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What Is It Like to Be Mysterious, Alienated, and Wildly Rich through Less Than Savory Means?

The problem of “phenomenal consciousness” remains among the most hotly debated issues in contemporary philosophy. It has been called “intractable,” identified even as the “hard problem” (Nagel 1997, Chalmers 1995, 1996). Indeed, the divide between the so-called “mysterians” and the physical reductionists has stretched to such a profound degree as to appear hopelessly unbridgeable. With words sprouting up in the “dialogue” like, “qualiaphile” and “qualiaphobe,” one cannot help but detect the unhappy encroachment of insular dogmatism.

What exactly is at stake here? The Dennetts and Churchlands of the debate insist that there is nothing mysterious about consciousness, that it can be reduced quite satisfactorily to the physical processes of the brain (Dennett 1993, Churchland 1995). The Nagels and Levines, on the other hand, complain that this cocksure scientistic reductionism “leaves something out.” What is “left out,” we are told, is the what-it’s-likeness of a sentient being, that is, what it is like for X to be X (Nagel 1997). Although Nagel (1974) has little to say about qualia specifically, others carrying on the “mysterian” banner have linked the first-person experience of qualia to what-it’s-likeness (Chalmers 1995, p. 3), e.g., “what it’s like for x to see red.” In his almost smugly clever endeavor to “quine” qualia (Dennett 1988), is Dennett really suggesting that there is nothing at all like conscious qualitative experience? Am I to believe that the distinctly rich and highly affective feeling I experience in hearing the ambient Music for Airports of Brian Eno, for example, simply does not exist? Surely this is not what Dennett is getting at.

In this paper, I will side with neither the “qualiaphiles” nor the “qualiaphobes.” Rather, I will try to show that this very opposition is the silly product of a number of confusions, most of which are purely linguistic and rhetorical. The confusions I will address and attempt to clarify primarily are: (1) the distinction between explanation and description, (2) whether the nature of qualitative experience is discrete or holistic, and—building largely upon the foregoing—(3) whether the so-called “explanatory gap” (Levine 1997) is substantive, or the result of a misunderstanding of the proper role of science.

As a means of bypassing the intransigence in which the opposing camps are mired, I propose that we open up a space in the discussion for a new, reconciliatory perspective: the field of aesthetics. I submit that what Nagel is looking for in an adequate theory of consciousness falls outside of the domain of objective scientific inquiry, commonly understood. In order to capture the what-it’s-likeness of a particular conscious entity, it seems that a kind of empathetic, re-creative description must take place, rather than a disinterested scientific account. This is something that science simply cannot do, not because it is inadequate or inferior, but because such is not its job.

On the other hand, this exploration of the subjectivity of qualitative experience is something art has done quite well, which explains in part why it has remained such an integral and pervasive part of human activity. It is for this reason that I would like to bring the discipline of aesthetics to bear on the problems of consciousness mentioned above, circumventing the "explanatory gap" in favor of a different approach.

In §1 I will complicate simple what-it’s-likeness by insisting upon the importance of a rich, holistic contextualism. The focus of §2 will be the distinction between explanatory and descriptive accounts, and that the third-person approach of science is limited to the former while the notion of what-it’s-likeness relies on the latter. Finally, in §3 I will introduce the concepts of aesthetic experience and stylistic analysis to the discussion of phenomenal consciousness, suggesting that, through a method akin to art criticism, the cleft between first and third person approaches can be overcome.

In his famous 1974 paper, Thomas Nagel asks a very serious question: what is it like to be a bat? The aim of the paper is to show that physicalism is problematic because, although an empirical investigation into the physical components of a bat’s sensory organs may lead to significant knowledge about bats, such knowledge would not be exhaustive; something would be “left out” (Nagel 1997, p. 519). The thing “left out,” according to the view, is knowledge of bat experience.

The question presupposes that there is in fact “something” it is like for a bat to be a bat, that is, that bats have experience. Bats must have experience; “after all they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience” (Nagel 1997, p. 520). Although, as Dennett remarks, Nagel makes this claim “without supporting argument” (Dennett 2006, p. 30), there seems to be a strong intuitional pull in its favor. Why? The answer seems to be: because I—the being contemplating the question—have experience. What does it mean to “have experience”? To say that an entity E “has experience”—in the relevant sense, not, that is, that E is worldly—is simply to assert that E is capable of experiencing. That E is capable of experiencing means that E can consciously engage in the world in a variety of contexts. Admittedly, this cursory definition of “experience” is highly simplistic, but for our present purposes it should suffice.

Clearly, experience is something of an abstract form that can be particularized in a multitude of ways (I can “experience” windsurfing, playing bingo, eating a block of cheese, etc…). What remains invariable in experience, my experience, for example, is that regardless of the particular context or activity, I experience from my point of view. Thus, an important feature of experience is that it is inherently subjective. It is countersensical, then, to suggest that I am capable of objective experience; even when engaging in, say, an empirical experiment in chemistry, my experience of the experiment is inescapably first-personal. This is not to say that the experiment itself or its findings are subjective—but only the experience itself. The old “death and taxes” adage, it seems, should be expanded to include experience; I can run as fast as I want and it always manages to keep up with me.

