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Abstract
This paper explores the view that, on Mumford’s account of the purist, to the degree that the purist adopts an aesthetic perspective, he or she doesn’t watch the sport in question, and to the degree that he or she does watch the sport, there is a loss of aesthetic appreciation. The idea that spectators oscillate between partisanship and purism means that the purist is unable to avoid either the Scylla of not actually watching the sport, or the Charybdis of loss of aesthetic appreciation at any given point. Ultimately there seems to be both a sport-shaped hole and an aesthetic-shaped hole in Mumford’s account of the purist. It is argued that oscillation is incapable of dealing with the problem precisely because it is disjunctive in nature and entails the spectator either watching sport from an aesthetic perspective or from a partisan perspective at any given time. An alternative conception of the aesthetic is considered that offers one way of dissolving the purist’s dilemma.
Acknowledgements
The material in this paper emerged from exploring an element of a paper read to the North American Society for Aesthetics Pacific Division meeting in Pacific Grove, California on 9 April 2015. I’m grateful to Alva Noë, David Davies, James Hamilton, Sean Kelly and Christopher Thi Nguyen for questions and comments on the paper from which this developed, and to Andrew Millie for assistance in relation to some of the references in n11. I’m also very grateful to Stephen Mumford for providing me with some of his work and for the interest he has shown in the work I am doing on this and related topics. As always, I’m very grateful to Graham McFee—in this case for inviting me to that conference, reading and commenting on this paper, and for innumerable discussions on the issues considered here.
Notes
1. In that particular paper (Citation2012c), Mumford concentrates on one aspect of the competitive perspective, namely, emotional experience. In this paper, I will consider the competitive perspective more widely because doing so identifies additional difficulties that emerge as a consequence of the partisan and purist distinction.
2. Given Mumford’s advocacy of a form of adverbial theory of perception, he would appear to be committed to the idea that these are features of the aesthetic way of watching sport, rather than aesthetic features of sport. That will be discussed further in §4 below.
3. There is terminological slippage in directly translating ‘purist way of watching sport’ as ‘aesthetic mode of perception’, or even as ‘aesthetic way of watching sport’, whereas ‘partisan way of watching sport’ does appear to be more or less synonymous with ‘competitive way of watching sport’.
4. There are growing challenges to the idea that those are distinct. See the literature on crossmodal correspondences and the notion of multisensory experience (and, for that matter, some of the philosophical literature on wine), for example, Fairhurst et al. (Citation2015), Spence et al. (Citation2014) and Smith (Citation2012a, Citation2012b).
5. Could it really be the case that Dixon gets the purist wrong? Doesn’t he just use the term differently? The term ‘purist’ may seem more appropriate for the kind of spectator that Mumford describes, but ‘purist’ isn’t a natural kind or some such thing, so it seems strange to accuse Dixon of getting the purist wrong, as if he had mistaken a certain kind of spectator for the purist in the way that someone might mistake a whippet for a greyhound (see Wisdom Citation1965, 69).
6. Clearly this is only one way in which the aesthetic possibilities in these two cases differed.
7. See Travis (Citation2008) for detailed discussion of the nature and implications of that observation, and McFee (Citation2011) for an investigation of the implications in relation to philosophical aesthetics.
8. Mumford (Citation2012a, 60) rightly isn’t too worried about whether the distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic can be made sharply. However, he seems to think that in some way ‘aesthetic’ is equal to ‘pleasure’, but not all pleasure is aesthetic pleasure, and not everything that is aesthetic is pleasurable (cf. Best’s Citation1978, 99, 100 distinction between the evaluative and conceptual uses of ‘aesthetic’).
9. Mumford (Citation2012a, 22, 49–56) does not accept this view of drama. As I intend to deal with this issue in a separate paper, I will not discuss it in detail here. Mumford (Citation2012a, 22) also implies that improvisation is a feature that many sports share with some art forms. However, at least some of the criteria for judging good improvisation in, for example, music, would be aesthetic in nature, and would have to be because of the nature of music, whereas the equivalent criteria for judging good improvisation in purposive sports need not contain a single aesthetic criterion (because of the nature of purposive sports—see Best Citation1974, Citation1978, 99–122).
