Reciprocations

The true being that becomes an object of love for us in art is finally the true being of the human spirit itself. Albert Hofstadter The difference between truth and untruth … cannot be reduced to … vouching for the Being … of people and things. Herman Rapaport The European schools of thought that analytic philosophers love to hate are antiscientistic. The love-hate relation is reciprocal. This is so of existentialism, the best-known school of continental philosophy in Beardsley's day. It is also so of deconstruction, perhaps the most prominent continental counterpart to contemporary analytic and postanalytic philosophy. But such stylized polarizations overlook continuities between the apparent opponents and fail to recognize how one side serves to correct the other. A contemporary attempt to theorize artistic truth cannot afford to be shortsighted in these ways. Instead it should foster a dialogue between the analytic and continental schools, both of which have come to recognize the limitations of empiricistic scientism. To surpass those limitations with regard to artistic truth requires an alternative to the propositionally inflected correspondence theory of truth that sustains Beardsley's metacritical denial. Continental philosophy has something to offer in that regard. Initial clues to an alternative come from two directions, both of which oppose the restriction of truth bearers to propositions or their equivalents. One is Albert Hofstadter's more expansive version of correspondence theory, which incorporates elements from what Beardsley labels Revelation Theory and Intuitionist Theory into an existential affirmation of artistic truth (section 2.1).