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Judgement and Beyond

One way Arnold Davidson breaks the mold is to give philosophical significance to the question of improvisation. In particular, in his enduring dialogue withGeorge Lewis, Davidson has developed a very original take on this issue, dealing with improvisation not only as aesthetic in the narrow sense but as a global and existential phenomenon. In “Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism,” he builds a connection between the kind of improvisation to be found in the practice of jazz by Sonny Rollins and the philosophical tradition of spiritual exercises, in which he is personally interested. He finds the same kind of “concern for the self” on both sides. In a very convincing analysis, Davidson shows how improvisation—as soon as it ceases to be interpreted as the mere performance of something that already exists—is a practice of the self in which the self is involved in its capacity to form and transform itself. It is no longer as much an aesthetic as it is an ethic—or, to put it more correctly, it is an aesthetic insofar as a real aesthetic is itself an ethic. Such an erasure of the border between the two is exactly what can be heard inMichel Foucault’s late motto of an “aesthetics of existence.” In order to make sense, then, of the shift made in the sense of ethic, it is helpful to remember the contrast drawn by Foucault between “a morality