Photo by Ieva Bērziņa-Andersone
Ieva Bērziņa-Andersone (I.B.A.): Your biography notes that your research interests are aesthetics, ethics, and the political philosophy. All of them may perhaps be described as branches of practical philosophy, nevertheless, they are quite different from each other. So, what unifies these fields for you?
Derek Matravers (D.M.): I suppose, the unifying factor is the value. The things of value are of importance. The philosopher who spent some time in Cambridge and who was a big influence on me and, I suppose, also on others, was Bernard Williams. Williams was particularly interested in questions on how one ought to live one’s life. I think if you are asking the question of how you ought to live your life, then the thoughts about the value of art, the value of behaving well, and on the value of politics would occur to you. So, that would be the unifying factor: thinking of what makes the good life.
I.B.A.: Then, why did you choose specifically aesthetics as the area for your PhD research, which is your first in-depth research?
D.M.: Yes, it is, it certainly was in those days. At the time, so this is back in 1987, aesthetics was... Well, it was never a very popular field, but it was even less popular than it is now. But I think there are some very intriguing questions in aesthetics. There are some complicated questions in ethics to deal with the objectivity of the right and wrong, because there is a difficult problem in ethics of what actually makes our judgments correct and binding for other people rather than expressions of our own opinion. And in aesthetics you have all those problems, but you have also problems to do with having to be actually able to see (I’m talking about paintings now), to be able to see the paintings rather than simply being able to describe them, having not seen them. So, for example, I might say that kicking dogs or causing pain to children is wrong. And I can tell you this even if you haven’t ever seen dogs being kicked before or pain being caused to children. But, if I say to you: such and such a picture in the Fitzwilliam Museum is beautiful, in that way it doesn’t really mean anything to you unless you know the picture. So there is a whole extra layer of problems in aesthetics, which there isn’t in ethics, and which makes it a very interesting area of philosophy.
I.B.A.: But do you think that philosophers actually need to get engaged in these questions on art? What can they do different or better than, for example, art critics or art theoreticians?
D.M.: Yes, that’s a good question. I think there is often now an intellectual exchange between the philosophers of art and art theorists and art critics. There is more now than it used to be, but there is still not enough. I think, philosophers are distinctive in two ways. I mean, one is that there are some purely philosophical questions, such as the nature of the representation, what it is to be a piece of music. And to answer these questions you actually need to know very much, but you probably don’t need to know anything about art. But there are a whole lot of other philosophical questions, which do require some in-depth engagement with art. I think, it is difficult to talk about the nature of interpretation and the nature of evaluation without knowing something about the art criticism. So, there are some distinctively philosophical questions. And, with the other questions, I think it is just helpful to use the tools characteristic to philosophy, for example, rigorous arguments, and so on. But this is not exclusively in philosophy: art critics and art theorists are talking very similar kinds of things.
I.B.A.: Perhaps your inclination towards aesthetics was also initially influenced by your personal interest in art?
D.M.: Yes, in fact it was. I started off by thinking that I really would like to be an art critic. So I started to do the philosophy of art. But the philosophy of art turned out to be very interesting, so I stuck with it. So yes, art was my love, it was the love of arts. But, the question I actually find even more interesting is: whether one should live one’s life... Sorry, how the value of art should affect one’s life: whether there is a role of the value of art in a worthwhile life is the question that intrigued me the most, I think.
I.B.A.: What is your relationship to art today? I mean, I have thought that if you start to think about art theoretically, it may disturb your enjoyment of art. Is it so for you, or not?
D.M.: Yes, it can be so. I have just been to a conference on films. There we were sort of going through films, showing bits of films and analysing them philosophically and looking what we can say about them. And sometimes, doing this, you can feel that the film itself is being received as a kind of background only. But, having said that, I think that since 1950ies, so in the last half of the 20th century, and in a lesser way, from about 1914, from Marcel Duchamp’s time, the French very avant-garde artist, the art has been incredibly philosophical. So, there is a plenty of art of the 20th century (and I don’t think that it necessarily makes it a better art at all) for which you sort of need a philosophy degree to understand it. It’s explicitly philosophical, explicitly conceptual, explicitly in the realm of ideas. So, the philosophy helps to sort out that bit. Philosophy helps to stop you going down blind allies. It sort of stops you thinking stupid thoughts. It doesn’t necessarily tell you the good thoughts to think, but it would tell you when you’re thinking nonsense. And, I think, this may sometimes help when approaching art.
