In my previous post I introduced the topic of artifactuality as a major resource of artistic meaningfulness. As with all the discussions of the great resources—the body, the hand, gesture, etc.—the accounts here are both introductory and highly selective, presented as an initial orientation and intended to be more fully developed later in the book in concrete analyses of works of individual works. Before turning to the basic model of artifacts that I’ll adopt, drawing heavily from the works of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, here I first briefly expand on the constitutive historicity of artifacts, and then turn to my major polemical target, the hylomorphic (matter + form) conception of artworks as inaugurated by Aristotle in his account of artifacts.
There is a sizeable recent literature in analytic philosophy on artifacts, most of which addresses basic ontological questions, such as ‘What is an artifact?’, ‘Are artifacts rightly understood as something limited to and distinctive of human beings, or are animal constructions (e.g. birds’ nests and beavers’ dams) also artifacts?’, and ‘Are artifacts identified by their (proper) functions?’ (e.g. Is a chair identified by its function as something-upon-which-to-sit?). In my previous post, oriented like this one towards the question of how artifactuality contributes resources of artistic meaning, I noted two characteristics of artifacts: that they are products and expressive of human intentionality and action, and their historicity, which is part means that there is a backwards-looking aspect to any artifact; this historicity is indicated by, for example, the fact that something is a chair in part because there is a socially established category of chairs, and that the current instance of a chair is a member of that category in part because it relevantly resembles some paradigmatic past instances of chairs. The major recent philosophical contribution to reflection upon artworks’ and so also artifacts’ historicity is a series of papers by the philosopher of art Jerrold Levinson articulating and defending what he calls the ‘intentional-historical’ conception of art. This conception arises as a competitor in the discussion of the ontological status of artworks in the 1960s through 1980s, where the leading candidates were Arthur Danto’s initial characterization (1964) of artworks as whatever is taken to be artworks according to contemporaneous theories of art, his later characterization of artworks as artifacts that embody their meaning (1981), and George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, in its initial crude characterization (1974) and then refined characterization, both that center on the claim that what makes something a work of art is its recognition as such by relevant authorities and institutions. On Levinson’s conception, “to be art is, roughly, to be an object connected in a particular manner, in the intention of a maker or profferer, with preceding art or art-regards: the agent in question intends the object for regard (treatment, assessment, reception, doing with)in some way or ways that what are acknowledged as already artworks, are or were correctly regarded or done with.” (Levinson (1996), p. 151) He further claims superiority for his account in that for him the historicity of art is internal to art, not a matter of some extra-artistic (theoretical, social, institutional, etc. factor) (p. 152), and so posits for each new putative instance of art “a relation to the concrete history of art-making and art-projection” (Levinson (2007), p. 75). Levinson thinks that, just as Danto’s and Dickie’s conceptions were induced by the theoretical challenges of works like Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, so his conception is motivated by the attempt to understand later works in Conceptual Art and Post-Minimal Art, which allegedly show that (visual?) artworks need not be more or less stable material objects at all. More generally, and shared with Danto and Dickie, he thinks that the past century of artistic innovation has produced “alternate modes of art-making . . . artworks need not be fashioned by their creators, need not involve recognized artistic media, need not be aimed at satisfying aesthetic interests, and whose making need not be governed by any very substantial conception of a genre in which the artist is working” (p. 82)
One effect of this recent history, according to Levinson, is that artworks, in marked contrast to non-artistic artifacts generally, have no identifying function (such as being beautiful, embodying meaning, inducing aesthetic experience, etc.), and are only identified via the relevant backward-looking intentions and history. I’ll consider Levinson’s account of Paleolithic art later in this book, and his general conception at length in a later book on contemporary art. We need not consider here the plausibility of the startlingly parsimonious character of Levinson’s account in order to treat it as partially explicating the sense of historicity in artworks.
I turn now to the major topic of this post, the hylomorphic conception of artifacts in Aristotle, and its criticism by Simondon and Ingold. In a recent major contribution to such a conception, Simon Evnine notes that “[t]he elaboration of Aristotle’s theory [of hylomorphism] is multi-faceted, often highly obscure, and subject to almost endless commentary and controversy.” (Evnine, p. 7) Conscience requires me to remind the reader that this is a crude and very partial summary of Aristotle’s account of artifacts; an even minimally adequate account would additionally require introduction of Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance and of the basic concepts of potentiality and actuality. So: initially, by ‘hylomorphism’ we mean any philosophical or theoretical account that treats entities (things, beings, etc.) as compounds of matter (Greek hulē) and form (Greek morphē or eidos). It is one of the great moments in the history of humanity and its reflections when Aristotle introduces hylomorphism in the first book of his Physics in the context of trying to understand change, and in particular how to understand the difference between change on the one hand, and coming-to-be and passing-away simpliciter on the other. His basic thought is that in change, as opposed to simple emergence or destruction, something persists through the change, while what changes is some accidental (i.e. non-essential) characteristic, which he thinks involves contraries, as the-lack-of-something becomes the-presence-of-something. What underlies the change and persists through the change is the material, and he adds that the material and the thing’s form are jointly responsible for the product.
