[Jimmy]

>The vast majority of philosophers are not good writers.

I never understood this claim. I have to assume that people are letting their judgement of the content affect the judgement of the writing style. Plenty of canonical philosophers were absolutely beautiful writers - Plato, Hume, Nietzsche. Modern analytic philosophers are almost fanatical in their adherence to simple, straightforward language. The result might not be beautiful, but I certainly don't think you can call it "bad" either. Some philosophers may be bad writers (Hegel is a pain), but on the whole they seem to be mostly good writers. It's all that they do, after all.

>After all, giants are giant for a reason.

Well... are they? All of them? I think you can make this claim with a good deal of confidence about math and science, because we have a pretty strict set of rules for evaluating good and bad work. But do you really think that everyone in the artistic canon has a good reason to be there? What about all the still-living artists who have only recently been "canonized" via a flurry of academic attention (writers like DeLillo and Pynchon would be good examples). Are we confident that we'll still be talking about those guys 200 years from now? If not, how far back in time do we have to go before we can confidently say, "these giants have a reason to be giants?"

I'm not endorsing pure aesthetic relativism, nor am I saying that none of the canonical artists deserve to be there. I'm just saying that I've never heard a convincing explanation of why the canon is a good judge of, well, anything.

[Analemma_]

Philosophy, at least in the analytic tradition, is supposed to be precise and formal, starting from axioms and reaching well-supported conclusions in the same way as mathematics.

By contrast, the problem with Nietzsche is that he was such a good writer that no one can agree on what it is he actually said or meant: the same colorful metaphor and ambiguity that makes Nietzsche fun to read also makes his writings a mirror into which people can see anything they want. Which is entertaining, but doesn't make for great philosophy.

That's why contemporary philosophy doesn't pay much attention to Nietzsche, especially by comparison with his stature in the public consciousness: they just can't decide what, if anything, he was actually saying.

[voidhorse]

The three philosophers you cite are among those commonly cited as good writers! I cited Nietzsche myself above. I suppose it depends on how you define 'good' writing. In the case of literary style I think for most people it boils down to there being some amount of creativity and play on the level of language itself (i.e. see Nietzsche) which is disconnected from the content. e.g. I'm sure Bertrand Russell was capable of comprehending Nietzsche's ideas(though the actual Russell never would have) and could just as easily have written a treatise on eternal recurrence or the history of morality as Nietzsche conceived of it. Point is, Russell's rendering of these ideas would have been entirely different, even though they are employing the same medium of communication. Another person could very well have formulated the same ideas as Nietzsche, but probably wouldn't have conveyed them with as much creativity and grace. There's writing that shines as writing and there's writing that is in service to some goal, i.e. the clear work of modern analytic philosophers--they'd hardly gain any attention for literary ingenuity or clever turns of phrase, but you are correct that if our judgement is based solely on the effectiveness of the communication of the idea, they are in fact quite fine writers. And actually, in this sense Nietzsche would be pretty poor, because as Analemma mentioned his loose play with metaphor, while incredibly delicious on the level of style, does not communicate very well, if the idea is that a 'good' piece of communication delivers a single idea all the consumers of that communication can agree upon.

So perhaps I'd revise the claim to something like, most philosophers are not good stylists (that is, they don't frequently engage in play at the level of language, as a skilled poet or essayist might)

As to your second point yes. There is always a reason. You can question that reason--i.e. you may think the reason is simply that academics were bored and decided to laud the first sap whose writing they came across that day--but this is a pretty absurd claim. You'd essentially be stating that a whole domain of tradition, practice, and procedure which organically grows and evolves, and I might add, in almost logical progressions at times, was ousted by the whims of one foppish professor who gamed everyone into liking something he liked simply because he liked it and was impassioned enough about it. When you plunge into a field of art, technique is often the criterion and leveling factor. For instance, you say you have never heard a convincing argument as to why Pynchon would be considered worthy of canon status--well, I'm not going to be so absurd as to claim he'll still be there in 200 years, but if you have knowledge of literary craft the reasons why he's there now are pretty clear--his maximalism is both well crafted and unique and his style is a turn away from the still dominant style of american literature (Hemmingway based minimalism) which is positively refreshing (the same could be said for DFW, who was consciously, I believe, rejecting the minimalistc style--I recall he wanted to move away from his maximalism too around the time of his unfortunate death). It's because he utilizes traditional structures and devices in a unique way--but in a way that is importantly still comprehensible under the lens of this tradition. Take for example the dawn of the unreliable narrator--it utilized a familiar technique in the field of literature, namely the narrator, and modified it in such a way as to generate interest--as to who gets the credit for such developments--well, it probably comes down to luck and knowing the right people. Yes, all these aesthetic considerations are ultimately conventional and wispy--as all human values tend to be--but they nonetheless obtain, and traditions develop, evolve, die, or persist. There are indeed plenty of 'rules' when it comes to art forms--that is how, at the most basic level, for instance, I know that something is a painting and not a piece of music--the medium and form follow particular restrictions (and then we have great fun blending and challenging these notions).

