Arts and Crafts

The generally accepted definitional distinction between art and craft is that the latter is a use-object, while the former isn’t. Another distinction, pertaining to the mental process of the artist/crafter rather than to the fate of the object produced, is that crafters begin with a finite notion of what their object should be—ostensible artists, however, do not begin with a finite concept of what their produced object will be. Crafts belong to the level of the mundanely purposive—art-objects occupy a different territory.

But if the concept of purposiveness did not pertain to art at all we would have no concern for it, because it would inspire no feeling in us. Summarizing certain of Kant’s arguments in the third Critique, Will Dudley writes that “Nature appears beautiful precisely when it appears as if its forms had been arranged for the purpose of pleasing us…” Though there is no evidence that reality and nature were in fact constructed for the purpose of pleasing beings like us, Kant argues that we need to encounter life as if it were purposively constructed with beings like us in mind.

I think the answer to the question of the sense in which art is purposive lies in investigating and developing the relationship between part and whole. Crafts, or use-objects, are characterized by the purposiveness of the whole object—the completed craft is a conglomeration of parts in which the part-hood of the parts is necessarily subsumed under the general purposiveness of the entire use-object. Parts, in crafts, exist only insofar as they serve the overall given finite use which the object is intended to carry out. Put differently, individual formal properties of use-objects do not call attention to themselves. Individual formal properties of art-objects, be they scenes or characters in novels, the foreground of a painting, particularly soulful guitar solos in competent rock songs, or the torso of a statue, do. The parts of art-objects are significant in a way that the parts of use-objects are not.

A physical rock, for example, is a seamless conglomeration of fragments whose particularities are lost in the general task of being a rock and doing whatever a rock might do. (Achieving rockness?) This basically amounts to being used as a barbaric tool by animals (human and non) or just sitting on the ground. There is rockness, but there isn’t artness, because purposiveness is different in use-objects than it is in art-objects. Use-objects are formally purposive, whereas art-objects have a purposiveness of form. We can summon an idea of rockness that conceives of the Idea of a rock in all of its various permutations, more or less. Trying to achieve a similar type of formal knowledge about art, an Idea of artness, doesn’t work because art is not characterized by the same purposiveness that rocks are. Art-objects are rather the fruitfully chaotic products of disparate, singular formal properties, each with its own purposiveness in tow.

With art-objects, the relation of parts to the whole is not conglomerative, but agglomerative. The integrity of the part-hood of individual formal aspects of art-objects remains intact—the parts of art-objects do not exist only to be subsumed under the broader finite telos of the whole. Rather, the art-object is a bristling agglomeration of detailed formal properties, each with its own telos which resembles but is not identical to the telic properties of the other formal properties of the art-object. An agglomeration, by the way, is a cluster of elements which, though occupying the same space, cannot be said to totally cohere—correlativity without coherence or causation. The purposiveness of art-objects is a purposiveness of form, while use-objects’ purposiveness is a formal purposiveness. In crafts, the form of the final product is all—in art, the form of the final product is only an incidental agglomeration of parts—each of which carries its own distinct purposiveness.

The purposiveness of art-objects, the purposiveness of form, exists in numerous formal aspects simultaneously. Thus the purposiveness of the totality of the art-object is as multiple as are its formal elements—what grounds the art-object is the indistinct but still powerful force of the purposiveness of form. The formal properties of art-objects form a relative unity, whereas the formal properties of use-objects form a total unity. The reason for the difference between the internal schemas of the two kinds of objects is that art-objects have no formal purposiveness; the totality of the art-object, considered as a definite whole, has no distinct purpose. But, since it cannot escape the concept of purposiveness entirely, it is necessary that art-objects be subject to a different kind of purposiveness—the purposiveness of form, with form understood in typical spatiotemporal terms.

The lack of formal purposiveness in art-objects results in this state of affairs, which is characterized by the agglomerative relative unity of the disparate elements comprising the art-object. Just like the definite formal telos of use-objects decreases the singularity of the individual formal properties of the object, the persistently indefinite formal purposiveness of art-objects results in the definiteness and singularity of its parts. The purpose of art-objects is a showing off of their intricately realized parts.