I.B.A.: You mentioned Duchamp and the conceptual art. You have written essays on contemporary art, so I wanted to ask you what, in your opinion, actually makes something art today: is it enough that you just put some mundane object, such as a urinal, in a museum, like Duchamp did, or do you need something more?
D.M.: I’m a big fan of Duchamp. I think he’s an extremely funny man. I think his career is worth studying to remind ourselves that he is the grandfather of all this modern conceptual stuff. In fact his view wasn’t heavily theoretical, it had a much lighter touch than for a lot of people that came after him. He never made his living through art: he worked as a librarian. He gave art up to play chess. He said incredibly funny things about art and very funny things about people who took him too seriously. And I’m not saying that he shouldn’t be taking seriously; he is a very interesting character. But I think that in a way one learns more about modern and conceptual art by looking at Duchamp’s take on it than looking at some of the successors’ take on it. But sorry, that does not answer your question. The question was what makes a contemporary art now. I think we went through a rather odd period, a rather dark period really, where there was a view, which kind of leaked out from philosophy, that something could be art for no reason at all, it could just simply be art because an artist has laid hands on it, that it was in an art gallery, or something like that. I don’t think that that view should be given the importance that it got. I mean, it is fading now, and it can’t last for long, because it’s not giving any result, and it’s not particularly interesting. On the other hand, it is true that the reasons by which something can become art, are much broader now than they used to be. So, if you go back to 1700, you would say that something was a work of art because... and what was filled in after this “because” was really narrow: because it was a painting, a sculpture. The reasons now are much broader: so broad, in fact, that it’s kind of unclear that the term “art” has any particularly robust meaning. But I’m not sure that we know what we mean anymore when we say that something is art. We go around some art galleries, and we’re not sure why something would be classified as art rather than just an inventory, a piece of social history, a comment or something like that. So the concept of art has shifted, and the so called post-1960ies concept of art is actually quite different from what came before. It is much broader and maybe even slightly content-less.
I.B.A.: Can it actually be defined somehow?
D.M.: It might be possible. There are some American philosophers, George Dicky in particular, who have tried to define art institutionally: that something is a work of art if it stands in a kind of social relation to the art world. I think that the problem with those definitions is that, although they are philosophically very informative, I don’t think they are informative to anybody who is not a philosopher. I think that the art is now just such a rag-bag of stuff, so there probably isn’t an informative general definition. But we shouldn’t be depressed by that, because the modern concept of fine arts only dates from 1780s; before then arts weren’t really classified together in a way. You can see a kind of three-stage history. So, prior to the mid 1700s, art was more bound up with craft, skill and technique, there wasn’t really a concept of fine arts. Then, from 1780s until some time in the 20th century, there was the notion of fine arts, which pretty much involves the beauty and the quality. And then, in some time during the 20th century, it kind of disintegrates, and you’re left with art, which is in some way more socially aware, a kind of rag-bag, which doesn’t have a real unity to it, I guess.
I.B.A.: Now I have some questions on your book Art and the Emotions.
D.M.: You read that!? Oh my God, you shouldn’t have!
I.B.A.: Well, I remember that in your e-mail to me you suggested that I shouldn’t read it, because it’s dull. But I did have a look at it, and it didn’t seem so dull after all. Why do you think it is?
D.M.: Oh, it’s very kind of you (laughs). Why do I think it’s dull? Oh, I can’t bear reading what I have written! Well, I suppose... (thinks). It’s interesting, but I think now that a lot of it I got terribly wrong. And, although oddly, some of it I got right, but almost by accident: I wasn’t sure and I didn’t know really. I had a vague feeling that I wanted to say something, and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. What I mean by this is that recently the modern philosophy of art, particularly in America, has become a lot less cognitive, it has got a lot less to do with beliefs, with representations of mental states. It has got a lot more to do with feeling and what they call “non-cognitive” effect; namely, the kind of direct influence of arts on our sensations and our feelings. What I was doing in this book, which, of course, is now ten years old, was trying to press exactly that line: trying to say that the problems that we face, the problems we try to solve, can’t be solved just by looking at cognitions – we have to involve the feelings. So, in a way, it sort of became quite trendy again. I was in California in the end of the last year, and the University of California was using this book as a kind of class text. Which, I thought, was absolutely astonishing, and I felt terribly sorry for the students. The thing was that the book was pushing a line, which was that kind of line what they wanted to push. Well, I shouldn’t say that it has become trendy again – it’s too boring to be trendy, but anyway it sort of didn’t disappear without trace: it’s rising up unto surface now and again.