In light of this understanding of experience, the question can be reformulated to read: what is it like, in general, for a bat to engage in the world?[i] Given my supremely limited knowledge of bat culture and identity, I will, for simplicity’s sake, replace in the sentence “a bat” with “me.” What is it like, in general, for me to engage in the world? An interesting effect of this question is that the more I ponder it the more unmanageable it seems to become. I am ultimately led to ask in response: engage in the world in what way? In what activity am I engaging? Moreover, in what state of mind am I engaging in said activity? Am I elated? Am I furious? In short, the very notion of what-it’s-likeness, posed in a general way, abstracted from any concrete contextual reality, is incoherent.

It is certainly the case, as I have observed, that all conscious experiences, despite their concrete reliance upon specific circumstances, are unified by virtue of a distinguishable quality, namely, the first-person perspective. It seems, however, that even when one strives to analyze this abstracted quality, one cannot help but particularize it in a concrete way, thereby conjuring in the imagination some particular set of concrete circumstances in which to ground the general abstraction. That is, when I try to contemplate the abstract “what-it’s-likeness” of my first-person perspective, I am invariably brought to think about it in terms of some more or less specific situation. Such is the difficulty of all abstraction; in the effort to contemplate pure “bedness” I inevitably imagine some particular bed.

In order to report what it’s like to be me, I must first introspectively ground the question in an imaginatively complex contextual moment wherein I am actively engaged in some more or less particular activity, under some more or less particular conditions. For instance, when asked what it was like for me to experience war in Iraq, I am initially at a loss to answer because the question’s deceptively amorphous scope frustrates the possibility of a sufficiently accurate yet succinct descriptive report. What I must do is very quickly recall for myself a number of more or less thematically discrete moments within the overarching experience of “war in Iraq,” and distill from them a general, underlying mood by which they are unified. I am now in a position to reply, “stressful” or “it was very hot.” It is in this way that what-it’s-likeness is contextually holistic.

The contextual holism described above is indeed rich. Take, for example, the hypothetical experience of chopping onions in preparation of a meal. I feel the cold, hard handle of the knife pressed firmly against my palm. The smooth, elliptical surface of the onion is revealed to my fingertips as they hold the vegetable stable. As I cut the onion down the middle, sulfured compounds are released and find their way to my eyes, causing them to tear up and blink uncontrollably. This peculiar sensation invokes the memory of a time in which I was cooking with my girlfriend and accidentally spilled hot oil on her foot, causing her to scream and strike me with a mixing spoon. This, in turn, brings my attention back to the chicken I have simmering in olive oil on the stove. Remaining inconspicuously in the background has been the air-conditioner, all the while gently humming away, providing as a sort of metronomic, unifying ground for the experience as a whole.

For the outside observer, the scene outlined above would appear rather mundane. That is, from the third-person perspective there is simply an individual cutting onions. From my first-person perspective, however, it is quite rich and structurally complex. To use Ned Block’s distinctions, there are multiple shifts from purely phenomenal consciousness to access consciousness (Block 1997).[ii] The intentional object of my conscious experience is the onion; it is “representationally” accessed as an object to be manipulated by me in pursuit of a given end (i.e., to make dinner). It is as a result of this functional aspect of consciousness that my act of onion cutting is available to third-person access. The phenomenal aspect, on the other hand, is for “my eyes only.” Only I can feel the cold sliminess of the onion. I can also, as it were, turn the intentional eye precisely to this sliminess. In so doing I am accessing this specific qualitative feature of my perceptual field and thereby incorporating it into my ongoing cognitive engagement with the world. To what extent is this highly specific phenomenal quality really made separate and distinct in this moment of so-called “access”?

The phenomenal characteristics of experience are often called “qualia.” Using the “onion chopping” example, there is the tactile quale of the onion’s sliminess, the aural quale of the hum of the air-conditioner, the visual quale of the white of the counter, etc… For Chalmers, it seems, these “qualia” are all quite discrete and distinctly analyzable. The various modes in which I experience the qualia (i.e., sight, sound, touch) remain confined to their respective domains, allowing one to proceed in an abstractive treatment of them without losing any affective significance (Chalmers 1995, pp.202-203). Is this an accurate picture of how phenomena are given in conscious experience? Rather, as Merleau-Ponty observes, “the apprehension of a quality…is bound up with a whole perceptual context, and…the stimuli no longer furnish us with the indirect means we are seeking of isolating a layer of immediate impressions” (Merleau-Ponty 1989, p. 8). That is to say, there is phenomenologically no reason to infer that my visual experience of the onion’s smooth, yellowish-white sheen is legitimately abstractable from my tactile experience of its slimy texture. Indeed, the very language I employ to describe my visual experience carries with it an implication of the tactile, i.e., the word “smooth.”

One may object that it is certainly possible to analyze different elements or dimensions of an object apprehended as a unified whole. Indeed, this is just what one is doing when one describes an onion as having a round shape, a yellowish color, a pungent taste, etc… I am denying neither the possibility nor the benefit of this analytical treatment. My point here is to establish the concrete phenomenological primacy of holistic perception. If one undertakes a method of analytical abstraction without first understanding how the horizonal connections of a context shape the affectivity of the experience in toto, one will miss important aspects that arise when appraising it pro parte. The relevance of this point for our purposes will be made clear in §3.IV below.

