Greenberg on Kandinsky

Everyone seems to despise Clement Greenberg these days, but I generally find him insightful. However, I find his account of Kandinsky unsatisfying: a good idea not quite demonstrated.

His main point is that Kandinsky took the turn toward the abstract too early. The innovation was premature.

Yes, I love the idea of “premature innovation,” and can easily believe that such a thing exists. But Greenberg just doesn’t affix this insight to Kandinsky’s career in a way that sticks to my ribs.

Incidentally, reading art criticism reminds me of another thing I dislike about the idea that philosophy should be entirely a matter of “arguments.” Arguments are a mediated form of knowing: in an argument you derive one thing form another. But at a certain point this process obviously must come to an end, and you simply have to look at the world and decide whether you believe what someone is saying about.

Consider the following passage from Greenberg, about Picasso:

“Before Guernica, Picasso had tried to compel an essentially decorative flatness or shallowness, and an almost equally decorative rectilinear and curvilinear regularity of design, to transcend themselves by carrying out illustrative functions: everything in the picture had to be assignable to a source in nature, even if that source were only an invented wallpaper pattern.”

I chose that passage at random, and it’s certainly not one of his better ones: it makes him sound more pretentious than he is. But my point is that this isn’t really an “argument,” nor could it possibly be made into one. You simply have to look at the paintings in question and decide how insightful these remarks are.

In other words, the statement is to be judged by its depth and breadth in confrontation with reality, not by whether it belongs to a valid chain of deductions. And this is why Whitehead is right to think that we need to get rid of this virus that makes us think that philosophy is a deductive logical system in the manner of geometry. It isn’t, for any number of reasons. And I think we’d be better off on the whole if history of philosophy were written more like art criticism (even the continentals don’t really do it that way right now), or even like a wine-tasting manual. You don’t make “arguments” in wine-tasting either, you simply have more or less subtle judgment.

But I don’t mean to sound completely unsympathetic to the notion of philosophy as built of arguments. Present-day continental philosophy can profit from this notion right now, as a tonic against its own brand of excessive mediation: the well-known tendency to talk about books rather than about reality.