I.B.A.: Well, in this book you are criticising this narrow concept of the cognitive theory in emotions. However, lots of examples you are using, come from the classical literature, music, and movies. I was wondering whether your assessment of art and emotions would differ if other examples would be used, such as conceptual art, installations, or other kinds of contemporary art?
D.M.: That’s an interesting point. The conceptual art is... Lot’s of philosophers now say that there are no philosophical problems in the conceptual art, that the philosophers overrate the conceptual art as being problematic. I don’t think that’s right; I think it is problematic. So, with a lot of modern art – I think it’s so explicitly cognitive that the role for feelings is probably lessened. And that’s not unique for the modern era. For example, the metaphysical poets writing in England in 1600s, they were very cognitive – not in the way the conceptual art is, of course, but it’s certainly true that throughout centuries there have been works, which have more to do with thinking rather than with sensations. Hmm, I think if I had thought about this a little bit more, I would have used films as examples more, because I think that films -- and I’m perhaps influenced by the American philosopher Amy Coplan -- are much better examples of stuff that directly affects your emotions than maybe literature and music.
I.B.A.: Because we don’t have time to think about them at the moment of watching?
D.M.: It’s interesting. I mean, Coplan doesn’t really think that literature can do this at all, and I disagree with that: I think that literature can do this in some respect. But films – they have more techniques at their disposal to act directly on your feelings. So, you can look at a film, for example, you can look at a passage in one of the trilogies of the film The Alien, or the 2000 Space Odyssey, and it can affect you in weird ways. And when you go back you realize that the sound was the sound of heartbeat, which you didn’t notice the first time, or the colour makes a big difference. So, they can create films, using colour, sounds, effects that startle you, priming things, they can set a mood in films. The Blade Runner is a good example, which really sets a mood. You’re being manipulated – we are all being manipulated; the films manipulate you in a way that you don’t notice, which really just bypasses your cognitive processing.
I.B.A.: In such a case, does the perceiver of the art matter? For example, their psychological state, their educational background?
D.M.: That’s a nice, big question that again the philosophy of art has struggled with. Because, certainly, going from Hume and Kant: the worry that Hume and Kant had was how to explain an agreement in arts. Why is it that we can agree, why don’t we all just disagree? So, what explains the normative in arts. Hume and Kant gave different solutions, but in one way they rely on something very similar: namely, what we need to do is to become ideal observers. When we become ideal observers we put aside anything that might be true just for us, and judge in a way that’s true for all people. So you get this very strong thread running through the philosophical aesthetics: that the right way to judge a work of art is to judge it from a universal standpoint. Then you’ll come up to a judgment, to which everybody ought to agree. But the problem with that is that a lot of what we care about in art is to do with where we find ourselves situated in the world. So, you know, whether you’re married, whether you have children, whether you have suffered terrible disappointments – all these things can, and, I would even say, should make you to react to works of art differently. So, a lot of what we care about in arts depends on our being the particular people we are. And this is the real tension with this view in the philosophy of art that in order to come up with a universally valid judgment you have to judge from a universal standpoint. I think, that is the tension in philosophy, but I don’t think it really matters, as it is the tension in the criticism as well. And, I think, it is just a productive, unresolved tension in thinking about art. The work of art might affect you very deeply, and you might know that... I mean, it’s not always idiosyncratic, it might also be just completely ridiculous. For example, if you were listening to a piece of music when you burned a toast or your girlfriend dumped you, and therefore you can’t bear that piece of music, it’s clearly irrelevant for others. But, if your engagement to a painting is because something more general has happened in the history, or the attitudes to sexuality or something like that, I don’t think it really matters that it’s not universal. So, I think it’s a productive tension.
I.B.A.: But how can it be explained that people are sometimes becoming obsessed with a particular style of art, for example, in literature or in movies?
D.M.: (Thinks) It’s difficult... There are various judgments one can make on a work of art. So, it makes perfect sense to say: “I really like that work, but actually I know that it’s not a great work, it’s just that I really like it.” Or you can even make the other judgment, you can say: “Well, I know it’s a great work of art, but it doesn’t particularly do anything to me.” And again, it creates a tension: if people find that a certain style or a certain genre of art really appeals to them, there’s always a danger to become too narrow-minded. But, provided that people don’t confuse their personal likes and dislikes, which may very well be well-grounded, with making universalistic judgments on the work, then I don’t think it matters very much. I think, this is, for example, the case with D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence is appealing to a certain kind of person, but I don’t think D. H. Lawrence is a particularly great novelist. So, I think people confuse a judgment on liking something with the judgment of thinking that’s D. H. Lawrence is an extremely good writer – but that’s perhaps my prejudice.
