"Appreciative Understanding"
A common trope about art is that we shouldn’t try to understand it; instead, artworks are to be appreciated with wonder, awe, or a sense of mystery. Bob Dylan gives voice to this trope when he writes, “Whether it’s Dogs Playing Poker or Mona Lisa’s smile, you gain nothing from understanding it.” My hypothesis is that this view arises in part from a tendency—explicit in some recent accounts—to locate artistic understanding as a species of theoretical understanding, the paradigm exercise of which is scientific explanation. My argument starts with the observation that the parallel trope about persons is much less compelling, because we are not tempted to hold that theoretical understanding is the only way of cognitively relating to others. I introduce some desiderata for a non-theoretical view of understanding persons and motivate the claim that they are also desiderata for understanding artworks. Ultimately, I argue that both are forms of appreciative understanding, which is distinct from theoretical and practical understanding both in terms of its content and in terms of what a grasp of that content enables.