I. Introduction

In Some Main Problems of Philosophy, G.E. Moore famously holds up an envelope and directs his audience to inspect it. In inquiring with them as to what happened, Moore launches into one of the most hotly debated issues in the past century of Analytic philosophy: the nature of apprehension, our cognitive relationships to the external objects amongst which we live, and our ability to make judgments about the world in virtue of what we see. In his effort to complete the story about the envelope, Moore comes to the topic of just what seeing is and what sort of cognitive relationships we bear to the things we see. In so doing, he turns to the issue of the knowledge of things, or apprehension, the cognitive relationship by which I am able to pick out a thing in the world and speak of it. In order to complete his story about the envelope, Moore must make a distinction between direct and indirect apprehension of things, which allows him to explain how we speak of those things which are not immediately picked out by their presence in our awareness. In considering similar problems in the similarly titled The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell develops a distinction that is in many ways similar—the famous distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Although Russell and Moore’s distinctions address a common problem and seem in almost every respect to be similar, a tension lurks beneath the surface between the two accounts. The tension arises from the different standpoints from which Moore and Russell attack the problem of knowledge of things, and it is cast in the starkest relief by consideration of their diverging views on the problem of memory and our awareness of the past. Careful consideration will show that, although neither Moore nor Russell’s approach to our awareness of objects is likely to be fruitful, the considerations that such comparisons raise highlight a crucial issue for any doctrine of apprehension, and Russell’s account will prove superior to Moore’s in expressing what it is to speak of a thing as it was. (I.1)

II. Moore: Direct and Indirect Apprehension

Moore’s distinction between direct and indirect apprehension arises in his effort to complete the story about the envelope. Both Moore and Russell have thus far agreed that when I beheld the envelope, a part of what happened to me was that I saw certain sense-data—a particular whitish patch of colour, of a certain size and shape (46). In the course of developing this part of the story, Moore is greatly worried by the apparently mutually exclusive properties borne by the sense-data observed by each of us. From different perspectives, it seems as though the envelope appears with many different patterns of color, perhaps even with different sizes and different shapes (from different distances and different angles). It seems, then, that the sense-data impressed upon me cannot be identical with the one envelope that we all see. Nor can they be identical with the other, mutually exclusive sense-data seen by the others around me. Moore—in the midst of a great deal of caviling—lays down three principles, described as the accepted view (because of their supposed widespread acceptance by philosophers) which he proposes as the most convincing account of how all of this is: (II.1)

1. Esse is percipi: absolutely no part of the sense-data, which I ever apprehend, exists at all except at the moment I am apprehending it. (M. 40) (II.2.1)
2. Privacy: no two of us ever apprehend exactly the same sense-datum. They would allow that we might, perhaps, apprehend sense-data exactly alike; but they would say that even though exactly alike—the same in quality—they cannot ever be numerically the same. (M. 41) (II.2.2)
3. Dislocation: none of the sense-data apprehended by any one person can ever be situated either in the same place with, or at any distance in any direction from, those apprehended by any other person. (M. 42) (II.2.3)

Now, however, we are in something of a pickle. At the beginning of the exercise we had wanted to say that we all saw the same envelope. But if all we are aware of is the sense-data that present themselves to us, then there is nothing common to all of us that we can bring before our minds and say that we saw the same thing. The sense-data before our minds, on the accepted view, are different from one another just because they are before our minds, rather than a single mind. And thus, having for the moment accepted the philosophical view that all the sense-data seen by any one of us are seen by that person alone, we are committed to arguing that if we do in fact all see the same envelope, this seeing of the envelope cannot possibly consist merely in our seeing of those sense-data (M. 46). (II.3)

In order to resolve the tension between philosophical reflection and common-sense intuitions, we must now distinguish (at least) two different ways for a thing to be before the mind. With the accepted view of sense-data in hand, one way of knowing things will be the apprehension of sense-data that has already been explored. This relationship Moore dubs direct apprehension, and characterizes in terms of apprehension of sense-data under the accepted view, i.e., that which happens when you actually see any colour, when you actually hear any sound, when you actually feel the so-called sensation of heat … etc., etc. (M. 46). Moore later also allows that we have direct apprehension of propositions, but his basic characterization of direct apprehension is carefully tailored to accompany sense-data under the accepted view. In any case it will seem as though anything which counts as the object of a direct apprehension, except for propositions, will be something sense-datummy and subject to the conditions of the accepted view. (II.4)

However, our ability to bring one and the same envelope before all our minds and say, We all see the same envelope, there must be another way of knowing things, another mode in which something can be brought before the mind. This relationship Moore characterizes as the relation which you have to a thing when you do directly apprehend some proposition about it, but do not directly apprehend the thing itself (74), and he gives it the name indirect apprehension. Whereas both forms of apprehension places us in some cognitive relation (M. 78) which enables us to know truths about the thing that we apprehend, direct apprehension is the picking out of data that are directly confronting the mind in their experiential richness, whereas indirect apprehension is a much barer relation, only obtaining in virtue of having the ability to make judgments about the thing indirectly apprehended. Direct apprehension will be phenomenologically basic, whereas indirect apprehension will depend upon bringing various propositions before the mind. (II.5)