In addition to the everyday sort of synesthesia described above, one’s qualitative experience is modally unified in terms of both mood and association. An example of the latter was given above in the “onion chopping” story. My act of chopping the onion was cognitively associated with the invoked past experience involving my girlfriend. This association affected my conscious engagement in the task in subtle ways. At the very least, the memory contributed to a change in the figure and ground of my perceptual field: the simmering chicken—hitherto among the horizonal ground of my consciousness—was pushed to the fore, replacing the onion as accessed intentional object.

Mood also plays a significant role in shaping contextual what-it’s-likeness. If the day leading up to my onion chopping was dismal in the extreme, a day in which absolutely nothing could go my way, my intentional dealing with the onion would be painted, as it were, with a pervasive hue of dejection. My previous experience of the day—taken as a fluid continuity—would be retained to color each approaching moment, and protended in my anticipation of future developments. What is important here is that the overarching phenomenal feel (essential for what-it’s-likeness) of my ongoing experience would be unified—in form and content—into a consistent, all-encompassing cenesthesis. To put it in a Heideggerian way, if one approaches the world depressed, the world gives itself as depressing.

My goal in this section has been to complicate Nagel’s notion of “what-it’s-likeness.” For an entity E to have something it is like to be that entity, E must have first-person access to its own phenomenal experience. I have endeavored to show that phenomenal experience is remarkably complex and cannot be analyzed away into disjointed qualitative moments without losing the very thing that one is investigating.

Hence Van Gulick’s observation that “phenomenal experience is not merely a succession of qualitatively distinguished sensory ideas, bur rather the organized cognitive experience of a world of objects and of ourselves as subjects within that world” (Van Gulick 1997a, p. 559). For Van Gulick, we are embedded in the world of experience; our first-person phenomenal consciousness is structurally connected to “the structure of underlying non-phenomenal processes” (Van Gulick 1997b, p. 154). When we understand that the “quale” of redness, for example, is not some free-floating, disembodied and structurally primitive sensation, but is rather the coarse red of my reading chair, the waxy red of an apple, the searing orange-red of an open flame, the intuitions behind such arguments as the “inverted spectrum” (Shoemaker 1981) and “absent qualia” (Chalmers 1995) lose much of their force (Hardin 1987).

It might be objected at this point that I am overlooking the crux of Nagel’s position: imaginability. Nagel is happy to assert, “without supporting argument” (Dennett 2006, p. 30), that “it is often possible to take up a view other than one’s own” (Nagel 1997, p. 522). That is, by virtue of the essential similitude of mental and sensory apparatuses between fellow human beings, we can know (imagine?) what it is like to be one another. The problem arises when one tries to assume the first-person perspective of a sufficiently alien being, i.e., a bat. I cannot imagine (know?) what it is like to be a bat for the bat—that is, without inserting myself as myself into the role of bat.

Given the complicated rendering of subjective experience offered above, is it really the case that one can so easily assume the first-person perspective of other people purely by virtue of their being people? It is certainly true that even after a detailed physiological explanation of a bat's modes of perception I still would not know "what it's like for" the bat to perceive. It seems equally plausible to assert, however, that I would not know "what it's like for" the president of a powerful country to experience the making of a declaration of war even after reading several texts on political science. Taking an objective scientific approach, I could analyze the causal chain leading up to the declaration in a variety of ways. As a political scientist, I would appraise the relevant policies and trends in the world of geopolitics resulting in the current situation. As a historian, I would investigate the broader historical forces from and in which the situation developed. As a psychoanalyst, I may want to look into the president’s formative childhood experiences to uncover some clues.

All of these approaches have at least two important points in common: (1) they are general systems of inquiry whose particular application begins with a given set of theoretical presuppositions, and (2) the subjective point of view of the agent operating from these presuppositions is entirely irrelevant. If it is precisely the subjective feel, the first-person experience of the president making the declaration that I am after, it is clear that any approach for which (2) is correct will not be of service. One might object that (2) requires only that I, the practicing agent, abandon my point of view, which, because the point of view I am after is the president’s, leaves the objective, scientific approach intact as a viable option. However, as Nagel points out, “the idea of moving from appearance [my subjective perspective] to reality [the president’s subjective perspective] makes no sense here” (Nagel 1997, p. 523). If I am somehow successful in imagining what it is actually like for the president, just one more step in my imaginative construction will reveal that, lo and behold, there is something it is like for me to take up a perspective “other than” my own!

What would it mean to explain first-person experience? If it means a reduction to physical processes in the same way that light is reduced to the electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength, then clearly something would be left out (Levine 1997). This something, it seems, is simply the describability of what-it’s-likeness, of what-it’s-like to have a particular point of view, through particular sensory equipment. One must ask, however, if it is necessary for an objective scientific explanation to describe the subjective feel of one’s actual engagement in the explanatory inquiry. If the answer is “no”—which it plainly seems to be—then it is misleading to suggest that the state-to-state mapping of mental phenomena to underlying physical processes envisioned in Churchland’s “golden age of neuroscience” would be “leaving” anything “out.”

One might object that I am cheating. While it is certainly the case that it is normally the job of a scientific explanation to provide a thoroughly objective account of the explicandum, in the case at hand the explicandum just so happens to be subjective experience itself. Thus, to explain what-it’s-likeness in purely objective terms is to miss entirely what is to be explained:

For if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence—the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems (Nagel 1997, p. 522).