I.B.A.: Returning to the distinction between the narrow cognitivist approach and the emotional approach, would it be probable that the cognitivist would be right with respect to art, which conveys social critique? For example, with respect artworks criticizing war, such as Michael Moore’s documentaries criticizing Bush’s politics. Perhaps in such cases art provokes to take a certain rational stance, probably even followed by a certain mode of behaviour?
D.M.: Well, I think one needs to distinguish two things. You are absolutely right that the purpose of the art works of that sort is trying to engender a certain cognitive mind-set in the audience, which might well lead to a particular action. But, very often the way in which they engender that mind-set, - and I certainly agree with you that the end-result is something cognitive, - but the means to getting to result are very often not cognitive. So, Michael Moore is enormously rhetorical. Or, let’s take a classical example from paintings. The example philosophers often use is the Picasso’s Guernica, which engenders a kind of belief about the brutality of the war. But it does it by semi-abstract, semi-figurative way, which kind of creates that this huge canvas has a whistle effect, which acts directly on us. It is an interesting issue -- sorry for a detour for a moment -- how best we get our moral beliefs. So for example, if you are a politician wanting to achieve raising more money in feeding starving children, you can tell the people that there is this number of children starving, and they will tell you that they nonetheless don’t have the money. But to drag the people over there and show them rooms in which there are children really starving – this will create exactly the same belief as before, but now this can motivate also their actions. So, it’s very interesting. For instance, Lord Carrington was the British Foreign Secretary, and it so happened that he wasn’t going to do anything about the refugees in Hong-Kong. But then he went on a trip over there, where he didn’t get any new information, but just the fact he got there, and what he saw there, made him change his mind. So, it’s a kind of affective thing rather than a cognitive thing.
I.B.A.: You mentioned moral beliefs, and your other area of work is actually ethics. Do you see that art can contribute to the moral education? For example, is reading a work of fiction in this sense better or worse than reading a philosophical treatise on ethics?
D.M.: Yes... There are a lot of philosophers who say that what novels do is that they put you in a kind of experiential contact with moral situation, and that’s a way of moral development. I’m sure that’s right. So, another famous stock philosophers’ example is George Elliot’s novel Middlemarch. It is such a psychologically fine portrait that it can really teach you things about the life. Yes, that’s where I’d like to sit at this question.
I.B.A.: But what should one rather read : fiction or an ethical treatises?
D.M.: (laughs) Having said all that, I also think that the above philosophical position is slightly overstated. I think it would be very sad if the reason you read novels was to make you an ethically better person; that would be just too awful. And ethical treatises teach you slightly differently: they teach you to stand back and take a theoretical perspective on things. I also don’t think that novels ought to aim to make the audiences better. And I also don’t think that a novel is good or bad depending on the ethical point it takes. I think, in a way, ethics - although it is a very self-indulgent, comfortable Cambridge philosopher’s position to take - that ethics is overrated in a way: that the arts give us a freedom in our lives, which ethics does not give us. I wouldn’t like to see the arts kind of harnessed to the ethical sledge, art is a lot more a domain of freedom, an area where we can mess around, which ethics does not give us.
I.B.A.: Right, but ethics sometimes tend to put limits on art. How far, do you think, art should go to create a certain effect on emotions?
D.M.: There are many different relations between ethics and aesthetics. So, for example, the artist... I don’t remember exactly his name, but it could be Marcus Harvey, constructed many years ago a portrait of a notorious child killer, Myra Hindley, out of children hands; so it looks like that lots of hand-prints form her face. It caused an enormous argument in the press. But we should not really care what the argument was about; I think what people were rejecting was that the artist was trying to achieve a notoriety on riding on the back of Myra Hindley’s notoriety. And that’s a complicated relation between the art and ethics. A less complicated relation may be propagandistic works of art, such as anti-Jewish novels, anti-Jewish films of the 1930ies in Germany. What limits should we place on art? Art is subject to enormous ethical limits, for example, a racist work of art is as bad as a racist joke or a racist person. On the other hand, Richard Wollheim said somewhere that nobody minds to be around good works of art rather than bad works of art, but it’s not clear that it’s better to be around good people rather than bad people, because bad people are so much more fun. So, I think if you think on how to live your life, and you’re thinking about some ideals in art, which have been picked up in a course of centuries, like Bohemians, the Beat poets, various hippies of all kinds of sorts, who kind of orient their lives in a way, which draws on artistic value more than on an ethical value, then this seems to me to be a contribution to the richness of life. In a way, although philosophers and everybody generally think, and that’s probably the right thing to think, that ethical values ought to be overriding, probably there are a kind of artistic values, which would be suffocated from the need to be ethically oriented. So it’s a complicated question, which I can’t to the least extent answer in a straight way.
