Andrew Bowie and Philosophy of Art re the Derry vs Standish Debate

Let's imagine the best way to grasp what philosophy of education might do for education is for it to pivot towards philosophy of art and play. I'm going to make Andrew Bowie do some work here. 

Bowie’s simple but far reaching reversal regarding philosophy of art is that philosophy does not merely interpret art. Art often shows philosophy what it has forgotten about meaning. In Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy he tracks this claim through a long line of sources. He begins before Kant with Montaigne, Descartes and Hume to show how modern ideas of the self emerge, and why they quickly run into the problem of how experience becomes intelligible at all. He then argues that the problem cannot be solved by piling up propositions, because much of what makes sense in lived practices is not propositional in the first place. This is where aesthetics enters as a basic mode of disclosure rather than as decoration. The book’s introduction is explicit that aesthetics for him concerns sense perception, the arts, and the making of new sense in what Heidegger called world disclosure, and that this has consequences for political economy as well, because the ways we make sense structure what a society can value. 

Kant is the hinge. Bowie reads the Critique of Judgment as showing that our capacity to experience something as meaningful is not exhausted by applying concepts under rules. The feeling of purposiveness without a concept is not a mystical remainder, it is a way the world shows up as organised for us when determinate rules run out, a point that becomes decisive for later debates about reason and art. He links this to Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where play and form cultivate a freedom that is not merely the absence of constraint. In Bowie’s telling these moves matter because they show how aesthetic judgement trains us to live with indeterminacy without giving up on truth, which is precisely what modernity demands once the old metaphysical anchors are gone. 

From there Bowie turns to the early German Romantics and to Schelling. He insists that their talk of irony, fragment, and the unfinishable is a disciplined attempt to understand how new sense is made. Works that refuse closure can disclose possibilities of life that no existing conceptual scheme can yet name. This is also why Bowie resists a narrow image of philosophical progress as a march toward final results. He prefers a picture closer to ensemble playing where different voices can remain in tension while still belonging together. Music is his preferred exhibit. It organises time, subjectivity, and sociality in ways that clearly make sense, yet that sense is not delivered through a message. 

In Music, Philosophy, and Modernity he makes this the guiding thread, arguing that modern philosophy has repeatedly tried to force music into the mould of language, when what needs explaining is how music lets us share an order of experience that often leads language rather than follows it. Bowie’s debt to Cassirer is crucial here. Cassirer’s account of symbolic forms rejects the idea that language, science, myth, and art are competing reports on the same facts. They are different ways of articulating the world. 

Bowie uses this to generalise the lesson from music. Meaning is constituted across practices whose intelligibility depends on forms, rhythms, and analogies that cannot be reduced to statements. That is why an aesthetic perspective belongs in first philosophy rather than as an afterthought. In his recent article on the philosophy of music he uses Cassirer directly to argue that once we look at how sense is constituted in broader terms the old demand that music must say something in order to mean something loses its grip. 

This reframing leads him to a sympathetic but critical engagement with hermeneutics. Bowie values Gadamer’s insistence that understanding is historically situated and dialogical. He also thinks hermeneutics risks sliding into vague slogans about openness unless it can explain how artworks actually orient sense. Hence his return to concrete musical experience rather than to generalities about meaning. He shows how performance and listening generate forms of shared attention that can anchor truth claims about works. These are not mere subjective vibes. They are disciplined by forms, traditions, and the resistance of materials. In short, practice does the philosophical work that an abstract theory of interpretation cannot finish on its own. 

Adorno is the other pole. In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Bowie argues that Adorno offers two senses of an end. There is the suspicion that philosophy’s traditional project is finished in a disenchanted world where systems harden into administration. There is also a task for philosophy that only begins there, namely to make sense of a damaged modernity by keeping open experiences that the administered world tries to close. For Adorno that task often falls to modern art. Bowie defends this claim but resists taking it as a licence for obscurity. He reconstructs how Adorno’s negative dialectics and his theory of modern music try to keep truth alive without dogma, and he presses the question of what, if anything, such works let us know. The result is a clear account of why Adorno still matters once we approach him through the lens of disclosure rather than through a false choice between aesthetic autonomy and social message. 

Bowie also reads Hegel, but he declines the easy story that art is superseded by philosophy. He treats Hegel’s claim that art becomes a thing of the past as a historically situated provocation that should push us to ask what kinds of art can still bear truth. In response he follows lines from late Romanticism into modernism and jazz. The point is not to sanctify difficulty. It is to show how new formal possibilities open spaces of subjectivity and community that neither science nor morality can occupy. That is why he keeps returning to specific musical cases, because they let us see how sympathy, anticipation, resolution and surprise structure a temporality we share with others before we exchange any reasons. On this view aesthetic experience is not a distraction from the serious business of truth seeking. It is one of the primary ways we learn how truth might appear to us at all. 