That's why any critic worth his salt often delves into art history, the artists personal development over a series of works, and analysis of form and technique over simple and baseless value judgement. I may wretch at every Jackson Pollock piece I come across, but if I am educated in the discipline of painting, its history, and its techniques, I can understand where his pieces fit into the narrative of painting history, what they challenge, what they change, and ultimately how unique his forms are and what they communicate within this context. If I dislike it, if I find it shouldn't be considered art--well I have to argue it from this perspective, from within the game of homo sapiens art history. This is why anyone who makes a snap judgement against such artistic efforts and says things like "anyone could do that, it's not art" always comes off sounding dumb and uncultured--they are treating the work entirely out of context and clearly lack an appreciation for the medium as a whole--unless of course they provide reasons which leverage knowledge of this medium.

At root our aesthetic explanations and investigations ultimately boil down to our base value judgements of simply "I like this thing or don't"--but artistic forms exist because there are elements of these traditions a large number of people can generally agree they appreciate, can describe with a common language, and can critique in comparative ways.

Thus the cannon isn't a good judge of anything other than what your precursors believed should be appreciated. It's essentially the historical development of a shared value judgement, or a shared human prejudice. So of course you can repudiate the whole thing. But at that point you are no longer even engaging in that art form--or at best you are engaging with blinders on, and any aesthetic mastery you manage to pull off is largely lucky and unconscious. You are starting from a different base. you are playing your own game. Thus you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language.

It's funny to compare different advice on reading material in this context. Faulkner suggested you ought to read everything. Schopenhauer suggested bad books ought to be avoided like poison--the old garbage in garbage out principle. Both work, but if you forget your contexts and say, suggest to a film critic that the marvel movies rival Citzen Kane, they won't even begin to agree unless you layout a sophisticated argument that appeals to the criterion generally recognized by adherents to the art form, elements of cinematography, the quality of the script, etc. etc...

Wittgenstein's notion of language games, I think, is very informative when applied to the realm of aesthetics.

Sorry for the lengthy reply. You got me on a role. Good stuff.

[Jimmy]

>You'd essentially be stating that a whole domain of tradition, practice, and procedure which organically grows and evolves, and I might add, in almost logical progressions at times, was ousted by the whims of one foppish professor who gamed everyone into liking something he liked simply because he liked it and was impassioned enough about it.

I mean, take this argument and apply it to something like theology. "Are you really going to say that an entire tradition, one which has produced innumerable great thinkers and has proceeded on a logical progression towards truth, is entirely mistaken in its most fundamental assumptions?" It turns out that, yeah, I would say that. Sometimes people make mistake. Sometimes lots of people make lots of mistakes and the mistakes go on for thousands of years.

>For instance, you say you have never heard a convincing argument as to why Pynchon would be considered worthy of canon status--well, I'm not going to be so absurd as to claim he'll still be there in 200 years, but if you have knowledge of literary craft the reasons why he's there now are pretty clear--his maximalism is both well crafted and unique and his style is a turn away from the still dominant style of american literature (Hemmingway based minimalism) which is positively refreshing

But this is exactly the issue. What does it mean for writing to be "well crafted", what does it mean for writing to be "positively refreshing"? If we can't give rigorous, verifiable definitions for these concepts, then we're just saying "he's good because he's good".

>It's because he utilizes traditional structures and devices in a unique way

Originality has at least the hope of being a more objective metric, although originality is clearly a very slippery concept. If I take a famous novel and change one word, the result may be a work that has never existed before, but that's not originality. If I use a computer to generate a completely random image, then again, that image may have never existed before, but that's not originality. So it's very hard to define. But I at least see the hope of a project there.