Immediately questions arise: What is material, and what is form? In what sense and ways are they ‘combined’ in artifacts, and how does this combining take place? While Aristotle later in the Metaphysics considers artifacts in relation to substance, and in History of Animals considers organisms hylomorphically, in the first three chapters of Book 2 of the Physics he first explicates the fundamental contrast between products of nature and products of art (technē), i.e. artifacts (technika), and then elaborates the conceptions of matter and form in setting out the so-called doctrine of four causes, or, better, four ways of citing cause (matter, form, agent, goal (telos or to hou heneka), stated succinctly at Physics 2.3 194b24-195a3). The distinction between the products of nature (organisms and their parts, plants, and ‘simple things of bodies’ (ta hapla tōn sōmatōn), such as earth, fire, air, and water) (2.1 192b8-11) and the products of art is that the former have an internal principle of change (for Aristotle, of movement and rest), and the latter do not have within themselves the principle of their own making. Rather, the principle (or: source (archē)) of the products of nature resides in some external agent, “as in the case of the house and its builder, and so with all hand-made things” (2.1 192b28-31) The four ways of citing cause or giving explanatory factors tend to collapse into two, particularly with regard to the explication of artifacts, where it is the agent, guided by some aim, who gives the form to the material: matter on the one hand, and agent/aim/form on the other, are the central explanatory factors. Aristotle’s most typical examples of the use of the account of the four causes in the service of hylomorphism are houses: the builder (agent) arranges bricks (matter/material) with the aim of producing a house (form) in the service of shelter and habitation (aim); Polycleitos (agent) shapes bronze (matter/material) to produce a statue (form) that induces wonder (aim).
The conception of artifacts plays a peculiar role in Aristotle’s overall system. On the one hand, the hylomorphic analysis of artifacts like the bronze statue provides the model of hylomorphic analysis generally, including organisms, other products of nature, and substances; on the other hand Aristotle does not treat artifacts as substances but rather ultimately places them, as Katayama puts it in his exhaustive study, in the “group of nonsubstantial pragmata, such as heaps” (Katayama, p. 11). Aristotle then does not address the issue of artworks as artifacts, nor a fortiori the question of the distinctiveness of artistic meaningfulness, although the account in the Poetics of the cathartic effect of tragedy remains as suggestive as it is elusive. For now, as a preliminary to my account of Simondon’s and Ingold’s on artifacts in the next post, I just note their criticisms of Aristotle. In a number places, and most extensively in his major work on individuation, Simondon notes that hylomorphic accounts leave a ‘dark zone’ that occludes or ignores how the artifact is made. This lack is particularly important, so I will argue, because the sheer fact and basic features of how an artifact is made will turn out to be important elements recruited into artistic meaning, as in this drawing by Van Gogh, [Photo Van Gogh]
but also in early artifacts that I’ll treat as instances of ‘proto-art’, as in the decorated eggshells that were produced for several tens of thousands of years starting by 60,000 BP.
Ingold’s criticism is consistent with Simondon’s, though with an emphasis on the explanatory role of the agent as something external to the artifact that supplies its form. Ingold notes that the hylomorphic account turns the form into something in the mind of the agent that (conceptually) pre-exists the artifact, and then treats the actual process of making as an imposition of form upon some pre-existent and relatively unformed matter. To see the justness of Ingold’s claim, consider a typical statement in the philosophy of art, here from R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art: “Making an artifact, or acting according to a craft, thus consists of two stages. (1) Making the plan, which is creating. (2) Imposing that plan on a certain matter, which is fabricating.” (Collingwood, p. 133)
The hylomorphic model is so entrenched that it is difficult to consider it as something other than an uncontroversial truism. What is the alternative? In my next post I’ll turn to the revolutionary accounts given by Simondon and Ingold, and consider how the two thinkers apply them specifically to the arts.
References and Works Consulted:
Barry Allen, Knowledge and Civilization (2004)
--Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)
Aristotle, History of Animals
--Metaphysics
--Physics
--Poetics
Paul Bloom, ‘Intention, history, and artifact concepts’, in Cognition (1996)
R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (1938)
Simon Evnine, Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (2016)
Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’ (1964)
--Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974)
--The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (1984)
Kit Fine, ‘Aristotle on Matter’, in Mind (1992)
Daniel Graham, Aristotle’s Two Systems (1987)
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Tim Ingold, ‘On Weaving a Basket’, in The Perception of the Environment (2000)
--Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)
Errol Katayama, Aristotle on Artifacts: A Metaphysical Puzzle (1999)
Jerrold Levinson, ‘Extending Art Historically’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (1996)
--‘Artworks as Artifacts’, in Creations of the Mind, Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds) (2007)
Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Substance and Form in Aristotle’ and ‘Raw Materials, Subjects, and Substrata’, in Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy (2011)
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017)
-- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)