October 27, 2000 ...

"As I see it,  the attempt to make philosophy useful
to the arts is OK if philosophy is used as a source of
inspiration but dubious if it is used as a source of
instruction.
   "I can clarify what I mean by using philosophy as a
source of inspiration by a couple of examples.
Consider the relation of Yeats’ later poems to the
quasi-philosophical system found in his book A VISION.
That system was, or so the story goes, dictated to
Yeat’s wife by spirits. When Yeats asked his wife to
ask the spirits why they were taking all this trouble,
what they were there for, they replied that they had
come to give Yeats metaphors for poetry. Among the
results of the spirits’ beneficence were the gyres and
the phases of the moon which pop up here and there in
Yeats’ poems. Readers of these poems, however,
typically do not bother to read A VISION. The poems
stand on their own feet, and so do the metaphors they
cultivate. You do not have to take the system
seriously to be bowled over by the poems. To write
intelligently about the poems, you need not worry
about the truth claims of the system. You need not
regard it as a source of instruction, nor need you
even worry about whether or not Yeats himself regarded
it as such.
   "My second example is the relation of Botticelli’s
Primavera and his Birth of Venus to the neo-Platonism
which was popular among the intellectuals of
Botticelli’s Florence.  Iconographers have done a lot
of decoding of these paintings, using the writings of
Marsilio Ficino and others.  Botticelli was, they have
shown, inspired by those writings. But you do not have
to take neo-Platonism seriously as a set of
propositions about how things really are in order to
be bowled over by the paintings, nor to write
intelligently about them. You do not have to ask what
propositions Botticelli held to be true, nor whether
they in fact are true. It is enough to be tipped off
to the causal influences which Ficino and others
exerted on his imagination. 
   "What did matter for Botticelli was an intellectual
ambience that freed him up to  paint scenes from pagan
mythology—the ambience we call Renaissance humanism.
What mattered for Yeats was the ambience we call
literary modernism—one in which the poets were freed
up to do various things they had not been able to get
away with previously....
   "One way to tell the difference between a work of
art being inspired by a religious or philosophical
view and its being an application of that view by
asking yourself: do I need to know about the view in
order to appreciate the work? This is not a very good
test, however: appreciation is a matter of degree, so
the more you know about all the circumstances
surrounding the creation of the work, the better you
can appreciate it.  A slightly less crude test is: do
I have to believe in the view in order to take an
interest in the work?...
   "If the answer to this latter question is “yes”, we
may begin to have doubts about the value of the work
in question...."

http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/moma.htm

And so forth.  Obviously, I've my disagreements with
Rorty here--I'm all for the reserached which he
eschews here--but I do agree, it's not necessarily
necessary.  I guess the compromise to be reached is,
don't harsh on my mellow, and I won't kill your buzz. 
But there are a number of issues regularly discussed
here raised within, so ...

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