I.B.A.: Well, this brings me to a recent scandal, which took place in Latvia. There was a new opera coming out, and the opera poster was depicting a naked little boy standing with his back to the audience, so nothing improper could be seen. But, the police launched criminal proceedings on the possible pornographic content of this poster. At the end, nobody was accused, but this event generated lots of public discussions whether the police could or should have behaved like this towards this work of art. In this context, do you think that emotions should be a proper basis for the evaluation of art?
D.M.: I think it is a difficult problem. The answer, which is not very helpful, is that those works are bad, which are bad art, and they are not bad, if they are not bad art. But the problem is that this just shapes the question of what is good art and what is bad art, and that’s a terribly difficult thing to adjudicate. And it almost certainly could not be adjudicated in the courts. I’m sure there are works of art that depict naked children, which really just ought to be banned and shouldn’t be shown anywhere. And there are works of art, which depict naked children, which are masterpieces of art. So the fact that they depict naked children is not a decisive factor; the decisive factor is whether they are in a kind morally serious, whether they are serious art – and that’s a terribly difficult thing to make a judgment on. There is a famous case in Britain on a homosexual bookshop Gay’s the Word down the North London, which was raided by the police, and the police took some books away. When it came to a trial, the defence barrister was pointing out that amongst the books the police confiscated were books by, for example, Tennessy Williams – a Nobel prize winner in literature. So, what do you think you are doing? Well, the police just thought – well, that book is there on the shelf, the guy who wrote it was gay, so it has to go in the bag with the rest of them. So there was no judgment whether something is a great work of art or just something silly. And actually, I think until we can’t make that sort of judgments, we won’t get anywhere with that question.
I.B.A.: Would this mean that emotions are not sufficient to evaluate a work of art; that we need something else?
D.M.: Well, again, I think it’s one of the most difficult questions in aesthetics. I think that the emotions are very important in all cases, and the difference is... it’s just very difficult to say something systematic regarding this difference... but in some cases the emotional reaction is on a different or higher quality: it’s more reflective, it’s less to do with core things of psychoanalysis, such as self-denial and various other ways of falsifying emotions. So, in all these cases you’ll have an emotional effect, but there will be a difference between the defensible, good emotional effect and the emotional effect, which is due to one of the huge variety of reasons, being kind of corrupted. And to make that judgment you can’t draw on philosophy; to make that judgment you just have to draw on being a very sensitive critic of the work you are being shown. So, I think the case you mentioned about the poster in Latvia and the case about the Gay’s the Word in Britain: they should have got very, very good art critics who should say whether it is defensible; is it a mere effect or is it an effect of some quality. Does it make any sense?
I.B.A.: Yes, I suppose so. To end with the difficult questions, we can turn now to my last question, which is quite unrelated to philosophy but refers to your hobbies, which are also quite philosophy unrelated, such as motorbikes. How so? Do you have one yourself?
D.M.: Oh yes, I do; I do have a motorbike. I have a big 750 CC Motorbike. Well, I think it is actually in a kind related to that sort of thing, which I have been saying: there is a danger...or, perhaps, that’s too pretentious to say, but almost all philosophers would agree that over the past twenty or thirty years philosophy has kind of been professionalized. So, it has become a sort of a technical way of doing a subject. But this is certainly not true for all philosophers, and it’s not true for philosophers who I most admire: for example, Bernard Williams is very interested in opera, and Richard Wollheim is very interested in psychoanalysis, very interested in painting, and all kinds of things. I think there is sort of... which actually goes back to Plato potentially: that if you are a philosopher you ask yourself, what kind of life do I want to lead? And the answer to that is not necessarily that, well, I want to lead a particularly philosophical life. The answer may well be that I want to be driving around by motorbike and looking around. So, philosophy makes you reflective on the value of things, and that might lead you to think – well, I want to live a life with certain kinds of values rather than other kinds of values. So, those sorts of things I try to fill my days with are connected with my philosophical views: and that’s because in my philosophical views I worry much too much about what it is to lead a valuable life. And charging around on a motorbike is a good contribution to the value of life.
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