With this distinction in hand, the story about the envelope can now be completed. We all see the same envelope before us—but see here is being used in a sense other than the direct visual sensations that we have of its color, shape, position, and so on—for the objects of these sensations are, on the accepted view, essentially private. Rather, our seeing of the same material envelope consists, partly in directly apprehending certain sense-data, but in addition to this, being endowed with a cognitive relationship that can allow direct apprehension of a proposition connecting those sense-data to a material object, that is, knowing, besides and at the same time, that there exists something other than these sense-data (M. 51). Picking out the material object for all of us to talk about requires our perceptual faculty to convey the double existence that Hume so vigorously denied, presenting to us both a private sense-datum (directly apprehended) and also the ability to speak of a something quite other than these sense-data (M. 51). (II.6)

III. Russell: Knowledge by Acquaintance and by Description

Russell’s parallel distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description also takes its cue from Russell’s efforts to work out a story about the perception of office supplies. Like Moore, he is confronted with the question of how to string together many people’s radically private sense-data and connect them to the common envelope (or table) that is being observed. However, Russell leaves much of the ontological story about sense-data open, and he does not commit himself to the accepted view of sense-data in its entirety—in particular, he does not seem to take any particular stance on the esse-is-percipi thesis (1). The worry driving Russell in making his distinction is primarily a concern about how the sentences regarding a material envelope can be made meaningful. (III.1)

Russell frames this worry in the familiar terms of knowing what you’re talking about: it is scarcely conceivable that we can make a judgement or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is that we are judging or supposing about (R. 58). Our ability to talk about things (such as the material envelope) which are not brought before our minds in an unmediated confrontation requires us to have some cognitive relationship with the thing of which we intend to speak. But how can we account for the ability to bring things before the mind beyond the range of that which we primitively know? (III.2)

In order to get out of this pickle, Russell develops his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description—a distinction which will, initially at least, track many of the same things as Moore’s distinction between direct and indirect apprehension. We have acquaintance, Russell writes, with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or knowledge of truths (R. 46). In acquaintance the thing that we know presents itself, as it were, nakedly before the mind, placing us in a cognitive relationship to, for example, the color of the envelope such that I know the colour perfectly and completely when I see it, and no further knowledge of it itself is even theoretically possible (R. 47). Acquaintance, like direct apprehension, is an essentially simple relationship between the knower and the thing known such that the thing is indubitably identified and available for judgments, without any need to refer outside of the experience of acquaintance itself. (III.3)

So far, so good. But Russell has already examined the phenomenology of seeing an object before us, and he has confessed that he failed to find in it any acquaintance with material objects such as the envelope. If he is to speak of the one envelope that we all say we see, then he will need to distinguish a second way of knowing things, which does not require this primitive acquaintance with the thing known. Russell finds this in the notion of knowledge by description. Anything which does not disclose itself to the mind in its full richness, as objects of acquaintance do, must be known to us indirectly, through a description. On Russell’s account, like Moore’s, our ability to speak of things to which we do not have a direct cognitive relation requires us to pick them out in virtue of our ability to make statements about them. For Russell, this ability is explained in virtue of picking out the object by a description phrased in terms of other things. Thus, (III.4)

There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of the table [qua material object]; all our knowledge of the table is really knowledge of truths, and the actual thing which is the table is not, strictly speaking, known to us at all. We know a description, and we know that there is just one object to which this description applies, though the object is not directly known to us. (R. 47-48) (III.5)

The table itself does not show up on our cognitive charts, but we can use our knowledge of other things to, as it were, triangulate to the table itself and speak of it, even though it is not directly before the mind. (III.6)

If we are, then, to pick out objects outside of the range of acquaintance by speaking of them in terms of other objects which we have cognitively picked out, it soon becomes clear that all of the terms we use in the description must ultimately be reduced to the names of things with which we are acquainted. On Russell’s view, only objects of acquaintance present themselves as already picked out; therefore, only objects of acquaintance can provide a foundation from which to pick out objects beyond the range of immediate experience. He must introduce the principle of acquaintance as the basic requirement for any meaningful cognitive relationship involving description. Thus Russell: The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions concerning descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted (R. 58). (III.7)

With this distinction in hand, Russell can now survey the field of human experience to see what sort of things might count as objects of acquaintance, and what sorts of things will have to be triangulated by a description. Sense-data have already been taken as paradigmatic examples of objects of acquaintance, but this is not enough for Russell. In order to connect objects of immediate acquaintance with things outside of our acquaintance, we clearly cannot be acquainted only with self-contained particulars. Otherwise there could be no descriptions that identify anything other than a laundry list of objects of acquaintance. Russell, therefore, adds acquaintance with universals (according to what he describes as a roughly Platonic theory of their nature and self-disclosure) alongside our acquaintance with sense-data. With these two objects of acquaintance in hand, along with a rich set of logical operators, he can now begin to form descriptions that pick out objects outside of the range of acquaintance, as when he speaks of a material envelope or table as the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data. Such a description can now be broken down into an existential quantification (logical operator) for a thing which is (1) a physical object (universal), and (2) causes [universal] such-and-such sense-data [various particulars]. By combining universals and particulars with which we are acquainted, we can reason outward beyond the range of immediate acquaintance and thus pass beyond the limits of our private experience (59). As long as a thing to be spoken of can be completely described in terms of other things which are directly before the mind, we can say that (in a certain sense) we know it, and we will be able to speak of it even though our native faculties do not allow us to have it disclose itself directly to us. (III.8)

