Being a whatever vs being a good whatever
Just a fleeting thought for discussion: I’ve previously given plenty of thought to how people tend to conflate the question “what is art?” with the question “what is good art?”, such that they feel bothered when something they find artistically displeasing or subpar gets called “art” at all, as though calling it “art” is implicitly saying it’s good art, good at doing whatever art is supposed to do.
It crossed my mind this morning that something similar seems to happen with gender terms like “man”: in some sense, it seems as though some people will say that someone is “not a man” if the person in question doesn’t measure up to their standards of manliness, if they’re not good at doing whatever a man is supposed to do. I haven’t given it more extensive thought yet but I feel like something to do with the social construction of gender vs sex might be implied here: the social construct of “man” is the reification of the notion of “good man” as in “good male person”: someone who does what is expected of a male person.
Can anyone think of other cases where being a kind of thing at all is conflated with being a good example of that kind of thing?
It crossed my mind this morning that something similar seems to happen with gender terms like “man”: in some sense, it seems as though some people will say that someone is “not a man” if the person in question doesn’t measure up to their standards of manliness, if they’re not good at doing whatever a man is supposed to do. I haven’t given it more extensive thought yet but I feel like something to do with the social construction of gender vs sex might be implied here: the social construct of “man” is the reification of the notion of “good man” as in “good male person”: someone who does what is expected of a male person.
Can anyone think of other cases where being a kind of thing at all is conflated with being a good example of that kind of thing?
Comments (62)
I think about the question of good art and bad art a lot. There may be certain standards, even ones deemed as professional, but it is extremely hard to claim them as objective, as opposed to subjective. I know that I think that U2 are a wonderful band, and I like so much alternative music, but I am sure that others would disagree. So , it does come down to the way the subjective is seen, in the context of wider socially agreed standards and measures of what is viewed as 'good'. This is an example in music but I believe that it goes beyond, in the arts and other aspects of cultural life.
Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," solved this problem by defining art as "high quality endeavor." The example he gave was the very skilled welder who fixed the fender on his motorcycle. I've come to think this is not a very useful definition. In a previous discussion, someone, was it you @praxis? said that art is anything created with an aesthetic purpose, i.e. intended to be judged by aesthetic standards. I find that a really helpful way of looking at things. It also deals with the good art vs. bad art question.
What does that say about the broader question raised in the OP? To me it says define first, judge later. A man is an adult male human. Of course, these days we have to describe what a male is too, but let's not get into that here.
Being a true Scotsman.
But of course there are more mundane and often manipulative reasons for defining something as art, masculine, or whatever.
It seems to me that it is instinctive to conflate identity with goodness. We do this whenever, for example, we take a bite of food, grimace and exclaim, “That’s not food!”
@baker’s “true Scotsman” reminded me of the old tv show theme song, “Daniel Boone was a man, was a real man”. The two parts of this verse really express the same sentiment; the second part is just added for clarification.
Returning to food, in defining what it is we might presumably call it “dry nourishment for the body”. How then do we explain the difference between good and bad food? Substituting the phrase, as in a mathematical equation, “dry nourishment for the body” for “food”, we obtain, “good food” = “good dry nourishment for the body”, and “bad food” = “bad dry nourishment for the body”. How would you respond, however, to this objection: “But ‘good’ is already implied in ‘nourishment’, so in the first equation, ‘good’ is redundant, and in the second, ‘bad’ is contradictory”?
The way I phrased that last bit raises another interesting philosophical point. I go on a lot about how to be is to do, things are defined by their function, but perhaps that’s as much about the purposes they are put to as it is about their (efficient) causes: a chair is made a chair by its being used to sit on, and something is a good or bad chair inasmuch as it is useful for that purpose.
Maybe this was more the point on Aristotle’s “final cause” and associated teleology: not so much about someone having a purpose in mind being responsible for enacting the efficient cause of its existence, but about the very definition of it being a thing of that kind at all hinging on its being used for some purpose. A rock can “become a chair” without someone efficient-causally doing something that changes its form or substance, but just by putting it to the use of sitting upon.
Ah, but labeling and social norms can be handy, can't they "sissy" man?
Absolutely. They are needed and can be used, when required to give someone like you a reality check. Which is why that phrase was correctly used in your case.
Unfortunately, people like you can use them stupidly.
Go back to playing with your cartoons.
So we have a continuum of nourishment here where some food is more nourishing than other food. Not only that, we also have some food that is “negatively nourishing”, that is “actively bad”. Can you explain more fully what you mean by “negatively nourishing” and “actively bad”?
Nice - you beat me to it.
No question. For me the act of curating something and hanging it up in a space for art makes it art. The question of merit is separate. This was the view of my favorite common man's art critic, Robert Hughes.