>I can understand where his pieces fit into the narrative of painting history, what they challenge, what they change, and ultimately how unique his forms are and what they communicate within this context. If I dislike it, if I find it shouldn't be considered art--well I have to argue it from this perspective, from within the game of homo sapiens art history.

I can certainly appreciate and enjoy playing games, since some games are very beautiful. But this "game", the game of "make an original contribution to art history and get academics to talk about it", seems to have no rules! What good is a game if no one can tell you the rules? The judges of the game can gesture towards criteria like "originality" that might conceivably give you some guidelines on how to play, but no one can definitively prove that one person deserved to win and another didn't.

>artistic forms exist because there are elements of these traditions a large number of people can generally agree they appreciate

Yes, I agree. But if we tried to submit the works of the canon to an analysis of this kind, to see how many of them contain "artistic forms that people agree they can appreciate", how many of them would survive? Some would, I'm sure. I think Shakespeare and Homer, for example, are still legitimately appealing to people today, if they can work past the archaic language. But exactly how many works of the canon would survive this analysis? Does Schoenburg's music have "forms that people agree they can appreciate"? If not, then what does that say about the validity of Schoenburg's status as a great canonical composer? (I happen to enjoy a lot of Schoenburg's music, but I don't think someone is stupid if they don't).

>Thus the cannon isn't a good judge of anything other than what your precursors believed should be appreciated.

All that effort, and this is the conclusion we're left with!

>It's essentially the historical development of a shared value judgement, or a shared human prejudice. So of course you can repudiate the whole thing. But at that point you are no longer even engaging in that art form--or at best you are engaging with blinders on, and any aesthetic mastery you manage to pull off is largely lucky and unconscious. You are starting from a different base. you are playing your own game. Thus you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language.

Ok, this is a really interesting paragraph. You say it's the development of a "shared value judgement", but who, exactly, shares this value judgement? We have, on the one hand, a comparatively small community of academics who share the value judgement that Proust and Melville are wonderfully nourishing authors who deserve to be read again and again by new generations, and on the other hand, we have hundreds of millions of people who would just as soon throw Proust and Melville in the trash so they could go watch the latest Marvel movie or listen to the newest Justin Bieber song. Taking your comment about the "historical development of value judgement" seriously, what can we say by looking at this concrete historical moment? What can we say about what that value judgement has become? What authority can the university canon possibly have in the face of this sheer numerical onslaught? You say that "you shouldn't be too upset when other people don't appreciate what you do, or your work isn't considered interesting. You're not even speaking their language," but who exactly are the artists who are being appreciated these days? Who is speaking the language that most people find congenial? It's certainly not the academics or the purveyors of "high culture", the defenders of the "artistic tradition". MoMA exhibits of great theoretical sophistication are laughed at while Jay-Z packs stadiums. Your warning applies much more to all those who would play that slippery, ephemeral game known as "art history", rather than those who would simply "copy what they like".

All that being said, I do think the notion of a "canon" could be saved, but it has to be grounded in genuine, verifiable scholarship. With Shakespeare, for example, we could do research on his influence on the English language, his influence on other artists, his continuing popular appeal, etc, and come to the conclusion that his plays constitute a major accomplishment. But this game of "aesthetic criticism", or declaring this or that work to be beautiful or enlightening or whatever, that doesn't need to be done in universities. People can do that on their own time. Like I said above, a game where you can't even know the rules can't hold your attention for very long. You're better off playing Go or doing math. At least there you can know that you're winning.

[voidhorse]

Great stuff Jimmy. I appreciate your response, and your willingness to address the lengthy post--most would give up! You've clearly got an intellect.

I know before you said you weren't totally advocating aesthetic relativism, but I think you should go ahead and take the plunge! I think you're most of the way there, and why not commit to the position? Why not elucidate it? Examine it, explore it? I think you'd be a fine proponent.

Anyway, I'd love to continue this discussion, but I don't want to clog the thread here since we are getting a bit far away from PGs essay at this point--my email is in my profile. Shoot me one if you're interested. Otherwise, you can be certain I'll be mulling over your reply for the next few days.