That's not art!

No-one is immune to the shock of contemporary art. It strays so far from the mainstream that sometimes we can't help thinking that it might not be art at all. It's imposter art. People only think it's art, it's really something else. But if we are to judge what is and isn't art, then shouldn't we be able to come up with a definition of art? Shouldn't there be a defining feature that makes something an artwork? In other words, what makes an artwork, art?

To answer this question, we need to find something that is common to every single work of art: an essence of art. You might think "Well, every artwork is created by an artist, so something is a work of art if it is created by an artist". Unfortunately, this definition is circular:

What is an artwork? Something created by an artist. What is an artist? Someone who creates artworks. What is an artwork....

So this definition gets us nowhere unless we can define what an artist is.

It's pretty hard to find something that is common to every piece of artwork, and yet we always seem to know what is and isn't art. How do we know? How do we know that the Mona Lisa is an artwork? Is it because it is in a gallery? That can't be right - there are some artworks that are never exhibited in a gallery, and yet they still seem to be works of art.

The quest for finding the common feature to every artwork has proven to be so difficult that some philosophers have given up entirely. Instead, they suggest a family-tree explanation of our ability to detect "art"; it's similar to the way we recognise people from families. For example, imagine that the Smith family have particularly large noses and small eyes. These features make them easy to distinguish from others. The aunts, uncles, cousins are not so easy to recognise. Some of them have the same small eyes, some of them have the particularly large nose. But once we can pick them out, we can pick out even more distant relatives, and so on. The story is the same with art. We are all well aware that Renaissance paintings are art. Impressionist paintings, however, are different because the images are blurred. But we can still recognise them because they're still painted with oil on canvas. It has now gotten to the point where we can recognise Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes as art (although it debatable as to whether it is).

So there is no essence to art after all. It's art if it's only similar to what we traditionally recognise as art. Actually, there is one potential essentialist theory of art, and this is given by Arthur Danto. In his argument, he uses Brillo Boxes (shown above) to illustrate his point.

Brillo Boxes represents the edge of art. If it was on the family tree of art, it would be the most distant relative. It is completely on the border because it is indistinguishable from a stack of Brillo Boxes at a supermarket. The boxes are actually made out of plywood, and were painted by the artist, but this does not concern us because we are interested in finding out how we can distinguish art by just looking. There is one crucial difference between Warhol's boxes and the boxes at the supermarket: behind Warhol's painted boxes is a theory of art. In fact, behind every single work of art is a theory of art. Even behind the cave paintings at Lascaux. And this, Danto argues, is the essential feature of art. When we see the Brillo boxes at the supermarket, we see a stack of Brillo boxes. But when we see Warhol's Brillo boxes, we see something else. There is something which is much more intriguing and exiting about the artwork, and that is it's conceptual component.

It's a neat theory because it suggests that there is such a thing as art, and it gives us the ability to determine what is and isn't art. The only problem with Danto's theory is that it pre-supposes that Brillo Boxes is an artwork. Brillo Boxes is a work that quite a few people would protest as not being art. I'll leave this up to the reader to decide.

It is important to note that just because it is art, it is not necessarily good art.

Further Reading:

• Danto, A., 1964, "The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld", Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19, pp. 571 - 84
• Kennick,W, 1958, "Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?", Mind 67, pp. 317 - 334

True and False

What is truth? How can we describe it? Does it even exist? Some might laugh at this last question: "Does truth exist? Of course it exists! What kind of question is that?" Well, it's a philosophical question, and there's no such thing as a silly question in philosophy.

I find those areas of philosophy which question our most deep-rooted assumptions the most fascinating. Our belief in truth is an interesting one indeed. In Primary School, we are asked to sort out the true questions from the false ones, with that familiar "T" and "F". From there on, we associate true with right and good, false with wrong and bad. But is the world really divided into two halves? Heroes and villains, heaven and hell?

In philosophy, we call sentences which can be true or false, "propositions". So, "I am eating an apple" is a proposition but "eat an apple" is not a proposition because it is neither true nor false. Now, all we have to do to find the essence of truth is gather all the true propositions that we know, and see what they all have in common.

Let's see. We know that the two following propositions are true (if you don't agree, just pretend they're true anyway): "1 + 1 = 2" and "apples grow on trees". What do these two have in common, apart from the fact that they are both true? What makes them both true? Nobody knows. Nobody has yet found a commonality between all the true propositions in our knowledge. And this has lead many to the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth.

But let's not be so hasty. Maybe there is no essence of truth. Maybe "truth" is a word that simply describes all those propositions which accurately describe the state of things in the world. And, as the two propositions above show, there are different ways of ascertaining the truthfulness of propositions (the first proposition uses deductive logic and the second proposition uses sensory experience and inductive logic).

Philosophers who do not believe in truth are called "anti-realists". Among the anti-realists are people who believe in relative truth. These are the "relativists", and they believe that if something is true for you, then it is true. So if you think the world if flat, then the world is flat. The problem with this view is that it can't claim to be true, because it can only be true if you think it is true. As such, it is not taken very seriously.

The Experience Machine

When you go into the experience machine, you can experience anything you like: eating the finest Swiss chocolate, climbing Mt. Everest, bringing about world peace. You can even experience the bad things, if you want, to make the good things seem better. The machine is designed to stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel whatever you liked. You're not really eating Swiss chocolate, you never really climbed Mt. Everest and countries all over the world are still fighting with each other. But the feelings that come with the fake experiences are very real indeed.

If someone gave you the opportunity to live in the machine for the rest of your life, would you? You can't go in for just 5 minutes - you can either go in for the rest of your life, or never.

