In my two previous posts on Georg Bertram’s Art as Human Practice, I have tried to outline his general conception of the tasks of the philosophy of art and how previous philosophical work has been vitiated by its adherence to the idea that art is an autonomous practice, something wholly distinct from other human practices in its aims, characteristic products, institutions, modes of making meaning, and habits of reception. Bertram further criticizes other views for their assumption that art is a practice that can be characterized some set of well-defined, determinate features. On such an account, the philosophy of art attempts to define art by citing such features. And, Bertram thinks, an immediate consequence of this conception of the philosophy of art is that the definition of art is conceptually distinct from the question of what the value of art is. These criticisms set the constraints upon Bertram’s positive account: He must show how art is a distinctive human activity that nonetheless is necessarily bound to other human practices; he needs to characterize art in such a way that it does not as such and in every case consist of some set of determinate features; and he must start from the thought that nature of art is inextricably bound to its value.
Bertram’s most concise formulation of his positive conception is that “art is a fundamentally unassured practice.” (p.162; Bertram’s italics) One way of explicating this claim, which emerges amidst sustained chains of philosophical reasoning, is to see it as the product of two lines of reasoning, a shorter and a longer one. The shorter line of Bertram’s reasoning, as I understand it, goes like this: human social life consists of people acting and interacting within loosely unified and determinate structures that we might call ‘practices’. Such practices in each case embody some determinate conception of ‘the good’, that is, something that people are trying to achieve by engaging in the practice, and so something that people treat as prima facie valuable. (Here I am perhaps reading too much into some scattered remarks that Bertram makes early in the book.) In any society there are many, perhaps indeterminately many, practices. A crucial feature of practices is that they are in each case historical; that is, no practice is so to speak crafted ex nihilo at a particular moment. Rather, people act, and their actions fall within existing practices. To the degree that people’s actions fall within a practice, their action is ‘determinate’. Art too is a practice, but unlike other practices it is one that is marked in every case by the possibility of the failure of its actions. What Bertram is trying to get at here, I think, is something like the thought one finds in Kant and Collingwood that it is a distinctive feature of art that artworks are not produced in ways that are wholly rule-governed, and so art-making always requires more than that the artist ‘simply’ follow a set of existing rules and conventions in order to produce an artwork, at least a richly successful one.
This shorter line of reasoning becomes more ambitious as Bertram picks up the point about ‘determinate’ actions and weaves in a conceptual dualism of ‘determinacy’ and ‘indeterminacy’. He further adds the thought that, because the practice of art is necessarily marked by the live possibility of ‘failure’ of any of its products, that is, it is unable to guarantee its own success (p.163), it is characterized by ‘indeterminacy’. Put alternatively, art “always struggles for its own success.” (ibid) Bertram quickly draws two consequences from this. First, the struggle to make (successful) art is internal to the practice of art, and so lines of reasoning and traditions of making arise that struggle over the nature of artistic success and the changes in human practices that alter conditions of artistic success. Secondly, because these achievements, failures, and the struggles to understand them are unpredictable, they strike us as novel challenges in human life, and our attempts to come to grips with them are exemplary instances of human freedom as autonomy.
It’s not clear how to evaluate this account, given its very high degree of abstraction and its presentation without any consideration of kinds of meaning-making that characterize art. The longer line of reasoning will partially address this through consideration of art as a kind of practical reflection upon materials in aggregates that Bertram terms ‘constellations’. This longer line will be the subject of the next blog post . . .