This observation carries considerable intuitive force. If I were to trace my qualitative experience back to empirically observed processes of the brain, the objective facts reached would bear no resemblance to the phenomenally rich lived experience to which I have first-person access. Thus, there would appear to be a “gap” between my conscious phenomenal experience and the physical processes purported to underlie it. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes clear that this “intuitive force” results from the conflation of phenomenal description with explanatory description.

Consider the following example. Let us say that I am curious to know how all of the strange, interesting, and stimulating sounds in electronic music are created. In an effort to learn, I decide to ask a scientific expert in the field of sound manipulation. More than willing to help, the scientist expatiates with detailed precision about how synthesizers function by manipulating electrical signals through oscillators and filters in either an analog or digital circuit. When submitted through an audio amplifier, he explains, the manipulated signals appear as sound, which can be shaped in accordance with various scale structures, such as the diatonic, chromatic, whole tone, or pentatonic. At the end of the expert’s explanation, I fail to grasp how it is that a bunch of plain old electrical signals can ultimately amount to something as exciting as say, Front 242’s Neurobashing. That is, in reducing this piece of music to its formative, constitutive elements, I no longer see (or hear) the unified structure, which in my experience is so cognitively and viscerally affective.

When I reflect on this cognitive and visceral affectivity, I am imaginatively re-creating my first-person phenomenal experience, which I can describe for myself or others. It is precisely this description that the scientist is “leaving out” in his explanation of the physical basis of electronic music, and that the physicalist is “leaving out” in his “reduction” of consciousness to brain processes. If, equipped with my new knowledge of electronic music, I ask a neuroscientist to explain how manipulated auditory electrical signals can affect my mood and mental states, he might tell me that music affects the amplitude and frequency of so-called “brain waves,” which can be physically measured with devices like the electroencephalograph. Still, the image of the affected brain waves demonstrably correlated with the subjectively realized shifts in my phenomenal consciousness is somehow unconvincing. I simply cannot perceive the rich phenomenal manifold of my subjective experience in the objectified depiction of sporadic peaks and valleys, any more than I can “see” the shapes and colors of a television program in a complex circuitry diagram. If I am willing to accept a materialist account of how images are produced on a TV screen, why does the idea of an objective materialist account of my own phenomenal consciousness seem so dissatisfying?

The answer, it, seems, is that my consciousness is not an object—it is rather the very act of objectification. When I accept that “water” is identical to “H₂O,” I am apprehending an object in a particular way, under a given set of theoretical presuppositions (i.e., that substance is reducible to discrete, constitutive elements, etc…). I am not, in this case, forced to stand outside of myself, to objectify my very ability to objectify. It is perfectly conceivable for me that my phenomenal consciousness, my first-person what-it’s-likeness is ultimately the product of natural, physical processes. Any objective, scientific explanation of these vague notions of “process” and “product” must necessarily—by virtue of the scientific method—“leave out” the affectivity of first-person subjective experience. This is not a problem. There is a difference between a description of phenomena to be scientifically explained in physics or chemistry, and say, Montale’s description of a “magnolia’s ever shrinking shade.” The former is put forth in an established theoretical framework to tell a convincing story about the objective existence of some physical phenomena. The latter has no such purpose. What is required to overcome the dissatisfaction of physical or functional reduction is an approach that combines the subjective and the objective. This is what I propose to do with my introduction of aesthetical methodology in the following section.

In short, a satisfactory description of the what-it’s-likeness of a given context cannot be appropriated by any overarching, entirely third-person explanatory project. When imagining what it would be like for me to fly like a seagull over the ocean, I do not describe the imagined experience as a means to explain how or why any of the involved phenomena come about. I am certainly at liberty to attempt such an explanation, but it would be a new project, conceptually distinct from purely phenomenal description. I am in agreement with Searle when he asks, “Why should we assume that all the facts in the world are equally accessible to standard, objective, third-person tests” (Searle 1997, p. 497)? It is of course an empirical fact that I am a conscious being, but there is no reason to assume that the various experiential contexts of conscious what-it’s-likeness for me can be accessed and rendered intact by the same method used to explore photosynthesis in filipendula. It is simply not in the job description of the empirical sciences to capture the what-it’s-likeness of subjective experience.

If it is not the job of science to capture and describe this elusive what-it’s-likeness, then whose job is it? The fact that there is no dearth of concern for phenomenal consciousness in philosophical literature shows (despite the insistent, though confused demand for explanation) that it is a job that needs to be done, even if no one is doing it. In this section I will argue that while science must abstain from any ill-fated forays into the what-it’s-likeness of consciousness, it is this very field with which art has been dealing for as long as it has been dealing with anything.

As the title of this paper indirectly asks, what is it like to be the ‘Great Gatsby’? Is this not one of the central lines of inquiry along which we are carried when engaged in Fitzgerald’s text? I submit that it is not the outlandish hyperbole of an over-zealous aesthete to suggest that in aesthetically pursuing this line of inquiry, we uncover what it is like to be Gatsby by coming to terms with what it is like to be ourselves. I will not limit my treatment to literature, but through a liberal—though relevant—analysis of aesthetic experience and stylistic analysis will endeavor to incorporate multiple art forms as contribuitive to a rich squaring with descriptive what-it’s-likeness.