Given the outline of Russell’s distinction, we can see that there are very close parallels with the distinction made by Moore between direct and indirect apprehension—with acquaintance being roughly equivalent to direct apprehension and knowledge by description being roughly equivalent to indirect apprehension. However, Moore and Russell have approached their doctrines from different directions. Moore developed his distinction between direct and indirect apprehension in order to complete the story about the envelope in light of a doctrine about the ontological status of the objects of our direct experience. On his view, direct apprehension is a phenomenon tightly fitted to sense-data, and indirect apprehension will have to cover nearly everything else. Russell, on the other hand, develops his distinction in light of a principle about the meaningfulness of sentences, and his distinction has far fewer ties to a particular view on sense-data. Because of this, Russell can—and, ultimately, must—add much more to the roster of objects of acquaintance than simply sense-data. Acquaintance less narrowly constructed than direct apprehension, and and it will turn out that this difference in approach leads Russell and Moore’s apparently congenial distinctions come into conflict. (III.9)

IV. The Remembrance of Things Past

The most dramatic separation between Moore’s and Russell’s accounts can be seen when we turn to their accounts of memory. Returning to the envelope, Moore observes: (IV.1)

I look at the envelope again and I see the whitish colour. I turn my head away, and I no longer see it. But I remember that I did see it a moment ago. I know that I did see it. There is nothing that I know more certainly than this. Moreover I know that that whitish colour was: that there was such a thing in the Universe. (M. 49) (IV.2)

What is the nature of the presentation of the envelope in memory? One potential confusion must be mentioned in order to dismiss it immediately. Both Russell and Moore note that memory of an object is apt to be accompanied by an image of the object, and yet the image cannot be what constitutes memory (R. 114-115). This is shown clearly enough by the observations that (1) the image is in the present, whereas what is remembered is known to be in the past (R. 115), and (2) that if the image itself were memory, then I could not possibly know that the image which I now see was at all different from the colour which I saw a moment ago (M. 50), but in fact we can and do evaluate the images that accompany our memories and speak of whether or not they justly portray the thing remembered. (IV.3)

Remembering an object, then, is having that object, safe at home in the past, before my mind now, presented to me by the faculty of memory. But what is the nature of this presentation? Is it knowledge by acquaintance or knowledge by description? Is it direct apprehension or indirect apprehension? (IV.4)

Moore argues that memory is one way of having before the mind, which is not direct apprehension (M. 47)—indeed, in this passage he introduces it as a paradigm case of indirect apprehension. When you remember an object, Moore claims, you are no longer directly apprehending the coloured patch which you saw (M. 47). Moore draws an analogy between the relationship between present sense-data and the material object with which they are connected, on the one hand, and the relationship between the present image and the sense-data remembered, on the other. Just as direct apprehension of present sense-data somehow also elicits indirect apprehension of the material object, direct apprehension of the mental image also elicits indirect apprehension of the remembered object. When you turn your eyes away from the envelope and remember what you saw, there is—so to speak—a leftward shift in the ledger: (IV.5)

Russell, on the other hand, introduces memory as a paradigm case of the extension [of knowledge by acquaintance] beyond sense-data (R. 48). On the account of memory he develops, the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognized as past (R. 115, emphasis added). Here the image is, at most, a psychological illustration that accompanies the essential acquaintance with past objects, and our relationship with these objects is no more strained, just as immediate and cognitively simple, as it was when we had seen them face to face. In light of further deliberations about problems of fallacious memory, Russell will eventually recognize that some memories (or memories so-called, at least) are examples of knowledge by description, but here as always they are rooted in the primary knowledge of things, which is the acquaintance—here the acquaintance conveyed in (primary) memories. (IV.7)

Moore and Russell are each driven to the conclusion that they adopt by the prior commitments that structured their respective distinctions. For Moore, the driving force is his ontological theses about the objects of direct apprehension. For Russell, it is his semantic and epistemic commitments in the analysis of knowledge by description. (IV.8)

We reviewed earlier the three theses which Moore presents as the accepted view about sense-data, and noticed how Moore’s notion of direct apprehension is tailored to fit sense-data under the accepted view. It should come as no surprise, then, that the accepted view theses weigh heavily in Moore’s efforts to place memory in terms of the various ways of knowing a thing. The first of the three theses, the esse-is-percipi principle, holds a decisive weight here. Remember that on this principle, a sense-datum exists as long, and only as long as it is the object of direct apprehension. (IV.9)

As of yet, the thesis does not say anything about memory: whether I directly or indirectly apprehend something in memory, I apprehend what was then, not anything that is now. Nevertheless, when (1) is conjoined with the other two theses (privacy and dislocation), the doctrine that emerges does bear heavily on memory. Sense-data exist only as long as they are apprehended because they essentially dependent upon the act of apprehension. The relationship between the object of direct apprehension and the act of direct apprehension, in fact, is so tight that wherever there are two distinct acts of direct apprehension, there must be two numerically distinct sense-data to accompany them. And now, the pressure of the accepted view is brought to bear on memory. If, after turning away from the envelope, I directly apprehended the envelope’s sense-data in memory, then this would be a second, different act of direct apprehension. As Moore writes, the quality of the relationship changes such that (IV.10)

the relation which you now have to the image is obviously different from that which you have now to the sense-datum, which you saw but do not now see; while this relation which you now have with the image, is the same as that which you had to the sense-datum, just now when you actually saw it. (M. 47) (IV.11)