10. One can’t help wondering what ‘no longer’ means here. Wittgenstein’s observation (in PI§43) that ‘For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning” – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’, should not, I think, be understood as justification for the view that if some people start using a word differently, such as talking of machines ‘thinking’, then that changes the meaning of the word. To think that is to fail to appreciate that Wittgenstein did not say that meaning just is use. Apart from the notable qualifications in PI§43 (‘large’ is italicised, ‘though not for all’, and in the Anscombe, Hacker and Schulte translation (Wittgenstein Citation2009), which in this case is preferable to the previous translation by Anscombe (Wittgenstein Citation2001), ‘all’ in ‘though not for all’ has also been italicised), it’s important to appreciate that what he actually refers to is not just use, but ‘use in the language’ (emphasis added). This is important because there is a whole range of what Best (Citation1978, 14 also see Hacker Citation2007, 7–11; Bennett and Hacker Citation2003, 379–386; Baker and Hacker Citation1980, 468, 469; Citation1985, 52–55; Baker Citation2004, 55–59) calls ‘logical consequences’ because of the interrelationships between concepts. Simply using a word differently does not alter those, so what different uses of that kind do is not alter the meaning of a word in its original sense, but rather introduce a new sense in which it is being used. That in itself is no simple matter. Neither words, nor sentences are the bearers of determinate meaning, but rather something like utterances in a context, but even then our uses of words admit of descriptions and what constitutes an appropriate description depends on one’s concern in asking for a description or the nature of one’s puzzlement (see Baker Citation2004, 55–9). To fail to appreciate that and to think that the same logical implications follow from a new use of a word frequently results in nonsense (in the strict sense – saying things that have no sense). So there needn’t be any harm in talk of machines thinking and such like as long as no one assumes from the fact that we talk in that way that the machine could doubt its answer is correct, or lack confidence in an assertion it has made. The problem is not just with doubt and lacking confidence, but also with the idea that the machine gives an answer in the sense in which a human being does (or calculates the answer), and with the idea that a machine could assert something (in the sense in which a human being does). Given all of this, it really isn’t clear, to me at least, what ‘no longer’ could possibly mean here.
11. The attribution of Fountain to Duchamp has been questioned. Spalding and Thompson (Citation2014) make the case for Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven having made the work as a protest against the United States joining the First World War in 1917. See Naumann and Duchamp (Citation1982, 8), but also, in contradiction to that, Naumann and Duchamp (Citation1982, 18, n20), and http://www.thejackdaw.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Duchamp-Fountain-II1.pdf.
12. Cf. Best (Citation1992, 130; Citation1985b, 115). Best (Citation1992, 130) stresses that ‘I may respond with sadness to a joyful Mozart rondo because it was my dead mother’s favourite piece of music .… [In such a case] understanding of the music may be irrelevant to it [the response]. The feeling just happens to be related to the music by association, since another piece might have been her favourite. Such a response is not part of artistic appreciation; it is not related to features of the music, and notions such as understanding and appropriateness to the character of the music play no part.’
13. For Duchamp ‘readymades’ are everyday objects made for some purpose, and not to be art, taken out of their original context by an artist and placed in a context such that ‘its useful significance disappeared’ (Danto Citation2013, 28).
14. Adverbial theories of perception are largely motivated by providing an account that avoids employing the notion of sense data while avoiding naïve realism—the idea that in good cases of perception, as opposed to cases of illusion or hallucination, one perceives what one does as a result of the nature of the thing perceived because it is the thing perceived and its properties that ‘shape the contours of the subject’s conscious experience’ (Martin Citation2004, 64).
15. It should be stressed that Fish is not an advocate of adverbial theories, but rather of a form of disjunctivism (see Fish Citation2009). I have simply employed his example because it helps bring out the contrast to which I want to draw attention.
16. My use of the term ‘disjunctive’ here is potentially confusing because Mumford does not subscribe to a disjunctivist account of perception. The relevant disjunction is in the claim that the sport spectator watches sport either in a competitive way or in an aesthetic way, or to be more accurate, either in a partisan way or in a purist way. It is this ‘either … or …’ structure to his account of watching sport that renders that account disjunctive, but his account of perception is adverbial, rather than disjunctivist, in nature.
17. See McFee (Citation2015a, 130, 131) and McFee (Citation2015b). McFee (Citation2004, 131) identifies a similar problem in much sociology of sport, where many of the theories ‘can tell us everything about sport except what makes it sport – for the terms of the (sociological) discussion apply as well to activities other than sport as they do to sporting activities’.
18. There are other ways that someone can fail to be concerned with the sport or game. Contrast the way described here with what Best (Citation1978, 74–8, but especially the end of 77 and top of 78) says about a causal account of a chess move rather than an account in terms of reasons. Best (Citation1978, 78) accepts that ‘there may be causal reactions to chess moves, but they are not normally of any interest to players or spectators. Indeed, if their interests were exclusively causal they could not be said to be interested in the game at all’. This is another way someone can fail to be concerned with the sport or game, but it is different from the problem that faces the purist who views purposive sports from an aesthetic perspective.
19. Recall, I have also argued that there is another, constant, sense in which there is an aesthetic-shaped hole in Mumford’s account.
20. What constitutes the relevant whole in any given case depends on one’s interest. It could be an action in a match, it could be the match, or it could be the sport as a whole. If one’s concern is only with something quite specific, say an action in a match, then the resulting description need not go any further than that, but the important thing to see is that if one’s concern changed and it was necessary to have a wider focus, then that would be possible. The relevant whole would simply be the match or the sport. What we are concerned with here is a form of understanding that is useful in relation to complex things. Rather than thinking of them as composed of distinct parts, they are thought of as complex wholes that admit of multiple appropriate descriptions because we can identify countless aspects of the relevant whole. The questions that we ask determine what aspects are of relevance in answering those questions, so for a given concern some aspects are brought to the fore and others pushed into the background for the purpose of assisting with the question at hand, but a different question or concern might require a different emphasis, and so different aspects to be brought to the fore. Any whole is given its relevance by the concern one has in asking the question, so if another question is asked it may shift the focus so that what was the relevant whole (an action in a match) becomes an aspect of a wider whole, such as the match or the sport.