For present purposes I will now provide a brief exposition of two aesthetic theories I find to be especially amenable to the articulation of what-it’s-likeness. The theories are both appropriate principally for their emphasis on art as a kind of activity or experience. The first will be Giovanni Gentile’s “art as feeling,” and the second John Dewey’s “art as experience.”

For Gentile [1875-1944] the phenomenon of “art” is not limited to the circumscribed domain of “artworks,” but exists rather as a necessary and constitutive element of human experience. Approached in abstract analysis, art reveals itself as “feeling.”[iii] Feeling—in a strongly Kantian sense—must itself “be an intrinsic part of consciousness; it must be consciousness itself, in the experience of which we realize our own being” (Gentile 1972, p. 138). It is this unified, underlying “feeling” that paints even our everyday experience with varied and complex phenomenal hues. I use the term “abstract analysis” because, for Gentile, art (subjective feeling) in its concreteness is never divorced from “logic”[iv]; the latter is the necessary objective mechanism through which the former is articulated.[v] We are able to differentiate “works of art” from “non-works of art” largely by identifying the prevalence of feeling (manifested by the artist and (re)constituted in one’s attentive engagement) in a given work. Thus, we normally regard Platonic dialogues as “works of philosophy” rather than “works of art” because the presence of feeling is less intentionally pronounced than that of objectivity, although the former is certainly an intelligible dimension. Moments in our experience, then, in which feeling emerges as a consciously dominant presence can be characterized as “aesthetic moments” or moments of “aesthetic experience.”

Feeling “accompanies”[vi] our everyday experience, no matter how mundane. Likely because feeling is, in this regard, rather mundane, it often goes unnoticed. It is the role of the artist to thematize feeling, thereby bringing out subtleties of meaning that are otherwise covered up or ignored. Monet’s landscapes and Cezanne’s still-life paintings are examples of this. Feeling can also be less than subtle, compelling one, for example, to compose an impassioned lyrical poem expressing the agony of a failed love affair. In this case, the poet begins with a yet unthematized feeling of despair. Observing the feeling, she then sits down to compose her piece, now treating the feeling as an object before her. The whole process of composition to follow is something of a dialectical development between the unity of the subjective feeling and the multiplicity in words of the objective rendering.

The constitutive element of “feeling” can be thought of rather generically as pleasure or pain, insofar as it is at bottom only first-person accessible: “the life with which pleasure [or pain] is to be identified is not the physiological life as understood by science, but the life which unfolds on the stage of consciousness and is consciousness itself” (Gentile 1972, p. 145). Understood thusly, Gentile’s feeling bears striking resemblance to Nagel’s what-it’s-likeness. For Gentile, however, feeling (what-it’s-likeness) is articulated and given “logical” form through the work of art, and thus made available for third-person access. Perhaps by engaging in artworks with a strongly critical attitude[vii] (which entails attending very closely) we can circumvent the “gap” between third and first person approaches by unifying them in necessarily socially grounded aesthetic experience. More will be said on this below.

John Dewey’s aesthetics emphasizes the constitutive importance of “responses on the part of perceiving, cognizing, and feeling subjects” (Goldman 2001, p. 185), rejecting the notion that artworks exist as such purely by virtue of “intrinsic” aesthetic properties. When one engages a work of art, “aesthetic experience” arises in the constitution of a conscious moment much more unified, coherent, and complete than examples of ordinary experience: “that which distinguishes a moment as esthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close” (Dewey 2005, p. 58). The unity of this “close” is made possible in aesthetic experience by the vital charge of meaning in which multifarious and potentially antithetical elements are connected and synthesized.

Two important points about this notion of “aesthetic meaning” need to be mentioned: (1) aesthetic meaning is socially grounded, and (2) aesthetic meaning is directly related to and expressive of the everyday sort of meaning of our lived experience.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, all meaning is socially grounded. The pen on my desk means for me a potentiality for writing in the same way that it means such for everyone else. This bears directly on (2). If, say, a pen appearing in a film turns out to play an instrumental role in the meaningful unfurling of the narrative,[viii] it will hold this intensional meaning for all reasonably attentive spectators. The fact that the pen takes on this meaning in the aesthetic experience is contingent on the everyday sort of meaning of “pen” mentioned above. The experience of the film imbues this basic socially grounded meaning with a rich, aesthetico-contextual significance that carries into one’s phenomenal consciousness of pens (what-it’s-like to see a pen) in the future.

What is more, both the active engagement of a work and the lingering suffusion of meaning that follows tie the spectator to the artist in a significant way: “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent” (Dewey 2005, p. 56). In short, aesthetic experience is at the same time shaped by the world and instrumental in shaping it—that is, the shared social world as it is given to phenomenal consciousness.

While Nagel is strongly committed to the deep, seemingly irreducible existence of first-person qualitative experience, he does not want to keep it confined to an impenetrable introspective realm devoid of all objectivity. The “proposal” at the end of his 1974 paper makes this explicit: “It may be possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective from another direction. Setting aside temporarily the relation between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right…without relying on the imagination” (Nagel 1997, p. 525).

