Abstract
The paper is a critical discussion of the rich and insightful final chapter of Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression. There, Green seeks to elucidate the compelling, but inchoate intuition that when we’re fully and most expertly expressing ourselves, we can ‘push out’ from within not just our inner representations, but also the ways that we feel. I question, first, whether this type of ‘qualitative expression’ is really distinct from the other expressive forms that Green explores, and also whether it’s genuinely ‘expressive’. I then scrutinize the nature of the ‘qualitative congruences’ that lie at the heart of Green’s theory; and I wonder whether they can play the role Green claims they can in providing a novel account of artistic expression.
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Notes
I’ve done my best to provide an example of merely expressing that I’m in an emotional state. In his précis, Green cites my trashing your car as way that I might express that I’m angry. But I think this might seem to express merely the proposition that I’m angry and not the state itself only because you’re not around to witness the behavior (facial, gestural and otherwise) that is part of the trashing. It’s only relative to you, that is, that my anger itself is not shown. Of course, one might worry that exasperation is also shown-α in my example—the very fact that I’m controlled enough to produce a ‘flat’ utterance says something about its moderate intensity.
Describing the physiological or behavioral aspects of an emotion seems to me to fall into the same expressive category, though I’m not sure if Green would agree, since he doesn’t include it in his discussion, or in the list of qualitatively expressive methods he provides on p. 177.
For the record, the exasperation I feel towards my children is never, ever like a raging storm. At it’s worst it’s like a small swarm of mosquitoes on a humid day.
It’s unclear from Green’s discussion whether these three ways of enabling experiential knowledge (presenting a characteristic appearance, presenting characteristic behavior, and showing how the emotion feels) are meant to line up cleanly with his three forms of knowledge (knowledge-that, perceptual knowledge, and know-how). One might have expected such an alignment, but Green talks at one point (p. 196) as if each way yields a mix of propositional and qualitative knowledge.
It’s also unclear why Green doesn’t include presenting an emotion’s cause as a distinct method. He does so when discussing qualitative self-expression.
See, for example, Quine 1969, p. 124 ff.. To get from Quine to Green we also need to substitute sensory experiences for ‘perceptual stimuli,’ which, for Quine, moved out, over the decades, from somewhere near the edge of our sensory apparatuses towards the distal sources of our perceptions.
Green is right to dismiss (p. 184) the relevance of worries about qualia inversion. It’s true that those philosophical worries might persist even if our behaviorally detectable congruence discriminations are isomorphic to one another. For if our shared quality map contains any structural symmetry one might always wonder whether certain ‘purely qualitative’ features of our experiences are systematically reversed. But Green’s proposal provides an insightful account of expressiveness nevertheless: by means of qualitative congruence an artwork can inter-subjectively convey the functionally tractable aspects of the way an experience feels. This commits Green to the (to my mind plausible) claim that the way an experience feels can be captured, to some significant extent, by the experience’s functional role. And indeed Green seems to endorse this point when he argues (pp. 184–5) that qualitative congruence might allow us to overcome, to some extent, ‘what-it’s-like-to-be-a-bat problems’.
A similar worry applies to Green’s interesting discussion (pp. 183–4) of Hawthorne’s famous character, Hester Prynne. Hawthorne describes Prynne’s emergence from prison with the following sentence:
Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modeled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.
In his discussion, Green says that Pryne’s ‘attire might show, or help to show, that she is feeling desperately reckless, but it does more than this. It enables us to know how she feels because experience of that attire is congruent, in a way we now know how to articulate, with the experience of desperate recklessness.’
Now, the experience of perceiving Pryne’s attire may be congruent in some way or other with the feeling of desperate recklessness, but if the example works as Green claims, the congruence must hold between desperate recklessness and visual features of Pryne’s attire. However, Hawthorne doesn’t provide any first-order visual details, only descriptions of their social abnormality—‘wild’, ‘picturesque peculiarity’. Yet one senses that Hawthorne has, nevertheless, said enough to exhaust the expressive situation. If Pryne’s attire showed a Salem citizen how she felt it wasn’t because her attire was red instead of blue, or striped instead of checkered. Or more precisely, it wasn’t in virtue of some congruence between desperate recklessness and a purely visual experience of that color or pattern. The contingent cultural fashions which surround these visual features would seem to have done all the expressive work.
I wonder, however, whether the EST actually provides a plausible account of non-artifactual expressiveness. According to the EST, the hurricane is expressive of rage (i.e., possess the affective quality of rage) just in case the hurricane is a potential source of knowledge about rage. I can see how I might point to the hurricane as a way to express how I feel: I can make salient resemblances between the dynamic profile of the hurricane and the unstable and destructive ways that I’m inclined to behave. But is this a feature of the hurricane considered on its own—that is, independently of my drawing on those particular resemblances? The hurricane might be used in various ways to demonstrate any number of other things about human experience. This is why, unless I were guided in some way, I would never look to non-artifactual objects to learn anything at all about human emotions.
Indeed, Kivy himself articulates such worries (see Kivy 2002, pp. 37–48).
Of course, the theory may not be able to provide an underlying structure for all the congruences. Since pleasantness is one of Green’s proposed dimensions one wonders what can be said about why a major chord is expressive of pleasantness, which it surely is. And if there’s a basic and unstructured congruence between the two, then one worries that this congruence results from the expressiveness that it seeks to explain.
References
Clark, A. (1993). Sensory qualities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Green, M. (2007). Self-expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kivy, P. (2002). Introduction to a philosophy of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, J. (2006). Musical expressiveness as hearability-as-expression. In J. Levinson (Ed.), Contemplating art: Essays in aesthetics (pp. 91–108). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1969). Natural kinds. In W. V. O. Quine (Ed.), Ontological relativity & other essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Moore, J.G. Artistic Expression Goes Green. Acta Anal 25, 89–103 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0086-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0086-9