And since we have here two separate acts of apprehension, if both were acts of direct apprehension, rather than indirect, then that very fact would constitute two numerically distinct acts of direct apprehension, and thus two numerically distinct objects apprehended. You could not, then be thinking of the colour which you saw, and therefore having it before your mind in a sense (M. 47). Thus it must be that you are no longer directly apprehending it (M. 47), that you pick it out by entertaining propositions about it, but you do not have a direct apprehension of the thing that you remember. (IV.12)

For Russell, on the other hand, the looming issue in understanding memory is the principle of acquaintance. On his account, in order for me to have a thing before my mind, it must be picked out entirely by things with which I am acquainted. And so it is with judgments about the past just as much as judgments about the present. But here a worry arises: if the only vocabulary with which I can pick out a past thing is what is contained in the directory of objects of my acquaintance, then in order to describe anything before the present moment, I must have some acquaintance which allows me to speak of what has gone before, which is to say, some acquaintance with something in the past. Russell mentions his reasoning briefly twice: (IV.13)

This immediate knowledge by memory is the source of all our knowledge concerning the past: without it, there could be no knowledge of the past by inference, since we should never know that there was anything past to be inferred. (R. 49) (IV.14)

Thus the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognized as past. But for the fact of memory in this sense, we should not know that there ever was a past at all, nor should we be able to understand the word past, any more than a man born blind can understand the word light. (R. 115) (IV.15)

We can understand the arguments as a sort of elliptical transcendental argument, and reconstruct Russell’s reasoning more or less as follows: (IV.16)

1. Knowledge of past things is possible. (IV.17.1)
2. If knowledge of past things is possible, then either it is all knowledge by description, or else some memories convey knowledge by acquaintance. (IV.17.2)
3. Either all knowledge of past things is knowledge by description, or else some memories convey knowledge by acquaintance. (IV.17.3)
4. If all knowledge of past things is knowledge by description, then past things must be picked out entirely by from present or timeless things with which we are acquainted. (IV.17.4)
5. Past things cannot be picked out entirely by present or timeless things. (IV.17.5)
6. If all knowledge of past things is knowledge by description, then knowledge of past things is not possible. (IV.17.6)
7. Not all knowledge of past things is knowledge by description. (IV.17.7)
8. Therefore, some memories convey knowledge by acquaintance. (IV.17.8)

The crucial step in establishing that memory must convey at least some acquaintance is the introduction of the principle of acquaintance at step 4, and then the introduction of a principle at step 5 which we may call the flatness of the present principle. Roughly speaking, on Russell’s account, my acquaintance with present things (sense-data, acts of consciousness) and timeless things (universals) leaves me with a flat perspective on time. There are no objects of acquaintance in either of these categories which give me cognitive license to speak of a duration of time beyond the present moment or the view sub specie aeternitatis. Unless I have acquaintance with past things as past, I have no way of spreading my judgments outward in time from the present moment. Flashbacks in the cinema of my awareness would be indistinguishable from the ordinary forward motion of the plot. (IV.17.9)

V. Different Strokes

It seems, then, that in spite of the initial similarities between Russell’s and Moore’s distinctions, there is a deep conflict between them. If we have knowledge of past things, then Moore’s accepted view with regard to objects of direct apprehension and Russell’s principle of acquaintance come into conflict with one another. Moore’s view requires an essentially ephemeral character for direct apprehension. Russell’s requires acquaintance with past things in the present. What, then, are we to do? (V.1)

Such questions may themselves be questionable. There are, after all, very good reasons to reject both Moore’s account of sense-data and Russell’s principle of acquaintance. Nevertheless, even if we reject the motivations for Russell and Moore’s solutions on memory, we still must come to some kind of peace with how it is we speak of things that we experienced in the past. How do we get a cognitive grip on such objects? Will a Moorean indirect apprehension do, or do we need Russellian knowledge by acquaintence to account for our knowledge of how things were? (V.2)

Moore, if he were prone to saying such things, might tell the Russellian that she has the phenomenology all wrong. When, immediately after directly apprehending some sense-datum, Moore writes, you remember that sense-datum, or remember that you did just now directly apprehend it, there is nothing more obvious than that you now stand in a different relationship to the object than you did when you were looking at it. It seems that you are, ex hypothesi, no longer directly apprehending the snese-datum in question (M. 74). Otherwise, you would still be seeing it, rather than remembering it. (V.3)

Such a response, however, will only work by begging the question. On Moore’s account, it is true that the only way you could still have direct apprehension of the sense-datum is by it continuing to present itself visually to you. A Russellian account, however, can just as easily account for the phenomenological change. Memory, for Russell, simply is a different faculty of acquaintance from the sense of sight. In this way, one is acquainted with the past sense-datum, and why should the phenomenal character of this relationship be like the phenomenal character of being acquainted with a present sense-datum? If Moore assumes that the change from sight to memory requires a change in the underlying cognitive relationship, then he has in fact merely ignored one of his own principles about direct apprehension: with each of the different sensory faculties, Moore argues, (V.4)

what I mean by direct apprehension, namely, the act of consciousness, is exactly the same in quality: that is to say, the actual seeing of a colour, considered as an act of consciousness, differs in no respect at all from the actual hearing of a sound, or the actual smelling of a smell. They differ only in respect of the fact, that whereas the one is the direct apprehension of one kind of sense-datum, the other is the direct apprehension of another kind. (M. 47) (V.5)