Most people hesitate because there's a catch: we're never really going to see our loved ones again; we're never really going to make a difference. We are no longer of any use in the real world. In the words of Robert Nozick, going into the machine makes us an "indeterminate blob".

So what does this say about us humans? It says that we value things beyond pleasure and happiness. We value reality. One might see this as having implications for the theory of Psychological Egoism, which suggests that we do things only to make ourselves happy.


Further Reading:

• Nozick, R., 1974, "The Experience Machine", Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 42 - 45

Two arguments for God

How can we be sure that God isn't a figment of our imagination? God has never shown himself to us. We have no proof of his existence. Many of us are content to listen to the authorities: the bible, the church, our parents. But even very devout Christians have been known to question their beliefs.

Questioning is a good thing, because it gets you somewhere. You don't necessarily have to take the other side. But you should be able to come up with a reasonable argument for your beliefs. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas did. Aquinas was a devout monk who lived in the thirteenth century, and tried many times to prove the existence of God with logic. Here is one of his more famous arguments:

First, he points out that every event has a cause. A glass will smash only if you push it off the table; it's not going to jump off the table by itself. Secondly, he points out that causes can be events. Pushing the glass off the table is an event which also had a cause (a tantrum, I suppose). In this way, we get chains of events, where each event on the chain is caused by a previous event: A called B fat, which caused B to get angry, which caused B to push the glass, which then caused the glass to smash into a thousand pieces. Aquinas strokes his chin and realises that these events must have had an initial cause. Because if A didn't call B fat, the glass wouldn't have smashed into a thousand pieces.

But how can you have an initial cause? What caused the initial cause? Aquinas strokes his chin again and realises that there can be only one thing in this entire universe which can give brith to an initial cause: God himself. Therefore, God exists.

This is a pretty sophisticated argument. It logically makes perfect sense (leaving besides what caused the existence of God). God pushed the first domino.

So why isn't everyone today convinced that God exists? Well, first I'd like to point out a small logical problem. It's called the Birthday Fallacy. The Birthday Fallacy is shown in the following argument:
1. Everyone has a birthday
2. Therefore, there must be one day which is everyone's birthday
It's a mistake to assume that just because everyone has a birthday, that everyone has the same birthday. Aquinas made this mistake when he assumed that every cause could be lead back to one common cause (God's initial cause). There could have been separated chains of events.

But this wouldn't have really hurt his argument because then he could have just said that God made more that one initial cause. The real problem with Aquinas's argument is the assumption that only God could create an initial cause. Quantum physics tells us that the rules of causation do not apply to the tiniest of particles. Scientists nowadays have also replaced God's initial cause with the big bang. Science has replaced God.

But we can't criticise Aquinas for this: the study of quantum physics developed six centuries after his death. It would be unfair to judge him on these grounds.

Now we shall have a quick look at what is probably one of the best arguments we have on the existence of God. It's called the clock analogy. The story basically goes like this:

You are walking along a deserted beach and you stumble across a watch. Curiously, you pick it up and open it. Inside, you see all the carefully crafted mechanical workings of a clock, and you wonder how this could have come about. You have two options: it was made by a craftsmen, or the watch came into existence accidentally.

Obviously, it was crafted by a person of the trade. The clockwork could not have been made by the subtle movements of the sand, or the risings of the tide. It was made by an intelligent being. Now we can make the analogy. The clock is a human being. The craftsman is God. The silly option of the clock coming about accidentally is evolution.

The argument has a point. Humans and other living creatures are immensely complex in structure, so much so that you would think that we were made by someone really smart. But what about Darwin's theory? Apparently we are the product of 3.7 billion years of evolution. That's a very long time. Darwin's theory also gives sound explanations as to how we came to be this way, without the helping hand of God (Darwin had trouble accepting this himself). Another problem with the analogy is that it is not analogous. Clocks don't reproduce. So the evolutionary changes that take place over thousands of generations of living organisms could not have taken place in the development of a single clock.


Further Reading:

• Sober, E., 1995, Core Questions in Philosophy, Simon and Shuster, pp. 39 -60

A definition of God

It often happens that when someone mentions the word "philosophy", another person will mention the tree that fell down in the forest. They're referring to the question: if a tree fell down in a forest, and no-one heard it fall, did it really fall? At first, it appears as a silly question. Of course it fell! But it's actually quite a serious problem that was pointed out in Bishop Berkeley's argument. Another common misconception that people have on philosophy is that is heavily concerned with spiritual matters, vague and meaningful. This is heavily misguided; philosophy is the rigorous pursuit of truth. It is not vague, and mysterious; it is clear, and logical. However, the arguments concerning God do form a branch on the tree of philosophy.

Why do we need to question the existence of God? Because we're rational, and we really want to make sure he's there. So we use the best methods we have of testing truth. In science, it's using the senses. In philosophy, it's logic. If God existed, we should either be able to see him, or come up with a good philosophical argument.

Definitions are important in philosophy. To understand what something is, we need to know some things about it. Here is the standard definition of the Christian God: he is omnipotent (absolutely powerful), omni-benevolent (absolutely good), and imniscient (knows everything).

A problem with this definition was found by medieval scholars, who grew very concerned over its conclusion. The problem came from the question: could God cease his own existence? Note that the question is not concerned with whether he would, but whether he could. According the definition, God is omnipotent. He can do anything he wants. Ruling out the ability to kill himself would infringe on his almighty power. So God must be able to commit suicide.

What worried the medieval scholars was that if God were to kill himself, we wouldn't even know.