Opening Mind: Philosophical Study of Humanistic Concepts

282 Pages·1978·22.654 MB·English

by  Weitz

The
Opening
Mind
For my
parents
Contents
Preface ix
1 Words, Concepts, and Things 3
2 Open Concepts 25
3 Art 49
4 Tragedy 91
5 Style in Art History 105
6 Human Action 141
7 Morality 189
8 Epilogue 237
Notes 251
Bibliography 257
Index 271
vii
Morris
Weitz
The
A Philosophical Study of Humanistic Concepts
Opening
Mind
The University
of Chicago Press
Chicago
and London
Morris Weitz is the Richard Köret Professor of
Philosophy at Brandeis University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1977 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1977
Printed in the United States of America
82 81 80 79 78 77 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Weitz, Morris.
The opening mind: a philosophical study of humanistic concepts;
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Concepts. I. Title.
BD181.W38 121 77-7387
ISBN 0-226-89240-9
Preface
Concepts are fundamental in philosophy, the sciences, and the
humanities and in many human and animal activities. What they
are and what roles they play have been of perennial concern to
philosophers in their efforts to provide an adequate account of
the conceptual life. Perhaps philosophers alone employ concepts
and proffer theories of them: what they are and what they do.
Even though a particular philosopher's range of concepts can be
as narrow as he pleases—he may devote his life to an investiga­
tion of the one concept of entailment—any philosophical theory
of concepts, if it is to do justice to the ostensible variety of
conceptualization, must accommodate at least the major distin­
guishable uses of concepts, whether the concepts themselves are
ordinary, scientific, or humanistic.
It is just here, I think, that philosophy is inherently inter­
disciplinary, since the adequacy of our understanding of con­
cepts depends primarily on our appreciation of the diversity of
concepts as they are found, not only in philosophy, but in all
disciplines.
It has long seemed to me, as it has to others, that a central task
of philosophy is the exploration of the conceptual life. One
important region to be mapped—certainly as important as the
sciences—is the humanistic disciplines. During the past ten years
or so, especially in Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary
Criticism and in various essays in the philosophy of art, I have
tried to elucidate some of the basic concepts of literary criticism
and art history. Instead of beginning with preconceived theories
of drama, tragedy, interpretation, evaluation, and criticism of
works of art in literary criticism or of period-style concepts in art
history, I studied the roles of these concepts in a rich and living
tradition of criticism and art history. This examination, whether ix
x finally correct or not, uncovered three radically different kinds
of concepts, hitherto unnoticed by philosophers: the perennially
debatable (tragedy); the perennially flexible (art, drama); and
the irreducibly vague (Mannerism). All of these seem to me
indisputable examples of open concepts: that is, concepts and
their conveying terms that function under no definitive sets of
criteria. These concepts, I concluded, are not ambiguous, nor
are they vague in the traditional sense of obscure or without
boundaries"; and, more important, they are not closed in the
classical platonic sense of being governed by necessary and
sufficient criteria.
These discoveries of the logical character of certain concepts
were, of course, anticipated as well as inspired by others,
especially Waismann and Wittgenstein. But I also realized that
their probings into open texture and family resemblances do not
Preface sufficiently clarify the logic or range of open concepts. More is
needed on the logic of different kinds of less-than-definitive sets
of criteria for certain concepts if these diverse open concepts are
to be sorted out.
It is precisely this task of sorting-out that I have set myself in
this book. I begin with the relation between words, concepts,
and things or, in grander, traditional terms, the relation between
language, conceptualization, and the world. In particular, I ask
whether concepts are words, meanings of words, or uses of
words; whether concepts are abilities or entities, either sensible
or supersensible; whether talk about concepts is reducible to talk
about uses of words; and whether the having of concepts is the
same as the having of certain skills, including being able to wield
certain expressions. I attempt to formulate and defend the only
theses I am able to support regarding these questions: that there
are concepts, irreducible to anything else, and that any theory of
concepts, whether explicit or implicit in a particular philos­
opher's use of concepts, entails a corresponding theory of
language—specifically, a theory about the logical nature of the
sets of criteria governing the intelligible, correct use of certain
words.
Having articulated these two theses, I go on to present a
survey of the recent critique of closed concepts among some
contemporary philosophers, along with their various concep­
tions of open concepts.
These first two chapters introduce the next five, devoted to
certain basic concepts in aesthetics, art history, psychology, and
ethics, in which I argue that these concepts are open, in varying
degrees of openness, rather than closed, as they are traditionally
and commonly assumed to be. Unfortunately, I have not
canvassed as many varieties of open concepts as I wished; there xi
is much to be done on the detailed explorations of concepts,
especially in the social and natural sciences and in mathematics,
which, had I attempted them, would have required another
volume. However, having established my main contention, that
the underlying assumption of Western philosophy, expresed or
embodied in its various theories of concepts, namely, that all
concepts are and must be closed—beautifully put by Frege's "A
concept that is not sharply defined is wrongly termed a concept"
—is false, I am satisfied with the results of this volume. What I
have done, I have tried to do thoroughly. That there are
concepts other than closed ones, of varying degrees of openness,
I think I have shown. What I have not established or even
ventured is a general theory of concepts: open and closed. The
reason I have not is that my lingering suspicion that there is no
such theory may be justified; if so, we are left in philosophy with Preface
an ever-incomplete sampling of their great diversity. In place of
a conclusion, then, I offer only afterwords: about what is no
longer questionable or deniable, that there are irreducible and
respectable varieties and even vagaries of conceptualization; and
about what can be done in this area of inquiry, where what can
be done is not to be understood as what remains to be done. I
know the answer to the one, but not to the other.
Throughout the book, I attempt not only to establish founda­
tions for concepts in the humanities, by disclosing their varieties
of openness, but, equally as important, to dispel the myth that
the respectability of the humanities rests on the determination of
closed concepts and their definitions, supposedly modeled on the
precision and definitive sets of conditions governing scientific
concepts. In showing that some of the basic concepts of the
humanistic disciplines are governed by open, not closed, sets of
criteria, without which they do not and perhaps cannot func­
tion, I celebrate rather than continue to apologize for the
irreducible varieties and vagaries of the conceptual life.
Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 have appeared in other versions
elsewhere. I have reworked these extensively and have tried to
integrate them with the wholly new materials of the other
chapters. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in my article
"Open Concepts" in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie,
no. 99 (1972), pp. 86-110. Parts of chapter 4 have been
reworked from my article "Tragedy," which appeared in volume
8 of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards,
copyright © 1967 by Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc.
Chapter 5 is a much-revised and expanded version of my article
"Genre and Style," published in Perspectives in Education,
xii Religion, and the Arts, edited by Howard Kiefer and Milton
Munitz, copyright © 1970 by the State University of New York
Press, Albany. And an earlier, quite different version of chapter
6, "Human Action," appeared under the same title in the Annual
Proceedings of the Center for Philosophic Exchange, vol. 1, no.
3 (1972).
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues,
Douglas Stewart and David Wiesen, for aid in certain matters
Greek and Latin, and to Henry David Aiken for invaluable
conversations in the language of philosophy; to The National
Endowment for the Humanities for a Senior Fellowship that
enabled me to devote the academic year 1973-74 to the writing
of this book (as well as a companion volume on the history of
philosophical theories of concepts, to be published, I hope, in
the not too distant future); and to La Fondation Camargo and,
especially, its director, Russell Young, who graciously and
generously accommodated myself, my three children, and my
wife—a Resident Fellow—in the Fondation.
The
Opening
Mind