Appreciating Appreciation

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone.ⁱ

This essay constitutes one aspect of an overall project to spell out the implications for the literary arts of Wittgenstein's systematic distinction between acts of description that carry truth values and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but bad news for the present reader, since I feel I have to offer a painfully brief version of my overall theoretical position as a backdrop for what I will say about appreciation. Expressions elicit or solicit attunement rather than propose representations of what we find in our worlds. So I will argue that the more we flesh out the content of typical expressive acts, the fuller and more intense are the demands for something like attitudes of appreciation as models of response to works of art.¹

Wittgenstein bases this distinction on a very simple concrete contrast between "Red." and "Red!" (187). Under standard discursive conditions, the assertion "Red." binds us to examining how this could be a meaningful statement: something addressed is or is not red, and so this utterance is either true of false. But if we replace the period by an exclamation mark, we drastically change the semantic environment. Now we are not dealing with a statement intended to be held up against the world and judged for its pictorial adequacy. Rather we are invited to imagine how we might flesh out this statement to explore its significance—for the agent whose expression it is, and for the invitation to observe in the world what might be worthy of exclamation. Such fleshing out could involve asking the agent why he or she thinks the object of attention worthy of exclamation, then trying provisionally to identify with that perspective. Or we could imagine possible answers to these questions that open up our own possible affective relations to the scene—directed both to the observer and to the "red" that the speaker cares about.

Once we are clear on this distinction, many claims follow that prepare the stage for elaborating the roles of appreciation in literary studies. My most ambitious claim is that we would be better off if we stopped using the term "humanities" and replaced it with something that has some practical grounding. The term "humanities" is obviously arrogant and self-congratulatory. It assumes that whatever is not encompassed in its ken is somehow other than human. And it assumes that being human is something to celebrate, although there is considerable evidence to the contrary. (I think of Spinoza's lovely retort to those who complain that God can't be divine and allow suffering. He replied that this is only from the point of view of humans, and not a god who might command worship.) This assumption that the humanities are instruments of celebration also masks a second weakness—that the term is hopelessly vague because, unlike the sciences, it projects no specific disciplinary ideals, practices, or grounds for practices. The term "humanities" has no practical correlate: it is as if the term just gives overall practical concerns to its other, the sciences, and so can only make vague claims about developing sensibility and bringing ethical consciousness to bear on how we deal with an otherwise practical world.²

To find more practical general terms for our range of interpretive practices, I suggest we turn to a somewhat new version of the tripartite scheme of disciplines distinguishing pursuits of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Where science was, I would put the domain of description. Descriptions aim at truth values because they are measured by their power to refer to observable entities and to place them in explanatory frameworks. Second, there is the domain of policy, that invokes something like Aristotle's practical reason or Kant's prudence. Policy relies on descriptions, but the aim is not developing a stable relationship between phenomena and the laws that govern them. Rather, the basic aim of...