This is also why Bowie engages analytic debates about meaning and truth rather than writing them off. He argues that if one models understanding on formal semantics alone one will keep asking music the wrong questions. What does it say? What proposition does it express? The answer is that it discloses an order that helps us orient our lives, which may then be put into words, but whose intelligibility does not depend on that later translation. Once this is granted, familiar disputes about subjectivism and relativism look different. There is room for better and worse understanding of works because there are better and worse ways of learning to hear, to rehearse, to place a piece in a living tradition, and to let new work re order that tradition. Aesthetic judgement can then be rational without being rule bound. It is accountable to forms of attention and to communal practices that have their own standards. 

The later chapters of Aesthetic Dimensions tie these arguments to themes that usually live far from aesthetics. Bowie brings in political economy and the sociology of knowledge because the forms through which a culture makes sense are bound up with its institutions. If a society routes meaning through metrics and dashboards, it will tend to reward art that enchants quickly and at scale. If it supports rooms where slow attention is protected, it will keep alive modes of disclosure that resist capture. Bowie does not pretend that art saves us. He argues that without these aesthetic capacities a society loses ways of finding things out about itself. 

That is why his book moves from early modern philosophy to Cassirer and to hermeneutics, and then back to contemporary concerns about how attention is organised. The conceptual route is long because the point is not a slogan about art. It is a diagnosis of how understanding happens in practice, and of how easily cultures forget this when they treat meaning as a list of true sentences Two examples show the pay off. 

First, take the recurring worry that music is mere emotion. Bowie counters by showing how musical form teaches temporal understanding. To follow a sonata or an improvisation is to learn a kind of practical foresight and retrospect. One experiences how expectation, delay and return can be held together in a unified experience of time. This training in temporal sense making is a resource for life more widely. It is not a message about time. It is time learned as a shared form. 

Second, take the claim that modern art is empty provocation. Bowie’s reading of Adorno allows him to say that difficulty is sometimes the price of resisting ready made sense in an administered world. The test is not whether a work shocks. It is whether it opens a space of experience where things that matter can become available again. These tests are demanding, but they are public. They require rehearsal, criticism, and history, not private revelation. 

All of this feeds a Gellner inflection I’ve banged on about elsewhere. If public reason is hollowed out and civil society is thinned, the channels through which aesthetic disclosure loops back into shared inquiry will narrow. That does not destroy enchantment. It reallocates it to places where feeling can be mobilised without follow on accountability. Bowie’s work helps specify what a healthier settlement would require. We would protect institutions that host slow, formative encounters with works. We would teach criticism as a civic practice rather than as a badge of taste. We would let music and art inform philosophy about how meaning appears, instead of demanding that they justify themselves to a theory that has already forgotten half of what people know. 

That is the deepest lesson in Bowie’s corpus. A culture that knows how to be guided by its best aesthetic experiences has not abandoned truth. It has remembered where truth often first shows up. Derry versus Standish notes as a staging of two basic temptations in the philosophy of education. One leans toward the claim that reason realises itself historically in forms of discourse and institution, so that education should induct us into practices where contradictions are worked through and overcome. The other leans toward the claim that meaningfulness precedes rule and concept, so that education should first awaken an attuned responsiveness to the world that makes discourse possible in the first place. 

The piece casts Jan Derry as Hegelian in spirit and Paul Standish as Heideggerian in spirit, then draws the lines of tension with admirable clarity. A Bowie inflected response begins by refusing to let the alternatives harden. For Bowie, aesthetic experience is neither a private gush nor a mere ornament to rationality. It is a basic mode in which the world is disclosed and shared, often ahead of propositional articulation. 

This is the core of his recent book, where he argues that modern philosophy repeatedly forgets how sense is made in practice, and that the arts, especially music, show philosophy what it keeps abstracting away. In conversation about the book he makes the point plain. If one thinks meaning is only what sentences report, much of what actually orients us drops from view. If Standish worries that a dialectical confidence about reason risks repeating the forgetfulness that Heidegger diagnoses, Bowie can agree that pre conceptual disclosure matters while also insisting that disclosure is public and educable. Music is the master example because it is palpably intelligible and yet does not primarily communicate by statements. To follow a rhythm, to anticipate a cadence, to feel the rightness of a resolution, is to share an order of time with others without first passing through a proposition. For curriculum this matters. It means teachers should sometimes lead learning by forms that cultivate shared attention and temporal judgement before and alongside discursive achievement. This is not a retreat into mysticism. It is a way of giving students the resources to inhabit concepts with understanding rather than simply to repeat them. Bowie’s long study of music in modern thought develops this as a sustained alternative to treating art as a puzzle that philosophy must solve. 