And so, with memory, the phenomenal difference can be understood not in terms of the difference between direct apprehension and indirect apprehension, but rather in terms of the difference between a past object of acquaintance and a present one. (V.6)

Russell, for his part, can renew his transcendental argument on behalf of acquaintance with the past, even without the demands of the principle of acquaintance. If the present is inferentially flat in the way that Russell argues that it is, then quite apart from Russell’s semantic worries, there will simply be no way to get an epistemic grip on the past unless I am able to stand towards past objects of awareness independently of the present objects around me. Without an independent epistemic grasp on the past, as Russell writes, we will not be able to infer anything about the past, because we will have no basis on which to suppose that there are past things to be inferred. Russell’s division of our epistemic and semantic lives into acquaintance and description is certainly not to be accepted uncritically, but examination of his distinction and comparison with Moore’s highlights the crucial need for a theory of apprehension which respects the timeliness of things in the world, and raises concerns for anyone explicating our relationship to the things of which we speak and think. (V.7)

I. The Quixotic Career of Pierre Menard

In Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1962), Jorge Luís Borges recounts how a friend of his, a French poet and sometime philosopher, decided in the mid-1930s to write Don Quixote. He did not, according to Borges, want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be easy—but the Don Quixote (48). Menard intended to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes (49)—not by a mechanical transcription of the original (49), but by his own literary efforts. With only fragmentary memories of his adolescent reading of Quixote—a vague image little different from the outlines that an author would have of a work she has not yet begun—Menard labored for years. He considered, but rejected, the project of becoming Miguel de Cervantes. To rewrite Don Quixote through the experiences of Cervantes would be a far less interesting task than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard (49). And, indeed, by his death Menard had succeeded in replicating the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One of Quixote as well as a fragment of the twenty-second. (I.1)

Borges claims that on reading Menard, one finds that The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer (52). As three hundred years have passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote (51), and authored by a French devotee of Baudelaire rather than an old soldier of seventeenth century Spain, Menard’s work probes history and philosophy with intellectual sophistication in ways Cervantes’s cannot. Whereas (I.2)

The latter indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country; Menard chooses as reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope. What Hispanophile would not have advised Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta to make such a choice! Menard, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, eludes them. In his work there are neither bands of gypsies, conquistadors, mystics, Philip the Seconds, nor autos-da-fé. He disregards or proscribes local color. This disdain indicates a new approach to the historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô without appeal. (51-52). (I.3)

On the other hand, Menard’s text has deficiencies of style compared to the identical text of Cervantes; the intentional use of seventeenth century Spanish by the twentieth century French intellectual suffers from a certain affectation whereas Cervantes handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time (53). (I.4)

Menard’s Quixote raises an important question. Is it possible that through repetition of a pre-existing book in a foreign tongue (54), Menard has authored a [new] work, possibly the most significant of our time (48)? To generalize the problem, is it possible that two pieces of art might be perfect physical replicas of one another, and yet have radically different artistic properties? Is it possible for Cervantes’s Quixote to tilt only at windmills, whereas Menard’s tilts at the philosophy of William James? (I.5)

If Menard could not have written a better book than Cervantes because he produced nothing which was not already there, then we must exclude from critical consideration anything and everything other than the bare physical details of a work and whatever moral, emotional, or other properties that arise directly from those details. We must, as Kendall Walton (1970/1995) summarizes a position not his own, ignore how and when a work was created, the artist’s intentions in creating it, his philosophical views, psychological state, personal life, the artistic traditions and intellectual atmosphere of his society, and so forth (332). This view has been propounded by, among others, Formalists such as Clive Bell, and since it argues that we must only consider the perceptible elements of a work (and perhaps the properties entailed by those elements), we may dub this family of positions Aestheticism. (I.6)

If, on the other hand, Menard has succeeded, then we must admit at least some of these historical properties that the Aestheticist excludes, and reject any aesthetic theory which bases a work’s artistic properties only on the perceptible forms or elements of the work. Since such a view considers contextual properties external to the perceptible properties of an artwork, these theories may be called Contextualist1. The groundwork for a sophisticated Contextualist position is laid by Kendall Walton in Categories of Art, and in light of Walton’s theory—supplemented by concepts from Arthur Danto’s The Artworld—the Aestheticist claim should be rejected. Menard could, indeed, create a new artwork—although perhaps not in the way that Walton or Danto thinks he could. (I.7)

II. The Aesthetic Hypothesis

According to the Aestheticist, since Menard has successfully replicated Don Quixote word-for-word, he really has succeeded in replicating Quixote, and despite the arduous labors it required, he has no more created a new artwork than a printer does by reprinting copies. This commits the Aestheticist to a theory under which artistic features are harshly separated from every condition external to the perceptible properties of an artwork. If no artwork with the same perceptible elements on the page can have different artistic properties, then it must be the case that all that can be relevant to enjoying art is that the object possesses certain perceptual properties, and that these properties realize some aesthetic effect. Thus, in the words of Clive Bell (1914/1995), we have only to consider our emotion and its object: for the purposes of aesthetics, we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it (101). (II.1)