But here is something I find interesting. A statue by Rodin, found in a building site is still art. But Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII found in a building site is just a pile of bricks.
Like something poisonous, something that reduces your health rather than preserving it.
In such cases, people will sometimes put forward the charge of the No True Scotsman fallacy, when in fact what is going is an equivocation, given that terms for national, religious, political, racial, gender, class identity are typically complex, multilayered.
Not necessarily, many may not take much notice of a Rodin, disregarding it as mere decoration or whatever. Others may, for whatever reason, experience a shift in their mental state and see the sublime beauty of bricks.
:up: Although the way I would phrase more or less the same idea is that “framing” something makes it art: presenting it to an audience for their consideration, making it the content of a communicative act. It’s not so much it being in any particular place that makes it art, except inasmuch as being somewhere indicates that it is being used as art, and it’s being used as art that makes something art, just like being used as a chair makes something a chair.
That's much better - I was too hasty.
So do you say then that subsumed under the general category “food” is a scale much like that of the integers, where the positive numbers represent “nourishing” food, “poisonous” food is represented by the negative ones, and zero quantifies food that is neither nourishing nor poisonous?
Provided it's used by the right people, the ones who are in the position to determine whether something is art or not, and whether it's good art or not.
You could frame a painting done by a naive artist, put it into a fancy gallery, and it still wouldn't be art proper.
I don’t want you to be equivocal here. We’re talking about an important thing; what is good and bad for the body. So let me ask you again: do you or do you not agree that good food nourishes the body, and that bad food poisons it? and that food that neither nourishes nor poisons it does it neither good nor ill?
What makes whom the right person or not?
Quoting baker
I disagree completely. It could even just be pinned to their mother’s refrigerator and it would still be art. That says nothing, however, above the quality of it as art, whether it is good art, good at doing what art is to do. Even if it fails miserably at doing what art should do, it’s still art; it’s just bad art.
Yes I agree with that, I was only avoiding a straight “yes” before because I was unsure if you meant to imply more with the integers analogy.
You're an American, aren't you? If you were raised in Europe, you'd learn early on to distinguish between art and mere craft (and kitsch).
Before you seemed to be saying that only the art elite is capable of making such distinctions when you wrote, "Provided it's used by the right people, the ones who are in the position to determine whether something is art or not, and whether it's good art or not." Now you're saying that any school child (provided they're schooled in Europe) knows the difference.
Can you resolve this apparent contradition?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Then would you also agree it follows from this that we cannot define food as dry nourishment for the body?
Would you then define food as anything ingested?
Well J.L. Austin talks about how to decide if a bird is a goldfinch or not, and he uses the example to draw out the criteria we use in making that decision, in determining its identity; this is in distinction from other birds, what distinguishes it.
In another case, we would identify two dogs as bloodhounds but hold one over the other, say, in its "bloodhound-ness". We might say we use criteria of judgement. The importance of saying one is a better example or more representative (rather than just a set of criteria, or ideal) is that there is an embodied comparison and thus no way to explicate all the ways one example differs from another, or, more importantly, how we might value one over another.
And we wouldn't normally say criteria of identity are set by us (that we created the distinction between a crow and a bluebird) but usually that criteria of judgement are in a sense manufactured: utility, beauty, right, etc. Stanley Cavell said "modern" art brought its identity (its medium, its form) into discussion with us as part of our judgement. We might also say when we identify something as fair it is also a matter of judgement.
It's all got to do with vagueness. The boundary between art and not-art is fuzzy and it's a Herculean task to tell the difference. Good art, on the other hand, is further away from the grey area mentioned above and identifying it as art is easy peasy. Thus, art and good art are conflated.
Same goes for so-called manliness, men and women overlap in terms of certain qualities creating a no man's land between them populated by masculine females and feminine males. A man/woman who's farther away from this intersection will be considered a good man/a good woman or simply a man/woman - you know what happens to those in the twilight zone!
Quoting Pfhorrest
And would you define poison as something ingested with the intent of harming the body?
Do you really believe that people who ingest poison on purpose, in order to commit suicide, are fewer in number than those to whom it is administered in order to commit murder?
I don't have a strong belief about it either way, but that was my initial expectation, yeah. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that it was wrong.
So would you be willing to accept, for the sake of the argument, that the intent of harming the body by the ingestion of poison commonly belongs to the one ingesting it, and not to someone else?
Damn!...I gotta go up. I’ll ask you a further question tomorrow.
It's not my place to think such things, as I am not a member of the elite who decides about such things.
Quoting praxis
Certainly. At least up until some 30 years ago, children were typically taught to distinguish between proper art and that which is not proper art. This knowledge, however, has to go hand in hand with knowing one's place in society, and knowing whether one is in the position to speak on a topic or not.
