By: Nick Santangelo

"And you may ask yourself, 'well, how did I get here?'" That line from The Talking Heads' 1980 song Once in a Lifetime served as a perhaps unlikely stage-setter for University of Kent and Princeton University's Professor Murray Smith's Monroe Beardsley Lecture at the Barnes Foundation on April 20. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts' Department of Philosophy, Dr. Smith's lecture examined why people assign human values to certain things—like rock music.

"There's something important about the relationship between what happens in art school and rock music," asserted the professor.

Dr. Smith had that connection to thank for his being chosen to speak at the lecture named for famous Temple University philosopher Monroe Beardsley. While acknowledging that it's not a new idea that great works of art are sublime, mysterious and beautiful, the professor questioned the nature of aesthetic experiences and our ability to explain the value we assign to them. Dr. Smith spoke of "the supposed elitism of aesthetics," saying he doesn't believe it's elite at all because films, video games and comic books "are thriving areas of debate in philosophical naturalism."

But many do see an elitism in the valuation of art. Here, Dr. Smith cited the philosopher Samuel Scheffler, who believes people "develop an expert sensitivity" to the nuances of a certain discipline when they become aficionados of it.

"I may, for example, go to the opera from time to time and I may regard opera-going as a valuable activity, and yet I may still not value it myself," wrote Scheffler on the subject. "Even though I participate in the activity and believe that it is a valuable activity, opera-going may leave me cold."

Dr. Smith was able to relate to this on some level, explaining that he attempted to get into classical music when he was 18, but it didn't stick. Not the way rock and roll did. It was 1980, and The Talking Heads' Remain in Light album, from which Once in a Lifetime is the lead single, had just been released. The professor found himself valuing this new wave rock record more than he could classical music. Why?

"Just what is a value, and what sense can we make of values and valuing in a naturalistic view?" he asked the audience before answering his own question. "Value is a kind of desire. Desire is a kind of impulse in the animal world. How do we get from the primitive values to complex ones? How do we get from bacteria to Bach?"

In Dr. Smith's view, we value our own well-being above all else, but we also value the well-being of some others and we value our understanding of the world. Sometimes we even place value on things that are self-rewarding. And how do we decide if these values are worth pursuing or not? It's often through dialogue with others that we reflect on things and ultimately idealize them. Values, therefore, must be social, argued the professor.

In the case of Once in a Lifetime, he mentioned a review in The Guardian by Malcolm Jack. "Once in a Lifetime is a thing of dizzying power, beauty and mystery," wrote Jack at the time of the song's release. "It sounds like nothing else in the history of pop."

Dr. Smith took issue with this assessment, calling it hyperbolic and easily disprovable. Later in his talk, he played a track from Once in a Lifetime followed by some music by the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. There was some undeniable similarity between the two. Dr. Smith explained that The Talking Heads had in fact been listening to Fela Kuti and drawing inspiration from his works when they were recording Once in a Lifetime. But Fela Kuti also wasn't being wholly original when developing his own music. He had drawn inspiration from African music that came before him, combining it with American funk to find the sound that would become known as "world beat" or "world music."

"So, it would be wrong to think of the interactions between musical genres as being inevitably superficial," argued Dr. Smith.

He allowed that it is possible for superficial interactions to exist. His point, though, is that each artist was only able to find their sound by first appreciating what came before them. Again, he admitted that this isn't the most original idea in the world. And yet, he finds that it's more often argued that people first become creators and then they become appreciators. This has led to the idea of elitism in aesthetics. Dr. Smith, however, flipped this idea.

In his book, Film, Art and the Third Culture, the professor proposes "that aesthetic experience arises when our perceptual, affective and cognitive capacities are engaged in a way that goes beyond their normal functioning and that such engagement prompts us to savor and reflect upon the resultant experiences… The vocation of art is to offer us an adventure in perception and cognition."

One audience member claimed the very notion of things having value serves as a motivation to acknowledging their value. Dr. Murray responded that he sees a degree of contingency in the things we come to value, but to actively value something is to seek to show its value to others.

"I'm trying to separate the desire to bring others with you in your evaluation with the extent to which it's even possible to do that," he said.

In conclusion, he told the audience that naturalism is more like a perennial valuing of aesthetics. Yet, he argued there is some reduction necessary to accept aesthetics, which he described as "a world of enchantment." It is possible, he claimed, to explain aesthetic value even while retaining a sense of wonder for that which we value, which would negate the idea of elitism in valuation. Instead, it is our different aesthetic passions and traditions steeped in biculturalism that limit us "but by no means eliminate the appreciation."