Over the past century the most significant exponents of Aestheticism have been the most severe: the Formalists. They argue that the only question of art criticism is the description of the artwork’s perceptible form—in the case of painting, in terms of lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms (Bell [1914/1995] 100).2 However, not all Aestheticism is Formalism. A Formalist and a Contextualist would argue over whether or not the artistic properties in Quixote are identical with its arrangement of perceptible elements. However, other Aestheticists would argue with a Contextualist whether the artistic effects of Quixote supervene on its perceptible elements. For example, an Aestheticist could argue a mimetic theory, that the essence of art is its ability to represent a certain object to a viewer. The appearance of an artwork, and thus its mimetic qualities, cannot change without a change in the perceptible (non-aesthetic) elements of the artwork. In this case, Don Quixote is still portraying the exact same thing, and therefore Menard has not succeeded in producing anything new. (II.2)

III. Walton’s Critique

In order to develop a critique of Aestheticism, Kendall Walton (1970/1995) elucidates the concept of artistic categories. It is uncontroversial that there are different categories of art, such as painting, cubist painting, Gothic architecture, classical sonatas, painting in the style of Cézanne (335). Works are recognized in these various categories through three different kinds of properties that artworks possess: standard, variable, and contra-standard. A standard feature of artworks within a category is among those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category—that is, just in case the absence of that feature would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category (335-336). A variable feature of a category is one which has nothing to do with works belonging to that category; the possession or lack of the feature is irrelevant to whether a work qualifies for the category (336). And a contra-standard feature is the absence of a standard feature with respect to a category—that is, a feature whose presence tends to disqualify certain works as members of the category (336). (III.1)

Each of the three features plays its own role in art. Artworks are categorized according to their standard and contra-standard features: the artwork belongs to whichever category in which it is qualified by the greatest number of standard and counteracted by the least number of contra-standard features. The variable features provide the content of an artwork. It is standard of a Classical bust that it is made of marble, white, and severed at the chest. The features of the person represented are variable: the bust may represent Julius Caesar, George Washington, or a completely fictional woman with curly hair and a sharp nose. It would be contra-standard and shocking if a mechanical device were used to make the bust wink every five minutes: busts are not supposed to move. However, this would not necessarily disqualify it from being a classical bust: if all the other standard features are there, then the artwork is probably best categorized as a bust—just a queer bust with a disturbing tendency to wink. (III.2)

Crucially, however, the categories in which we perceive artworks help to determine what aesthetic properties a work has (352). A masterful Petrarchan sonnet, if it were perceived as free verse, would seem affected and pretentious; a free verse of fourteen lines, if it were perceived as a sonnet, would seem undisciplined and chaotic. Fair enough—normally there is no difficulty in properly categorizing works of art solely based on the weight of their standard and contra-standard features. We do not need anything special to distinguish a fourteen-line free verse from a sonnet: the sonnet has well-defined rhyme schemes and meters which tend to disqualify irregular poetry, whereas fixed rhyme and meter tend to disqualify a poem from being seen as free verse. Perceiving the artwork is good enough to properly categorize it. (III.3)

However, a deeper investigation will reveal that there are many points at which this breaks down. A still photograph of a high jumper is motionless, but if we see it in a gallery it does not look like a high jumper frozen in mid-air. Indeed, in the photograph the athelete may seem in a frenzy of activity; the pictures may convey a vivid sense of movement (339). However, if perceptually identical static images exactly like those of the two pictures occur in a motion picture, and we see it as a motion picture, they probably would strike us as resembling a static athelete (Ibid.). The Aestheticist will reply that this situation or medium in which a work is presented is itself part of the form of the work. A film (which is presented over time) is different from looking at a series of static pictures (which each portray only a static instant). (III.4)

But the move falls apart when we consider that for any piece of art, we can construct infinitely many different arbitrary categories into which it can equally well be placed. A seemingly formless and chaotic musical piece may be seen as a masterful work of meticulous structure if we invent an arbitrary set of rules about the precise number of As it must have, the times at which key must shift to C-sharp, and so on.3 Given the contradictory artistic effects of the ever so many categories that we can construct, we must ask, How is it to be determined in which categories a work is correctly perceived? (347) before we can appreciate any artistic effects at all. But we cannot do this on the basis of anything about the presence or absence of perceptual properties. The categories we are working with have been constructed in such a way that the artwork has equally good perceptual credentials as either one or the other. (III.5)

We might try to use contextual factors other than the historical concerns that the Aestheticist wants to exclude. For example, a principle of artistic charity: the proper category is whichever one makes the artwork appear most skillful. Yet if we invoke this, we have basically made it impossible for bad art to exist. For if we Take any work of art we can agree is of fourth- or fifth- or tenth-rate quality, then It is very possible that if this work were perceived in some far-fetched set of categories that someone might dream up, it would appear to be first-rate, a masterpiece (349). Some of the possibilities for this were mentioned above. We might transfigure a sorry musical piece into a masterwork by imposing arbitrary mathematical rules on the composition.4 But surely from this it does not follow that the work really is a hitherto unrecognized masterpiece (349). We would be doing violence to the possibility of art criticism if we were to impose such a condition. (III.6)