This inclination to expel the imagination from objective inquiry simply betrays, on Nagel’s part, a poor grasp of its wide-ranging and effectual reach. As Dewey points out:

More perhaps than any other phase of the human contribution, [the imagination] has been treated as a special and self-contained faculty, differing from others in possession of mysterious potencies. Yet if we judge its nature from the creation of works of art, it designates a quality that animates and pervades all processes of making and observation. It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole (Dewey 2005, p. 278).

Thus, rather than being a mere faculty for “mental representation” or, as Nagel seems to suggest, the circumscribed and artificial effort of “taking up the point of view” (Nagel 1997, p. 525) of another subject, the imagination plays a much more ordinary role in our everyday engagement with the world. It does so primarily by subtly playing with the complex relational meanings of objects of our experience—expanding and connecting, reducing and changing, coloring them with the hues of memory and thrusting them forward in anticipation of the future.

The experiential aesthetic theories of Dewey and Gentile seem quite serviceable as an answer to Nagel’s call for an “objective” squaring with “subjective” phenomena. While the subjective character of aesthetic experience (or experience in general) is integral[ix] for the production of artworks, there is a clear sense in which the works are quite objective. It is in this way that my proposed aesthetical approach differs from Husserlian phenomenology, which is also quite useful for phenomenal description. While phenomenology is the science of first-person awareness, the approach of aesthetic experience is transcendent of the subject/object rift.

The expressive quality of art is precisely its objectifying quality.[x] For example, The Great Gatsby, as a “completed” novel, is given as a body of work in which a richly unified, though thematically complex, aesthetic meaning is “embodied,” and therefore no longer free to “float about.” This meaning is “unlocked,” as it were, when one engages the work. This may strike one as either banal or mystical, but after careful consideration it makes perfect sense; the meaning constitutive of aesthetic experience is, in this regard, perfectly objective. Of course, as I have shown, subjectivity is necessary for the active experience, but such aesthetic engagement is clearly a consciousness of something transcendent of the mental activity itself. Dewey writes, “the medium of expression in art is neither objective nor subjective. It is the matter of a new experience in which subjective and objective have so cooperated that neither has any longer an existence by itself” (Dewey 2005, p. 299).

I chose The Great Gatsby for my literary example because it has the rare distinction of being a first-person narrative whose hero is not the narrator himself. Thus, both the essential modes of diagesis and mimesis are of substantial effective presence: Nick Carraway tells us what has happened, and, from within this telling, Gatsby shows us his desire, his alienation, his tragic end. As a result, we are given the opportunity to identify not only with the explicitly first-person perspective of Carraway, but also with the second/third-person portrayal of Gatsby.

The effect of a great novel like The Great Gatsby is such that, when one is engaged in it the everyday world of one’s experience becomes supplanted entirely by the world of the work. One becomes an active and inextricable part of the diagetic unfolding. The reader does not become this character or that, but rather a conscious participant in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of every character, and therefore, in the objectified conscious experience of the author himself. It is in this way that aesthetic experience is analogous to dream experience, though I do not here mean to invoke the irrelevant sense in which both are “illusory.”[xi] The important similarity is that when one is in the grip of either, one does not know it: “in this dream thought, as the waking man judges it, is imprisoned, though, from the point of view of the dream, it expatiates with infinite liberty” (Gentile 1972, p. 89). For Gentile, x is a proper aesthetic experience if and only if x is an infinite world, logically coherent, and unified by a singular feeling (what-it’s-likeness). In short, if it is truly art, it is not art at all, but rather the whole universe: “while art is going on, it is never recognized as art; when we can say: ‘here is art!’ it is all over” (Gentile 1972, p. 97). Artworks fail precisely when they reveal obstinate fissures between the world of the audience and the world of the work.

One’s aesthetic engagement of The Great Gatsby, then, can be described as diaphanous; when fully absorbed in Gatsby’s world of anxious melancholy, I am not aware of the physical letters and words lining the pages, but see through them to the coherent intentional content of the experience.[xii] “Engaged” in this manner, I know (imagine?) transparently “what-it-is-like” for Gatsby to longingly stare at the glowing green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, for Nick Carraway to face the ominous silence of Gatsby’s normally bustling but now empty home. The meaning of these experiences resounds in my thoughts and feelings and cannot help but paint the everyday, contextual phenomenal conscious of what-it-is-like to be me.

I have so far tried to show that in order to more fully understand what-it’s-likeness, we must understand aesthetic experience. By virtue of its nature as, in a sense, “world creating,”[xiii] in order to grasp aesthetic experience, we must understand its essential holism. In properly squaring with the holism of aesthetic experience, we can more accurately express and describe it, and, by extension, more accurately express and describe what-it’s-likeness.

Once the essential holism of aesthetic experience is properly grasped, one may fruitfully pursue various avenues of abstract analysis. This point is tied to my treatment of holism and abstraction in §1.III above. Abstractive analysis is beneficial despite the essential holism of experience precisely because of the following principle: to dissect is to both destroy and create at the same time. When we separate away elements of our total experience, the qualities focused upon assume a singular character. This positing of singularity results in the emergence of a new “world,” so to speak, that is, the world of this abstracted quality, intended now in a new way. This new intentional relationship has the potential to give rise to new meaning, hitherto unseen in the experience taken in its natural holism. The meaning newly constituted through analysis is then brought to bear on the temporarily shattered unity of the aesthetic experience in toto, thereby shaping its overarching character in a fresh way, effectively altering its significance. This is the function of criticism. In this section I will investigate how the various critical methodologies of stylistic analysis can contribute to our project of developing a more “objective” descriptive treatment of what-it’s-likeness through the lens of aesthetic experience.