Hm. I guess this is hard to explain to an egalitarian/democrat. I'll put it this way: If you belong to the (lower) middle class and lower, it is, by old European standards, inappropriate for you to go to a classical music concert. Such art is simply considered to be out of your league and you're just not appropriate for it. It's completely irrelevant how much you might like it or how much you might know about it. You must know your place. If a member of the elite has a particularly charitable day, they might tell you that your time would be better spent in other pursuits, otherwise, they'll just frown upon you.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So if I ingest something, thinking it is poison, with the intent of harming my body, but instead nourish it, would you say the thing I ingested is poison or food?
When you use something for some purpose, does the use of it lie in the outcome or the intent? For example, if I thrust a knife at your throat, intending to cut your jugular, but instead inadvertently cut off a cancerous tumor that would have otherwise killed you, have I used that knife to save you or to destroy you?
I'm so glad you are obedient. I would hate to think you had ideas of your own. :razz:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I failed to notice that you were answering my question by avowing that the substance I ingested was indeed food, though I thought it was poison. Likewise, were I to ingest something thinking it to be food, but it ended up poisoning me, wouldn’t you agree that it was really poison? If you do, then doesn’t that contradict what we agreed to earlier, viz:
Quoting Leghorn
Quoting Pfhorrest
In other words, whether what I ingest is food or poison depends, not on my intent in ingesting it, but rather on its effect on my health. Would you agree with that?
I think either intent or effect can be used as the criteria to define it, as I said just above in response to your question "When you use something for some purpose, does the use of it lie in the outcome or the intent?"
Quoting Pfhorrest.
For there you avowed that the intended poison was indeed actually food.
To your last response let me point out that the “use” of something is not obviously identical with the thing used.
In this case, is the word whose meaning is in conflict “food”, in your statement,
Quoting Pfhorrest?
I'm not saying that there's literally a conflict over the meaning of a word here, but that use-of-a-thing-defining-what-it-is is analogous to use-of-a-word-defining-what-it-means.
Nonsense. One of the most important things to know in life is to know one's place. It's amazing how much trouble one avoids that way. There's just no use in forcing oneself upon a culture or social group that doesn't want one.
So let me apply this to the example of someone ingesting food though thinking it poison: by ingesting it for the purpose of harming his body, ie as poison, he makes it a “thing of some kind”, ie poison, defined as “something ingested which is harmful to the body”. Therefore food, what nourishes the body, becomes poison, what harms it, “to the extent that the use of something for some purpose makes it a thing of some kind”.
Furthermore, since
Quoting Pfhorrest
it is also still food, since its effect was to nourish the body. So it is both food and poison at the same time. Therefore it both nourishes and poisons the body, and the body is both bettered and made worse at the same time.
But I must make note of this apparent caveat in what you said: “TO THE EXTENT THAT the use of something”, etc....Maybe the use of food as poison doesn’t extend so far, and we can avoid the absurdity that results in attempting to stretch it beyond reason. After all, what reasonable person would call “poison” what, after ingestion, nourished instead of harmed?
Yep. Food poisoning is totally a thing (getting poisoned by your food), and this is the reverse of that (getting fed by your poison).
Quoting Leghorn
No. It is intended by its user to poison the body, make it worse, but it has the effect of nourishing the body, bettering it. It's thus poison by its use-intent and food by its use-effect.
Quoting Leghorn
That caveat is because I'm not yet certain that this (new to me) idea of use defining a thing applies to all things. Do we use stars for something and is that what makes them stars, or are stars just stars because they are what they are? They don't seem to fit the pattern by which a rock can be made a chair not by any change to the rock, but by its being used as a thing to sit on.
Which also seems to connect to the gender example in the OP: a person is made their gender (but not their sex) by them being treated by society as a person of that gender. I guess maybe what all of this thread boils down to is that "chair" is a social construct; "food" and "poison" likewise? But not stars, or sexes?
This reminded me of when I helped my landlord, Archie, one day repair a vacated room in the boarding house. He needed a hammer (we already had a nail), but neither of us had brought one. Spying an empty tequila bottle sitting on the window sill, Archie took it up and, wielding it like a hammer, drove the nail into the jamb. I was amazed that the bottle didn’t break during this process...but it didn’t. Indeed it admirably served as a hammer, without us having to go searching for a “real” one. I got the sense that Archie, being an old-timer, had not used this trick then for the first time...
...numerous examples of this sort of thing can be drawn from the teeth of necessity, the mother of invention. Who has not found a sheet of cardboard in the trunk of their car that could be cut and rounded into a funnel through which to pour transmission fluid or engine oil in lieu of an actual funnel made for that purpose?
The question is, did these extemporaneous things, cardboard and glass, in that moment, become hammers and funnels, or did they merely stand in for them as scrap packaging and containers of alcohol?