The most natural criterion remaining is the historical circumstances of the artwork and its artist. The historical context, intellectual milieu, creator’s intention, and so forth are all necessary considerations in determining the proper category for an artwork. Bell (1914/1995) is wrong to say that we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object (101)—in fact, the critic must go beyond the work before him in order to judge it aesthetically (Walton [1970/1995] 353, emphasis added). Indeed, the tables have been turned on Bell: if the impact an artwork has is entirely due to its formal, aesthetic properties, then we must recognize that historical properties are relevant to artistic effect, because we need them in order to be able to perceive the right formal properties. (III.7)

With this in mind, we may now see how Pierre Menard has succeeded in producing a new work of art. Because the relevant historical facts of an artwork help to determine what aesthetic properties a work has (Walton [1970/1995] 352), Menard’s Quixote has shifted to a new category. Whereas Cervantes’s Quixote was a seventeenth century Spanish popular novel, and therefore, say, incapable of commenting on the philosophy of William James, Menard’s Quixote is a twentieth century French intellectual novel, putting it in an entirely different relationship to the tradition of art, literature, and philosophy. How can the works have different effects when they are identical to the eye? Because merely examining a work with the senses can by itself reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it that way (Walton [1970/1995] 354). The two works fall into distinct artistic categories, and therefore to perceive Menard’s Don Quixote we must attend to entirely different features, and interpret those features in a different context, from the Quixote of Cervantes. (III.8)

IV. Assets and Liabilities

Walton provides a fundamentally dynamic account of what things are included under the definition of art, since the range of standard and variable artistic properties can shift and expand over time. This will not satisfy anyone seeking a fixed, Socratic sort of a definition. However, it does help explain important features of the world of art. (IV.1)

Arthur Danto (1964/1995) observes that with the development of a new style (i.e., a new category with the added standard feature) H, every other painting in existence becomes non-H, and the entire community of paintings is enriched, together with a doubling of the available style opportunities (212). The presence or absence of H, which had once been irrelevant to artistic merit, is now part of the set of standard and contra-standard properties which delimit the various denizens of the artworld—including those which were made before H became a standard feature of an artistic style. With this retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld, the tradition of art has a nearly infinite capacity to expand and enrich itself, allowing us to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or Lichtenstein and Michelangelo (Ibid.). It also helps explain why appreciation of art grows keener through the experience of a wide variety of artworks and knowledge of art history. For those unfamiliar with the matrix, it is hard, and perhaps impossible, to recognize certain positions as artworks (Ibid.), but through greater acquaintance with the standard and variable elements of the category, one gradually acquires the ability to properly categorize—and thus, properly appreciate—the given style of art. (IV.2)

On the other hand, despite Danto’s optimism about the progress of the artworld, we must also note that there are dangers to an increasing population, and that in some cases the enrichment of styles may result in the impoverishment of existing artworks. This is unwittingly illustrated by Walton (1970/1995): (IV.3)

One such dispute might well arise concerning Giacometti’s thin metal sculptures. To a critic who sees them simply as sculptures, or sculptures of people, they look frail, emaciated, wispy, or wiry. But that is not how they would strike a critic who sees them in the category of thin metal sculptures of that sort (just as stick figures do not strike us as wispy and emaciated). (350) (IV.4)

Yet Giacometti’s art hinges, in part, on seeing the sculptures precisely as emaciated and wiry, as a shock given the monolithic standards of human figure sculpture. This expansion of the artworld has led to the disreputable process of genrification. Whenever a shocking new work is introduced as a reaction to the tradition, this work’s features enrich the properties of the artworld, and a genre of works begins to coalesce around this new way of doing art, adapting the insights of the first work. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shocked the artworld through contra-standard distortions of proportion, form and color, but soon, these contra-standard properties became standard properties of analytic cubism. However, since Shock … arises from features that are not just rare and unique, but ones that are contra-standard relative to categories in which objects possessing them are perceived (Walton [1970/1995] 345), the entrenchment of these new genres undermines their disruptive power. Indeed, since there is retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld, (Danto [1964/1995] 212), it even overturns the shocking contra-standardness of the original, converting it into the matronly grandmother of the genre. (IV.5)

By this process a once-radical artwork is, quite against its will, tamed into an agreeable conservatism, and by becoming commonplace loses the boundary existence that had once made it significant and inspired vigorous reactions.5 Indeed, just this has become the condition of most art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dadaist Anti-Art is sold through art catalogues and has become a section of every history of the Canon; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shocks no-one; and Le dejeneur sur l’herbe seems positively staid and conservative. While the backward-looking enrichment of the Artworld gives us many reasons to appreciate artistic innovation, it also puts us in danger of losing the innocence needed to appreciate many of history’s most significant works of art. (IV.6)

V. A New Way of Reading

Aestheticism fails to explain artistic perception, but Walton and Danto’s version of Contextualism may be misguided as well. The issue can be framed with another question about Menard’s success as an author. (V.1)

While Menard did in fact write two chapters of Don Quixote, Borges suggests the enrichment of the artworld by a further means: subjective re-identification in the process of reading. Borges recounts that I often imagine that he finished it and that I am reading Don Quixote—the entire work—as if Menard had conceived it (50). Has Menard succeeded only in producing a new artwork in two chapters, or can Borges’s imaginary re-attribution of Cervantes’s other chapters to Menard produce an entire new Don Quixote? (V.2)