It might be argued that any benefit garnered by the aesthetical methodology I am proposing here could be adequately and more “scientifically” attained by something like Dennett’s “heterophenomenology.” To be sure, the heterophenomenological method seems quite effective as an objective psychological tool through which to analyze the beliefs and judgments of individuals. This, however, is not what is needed for a descriptive approach to what-it’s-likeness. Levine objects to Dennett’s approach as well, observing that, “conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer” (Levine 2003, p. 117). Dennett responds to this by pointing out that we must rely upon our propositional constructs of conscious experience because “if you have conscious experiences you don’t believe you have—those extra conscious experiences are just as inaccessible to you as to the external observers” (Dennett 2006, p. 45).

I believe this is patently false. Everyone[xiv] undergoes deeply affective and meaningful aspects of experience that cannot be sufficiently expressed in simple propositional language. If this were not the case, then the expressive language of every song and painting could be easily translated into a series of prosaic sentences. This irreducibility is not limited to the non-linguistic arts, but applies to prose and poetry as well. The critical approach of “deconstruction” aims at locating moments in a text at which meaning “spills over” the basic syntactic and semantic structure of the written work: “a text may ‘show’ us something about the nature of meaning and signification which it is not able to formulate as a proposition” (Eagleton 2003, p. 116). For deconstructionists like Derrida, there is always a “surplus” of meaning that constantly eludes semantic exactitude. If this is true, then the critical engagement of an individual’s work is clearly a very fruitful tool for teasing out hidden meanings, hitherto “inaccessible”—to use Dennett’s term—to even the author.

Even if Dennett is willing to admit into heterophenomenological analysis propositionally expressed beliefs about such purportedly non-propositional meaning, the analysis must nevertheless remain at the overtly propositional level. That is, Dennett’s method is not equipped to analyze that which actually remains unspoken, but only the propositionally expressed belief that something remains unspoken. It is precisely the job of critical approaches to the arts, on the other hand, to uncover through analysis subtle meanings contributive to the overall experience, of which even the artist may be unaware. Thus, while heterophenomenology is a useful tool, it is simply not adequate for exploring the rich complexity of what-it’s-likeness in the ways that an aesthetical methodology is disposed to the task.

The practice of “stylistics”[xv] (of which deconstruction could be regarded as a part) could play a significant role in a third-person approach to what-it’s-likeness. If one could successfully identify recurrent formal properties of a work like The Great Gatsby, a significant advancement in an objective understanding of what-it’s-like to be Fitzgerald, for example, would be possible. Given the vastly diverse formative environments in which individuals assimilate language, there is a clear sense of how astoundingly unique a person’s idiolect can be. The phonocentrism of Western culture notwithstanding, it seems obvious that even in a written work there is an irreducible tone or accent strictly peculiar to the author. This almost “ineffable” quality can be linked to Gentile’s concept of “feeling” discussed above and thereby seen as the very element of subjective consciousness and objectifying expression that makes meaning possible: “language is an organism, which, in the multiplicity of its development, is thought, but in the unity which animates that thought is feeling. So far as it is feeling it has meaning; detached from that feeling it is ashes” (Gentile 1972, p. 179).

The approach of stylistic analysis could conceivably be expanded and applied to the non-linguistic art forms, such as painting, sculpture, music, and film. Curtis Carter (1976) argues that there is a “pictorial syntax of shapes” providing as the structural foundation of any given painting. One can critically analyze this syntactic level by developing “an ability to concentrate on the compositional features of the work rather than on its representational theme” (Carter 1976, p. 113). That is, for example, by forgetting that the despondent figures contortedly sitting around the empty bed in Edvard Munch’s Death In the Sick Room are human beings, one can analyze the peculiar way in which Munch forms and compositionally posits shapes. The descriptive understanding yielded by this analysis would presumably provide insight into the what-it’s-likeness of Munch (in relation to the context of the work) as well as the what-it’s-likeness of the viewer.[xvi]

As for the field of music, one need hear but a few pieces by Philip Glass to be able to identify his signature swirling arpeggios in the future. It seems that the “language” of music resembles language proper to the extent that its formal inculcation in an individual simultaneously lends itself to the cultivation of an anomalous voice.[xvii] Something of a stylistic or syntactic analysis of music could be developed as a methodological approach to getting at the what-it’s-likeness of musical phenomena. From these brief examples it should be clear at least that the cross-formal potential for the phenomenological application of stylistics is vast and arguably quite fruitful. In analyzing the peculiar style of another’s expression, one can better understand how to “take up a view other than one’s own.”

My goal in this paper has been threefold: (1) to establish the complexity and holistic contextuality of Nagelian “what-it’s-likeness,” (2) to argue that the so-called “explanatory gap” between phenomenal consciousness and physico-reductive theories is really just the natural, unavoidable, and unproblematic “gap” between description and explanation, and (3) to argue for the phenomenological value of aesthetic inquiry in the transcendental first/third personal descriptive exploration of what-it’s-likeness.