If Derry presses the normative stake, that education must induct us into the space where reasons can be given and contested, Bowie again agrees and deepens the claim. Aesthetic practices are among the places where we learn how reasons might later hold. They train capacities that discourse presupposes. Consider ensemble rehearsal in a school. Pupils learn to adjust to others, to listen through noise for a line, to hold back for a bar, to recover from a mistake without panic, to recognise a pattern returning transfigured. When such training is then drawn into discussion, the class has an experiential grasp of what it is to be addressed by form and to respond. They are better placed to understand why a proof has a shape, why an argument modulates, why a paragraph earns its close. On Bowie’s view these are not decorative extras after the real work of concept use. They are how concept use becomes humane and shareable in the first place. 

The Derry versus Standish note worries, rightly, about how a turn to attunement can slide into quietism or into a rehearsal of rootedness that forgets pluralism. It reminds us that Heidegger’s appeal to poetic dwelling has a political shadow and that educational appeals to pre conceptual meaning can license nostalgia rather than critique. Here Bowie’s engagement with Adorno is instructive. He uses Adorno to show how art can resist the closures of an administered culture without claiming a privileged outside. The point is not to enthrone difficulty as a badge of virtue but to protect experiences in which what matters can show itself again, even under conditions that tempt us to reduce meaning to calculable results. 

This gives educators a test. Do our aesthetic forms open a space where significance can be argued about and taken up, or do they flatter identity and feeling while evading public accountability? Bring this down to concrete disputes that the note evokes. Suppose a department is torn between knowledge rich sequencing aimed at conceptual mastery and a looser pedagogy aimed at world disclosure. A Bowie inflected approach would reframe the choice. Begin with structured aesthetic practices that secure shareable experiences of order and surprise. In literature that might mean reading a poem aloud with attention to cadence and pause until pupils can hear the form as something they can answer to. The teacher then articulates the concepts that make sense of what has been disclosed, inviting pupils to find words that fit what they have already learned to notice. The class moves back and forth between felt organisation and explicit rule until the two begin to sustain each other. This is neither Hegelian triumphalism nor Heideggerian retreat. It is pedagogy that treats disclosure and discursivity as reciprocally illuminating rather than mutually exclusive. The note’s contrast between discursivity and disclosure is kept vivid while the classroom practice dissolves the polarity. 

Consider also assessment. The note’s Heideggerian strand worries about enframing and calculability. A Bowie inflected response would not simply reject measurement. It would ask whether our measures track the capacities that make discourse possible. Can a pupil sustain shared attention? Can they hear a pattern and vary it? Can they take up another’s contribution in a way that advances a common work? These are assessable when tasks are designed around performances whose success is intelligible to participants, not only to external scorers. The point is not to aestheticise assessment but to ensure that the dispositions without which reason cannot live are not driven out by a narrow image of achievement. 

The note presses a question about how pre conceptual meaningfulness can be taught without collapsing into sentimentality. Bowie’s answer is to keep disclosure tied to forms, disciplines and traditions that are public and corrigible. In music that means repertoire, technique and rehearsal, not free expression alone. In literature that means learning genres and their internal logics so that invention has something to work against. In moral education that means rituals of discussion that honour turn taking, reasons that can be repeated by others, and a cultivated patience with ambiguity. In each case the claim is that education should build rooms where pupils can encounter forms that address them before they have the words, and then be helped to find the words that do justice to what has addressed them. 

This makes Standish’s concern with attunement productive and at the same time meets Derry’s demand that freedom depends on conceptual self understanding inside institutions. The note ends by urging a balance of dialectical reason and ontological openness and raises the spectre of technological enframing that levels meaning into calculable presence. Bowie’s broader project fits that closing worry. He argues that modern cultures route sense through media that are increasingly designed to capture attention quickly. If education lets the arts be nothing more than fuel for attention, we should not be surprised if engagement rises while understanding thins. The remedy is not a purge of feeling but a renewal of the institutions and practices where feeling can lead into thought. That is why he keeps insisting that philosophy learn again from music. 

The lesson is simple. Before we can argue well together we must learn how to listen together and how to let form hold us long enough for reasons to matter. That is an educational task as much as it is a philosophical one, and it answers the Derry versus Standish dispute with a programme rather than a verdict. On this view the deepest service a philosophy of education can render is to make the link between disclosure and discourse reliable in the places where young people live and learn. That link is forged in practices where forms are patiently inhabited and then articulated, where reasons grow out of shared attention rather than float free of it, and where enchantment is not left to spectacle but is tutored into judgement. Read in that light, the Hegelian and the Heideggerian stop being banners and become warnings against one sidedness. Bowie offers a way to keep them in play while keeping education honest about how understanding actually happens.