Whether this succeeds is particularly interesting because of a one crucial fact about Pierre Menard: he is a fictional character invented by Borges. While Menard has succeeded in producing a new artwork within the story, is it possible that he has also succeeded in producing one outside?6 Is it possible for us, outside of the story, to read Don Quixote as if the fictional Menard had written it? (V.3)

Walton and Danto do not provide any framework for such erroneous attributions. Their account of the categorization of artworks is based on objective, historical circumstances under which the artist produced it. Under the objective-historical understanding of categorizing artworks, there doesn’t seem to be any way in which Menard has affected our reading of Don Quixote. It’s a nice story, after all, but really, this copy of Quixote in front of me is Cervantes’s Quixote, not Menard’s. Not surprisingly—Menard does not actually exist. (V.4)

In reply to such an artist-centric account, one might raise the objection of Roland Barthes in Musica Practica (1970), that (V.5)

There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic. (149) (V.6)

The statement applies equally well to other forms of art.7 If there are indeed two sets of artistic properties for every artistic object — the art produced by the artist and the art experienced by the public — then it would seem that the latter ought not to be bound by the same kind of standard criteria as the former. For the ars practica of the artist, it is correct that the categorization of a work depends upon the historical circumstances and artistic intentions through which it was produced. However, for the appreciator of a work of art, the correct categorization is a matter of a more personal attribution. Of course, purely arbitrary re-categorizations will not be easy. Vide Walton (1970/1995): (V.7)

One cannot merely decide to respond appropriately to a work—to be shocked or unnerved or surprised by its (absolutely) contra-standard features, to find its standard features familiar or mundane, and to react to its variable features in other ways—once one knows the correct categories. Perceiving a work in a certain category or set of categories is a skill that must be acquired by training (353) (V.8)

But nothing in this says that, in principle, that the criteria of correctly categorizing might not be changed to reflect the new form of art that Menard has produced. We might argue that the appreciator creates a fiction in which the actual artwork is used as a prop in a game of make-believe, and the historical properties attributed to it are fictions stipulated by the appreciator’s knowledge and interests. Engaging with an artwork already involves a game of make-believe about its content, and it does not seem difficult to account for the work’s category from additional make-believe ascriptions. The imaginative resistance to re-categorizing works remains, since it is certainly easier and more natural to use a given prop for some make-believe games, than for others—a banana is more easily a make-believe telephone than a make-believe television. (V.9)

But now we only glean the artistic experience through make-believe, and isn’t that in principle a different artistic experience from that of an actual artwork with the actual historical properties? Perhaps not. It is not necessary that an object of make-believe be unreal — in a game of make-believe, part of the game may be that I have blue eyes, and in fact, I actually do have blue eyes. Perhaps the actual historical properties that ordinarily condition our appreciation of the Quixote of Cervantes are no less objects of make-believe, than the merely fictional properties that we attribute to the Don Quixote of Menard. We do in fact tend to lean towards the actual, ars practica category of the artwork (that Quixote was authored by Miguel de Cervantes), because there is nothing easier to make-believe than what we know to be the case. But if the aesthetic of the appreciator’s art is in principle that of a make-believe game, then through considerable imaginative effort, we may liberate an infinite variety of new artworks from the old, and (V.10)

Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary act of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. (Borges [1964] 54-55) (V.11)

Notes

1. In order to avoid unfortunate confusions with the views in the social sciences, I have avoided the name Historicism. (FN.1)

2. The same account is given of other artistic forms. In music, the Formalist claims to pay attention only to the perceptible arrangement of notes; in poetry, only to the deployment of linguistic plays, rhythm, meter, figurative linguistic plays, and so on; in drama, only to the arrangement of plot, characters, and spectacle; and so on. (FN.2)

3. Indeed, it seems that anything and everything — a print of the Mona Lisa, a copy of a sonnet, a copy of Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote — are also (potentially) Dada ready-mades, giving them all kinds of different ironic and conceptual artistic effects than they would have had if perceived according to their normal category. (FN.3)

4. Indeed, one might argue that this is precisely what has happened with twelve-tone music in the twentieth century. (FN.4)

5. As with scholarly interpretation of historical traumas, the artworld finally incorporates shattering works into the system of signs and interpretations that they were designed to disrupt, and a noble posterity might misunderstand the whole past and in that way alone make it tolerable to look at (§38). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886). Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann (1989). New York: Vintage Books. (FN.5)

6. Nevermind the metaphysical problem of how a fictional character might effect such a thing in the actual world; the concern here is not over exactly who the causal agent was, but whether the effect is real or not. (FN.6)

7. Except perhaps for avant garde forms such as aleatory music, in which the role of the artist is more or less removed. (FN.7)

References

• Barthes, Roland (1970). Musica Practica. Trans. Stephen Heath. In Image - Music - Text. USA: Noonday Press (1997). 149-154.
• Bell, Clive (1914). The Aesthetic Hypothesis. From Art. In Neill and Ridley (1995). 99-110.
• Borges, Jorge Luís (1962). Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. Trans. Anthony Bonner. In Ficciones. United States: Grove Press, Inc. 45-55.
• Danto, Arthur (1964). The Artworld. In Neill and Ridley (1995). 202-212.
• Neill, Alex and Aaron Ridley (eds.) (1995). The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern. McGraw-Hill.
• Walton, Kendall (1970). Categories of Art. In Neill and Ridley (1995). 332-354.