The distinctions made in (2) are important. If, for example, I were to hire a clown to perform at a party, would he really be “leaving something out” if he failed to deliver a faithful rendering of a Verdian aria? If I press the issue, sure, he might sing—but what he offers should be expected to sound clown-like indeed. The same applies to bringing science to shed light on what-it’s-likeness; any objective scientific account of phenomenal consciousness is bound to obscure or neglect the feel of subjective experience.

This, to my mind, is precisely where the domain of art is useful in consciousness studies. As I have shown, by understanding the nature and efficacy of aesthetic experience, we can hone our abilities to imagine what-it’s-like to be or do something strange or unfamiliar. If I have unduly neglected the question of what-it’s-like to be a bat, it is because I doubt bats themselves are capable of aesthetic experience, and therefore see no reason to ascribe to them any substantive what-it’s-likeness at all. Once we understand the holism of what it’s like to be in some particular context, we can abstractly analyze layers of meaning, thereby improving our ability to describe phenomenal experience in general terms. If we can describe phenomenal consciousness in a more richly accurate way, perhaps we can explain it in such a way that does not seem so dissatisfying. The more accurate our description of what-it’s-likeness, the more satisfactory a scientific explanation of it will be. The overarching explanatory project in which the description is put to work will be thereby rendered more amenable to one’s first-person access to the phenomenal consciousness being explained; the description itself will provide a bridge over the so-called “explanatory gap.”

Carter, Curtis L. "Painting and Language: a Pictorial Syntax of Shapes." Leonardo 9

Churchland, Paul. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2003.

Gentile, Giovanni. The Philosophy of Art. Trans. Giovanni Gullace. Ithaca: Cornell UP,

Goldman, Alan. "The Aesthetic." The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Ed. Berys

Harman, Gilbert. "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience." Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. J

Levine, Joseph. "On Leaving Out What It's Like." The Nature of Consciousness. Ed. Ned

Levine, Joseph. Purple Haze: the Puzzle of Consciousness. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1989.

Nagel, Thomas. "What is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Nature of Consciousness. Ed. Ned

Searle, John. "Breaking the Hold: Silicon Brains, Conscious Robots, and Other Minds."

Shoemaker, Sydney. "The Inverted Spectrum." Journal of Philosophy 74 (1981): 357-

Smith, Murray. "Film Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction." The Journal of

Tye, Michael. "A Representational Theory of Pains and Their Phenomenal Character."

Van Gulick, Robert. "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: are We All Just Armadillos?

Consciousness. Ed. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 559-566.

[i] This “in general” should be understood to include all of the faculties at the bat’s disposal for experiential intercourse with the world, i.e., echolocation, etc… The point I am making is that, highly specific instruments of perception notwithstanding, specific activities carried out in a specific context are also necessary to proceed beyond superficial generality in considering what-it’s-likeness

[ii] I use Block’s distinctions as a means to distinguish between what is the figure of one’s conscious state, and what is merely the ground. This, to my understanding, has to do with the distinction between attended objects, and largely unattended objects. I am not entirely convinced, however, that it is possible for one to have “purely” phenomenal consciousness without any degree of attended “access” to it.

[iii] It should be made clear that this “feeling” need be neither intense nor even particularly remarkable. Gentilean “feeling” is best understood as a liminal, unthematized lower order state.

[iv] In this context, Gentile means “logic” in a very loose sense. The “logic” of a poem can be compared to the rules of a chess game, or the syntax of ordinary language. In a word, “logic” in this peculiar sense should be taken to refer to the formal structural components through which a mood or feeling is articulated and objectified, thereby making it accessible to others. From now on I will frame the word “logic” in quotations to indicate this somewhat idiosyncratic usage.

[v] Rhyme structure for the poet, compositional principle for the painter, rhythm and harmony for the musician, etc…

[vi] Though it is not something “extra.”

[vii] Obviously the matter of how one should approach and explore a work, and how varying approaches and intensity of involvement will shape aesthetic experience is very complex, and therefore worthy of much greater attention than I can afford to give it here.

[viii] Perhaps, for example, the pen is made “special” as a result of its being serendipitously passed around and used to sign a variety of important documents that all come together at the end.

[ix] For Gentile it is paramount.

[x] “Once we agree that the essence of art is the subjective feeling breathed into a thought, it follows that the sensible form in which this thought is developed and actualized concerns merely the technical means of expression” (Gentile 1972, p. 192).

[xi] For a good critique of this notion in the field of film theory, see Smith 1995.

[xii] Presenting aesthetic experience thusly, it is not incompatible with the transparent representationalism of Gilbert Harman (1990) or Michael Tye (1990).

[xiii] As shown in the “dream” analogy above.

[xiv] This is not exclusive to musicians and painters, as everyone who has ever merely enjoyed a song or a painting has done so by virtue of the present point.

[xv] Defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (2006) as, “The study and description of the choices of linguistic expression that are characteristic of a group or an individual in specific communicative settings, esp. in literary works.”

[xvi] This “syntactic” meaning—obtained through analysis—can be taken and applied to the unity of the aesthetic experience of the piece, viewed as an irreducible whole.

[xvii] For an interesting study into the alleged “syntax” of music, see Heller and Campbell 1976.